Samuel Padfield

‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’

 

 (Immanuel Kant and Hans Siegbert Reiss, Kant: Political Writings (translation by H. B. Nisbet).  

 

The virtual, by its nature, is built upon a foundation of unfulfilled fantasy. It is a place of absence and longing. We use it as a source of respite that will never be truly restful. We use it as a space of emancipation that can never be truly free. We use it as a means of connectivity that leads us toward a true alienation. In our post-digital world, the distinction between the physical realm and the virtual has blurred. This entangled continuum deconstructs and reshapes the social, political, and economic structures that once defined our embodied reality. Our temporality has been radically affected by this technocultural development. In the all-consuming alienation defining our moment, the collapse of temporality is especially palpable. ‘Time is out of joint’. The fragmented and algorithmic time of our augmented reality is disorienting, and in this state of overstimulated distraction we are vulnerable to manipulation. The volatile relationship between these two previously distinct worlds is characterised by fragmentation and abstraction, and these processes have offered up new forms of what Bifo Berardi has termed ‘Semiocapitalist’ exploitation. Signs, symbols, and language are commodified, and we become unwitting workers through the immaterial labour of our digital interactions. The division between leisure and labour becomes indecipherable in the addictive feedback loops that are fundamental to this attention economy. These dopamine driven online behaviours produce both a narcissistic individualism and a pathological desensitisation. In this state we see real violence become images and images become real violence. This violence is disembodied, normalised, and commodified. Everything is deferred, everything is other, our compassion is fatigued. In the eternal now of the virtual we have traded a future for fleeting pleasures that we know to be forever incomplete.