#non things

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

In a world controlled by algorithms, the human being gradually loses the power to act, loses autonomy. The human being confronts a world that resists efforts at comprehension. He or she obeys algorithmic decisions, which lack transparency. Algorithms become black boxes. The world is lost in the deep layers of neuronal networks to which human beings have no access.

In the course of digitalization, we have lost any awareness of materiality. A re-romanticization of the world would presuppose its re-materialization. We exploit the world with such brutality because we have declared matter to be something dead and the earth to be a mere resource. If we are to thoroughly and fundamentally revise the way we treat the earth, sustainability alone will not be enough. What is needed is an altogether different understanding of the earth and of matter. [ . . . ] Thus, ecology must be preceded by a new ontology of matter, one that views it as something that lives.

Information by itself does not illuminate the world. It can even have the opposite effect. From a certain point onwards, information does not inform — it deforms. We have long since crossed this threshold. The rapid advance of informational entropy, that is, of informational chaos, pushes us into a post-factual society. The distinction between true and false is erased. Information now circulates in a hyper-real space, without any reference to reality. After all, fake news is a kind of information, and one that is possibly even more effective than facts. What counts is short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth.

We are today completely blind to the magic of matter. The digital de-materialization of the world is painful for lovers of matter. I agree with Barthes when he says that every metal of alchemy is alive. The 'prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life', Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, was the 'intuition of metallurgy'. To a metallurgist, everything appears alive. Metallurgists are romantics, 'itinerants because they follow the matter-flow of the subsoil'. On metallurgy and alchemy, Deleuze and Guatarri write:

A book has fate insofar as it is a thing, a possession. It carries material marks that give it a history. An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. The book has to age, place, craft, or owner. It lacks the auratic distance from which an individual fate could speak to us. Fate has no place in the digital order. Information has neither a physiognomy nor a fate, and it does not allow for the formation of intense ties. One cannot have, for example, a personal copy of an e-book. A personal copy of a book is given its unmistakeable face, its physiognomy, by the hand of the owner.