Ivan_R wrote:I am just trying to explore some possible limits of what might happen next. We might think we either are still standing on a firm ground, or at least might get back to it whenever we like. Our common sense tells us there are no insurmountable problems. We should just keep being sane, critical, skeptical, etc. We should just treat other humans as humans, not machines, turn off our devices, go out to see our friends and relatives and so on.
There is a drawback here. Yes, we can turn off our devices and get out of any possible networks, though we cannot be sure all the others still can do the same. Most of us today can imagine this only in some very exotic conditions of extreme downshifting. So if I am totally ‘deplatformed’, while all the others stay where they are, there is no difference for me. I remain in the same continuum with all those values, facts, narratives, which might still be determined through the same network(s).
Our reference groups have always ‘meant the world for us’. Or as Marx said: ‘The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations’. What can we expect when this ‘ensemble’ becomes ‘reified’ in networks (@Wellsy)? When it becomes something visible and palpable? When someone can get hold of it entirely? If he can control and 'conduct' this ‘ensemble’, then he is able to change this ‘reality’. It is just inevitable. So yes (@anna), I tend to maintain it is rather a new ‘kind’, then a ‘difference in degree’.
Our networks (ex reference groups) already determine too much in our lives. Very soon, ‘deplatforming’ might become a much more cruel punishment, than expelling from the polis was for the ancient Greeks. If you have some resources, you will have to build a network of your own (Trump?). If not….
Indeed there is skepticism of any ability to escape at this point.
http://rickroderick.org/108-philosophy-and-post-modern-culture-1990/But in a culture so overloaded, where we already suspect – if we don’t know – that it’s goal is psychoanalysis in reverse. To make the parts of us that think into ones that don’t. To just react, follow, or replicate. One thing that we can do, is tune out. So, many of us do that in one form or another. We take the culture and simply try to tune out as much of it as we can. But… there is a flaw in the strategy. And that’s that no culture ever was so pervasive. Even this word may be bothering you. There was a time when culture meant going to the things created by us folks, as opposed to nature. Where is nature now? There isn’t one. Everything has been inculturated. The most beautiful natural scenes there are, are the filmed ones that are created through fractogeometry at IBM.
However, my view is that one doesn't ever try to escape the conditions but rather changes the conditions. If man's being is determined by social relations, then man indirectly determines himself by changing those social relations. Which doesn't require being beyond influences but rather being critically aware of them.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfMarx's second argument against Kantian morality is that its focus on the free will belies the extent to which the will is itself determined by material conditions and material interests. The abstraction of the “free will” is illegitimate according to Marx because it attempts to prize apart the intellectual life of individuals from their economic, social, and historical context. A person with a will that is “wholly independent of foreign causes determining it,” to adopt Kant's phrase, simply does not exist in reality, and therefore such a subject makes a rather poor starting point for moral theory. (Later, in 1853, Marx writes, there critiquing Hegel, “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself”74!)
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htmWhen a subject is faced with a conflict of motives (e.g., needing to get out of bed but still wanting to rest), the subject will voluntarily introduce an artificial stimulus which they use to resolve the conflict (an alarm clock or telling themselves “I will get up on the count of 3, ...”).
These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.
“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdfCritical voice is the capacity of a person living “inside” a society to form views available from a position “outside” that society:
“... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society.” (Sen 2002a, p. 476-77.)
Critical agency is thus “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.” The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be “critical voice.” This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But “critical voice” does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society. Critical voice is both instrumental, in that it is needed in order to sustain the other elements of well-being, and constitutive, in that only the person with critical voice is truly free.
This is to emphasize the point that we change the conditions but one must be cognizant of them and develop an alternative.
The freedom not being liberal choice between many options within set confines but to change the very basis in which one makes such decisions.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htmTherein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself
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This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against “formal” freedom are about, therein resides their “rational kernel” which is worth saving today: when he emphasizes that there is no “pure” democracy, that we should always ask who does a freedom under consideration serve, which is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of the TRUE radical choice. This is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice WITHIN the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s point is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice — when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: “Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?”
And to clarify further on that quote of Marx, the point is a criticism against the abstract universals which identifies that which is common to every individual case rather than properly understanding that individuals aren't identical in their development but differ precisely in their experiences in relation to social practices. It is foolish to think that the person of a capitalist class position is going to grow up typically like that of a poor urban worker.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIn Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.
In fact, Marx identifies the concrete universal of humans on the basis of their labor and activity as the cause of their 'social being'. So that what one instead identifies is something particular which underpins all other particulars. Within social relations there isn't a homogenous society but one of a division of labor where there is one sidedness to people's activity.
However, the entire life of many people isn't synonymous with the internet. The internet doesn't stand independent of our reality although it does have a reciprocal influence upon it. Which is clear enough when kids bully others via snapchat and such, it has offline consequences. To which the control of something like facebook in how it organizes its space is the same sort of influence and control that comes into say the design of supermarkets and so on in order to induce consumption/spending.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transferIt is again that we are subject to influences from things which are not of our own choosing as we do not have a substantial say in the direction of our environment and thus our lives, if man dictates his actions largely through his environment, then yes there is great influence from those who set the qualities of the environment. At the same time though we aren't necessarily synonymous with Behaviorist conditioning that we are purely influenced by the environment and do not in fact cultivate our commitments and self and make decisions. We in fact also alter the environment in even small ways to redirect ourselves and make decisions.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/self-control.htmAs his experiments have shown, human behavior that does not have a specific intention is subject to the power of the situation. Every thing requires some kind of action, elicits, excites, actualizes some kind of reaction. The typical behavior of a person waiting in an empty room with nothing to do is characterized mainly by the fact that he is at the mercy of the environment. Intention is also based on creating an action in response to a direct need of things or, as Lewin says, coming out of the surrounding field. The intention to mail the letter creates a situation in which the first mailbox acquires the capability of determining our behavior, but in addition, with intention, an essential change in the person’s behavior occurs. The person, using the power of things or stimuli, controls his own behavior through them, grouping them, putting them together, sorting them. In other words, the great uniqueness of the will consists of man having no power over his own behavior other than the power that things have over his behavior. But man subjects to himself the power of things over behavior, makes them serve his own purposes and controls that power as he wants. He changes the environment with his external activity and in this way affects his own behavior, subjecting it to his own authority.
That in Lewin’s experiments we are actually speaking of such control of oneself through stimuli is easy to see from his example. The subject is asked to wait for a long time and to no purpose in an empty room. She vacillates – to leave or to continue waiting, a conflict of motives occurs. She looks at her watch; this only reinforces one of the motives, specifically, it is time to go, it is already late. Until now the subject was exclusively at the mercy of the motives, but now she begins to control her own behavior. The watch instantly constituted a stimulus that acquires the significance of an auxiliary motive. The subject decides “When the hands of the watch reach a certain position, I will get up and leave.” Consequently, she closes a conditioned connection between the position of the hands and her leaving; she decides to leave through the hands of the watch and she acts in response to external stimuli, in other words, she introduces an auxiliary motive similar to the dice or the count “one, two, three” for getting up. In this example, it is very easy to see how a change in the functional role of the stimulus, its conversion to an auxiliary motive, occurs.
I state this to push back on any tendency some might have of reading the overwhelming influence that it leaves no room for self-determination of an individual although I would emphasize that the individual does have limited strength over significant influence from the design of their environment. Hence the stupidity of those who simply say eat healthier to poor people who get obese eating junk food with no consideration to how their time and effort gets utterly depleted on other things. Unconcerned with the conditions which best support people's health and needs against those who profit, they think of the free will as something absolutely free, metaphyiscal.
The scary influence of the internet is the manner in which people do end up having so little of a life and meaningful relations offline that they can be quite subsumed by the online spaces they participate in. So I do share that there is concerning influence but just trying to be a bit contrarian.
Yes, I have seen them. I felt just the same. For me it is a great illustration of what I described as the Marxian ensemble being conducted (just above). Especially that gathering in the Stadschouwburg theatre. There should probably be a child, who, as in that tale of the naked king, might say: “You may still think of yourselves as bold individuals, but now you are nothing but a bunch of completely naked people… leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
Do not you find the situation when people are compelled to give their informed consent, which might potentially strip them of any privacy, much more dehumanizing than that one?
I take it that what @anna describes is also characteristic of the sort of dehumanization which isn't necessarily something I see inherent from the position f GOd's eye/the universe looking down at our insignificant selves. Rather I can often see it in terms of the bureaucraticpigeonholing of people such that they are objects of qualities rather than people.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/On%20Political%20Representation.pdfIt is by acting in the world that an individual makes themself into a personality and in just the same way, by choosing and mandating representatives, a group transforms themself from a collection of individuals into a subject, an actor on the stage of history. There is no implication in this that internal differences are dissolved, overridden or ignored, but they are transcended.
So we have two concepts here of what constitutes a person and what constitutes a representative. On the one hand, a person is seen as someone with a certain gender, age, education, experience, nationality, etc., etc., and on the other, a person is someone who pursues certain purposes, has commitments, a life. The former is the object of surveys of voter preferences, the passive object of political policy and action. The latter is the active subject, who pursues ends collaboratively with others and changes the world.
Same thing happens with work where there is no individuality in the market other than perhaps how one tries to build their identity based on what they consume. Rather one's labor is part of a real quality of
abstract labor. Ones work is part of not a particular kind of work but in terms of hours and production and on this basis is one valued.
Tangential somewhat but is about how life becomes subject to this abstract general process rather than things serving human ends. We experience ourselves as more something to serve the process of production itself.
Which has become applied to the online space, does it reflect something inherent to the online space or is it how the online space has been shaped by the same relations as offline. Making people's data into a product.
People are often seen as objects of manipulation rather than persons with their own ends.
I mean, what is that thing you refer to as individuality and/or personality? Is it more like a soul? Or mind, consciousness, ‘qualia’, which even the analytical thinkers believe to be completely private (I think they may be wrong)?
Indeed, they are quite wrong because some don't understand how qualia while personally experienced is socially developed or not solely confined to one's mind but in relation to an objective world.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htmAccording to Vygotsky, Piaget fails to see the transition from “egocentric speech” (when a child talks aloud to him/herself while alone) to “inner speech”. Piaget believes that egocentric speech simply “fades away” as the child becomes less egocentric and more socialised. Vygotsky on the other hand, hypothesises that egocentric speech turns into inner speech; that it does not fade away but “goes underground”. The analogy with learning to count and add up is very convincing.
In contradiction to Piaget’s conception of development as socialisation, Vygotsky says:
“The earliest speech of the child is ... essentially social. ... At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric and communicative speech ... Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions ... Egocentric speech, splintered off from general social speech, in time leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking. ... the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]
Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality!
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.htmlMarx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics