Virtual Madness Unbound – OpEd

“I scroll, therefore I am” ~ James Ladyman

In the age of virtual realities, social media and artificial intelligence, the resurgence of certain new forms of Cartesian scepticism profoundly challenges our understanding of reality and what it means to be a subject in the virtual world. This calls for exploring how digital transformations blur the boundaries between the real and the illusory, reshaping our social structures and individual psyches. Within the evolving politico-economic environment accompanying this transformation (which some economists call techno-feudalism), we must examine both the troubling implications and immanent potentials of the virtual subject. Implications for political mobilizations of the left are also worth investigating within this context.

Descarte’s skepticism began with the systematic questioning of the certainty of everything, leading him to the conclusion that subjectivity (the existence of which is demonstrated by the fact that we think, according to him) is the only thing that is undeniably real, that which we are intimately aware of and through which we perceive everything else. Consequently, his metaphysics of substance dualism adopted a mechanistic notion of the ‘physical’, separate from and yet interacting with the ‘mental’ world. Cartesian skepticism (akin to what Jerry Fodor calls methodological solipsism) was abandoned for a long time with the rise of scientific advancement and empirical verification of entities postulated by complex theories, leading to pragmatism that undermined the search for closure and ontological certainty.

With the recent advent of virtual realities and artificial intelligence along with social media dictating the fabric of our existence, the ghost of Descartes has returned again (haunting mainly philosophers who remain blind to many social realities) with a renewed skepticism about objective reality as such and concerns about the illusoriness of it all, evinced by simulation hypotheses put forward by celebrated philosophers like Nick Bostrom and David Chalmers or idealist theories proposed by neuroscientists like Donald Hoffman. The problem with such skepticism is that it often leads to ungrounded speculations fueled by motivated reasoning, causing  confusion and dissociation from actual states of affairs. 

The world of social media and digital technology is exacerbating the tendential retreat from established grounds of scientific objectivity (or the quest for it) and also the lack of trust in epistemic authority engendered by the belief that there are no ideology-free or agenda-free knowledge about the world especially among established figures or institutions, rendering practically everyone an expert and a polemicist. One can see the real horrors of Baudrillard’s simulacra playing itself out today where meaning itself is becoming meaningless and the territory of reason is rotting, leaving behind a spectral footprint of the provisional maps of symbolic faith. It would be silly, however, to jump to the conclusion that purely negative social consequences follow from the present conjuncture of the virtual world. Effective mobilization and more organized social movements and resistance to oppressive structures can be mediated through virtual platforms that also show greater potential to be environments of social equalization. Individuals are also better “informed” about world affairs and current events, allowing them to better position themselves, both politically and morally.  

On the other hand, misinformation, echo chamber effect and information overload are all ubiquitous features of this virtual world, giving rise to increasing uncertainty about the present and future, leaving behind a nostalgia, often misplaced, of a simpler past. Class differences and inequality are starker, wars and death have become mundane and without a doubt, the virtual world is immensely contributing to several antagonisms that we see today. This is worth investigating by exploring the extent to which the offline world of political discourse and activism is driven by the polarizing propensities, demands of performativity, disinformation, illusions and disorders of the online world. 

The madness of the virtual world is unbound today and its inevitability (the illusion that there are no alternatives or that we lack control over actual events and developments) is merely a façade that the madness must maintain to sustain its amoral force and growth. The language of normativity and meta-narratives (a clearly explicated, albeit incomplete, ontology) must return to revindicate the emancipatory core of leftist politics by detecting its ‘bugs’ (contradictions and practical shortcomings that betray its virtues and lofty principles), distinguishing them from its ‘features’ (those underpinning the commonality of value-judgements and convictions). At the very least, this may pave the way for better, more lucid analysis and diagnoses of the problems that we face today. 

It is becoming clear that we are witnessing a crucial transition in the politico-economic structures across the globe today. Economists like Yanis Varoufakis claim that we have begun shifting from capitalism to what he calls ‘techno-feudalism’, where we practically pay rent to the digital platforms (particularly those who own our data, functioning like ‘private fiefdoms’) in the form of freely producing the capital stock for large corporations through uploading stuff, consenting to sharing our data, location, etc. and selling ourselves as products via our attention and time. He argues that digital platforms have come to replace traditional markets as the locus of private wealth extraction.

This structural transition brings about gradual and sometimes even unintentional mutations of subjectivity which reinvents itself and adapts (or maladapts) to the external exigencies of the politico-economic-cultural matrix. Phenomena like ‘doom-scrolling’, ‘joy-scrolling’ and ‘mindless scrolling’, coupled with more general collective tendencies of social comparison and conspicuous-consumption exacerbated by social media, are all symptoms of such maladaptive prisons of a virtual subject. It is rather ironic that the dominant philosophical conception in the postmodern age is that of voluntarism, where we are told that we are radically free to reinvent ourselves, while the apparent difficulty of breaking patterns of unhealthy conformity unveils the dark underbelly of the virtual world. 

Despite the structural limitations imposed on the virtual subject by the current predicaments, the left political axis strives to remain optimistic in spirit and pessimistic in intellect, following Gramsci’s (borrowed from Romain Rolland) famous maxim. A major concern for the left today, however, is the undermining and appropriation of its emancipatory vision by fragmentary and reactionary tendencies within, that are bent on obscuring the critical discourse and deflecting issues of priority with all sorts of misguided skepticisms and suspicions. Varoufakis’ statement expresses a hopeful sentiment of hope for the future: “while capitalism may end with a whimper, the bang may soon follow. If those on the receiving end of techno-feudal exploitation and mind-numbing inequality find a collective voice, it is bound to be very loud”. 

The digital age has thus revived an unhealthy form of Cartesian scepticism by questioning the actual world independent of virtual prisms, bringing to light the complexities and contradictions of the current era. The rise of virtual realities and the sway of digital platforms challenges our grasp on reality and exacerbates antagonisms. The antidote to the madness of the virtual subject is critical reflection and effective modes of mobilization against its malignancies.