[[../writing/Bibliography]] Han, Byung-Chul. _In the Swarm: Digital Prospects_. Translated by Erik Butler, MIT Press, 2017. **No Respect** > Literally, respect means "to look back." It stands for consideration and caution [*Rücksicht*]. Respectful interaction with others involves refraining from curious *staring*. Respect presupposes a distanced look– the *pathos of distance*. Today, it is yielding to the obtrusive staring of *spectacle*. The Latin verb *spectare*, from which spectacle derives, is voyeuristic gazing that lacks deferential consideration – that is, respect (*respectare*). Distance is what makes *respectare* different spectare. *A* society without respect, without the pathos of distance, paves the way for the society of scandal. - p. 1 > A name provides the basis for recognition, which always occurs by name. Practices that involve responsibility, trustworthiness, and reliability are also tied to being *named.* Trust may be defined as *faith in the name*. Giving answers and promising are also acts of the name. The digital medium – which separates messages from messengers, news from its source – is destroying names. – p. 2-3 **Demediatization** > Today, we are no longer just receivers and consumers of information; we generate and broadcast it… The digital medium does not simply provide windows for passive watching. It also offers doors through which we relay information that we generate. Windows on a computer are *windows with doors*; they communicate with other windows without intermediary spaces or authorities. Digital windows open not onto a public space but onto other windows. This sets digital media apart from mass media such as radio or television. In face, media such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook demediate communication. – p.15 ^f59caa **Clever Hans** > Earlier, there was more of the gaze through which, according to Sartre, the other announces itself. Sartre did not associate the gaze exclusively with the human eye. Rather, he perceived the world itself as gazing. As the gaze, the *other* is omnipresent. Even things look at us: > > Of course what *most often* manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain. > > Digital communication is *visually poor* communication.… [talking about video how calls the offcentre camera means each person is constantly looking past each other, asymmetrical gaze] …Camera optics alone are not responsible for the fact that we are staring past each other. Rather, it points to a fundamentally missing *gaze* – that is, to the missing *other*. The digital medium is taking us farther and farther away from the *other*. – p. 23-24 > Tapping around on the touchscreen has consequences in regards to the other. Such motion eliminates the distance that constitutes the other in its otherness. One can swipe or tap the image – touch it directly – because it has already lost its gaze, its countenance. …Lacan would say that the touchscreen is different from the image as screen [*écran*], which simultaneously screens one off from the gaze of the other and lets it shine through. The touchscreen on a smartphone could be called a *transparent screen*. It does not look. > There is no such thing as a transparent countenance. The countenance that one desires is always *opaque*. Literally, opaque means "shadowed". The negativity of the shadow is integral to desire. The *transparent screen* does not admit any desire, which is always the desire of the other… Things that are transparent do not glance. Glances and gleams arise where the light breaks. If there is no break – if nothing is broken – then no eros, no desire can arise. Uniform, flat, and transparent light is not a medium of desire. Transparency means the end of desire. – p. 24-25 ^dc43d2 > Today, images [*Bilder*] are not just likenesses [Abbilder] but also models [Vorbilder]. We flee into images in order to be better, more beautiful, more alive. Clearly we are enlisting not only technology but images, too, in order to drive evolution forward. Yet could it be that evolution is fundamentally based on illusion [Ein-Bild-ung] – that the imaginary plays a constitutive role in evolution? The digital medium is bringing about an *iconic reversal* that is making images seem more alive, more beautiful, and better than reality itself. Reality, in contrast, strikes us as defective: "Looking around at the customers in a cafe, someone remarked to me (rightly): 'Look how gloomy they are! nowadays the images are livelier than the people.' One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: only images exist and are produced and consumed." -Jean-Paul Sartre, *Being and Nothingness*, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Sqare Press, 1984), 346 > -p.27 > According to [Vilém] Flusser, human beings are 'artists' who envision and design alternative worlds. This amounts to erasing the difference between art and science. Art and science are both projects. Scientists, Flusser claims, are 'computer artists *avant la lettre*'. > > Oddly, Flusser founds his 'new anthropology' on 'Judeo-Christianity,' which 'sees only dust in human being.' Within the digital universe of pixels and dots, all discrete quantities dissolve. Here, neither subject nor object represents a meaningful category: 'We can no longer be subjects because there are no longer any objects whose subjects we might be – and no solid core that could be the subject of any object.' As Flusser sees it, the self is now a 'node of intersecting virtualities.' Likewise, whatever *we* exists amounts to a 'node of possibilities': 'We must understand ourselves as curves and bulges in a field of intersecting – above all, interhuman – relations. We, too, are 'digital computations' of whirring dots in possible combinations.' But Flusser's digital messianism fails to do justice to the network topology that now prevails. This landscape does no consist of points and intersections without a self so much as it comprises narcissistic islands of egos. > > On the whole, utopianism dominated the early phases of digital communication. Accordingly, Flusser's idealized anthropology pictures a busy, creative swarm: 'Does the telematic human being represent the beginning of an anthropology, one announcing that being human means being connected with others – reciprocal recognition for the purpose of creative adventure?' The question is purely rhetorical. Over and over, Flusser exalts networked communication into the religious sphere. Here, the telematic ethos of networking is supposed to correspond to 'Judeo-Christianity with its commandment, "Love thy neighbour."' For Flusser, digital communication harbors a messianic potential; this makes it serviceable for the 'deep, existential human call for acknowledgment of the Other and selfknowledge in the Other – in a work, for the love in the Judeo-Christian sense.' Following this logic, digital communication has inaugurated a kind of *Pentecostal communion.* It frees the individual human being from isolation within the self by summoning forth *spirit*, a *resonance chamber*: > The Net vibrates: it is pathos, resonance. This is the foundation of telematics – the sympathy and antipathy of nearness. I believe telematics is a technology of living one's neighbor, a technology for carrying out Judeo-Christianity. The basis of telematics is empathy. It abolishes humanism in favor of altruism. The very fact that this possibility exists is something altogether colossal. > The society of information itself is supposed to represent a 'strategy' for 'abolishing the ideology of a sel'; it is supposed to promote the 'insight that we are there for each other, and no one exists for him- or herself alone,' 'Automatically,' digital technology is 'doing away with the self to the benefit of intersubjection realization.' > > For Flusser, digital networking represents not a medium of *compulsive searching* for the new but a medium of 'fidelity' that lends the world an 'aroma,' a 'specific fragrance.' By dispelling spatiotemporal distance, digital communication enables the experience of joyous proximity – a flicitous moment of fulfillment (*kairos*): > This is the image before me: when I telematically communicate with my friend in São Paulo, it is not just space that bends– he comes to me, and I to him; time bends, too – past and future: the past becomes the future, the future turns into the past, and both are present. Thus, I experience intersubjectivity. > Such a *messianism of networking* has not proven true. Instead, digital communication has made community – the *we*– deteriorate markedly. It is destroying the public sphere and heightening human isolation. It is not the precept 'Love thy neighbor' but narcissism that governs digital communication. Digital technology does not represent a technology for 'loving one's neighbor as oneself.' On the contrary, it has proven to be a narcissistic ego machine. Nor is it a dialogical medium. The dialogical– which determines Flusser's thinking through and through – commandeers the way that he understands networks. > - p, 46-48 > The secret loves silence. This is what differentiates the secretive, or mysterious [das Geheimnisvolle], from the ghostly. Like the spectacle, the spectral depends on seeing and being seen. That is why ghosts are noisy. The digital wind blowing through our houses is ghostly… Their high degree of complexity makes digital things spectral and uncontrollable. In contrast, the secret is not defined by complexity. > > Transparency society has a flipside – indeed, a dark side. In certain respects, it amounts ot a *surface phenomenon.* Behind or underneath it, *spectral spaces* open up that defy transparency altogether. *Dark pools*, for instance, refer to anonymous financial transactions. Ultimately, so-called high-speed trading is commerce with, or between, ghosts: algorithms and machines are communicating and fighting with each other. As Kafka would say, these spectral modes of action and exchange reach 'beyond human power'. They give rise to unpredictable, spectral events such as *flash crashes*. Today's financial markets also breed monsters. Because of their exceedingly high level of complexity, they can stir up trouble – and worse – and do so without any supervision. *Tor* is the name for software enabling one to travel through the Net anonymously, in quasi-subterranean fashion. Is it the *digital deep sea*, where all visibility vanishes. The more transparency increases, the more the darkness grows. > - p. 57-58 Tor in English = a hill or rocky peak: [in place names] : Glastonbury Tor. Tor in German = gate, goal, door