Heidegger’s farmer is a subject. Eytmologically, subject means “one who is cast under” (as in subject to or sujet à). The farmer stands subject to the nomos of the earth. The terrestrial order produces subjects. Heidegger defines human existence as a matter of fundamental “thrownness.” Today, Heidegger’s existential ontology needs to be rewritten: people no longer consider themselves subjects that are cast under a general law but as self-designing—“self-casting” and, indeed, self-optimizing—projects. Of course, the transition from subject to project was already underway before the advent of digital media. Now, as ever, the rule holds: in critical phases of its existence, the prevailing form of being or life pushes for modes of expression that attain completion only in a new medium. The forms that life assumes depend on prevailing media. Now, digital media are completing the process whereby the subject transforms into a projection. The digital is a medium of projection.
In light of the “digital turn,” Vilém Flusser called for a new anthropology—an anthropology of the digital:
We are no longer subjects in a given, objective world but projects of alternative worlds. We have raised ourselves up from a submissive, subjective position in order to project. We are becoming adults. We know we are dreaming.1
According to 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.”2
Oddly, Flusser founds his “new anthropology” on “Judeo-Christianity,” which “sees only dust in human being.”3 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.”4 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 combination.”5 But Flusser’s digital messianism fails to do justice to the network topology that now prevails. This landscape does not 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?”6 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 neighbor.’” For Flusser, digital communication harbors a messianic potential; this makes it serviceable for the “deep, existential human call for acknowledgment of the Other and self-knowledge in the Other—in a word, for love in the Judeo-Christian sense.”7 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 loving 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.8
The society of information itself is supposed to represent a “strategy” for “abolishing the ideology of a self”; 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 intersubjective realization.”9
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 felicitous 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.10
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.
Today, the subject achieves liberation by turning itself into a project. Yet this amounts to another figure of constraint. Compulsion and constraint now take the form of performance, achievement, self-optimization, and autoexploitation. We are living in a singular phase of history when freedom itself entails pressure and coercion. In actual fact, freedom represents the antitype of compulsion—period. And yet this same antitype is now bringing forth compulsion and constraint. More freedom amounts to more pressure. As such, it marks the end of freedom. We’ve gone down a dead-end street. We can move neither forward nor backward. Flusser fails to notice the fateful dialectic of freedom, which turns it into its opposite. The reason that he makes this mistake is his messianism. Contemporary society is not a world of “Love thy neighbor,” where we all realize ourselves in concert. Instead, it is an achievement society that enforces isolation. The achievement subject exploits itself until it collapses. It develops autoaggressive traits. Often enough, they lead to suicide. As a beautiful project, the self turns out to be a projectile that it now turns on itself.