KISS.
A fancy word, a delightful meaning. If words were colours, perhaps this one would have the brightest and prettiest ones – shimmering and glowing. Kissing is exhilarating, uncomplicated and engaging. Surely this is why its name has become the motto of modern design. Not only of design, though, but of all kinds of contemporary public interaction, especially online communication. It means almost the same thing – something simple and attractive, although in fact an acronym meaning “keep it simple, stupid”. One should not make people think if they want their message to reach everyone. One should make people smile and feel at ease. Amuse them – that’s the key. People don’t like to think, they prefer to enjoy themselves, they go for brief and uncomplicated statements.
There are psychological reasons for this – a man is freed from many of his restraints when he is joyous. The aesthetic and behavioural criteria of his solemn nature fall off. Entertainment is something stupid in the eyes of cultural tradition, although humour is probably the highest manifestation of intelligence. Skillfully presented irony and sarcasm can put the claims of high art to shame. Simply take Monty Python as an example. Yet, intelligent humour is generally hard to digest and far less “entertaining” to the crowd than the plain-spoken skits and quips. The German word for entertainment is very indicative – Unterhaltung. Consisting of 2 parts – unter and haltung, it could be loosely translated as a lowly attitude. In its meaning of frivolous approach and reduced criterion, it is to a large extent a cultural deviation. A niche where the air is not saturated with culture, but with …
Freedom
Indeed, high art requires intellectual tension, concentration of thought, which generally implies unfreedom. Culture itself is also somewhat unfree. It establishes patterns, stereotypes, standards, in short – culture “stuffs up one’ s head ” and leaves little free space for oneself. As the modernism of the early 20th century discovered, to be an independent artist, in the sense of being emancipated from everything that people before you have thought up. In the words of J. Joyce in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man “You talk to me of nationality, language,religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” Inside the inverted commas I add culture because it represents the spirit of a society, a nation, a family. The Latin word “cultivare” means “to raise”, so it is no surprise that culture is a tradition in itself.
How contradictory – the more cultivated and educated a person is, the less free he becomes. His thinking, acting, even unconventional ideas depend, by default, on his knowledge and upbringing. As has long been known, there is nothing new under the sun.
In contrast to high culture, in humour and entertainment, this is not the case. It is no coincidence that the ancient Romans had special holidays on which they gave the masses the right to laugh freely and break all mores with impunity. They knew that civilization was really a cold, stony and gloomy structure with windows tightly shut and hard to breathe in, so they aired it out completely once a year. The so-called entertainment culture does the same. Men of all ages need a “carnival” in their life to breathe better. They have devised all sorts of ways to achieve this, found millions of ways to enjoy themselves.
Unprecedented in the recorded human history
To this day, man has brought culture and fun together. Until now, they have always been clearly demarcated, in most cases even opposed. Something unseen is taking place nowadays – culture, the spiritual in its visibility, is placed next to the trivial, the frivolous, the commonplace. For the first time, the “vertical” opposition of the spiritual-intellectual upper and the material lower has been abolished. The virtual age has made possible what was hitherto unthinkable – the coexistence and fusion of low and high culture, elite education and “semi-knowledge” within one domain, has placed the vertical on the horizontal plane of the platforms.
Digital culture has transformed every achievement of humanity into dots, dashes and symbols, simplified even the most complex human puzzles, transmitted them through the codes of universal languages like “basic” or “html”. The digital discovered the lost universal language, translated into it every human achievement, regardless of its complexity, level, accessibility and affiliation, and “uploaded” it to the internet. Thus, it became part of the “hard drive” of our civilization – complete, unified, horizontal.
The vertical concept in the horizontal culture of modernity has no aesthetic or evaluative sense. Nor is it certain whether the new universal language is in fact the lost original language from the Tower of Babel. Nevertheless, it stands as a fact that today, as never before, every one can communicate in one language. Not only because of Google’s extensive translation services, but also because free access to the treasure trove of human knowledge has given everyone the feeling of being part of the Unique Great Spirit of humanity. It gave everyone the confidence to be monolingual with connoisseurs on almost any subject. Irrespective of their education, knowledge and talents. The taboos of learnedness have fallen. Whether this is good or bad cannot yet be said. Whether the cultural upper has been dragged down, that’s obvious – all that was once inaccessible and unattainable to the commons and the uneducated is now put on a platform, chewed over and ground up on Wikipedia to be understood by the masses.
An interesting dialectic
In digital terminology – you “upload” something to the web so that the average person can “download” it and get to know it. Culture and knowledge are not just brought down to the people today, they are slapped on the table, alongside garlic and bacon. It is not by chance that we speak of “mass culture” and “popular science”. This process, this liberalization of the mind, began of course several decades before the advent of the internet and the virtual. Back then, it was only a harbinger of the radical change that is now visible to the naked eye and has turned into a revolutionary leap.
Today, every average modern person believes that the cyberspace in which he spends most of his time will grant him infinite, almost divine creative powers. Willingly using all the possibilities of the virtual, he creates “artefacts” without genre and subject limitations, regardless of either knowledge or skill. Moreover, convinced of the importance of what he has created, he sincerely believes that his achievement must be “uploaded” into the global, virtual brain of humanity.
Uploaded in the literal and figurative sense. Whether the metaphorical meaning doubles the concrete one is not clear – does the fact that something is “up” in the virtual, elevate us like art does? Or does it rather lift us up onto digital clouds that spread over our individual servers in the troposphere of the universal information mantle, covering all existing bits and bytes. The geometrical terms of modern technology indicate a new dimension – the cyber dimension – of which we are all a part in one way or another. And although it is not positioned on top of us in the Euclidean sense, it is simply above us. Us in the sense of entities that produce Information Units. Online terminology has also created an interesting synonym nest – “upload” corresponds in meaning to “share”. In other words: By becoming part of the universal digital coverage of the world, voluntarily or not, we have become part of a network that is all around, subordinating us in every aspect of our existence. We have united with it, we have become a part, a section, a piece of the puzzle. Is it possible that this fulfils the Catholic aspirations of Christianity? To unite all people, to make them part of the whole, which is the meaning of communion – “to come into unity”. There is another proof here that the time of absolutes is over. Today everything becomes its other and nothing can be accepted unequivocally.
Is there a contradiction in this? Does our exposed egocentrism make us part of the whole? There is also an anthroposophical and axiological context to this question, namely how are ethical and aesthetic values reordered and how is man’s relationship to the spiritual world reformulated. And even more
What are the new dimensions of freedom.
Culture, as said at the beginning, in the sense of a civilisational-cognitive construct, is a paradigm, a defined and determining order that largely excludes the category of “freedom”. In contrast, carnival, the “low” culture, is its true manifestation. Likewise, virtual reality, despite its codes and regularities, rejects the limitations and canonicity of the traditional set of erudition and upbringing, thus declaring itself essentially free. Whereas until now, in trying to flee the world and daily life, we have always chosen the frivolous and funny, at present it is the virtual that is the shortcut, it is the escape itself. A false, materially non-existent, but at the same time omnipresent reality that is different, alternative to our being. Probably that is the reason why we all, almost with no exception, voluntarily hand ourselves over to it.
There is no freedom per se, and man is by nature unfree. Philosophers of the 19th century once said so, and as if to confirm it, we have willingly succumbed to the supposedly limitless cyber temptation. Into its trap we have fallen. Like in the song “Hotel California”, it turns out that no oncoming traffic is allowed. All roads lead in, but none leads out, once inside, we can’t escape it, there’s no way out. Something of ours, an imprint, a sign, always remains inside, enslaving us there. That is the true obscenity, a de facto irrevocable bond disguised as absolute and utter freedom. The most preposterous of it all is that both the victim and the torturer happen to be ourselves. Us. Our own intellect, the desire to provoke reality and make it follow our own will.
It worked. Not only have we modified reality, we also have re-created ourselves. The human being of the present is completely different from all the human beings who lived until that day. The cyber generation is so unique that we may announce the end of the species “Homo sapiens”. It is quite clear that the ratio has long since given way to the uncertainty of the quanta, so that we may declare “the rational Human Being” an extinct species and introduce his successor on the scene of civilization.
“Homo virtualis”
Neither genetically, nor anthropomorphically, nor socially does Homo Virtualis differ from his predecessor. Neither does he herald the end of the human race. The decisive difference lies in the dimensions of his free will. Embedded in the phony life fabric of the digitally existing human being, this concept is no longer attributed any significance. Choice and responsibility in the classical, existential sense convey no relevance to it any more. The new human species does not present itself as a single personality standing behind every single minor decision. Instead, it has a myriad of avatars, which gives it an almost anarchistic approach to any reality. There are no taboos or boundaries for him, he has permissions and cracks for every door.
Where it is not the word that stands at the beginning, but rather its signs, creation has no spirit and no essence. It is but a hieroglyph, a signature of dots and dashes. Condemned to mortality, error and transience. Human quest for perfection, is, nonetheless, unlimited.
How far Homo Virtualis shall succeed in this, provided he remains flesh and blood, only time can tell. Hopefully he will learn from our mistakes and not imagine that wings are all it takes to reach the sun. Be they made of wax or not.
Tradevarium 