Mark Jarzombek - Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

I MMANUEL K ANT, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, defined the parameters of the modern sense of personhood by replacing the standard assumption of the superiority of the soul over the body with a more complex entanglement built around an innate sense of unity:

No one is immediately conscious of a particular place in his body, but only the one that he as a human being occupies with respect to the world around him.... Where I feel, there I am. I am just as immediately in my fingertips as in my head. It is myself whose heel hurts and whose heart beats with emotion. When my corn aches, I feel the painful impression not in a brain nerve but at the end of my toe.... My soul is wholly in my whole body and wholly in each of its parts.

So powerful was this claim that it remained a key element of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and was just as foundational to the dialectic of Hegel as it was to the psychohistoricism of Dilthey. It reached its most extreme figuration in Heideggers claim that the original act of building, bauen, derived from nothing lessand nothing more!than Ich bin. The claim also produced a vast symptomology to describe conditions that did not fit the moldschizophrenia, mood disorders, psychosis, paranoia, bipolarism, and so onall of which become scientifically verifiable proof in the negative of the more elusive existence of the modern notion of a stable and unified Self.

We are now in a situation where the discussion of ontology has to be updated. The world is designed from the macro to the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological. The result is a digitally monitored, pharma-corrected, ontic-ecology now common to many people across the globe, not just the wealthy, and not just those savvy in the ways of the computer. The modern duality of the stable and the unstable when talking about the Self is increasingly revealed as little more than an artifice: a convenience.

This book is, however, not about the media/digital world of gaming and gadgets; nor is it about the geopolitics of globalization. It asks a more personal question, and tries to do so without first judging who we are or what we have now become. It used to be that we were what we believed, or we were what we ate. Now, we are determined by what data experts call our data exhaustor, as I would like to call it, ontic exhaust. We participate in this exhaust making willingly and unwillingly, wittingly and unwittingly, purposefully and accidentally. The word exhaust is, of course, a misdirect. Unlike car exhaust that dissipates into the atmosphere, this exhaust is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like.

Without this invisible ether of one and zeros, the world as we know it would, in fact, cease to function. It is the new oxygen, and everyoneand every thinghas to be dedicated to its production and maintenance. Unlike oxygen, which came into existence long before humans, this new substance is anthropocentric in that its production is a global/human enterprise. The individual, the corporation, the nation-state, and thousands of nameless hackers are increasingly shaping a destiny with an unknown proportion and an unknown termination date.

Though computers have been around for a while, this circulational condition has only emerged in the last five or so years, meaning that one has to completely rethink the philosophical and anthropological basis of our ontology and to do so without applying the lens of either victimhood or opportunity, the two modalities that are alien to this discussion. I do not, however, proclaim neutrality. Far from it. The questions are, What is this new ontology? What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of our new Self? Only with these questions at least partially answered can we begin to develop a more substantial critique of the positional paradoxes that define the problem of Being.