I imagine hell as a kind of hospital for the lonely, where only the word is heard. IAll the patients are condemned to repeat it spasmodically, but each time they do, the distance between them increases.
I have often argued that technologies are anthropological prostheses that amplify who we are. I no longer see it so clearly. What strikes me most now is the acceleration of this prosthetic process. Whatever prosthesis you're buying, there's already a new version about to hit the market. The paradoxical effect of this acceleration is the degradation of what is good in the face of what is new. What is good is less marketable because it resists obsolescence not so much of the product itself, but of the desire for it. The goal of marketing is the commercial manipulation of the awareness of what is possible in a perpetually dissatisfied consumer.
What truly exists in the market isn't things, but the metamorphosis of our desires. For this reason, the sum of partial technological advances doesn't amount to progress that satisfies us. Progress is measured by the growth of our appetite. Or, to put it more politically correctly, by consumer confidence. Each generation has had to learn to work with new prostheses, but now, as we read the instruction manuals, we glance askance at the future.
This situation is, in my opinion, a manifestation of a larger phenomenon, which Georg Simmel called "the tragedy of culture".
We can distinguish between what we will call CultureCulture, with a capital C, and Culture, with a lowercase c. Culture would encompass all the creations of the human spirit (language, science, religion, law, traditions, etc.). We can imagine it as an ideal library that holds the entirety of humanity's heritage. Culture is the personal and non-transferable process of subjectivation of culture. Culture is the Catalan language, and culture is my speech; Culture is the music of Benet Casablancas, and culture is my joy in listening to it.
Culture has always been unattainable, but today, when the process of subjectivation is much slower than the accumulating acceleration of Culture, we are like castaways in the Cultural Ocean. The tragedy of culture explains this growing imbalance between the available information and my limited capacity to even grasp the scale of what exists at my disposal. My awareness of the information surrounding me is far smaller than the cultural world that actually surrounds me. And even to transform accessible information into knowledge, I need a criterion that allows me to sift through it. But since I am a needle in a haystack and have no way of achieving a representation of my ignorance, my criterion is like a net with holes that are too large in the mesh. Until not so many years ago, to form our criteria we needed cultural mediators (teachers, librarians, intellectuals, the media...). Now, the awareness of intellectual precarity has affected our trust in cultural mediators, and we turn to internet search engines and AI.
From this situation has arisen the completely absurd pedagogical claim to dispense with factual knowledge (because, we are told, "everything is on the internet") and dedicate schooling to the acquisition of general skills. This means renouncing our memory and replacing it with exomemories Technologically very powerful, but in which information replaces knowledge (subjectification). Everything is indeed on the internet... except what's truly important: our ability to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. It's absurd to claim to be a general expert in sports and not know how to play any of them. It's impossible to become an expert without first becoming a learner.
What we must do, if universal culture is slipping away from us, is to strengthen our shared culture, which is like the lingua franca in which all forms of knowledge can communicate with one another. Michael Tomasello already warned us that the capacity to create a common conceptual, symbolic, aesthetic, and even emotional foundation is an absolutely critical dimension of human communication. I would add that shared culture has become today the only remedy to prevent the world from becoming a hell of speakers isolated by their individual processes of subjectivation. We must heed the testimony of Lluís Duch and persist in giving voice to the world. I am thinking, obviously, of Catalonia and Spain, but especially of Europe. We urgently need a symbolic European union.
