The conditions for democracy are two (at least): freedom and effectiveness of political volition. Both have been dismantled. Since language has been subjected to the rule of the technic, and techno-linguistic automatism has taken hold of social relations, freedom has become an empty word, and political action has grown ineffective and inconsequential. Hoping for the revivification of the values, principles and expectations of democracy is therefore a self-deception, because true decision has been absorbed by the connective machine, and popular rage has been organized instead by nationalist and racist parties.
The psycho-cognitive constitution of the neo-humans (their cognitive hardware, I mean) cannot support the software of the past humanist culture, so words like ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘fraternity’ have lost their situational meaning.
Can the beginning of this mutation be precisely dated? Obviously not. However, I will arbitrarily assign to it the year 1977.
That same year many interesting things happened. In Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple trademark. In London, Sid Vicious cried ‘No Future’. In Italian cities, the last proletarian rebellion of the last century and the first precarious rebellion of the new century went on stage.
Since then we have witnessed something deeper than a change, a transformation or a revolution: we have witnessed a mutation of the molecular composition of the human and of the social organism. Technology has altered the composition of the chemical matter composing the atmosphere, of the semiotic substances composing the Infosphere, and finally of the psycho-cognitive modes of elaboration. This is why political reversibility is impossible, why voluntary action has turned impotent: volition has no bearing when facing irreversible processes.
Conscious volition cannot dismantle the heavy machines that have provoked these irreversible changes: mutation has perfused and rearranged the human mind, and has consequently disempowered consciousness, volition and action.
A sort of palsy has in this way taken possession of the conscious organism. Cognitive and emotional dissonance results from the inability of conscious behaviour to oppose evil. So, we sense our own impotence and are led to think that our suffering cannot be relieved by political projects, but only by psychopharmacology.
Imagination
What about our imagination of the future in this age of impotence?
Let us go to the movies. Dystopia has taken centre stage in show business: Hollywood blockbusters bring us a perception of the future which is simultaneously violent and depressing.
The Hunger Games series is one of the most impressive financial successes ever in cinema history. Young people are the bulk of the audience for the series, as they were for the books on which they are based. The future world they depict is ethically repugnant and intolerable for the human consciousness, so much so that a naïve viewer might interpret the film as a sort of radical political denunciation of social precariousness and of the violence provoked by the militarization of economic power. Nothing, however, is more removed from the intentions of its creators, and, more importantly, from the way the young moviegoers receive and decode its message. The teenager who goes to see the Hunger Games, precarious, unemployed, impoverished by the crisis as she may be, does not draw from the movie the conclusion that we should rebel and stop the barbaric transformation it imagines. In the film, there is, finally, a rebellion that occurs, but it is something sad and hopeless, whose outcome contradicts any idea of possible solidarity among the oppressed.
The young viewer does not draw the lesson that he should rebel against the current state of affairs, but rather is persuaded that the Hunger Games describes the world he will inhabit, in which everybody will be obliged to live in the near future. In this new world, only the winner can survive, and if one wants to win she must eliminate all the others, friends and foes.
Acts of solidarity may occur in the Hunger Games. For instance, the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, enters the violent contest in order to save her sister from a near-certain death. But this is the solidarity of despair, the solidarity of people who cannot even imagine a life of peace, let alone one of happiness.
The majority of video games teach the same lesson. Beyond their narrative content, sensorial stimulation is training young people to compete, to fight, to win or to disappear. The morals on which these video game are based is the idea that the machine is always winning, and only those who interrupt its rhythm can defeat competitors.
In real life, everybody is a competitor, and the lover on Sunday night may be a competitor on Monday morning.
The Hunger Games, not dissimilarly, mobilizes the ludic attention of the connective generation, but not for a persuasive or ideological function. Rather, they have a function of psycho-cognitive moulding: a plastic effect, not through moral content, but through nervous stimulation.
The psychology and the cognitive reactivity of the precarious generation is led to internalize the perception of social life as a field of war, a place where everybody is a winner or a loser, is eliminator or is eliminated, a space where solidarity and empathy are only dangerous distractions weakening the warrior that you are obliged to be.
Thought is a self-defeating act because thinking slows one’s reactions, and slowness makes you prey in the game in which every other player is also trying to eliminate you.
A Tragedy for the Human Civilization
According to Mario Tronti, one of the most important thinkers of Italian operaismo, ‘the workers’ defeat has been a tragedy for the human civilization.’4
In the short term, the fall of the communist project has provoked a global collapse of late modern welfare, but from the point of view of long-term evolution, it has opened the door to a wave of barbarianism that endangers modern humanism itself.
The short-term consequences are easy to identify: the working class has not disappeared after the defeat; far from it, the industrial army has expanded worldwide, as huge concentrations of industrial production have emerged in newly industrialized countries. But the working class has been dispossessed of any political force, and stripped of any tools for self-defence as it is now composed of temporary aggregations of precarious labourers who are not allowed to create a community of solidarity within a process of continuous deterritorialization.
In a very short space of time, industrial concentration can be displaced from one region of the world to another, and no union or political organization can effectively oppose this act of aggressive delocalization. Long-existing structures of solidarity can be dismantled overnight because of the deregulation that has dismantled any legal protection of the community, of the territory and of the workers.
Wage conditions are now unilaterally determined by capitalists: as a consequence, salaries have been halved in the last decades and the industrial system is regressing to proto-industrial conditions. More generally, the living conditions of society are rapidly deteriorating. Access to education, health care and leisure time were social rights won by unionized struggles: as a consequence of their political defeat, society is going back to a condition of misery and dependency, while mass ignorance is resurfacing.
It’s difficult to ignore this regression, but neoliberal applauders have an easy reply for those who, like me, lament the Western depression: they say that Chinese, Indonesian, and African workers now have the possibility of buying a car or a cell-phone. This is true.
They use their car to go to the factory; they use their cellphone to call their families when they are forced to migrate in search of a job. Those who get the opportunity to be exploited in an industrial factory have access to the sphere of consumption. However, if we look closer at the social evolution of the new proletarians, it’s easy to understand that when they were poor they were not so poor as they are now: deprived of their communities, divested of solidarity, stripped of leisure time and obliged to sustain fatigue,