Is the Internet Auschwitz gone digital?
Post-History, particularly “The Ground We Tread” is perhaps my favorite piece we read this semester. As a designer, a “systems designer” at that, I struggle with what I am actually making. I look back in disgust at decisions brought us to our current situation, and know we can do better with the hope being to create new infrastructures so the world runs more ethically and sustainably. There's an attempt to redesign culture, to escape it, to break the patterns, and yet all of these attempts are perhaps in line with the “western project.” I worry about creating these inescapable mechanisms which redesign the world as one apparatus in which we are only further objectified.
Flusser begins by describing Auschwitz. “There for the first time in history of humanity, an apparatus was put into operation that was programmed with the most advanced techniques available, which realized the objectification of man, together with the functional collaboration of man.” (7) Auschwitz was simply the best job we had ever done at scaling man as machine. Making it capable of even genocide. We built this system to destroy ourselves. This assemblage of man as machine for the most evil of ends.
Psychology, such as the work done by Stanley Milgram, has attempted to understand how the Holocaust was even possible. Flusser claims that this was not just the psychology of individuals but is the culture of our western world. He says, “Western culture reveals itself as a project that seeks to transform itself into an apparatus” (9). Progress for the western world is the creation of a giant mechanistic state.
Flusser predicts the modern day when he says, “The ultimate objectification of the Jews into ashes...will be followed by less brutal objectifications, such as the robotization of society” (10). Look at how much of this world we attempt to automate. From self-driving cars, to drone delivery systems, automated taste via news feeds, voting via smartphone… How much do we want to give up til our role is reduced further and further to the simple cog. When we talk of the “internet of things” are we not praying for the manifestation of a Flusserian nightmare?
Is the internet, and its many orifices, perhaps Auschwitz gone digital? We certainly fall into our roles online. This is what Benjamin Bratton has alluded to in his talk of the Google Caliphate and reminds me very much of his concept of “The Stack”--this accidental megastructure that has grown “just like mushrooms after a Nazi rain” to form this planetary scale computational apparatus. In the era of big data and surveillance is there anything greater than than the internet to “objectify and dehumanize man”(9)?
As Flusser says, “it has currently become impossible to engage ourselves in the ‘progress of culture.’ As doing so would be to engage ourselves in our own annihilation. We have lost faith in our culture, in the ground we tread. That is: we have lost faith in ourselves. It is this hollow vibration that follows our steps toward the future.” (10). What is a hopeful designer to do? Recently I have come to a conclusion that a great revealing must occur. That perhaps it is not a construction project but an connection project. A decentralization of the apparatus. A breaking up of its parts.