CTheory. net. THEORY BEYOND THE CODESEinstein's Nightmare. On Bernard Stiegler's Techno- Dystopia.
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Mark Featherstone. I. Gadget Love. In the winter of 2. I became aware of . The people in each image are distracted. They grasp their gadgets, gaze at screens, lose themselves in mediation. They are immersed in their i.
Phones, smart phones, and other devices, and disregard the presence of their friends and family members. At the bottom of the meme is a quotation from Einstein.
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Here we read the details of Einstein's Nightmare: . The world will have a generation of idiots. Perhaps the meme is inspired by Mc. Luhan, Baudrillard, or both? According to the meme, we may argue that the technological medium of human communication has started to work against its original purpose - - the creation of social relations, where the term .
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But this is not the relation that predominates in Einstein's Nightmare. In the nightmare, we gaze at screens and communicate with absent, virtual bodies, yet we ignore the real people in our immediate vicinity. The people in the images are Mc. Luhan's gadget lovers who love their phones because they insulate them from real social interaction.
As Mc. Luhan explained, there is simply too much happening in our hyper- media society to take everything in, so we . Speak, write, communicate for the sake of it.
As John O'Neill noted long before the Internet - - let alone the i. Phone - - took off, . According to the meme, this is Einstein's technological dystopia. However, there is one problem with this picture, which is entirely predictable and probably essential to the idea of the meme itself: Einstein never wrote or said this phrase to anybody. At least this is the conclusion we reach if we consult Alice Calaprice's Ultimate Quotable Einstein. There is no record that he ever expressed this particular nightmarish vision.
What if the counterfeit nature of the quote at the centre of the meme is itself part of the nightmare? Is this not Plato's nightmare of mediation and recorded memory from the Phaedrus? In Plato's view, technological memory, or writing, is thus essentially sophistry. It turns us into idiots, the original proletarians, and it cannot be trusted. This idea is taken up by Derrida in his discussion of Plato's pharmacy and by Baudrillard in his works on simulation. For Derrida, the Platonic myth of the value of speech over writing and the fear of the infinite slippage of the signifier relative to the signified misses the essential diff. The same is the case with Baudrillard's notion of simulation.
Here, the signifier, media reality, is out on its own, an integral reality that has no relation to what we might mistakenly call the real thing. In their view, we should not imagine that technological memory or reality is in some way a poor version of ontological human memory or organic reality.
The latter does not exist. However, this reading may not be entirely correct. Arthur Bradley shows that Derrida never entirely abandons humanity to technology, because diff. It is possible to say that, despite their rejection of the Platonic idea of the superiority of lived memory, both Derrida and Baudrillard end up reasserting some ontological, pre- technological truth, even if this is achieved negatively, smuggled in by the backdoor, like a virus hidden inside a Trojan horse.
In much the same way that we might make this point about the place of the pre- technological human in Derrida and Baudrillard, we can cut through the tension between living and dead memory in the case of Einstein, whose . Although Einstein may not have said what the meme claims he said, a consideration of what he did have to say about technology suggests that he held similarly pessimistic views about the relation between the human and technology. In fact, the unreliability of technological mediation is in some respects undercut or traversed by metaphorical connections that establish the spirit of meaning that always resides somewhere else. Following Calaprice's collection, we may therefore argue that the truth of Einstein's Nightmare can be found in his various comments about machines - - .
There is nothing new about this feeling of course. It illustrates a horror of technology, techno- science, and what Langdon Winner calls the . This is, in other words, the horror of Frankenstein or the 1. The Terminator - - the horror of the decoupled, conscious instrument, the machine that works for the sake of working, and has no concern for human life. Exploring this Platonic tendency towards a fear of posthumanism through Winner's history, it is easy to pick out other key thinkers grappling with technological dystopianism. Consider the early Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; . The meme itself expresses such fear through the contemporary gadget par excellence, the mobile phone, which William Merrin tells us originally represented futurity and progress.
Here, the mobile phone turns people into idiots. The Mc. Luhanesque gadget lovers who inhabit the meme are caught in a closed loop of narcissistic, or autoerotic, self love. There is no social relation here. Instead, the principle of empty connectivity reigns and life is organised around the dictates of what Marcuse calls the . The global technical system destroys the self in the creation of what Jaron Lanier refers to as . Winnicott's famous transitional object, which creates a secure space conditioned by care, attention, imagination, and creativity, . In Winnicott's psychoanalytic work, the transitional object - - such as the teddy bear or blanket - - represents a source of attachment that the child can hold onto in order to feel safe and secure.
Winnicott's thesis is that these objects enable us to move from the space of parental care, where we receive unconditional love, to the space of social relations, where we must negotiate relations, without feeling abandoned. In other words, the object comes to symbolise a social system of care and attention beyond our parents, especially the mother. But what happens if the object no longer plays this role and no longer feels special? This is precisely the problem with the object in Baudrillard's work on the gadget in his book The Consumer Society. In this case, the object does not make us feel safe and secure, but rather transforms us into dysfunctional addicts by virtue of its own hyper- functionality. Since we exceed this simple equation, where functionality is enough in itself, our humanity becomes a source of lack. As a result, we become reliant on the technological object.
The effect of this reliance is that we escape our lack through the object. Of course, the additional problem of the technological object today is that, unlike the transitional object - - such as the ageing teddy or the old blanket, which grow with us - - the evolution of the modern technological object is organised around planned obsolescence. Where we are meant to outgrow the transitional object, the technological gadget outgrows us. It moves on - - the i. Phone 3 becomes the 3. G, the 4, 4. S, 5, 5. S, 5. C. As Steve Jobs famously said before the unveiling of Apple's latest gadget, .
It is debased in both directions - - it outgrows us and seems worthless in any case because we know that there will always be a new model in the near future. In this way, the infidelity of the object constructs and ensures our own unfaithfulness in the shape of a rational decision to hedge our bets and remain in a state of suspended animation, endlessly waiting for the new model that might solve our own worthlessness before the machine.
In this situation of heightened anxiety about the fidelity of the object, the object itself becomes ironically ever more important - - we become addicted to the communication and connectivity it enables, because for the brief time we possess it we can escape our anxiety and become part of the hyper- functional machine. While we are part of the global technical system, we work, and avoid the nightmare of what we can call being- disconnected. Essentially, this is what Mc. Luhan means when he writes of the gadget lover's connection to the object that narcotises him and allows him to escape from the anxiety of abandonment before the technological machine. Like the populous depicted in Einstein's Nightmare, he gazes into the phone, and the other who gazes back at him through the phone is a comforting image of himself.
When there is no other, and I am lost in a hyper- functional technological world, I become my own other. This is the masturbatory logic that supports, for example, the Apple universe. The i. Phone/i. Pad is a high- design, deeply erotic object. It is all screen, a mirror that reflects myself back to me. Before this techno- mirror, I am always Narcissus, or perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer's Tantalus, . The problem, then, of Einstein's Nightmare is that it constructs a blindingly bright, high- tech dystopia where people turn to gadgets and live in bondage with the technical system that demands obedience through the performance principle. Of course, this is a particular form of bondage - - voluntary servitude.
We turn to the machine in order to escape from the horror of information overload that destroys living memory and transforms us into proletarianised objects. As Mc. Luhan explains, we .
On the contrary, they will abandon us the moment we start to feel secure. In what follows I propose to explore the concept of technological dystopia expressed by Einstein's Nightmare through an analysis of the work of the contemporary French thinker Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, I make the case that Einstein's Nightmare is largely Stiegler's nightmare, and that the idea of a technological dystopia is contained within works such as Disbelief and Discredit, . Finally, I examine Stiegler's work on youth, hope, and the future.
Here, I propose an exploration of his dystopian vision of an endless present conditioned by banality, poverty, and meaninglessness.