Checkmate ?
A machine for seeing,
a machine for hearing,
and a machine for thinking….
very shortly to come
with the boom in all things digital
and the programmed abandonment
of the analogue.
How will the silence
of the infinite spaces of art subsist?
We are all seated in Plato’s cave,
which has become the Sybil’s lair.
—stupefied.
Excerpt from Art and Fear by Paul Verilio
These words are eerily prescient. They were written in 2006, twelve years ago. I was reminded yesterday of how far we’ve come, or regressed, in the course of email exchanges with friends. After months of emotionally charged, violence-tinged-rhetoric by a President who has daily demeaned and vilified political opponents,–reason is severed from discourse between us. The consequences of a line of reasoning based on empirical data are denied, and one cannot perceive that murder lies at the end of the road, if one follows the President and his parties line of rhetoric.
I cannot imagine what further moves are possible within this language game. Have we reached checkmate?
We no longer think. The machine thinks us.
