If we take the Boolean formula not as a historical matrix made by human hands but as a law of nature, it is not a scientific fantasy that is being redeemed—or cashing out—but a religious one. Dissolved into information, the world is becoming a pure sign. It stands opposed to analog hiss, contamination—all that noise. When something becomes a sign, it achieves immortality; along with its earthly body, it sloughs off all the darkness that works against pure reason. If the Greek word sarx refers to the perishable “flesh,” sarcophagus conjures up the idea of being buried alive in one’s mortal frame. For the sake of immortal luminousness, the Gnostics sought to mortify their bodies. Today—under the spell of the pure, manipulable sign—we can see similar fantasies emerge. The difference is that these fantasies do not aim to reach a world beyond so much as they seek to implant this same beyond—already attained through digital signs—in our world here and now.
If a blind clockmaker—or, in terms more suited to the times, a sloppy processing plant—has made the creatures of this world, then improving the faulty code seems to be a good idea. From this perspective, the evolutionary process that nature implemented as simple tryouts—a matter of constant trial and error—invites proofreading and correction. Now, whatever resists the digital ideal of purity must be deleted or eliminated. Advocates of transhumanism have left no room for doubt that genetic engineering is not only desirable but heralds the creation of an earthly paradise. All that enhances the resiliency or fitness of life is hailed; hereditary illnesses are to be rectified—erased as so many scribal errors. Indeed, some thinkers take the writing phantasm so far that they want not only to subject human nature to thoroughgoing redesign, but to abolish all natural suffering, period. This is only logical. If humankind’s lupine nature has been overcome, why not abolish wolves, too—indeed, why not get rid of predators in general? From the vantage point of comprehensive, universal happiness, what is a predator but an error of nature, a monstrosity, deserving to be wiped out?
As a rule, digitizing natural objects still means making digital reproductions. However, big data has introduced a form of modeling that works exclusively with relations: the fact that in some arbitrary respect, as per specification, a similarity can be found between objects. If, for instance, one looks up all the words in a dictionary that are thirteen or nineteen letters long, the law uniting them has nothing to do with the words’ meaning. The words constitute a group on the basis of a formal system for ordering a “population,” a social structure. By the same token, all items displaying the same timestamp might be brought together under a single heading. “Structure,” Roland Barthes wrote, “is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object.” For Barthes, structural logic was in the eye of the beholder. Now, we face structures emerging from the space between objects in a databank. The formula x = xn—especially when it works out as x = x2 = x3 = x4, etc.—opens up a dimension for new structures, new constructs, to take shape.
All this might seem rather abstract, yet the business models followed by social networks have long since spelled it out as a command. Even though we still speak of “friends,” everybody knows that this group functions as a voting herd: a multiplier indicating a particular user’s significance in terms of traffic. The result is striking: laws of friendship, which used to be informal, become elastic as soon as they are given notation and inscribed. Consequently, communities of fans now can simply be bought. Inasmuch as the new laws of friendship emerge as manipulable quantities, they expose the blind spot central to a certain ideology and image of humanity. Suddenly (as NSA metadata analyses have made clear), relations become visible that would have better remained hidden: who with whom, where and when. Friendship is the name for everything that one can count on yet defies calculation. When this paradox becomes formalized, the Other of capitalism vanishes.
When an object is digitized, it is no longer what it is, but what is assigned to it. It dies a symbolic death—death at the digital stake—and transforms into an object in a database. As such, it can be multiplied and correlated with other objects. It can be deformed and morphed, and the data it comprises may serve as a control mechanism or blueprint for generating an entirely new object. If a species barrier exists in nature, the digital sphere—which dissolves everything into bits—makes no distinction between images, sounds, and letters. What the human sensorium apprehends as a matter of synesthesia (say, “hearing colors”) is the law of the machine: everything can copulate with everything else. Once it is transformed into a database object, the object becomes part of a herd, a swarm. As an element of big data, it turns into a static pulse generator and contributes to the formation of templates: emergent patterns, emergent objects. As part of an assemblage, the object must admit strict identification. Accordingly, it receives an ID, a brand marker, specifying its place in the herd.
Such aggregation logic, which develops in databases—and nowhere else—is now spilling over into reality. Livestock farmers are using RFID (radio frequency identification) chips to watch over herds, count them, sort and breed them, market them, and optimize profitability. The IDs of animals are fed into databases along with information such as age, health, time to slaughter, and shearing, milk, or meat yield. In this way, the herd—which already represents big data’s master plan—turns into a data model that admits further calibration on the basis of trial runs, limit cases, and forecasts. The same mechanisms are at work in logistics. Companies use tagging methods to group packages together and share information about transportation routes and scheduling possibilities. All of this corresponds to how information is shared on the Internet. And the same logic prevails in construction: data models are cycled through until the object in question has assumed the optimal form; only then is a decision made about what material to use for actually building it. In contrast to the natural world, where things already possess properties, abstract objects “seek out” materials that will fulfill ideals as fully as possible.
The change of perspective is decisive. An analog prototype no longer provides the starting point; instead, the realm of data opens a window onto the real world. This shift holds consequences for our social order, too. As part of a database, individuals turn into quantities to be calculated—in keeping with standard operating procedure for insurance calculations, tax brackets, market research, and epidemiology. In contrast to practices today that still use “paper models,” the future will enlist data related to human beings in order to “optimize” society: people will no longer participate in communal life as decision-making actors, but as pulse generators; their micro-actions will factor into equations on a mass scale and go into effect as a kind of endocrinological dosage after the fact. Indeed, this type of mechanism is already at work. Consider Nielsen ratings, sales figures, illness rates, and other demographic data that determine what gets aired, manufactured, researched, and planned—thereby influencing what counts as reality. Should the same principle find elaboration along totalitarian lines, it would mean, in terms of our formula, that the individual (x), as part of a herd, gets fed into the datasphere and processed as xn, vanishing into the crowd; then, at t0—some point in time—she or he becomes x again, when assigned a place in society that digital calculation has deemed appropriate. A subcutaneous RFID chip, as the placeholder for the individual’s identity, would operate in payment processes, security systems, health plans, and social welfare programs. By the same token, data connected with this ID would be collected and used to recognize general patterns of movement, behavior, illnesses, trends, preferences, and psychological dispositions.
Angels, medieval thinking held, move so rapidly that if one of them needed to travel from Rome to Barcelona in bad weather, two raindrops would barely touch its wings. The Internet—especially in conjunction with mobile radio technology—has given us just such an angelic body. Even when, heavy-limbed, we trudge across the street, we are moving in an ether of information. We may still deem ourselves integral beings, but in fact we have long possessed two bodies that are independent of each other—and not just in terms of speed, but by nature. I can do as I wish with my natural body, but my “data body” travels on far darker terrain. Suppose, for instance, that the police are looking for me. The signal my data body emits will let the authorities track me down—and, if need be, liquidate me (by means of a drone, for instance).
As such, part of my person has dissolved into a data body. Or, more precisely, it manifests itself as a data body. If someone else—an institution or a program—manages to get hold of this second body, not only can purchases be made in my name; insofar as my social network is accessed, such capture may lead to my social death.
Thus, the problem of data security occupies the abyss between the ether, where my data body resides, and the physical world of objects. This gulf, which also represents a contradiction, enables legal entities—institutions like the NSA or companies like Google—to gain power over my data body: a form of symbolic arrest, or habeas corpus. It is impossible to resolve the dilemma, even if every kind of abuse could be prevented. As soon as I take advantage of the conveniences that come to the company of angels (navigation, search engines, and communication at the speed of light), I hand my data body over and make it public domain. Anyone who so desires can now track down my vita and texts—whatever I feed into the ether—and use the information to his or her own ends. The networking of my data body—like the wiring of eighteenth-century monks—represents the precondition for any number of applications that now seem indispensable insofar as they unite human beings into an angelic host of sublime sociability (under one flag or another).
At the same time, this social network dissolves everything I consider to constitute my identity. No one can claim that a given piece of information belongs to a determinate physical body in the data dimension; it might be assigned an address, but the blank space that the body forms has no purchase here. Ultimately, affirming data sovereignty would entail the collapse of all the comforts the angelic host enjoys. For that matter: would anyone crossing a wet field claim to have “authored” the tracks she or he leaves behind?
When we think of software, we think of something intangible: the disappearance of things. Such a vision of emptying-out resembles the sensation people had when they listened to CDs for the first time. A digital nothing became audible instead of crackling vinyl: palpable absence, as if the materiality of the object had faded. In this regard, the disappearance of things amounts, first and foremost, to a change in the way they are perceived. If the digital object allows itself to be copied at will, the idea of its irreplaceability, to say nothing of its uniqueness, is over and done. The formula x = xn, then, describes how material existence disappears into its own superfluity. Things are viewed as virtually inflationary. They lose their value. If, during its first two decades of existence, the Internet depicted itself as “Pirate Bay”—a harbor of giveaway culture—this fact reflected our formula’s economic rationale: it is inevitable that mere things will degrade into a pile of junk with no value at all.
For all that, people are still willing to pay for certain goods. But commodities are actually commodities only when they exude an aura extending beyond purely material worth. The object of desire must be fashionable, perfectly designed, and capable of being upgraded. A kind of intelligence is expected of things—an intelligent aura, if you will. In consequence, when goods are acquired, it means purchasing not just the things themselves but a spiritual presence inscribed within them (in smartphones, tablets, navigation devices, intelligent cars, and so on). In turn, this spirit enters a relationship with the bearer of the object: it becomes a proxy, amplifier, icon for the owner’s self-expression and self-discovery. What now comes into view is no longer the aura of the thing, but, as Walter Benjamin put it, that of its owner: “that ornamental halo in which he is enclosed as in a case.”
If everything admitting electrification gets translated into writing, the process yields a language that the machine can understand and speak. The matter does not involve spoken language so much as nature as a whole. Panlingualism was no Romantic fantasy, then. The vision opened the way for the digital age, the discovery of a universal code: “It is not only man that speaks—the universe speaks, too—everything speaks—infinite languages” (Novalis). Nor is it just a matter of computers being programmed to recognize speech, faces, or motion. The machine transcends the human sensory apparatus, period—whether viewed in terms of events in the pico or nano realm, infrared images, or the meteorological data provided by satellites. This explosion of the dimensions of knowledge concerns not only how the world is stored, but also how the world is read. Because processors operate at the speed of light, masses of data that otherwise prove indigestible can be examined for characteristic patterns—say, to identify genetic defects, cerebral irregularities, or molecular defense mechanisms. The significance of all this does not involve expanding the field of human knowledge so much as the emergence of a nonhuman speaker. In other words, universal, digital language has granted the power of speech to the race of devices. A new dimension and a new actor need to be added to the question, Qui parle? To be sure, the intellectual achievements of artificial intelligence lag behind the motor capacities of machines (e.g., drones, self-driving cars, or war robots), but the simple fact that digital logic is able to transpose one language to another level heralds a seismic shift. Not only will this achievement enable human beings from different linguistic regions to speak to one another; digital machines will be able to communicate with other entities (animals, plants, and so on). A metalanguage is emerging that will not just permit human language and human knowledge to be measured, but also enable communication on a subatomic or interstellar level.