By the early years of the new millennium, a collapse of the capitalist or capitalistic economies all over the world seemed inevitable. Then September 11 provided the solution for everything. Only an insane doctor would prescribe amphetamines for a depressive patient, but what came after September 11 was exactly that. The cognitive workers were both economically and chemically depressed, and because the attention economy was oversaturated, it was time to start the infinite war, the preemptive war, the never-ending war. This is what the Bush years brought: while using a lie to start a war in Iraq seemed crazy, the purpose was never to win or lose, but to fight a war that would never end. More and more signs buy less and less meaning. In a letter to linguist and semiologist Thomas Seboek, Bill Gates wrote that “the digital revolution is all about … tools to make things easy.”2 It seems that Bill Gates ingeniously grasped the problem in the relationship between meaning and power. Built under a hippie principle of bringing information to the people, the friendly interfaces developed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began a dangerous process of making things easy: if you make things easy, a large majority of people will follow you. In this way, we find the evolution of the internet to be the evolution of a totalitarian system that begins as a channel for research and discovery, for creation and invention, to become essentially a place where things are easy. It is in this way that meaning can be totally forgotten, but information can continue to move. When more signs buy less meaning, when there is an inflation in meaning, when the info-sphere accelerates and your attention is unable to keep up, what do you need? You need someone who makes things easy for you. It’s a problem of time.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 10:50:10 +0000
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