Metamodernity and human mind
Seven questions for László Ropolyi
Each time has its own signs and form of existence that shapes our consciousness. It is impossible to avoid the idea that it directly depends on the dominant type of media. Until the 20th century, the text was dominant, and it was this that determined our slow, archaic consciousness. Then came the radio, and with it the modern archetype of the time, with its propaganda and unification. Then television appeared, and with it came postmodernism, when the models to which we were supposed to aspire disappeared. Ten years ago, when cheap smartphones with cheap and fast 24-hour access to the Internet became widespread, the time of metamodernism came. But what does it look like?
We haven’t met for 5 years, but today is again — a new issue of my “Philosophical Drum” podcast. My guest is Mr. László Ropolyi, an ex-assistant-professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eötvös Loránd University. He is a philosopher of the internet. Our conversation will be based on my “Metamodernism Manifesto”.
Mr. Ropolyi, does the Internet really need philosophers? It looks like a greatest fair or an exchange where all traders would like to shout over each other. Of course, they don’t need deep thoughts and long inferences in long sentences. At best, they exchange short exclamations, personal insults, and engage in ego-showing. Are you sure that today anyone will still listen to philosophers?
The answer depends on your notion about the Internet and on philosophy. In my opinion, philosophy is a kind of activity which explains the nature of something. Philosophy of the Internet would explain what it means, what kind of being it is. I prefer classical Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotelian metaphysics suggests two (philosophical and scientific) views on the beings:
- We need to focus our philosophical attention on “the being as being”, as a whole.
- Scientific view tries to understand the beings from their different aspects.
It depends on what we should see in the phenomenon of the Internet: a communication tool, a technology or a cultural medium as the aspects of it.
I suppose it is obvious. We don’t need to clarify it.
The Internet is a complex being and something so complex can never be obvious. So we can consider “the internet as the internet”, as a whole as well. Everytime you see it you will discover a new aspect of it. And the aspects of the Internet are almost infinite.
Are you not afraid that we can just be stuck in these definitions and not be able to take a second step in our understanding of the Internet?
If you accept this you should explain the specificity of this tool. We need to understand how communication on the Internet differs from communication in public life.
Of course, it differs, because in real life we have a limited number of people to communicate with. But on the Internet it is potentially millions of people who could read and comment on you.
The second aspect is that Internet communication is going on online. Other sorts of communication like telephone conversations, radio, TV are offline activities. And the main and very significant difference is that while being online you are in the process of continuous communication. The other important feature is that online communication is extremely networked which is not inherent in other forms of communication. That means that using the Internet you can follow the network and eventually you can reach every element of this network. That is absolutely impossible when you are speaking on the telephone having direct contact with a person.
Another important fact about the Internet is that it was created in the 60s because of military reasons. Its inventor had a goal to create a network which is very resistant to heavy and massive destruction. The idea was to create a communication system without any center. That is, a non-hierarchical structure. This approach had a lot of consequences.
The center can appear in this network at any time and in any place. And everyone can suddenly become this center. As Andy Warhol said 60 years ago, “Today, anyone can become famous for 15 minutes.” But now everyone can be potentially famous all the time.
That’s absolutely true. When you create a podcast, a web page, then you can have a feeling that nobody will not read even a word from it. But you will always be present in these words, because you created something that will be continuously available for people. The presence is one of the very important concepts of the Internet.
The reality has not become more complicated. We just started to notice more than before. At some point this complexity of impressions increased so much that it exploded even before the Technological Singularity. The modern man reminds a patient of Asperger’s Syndrome, who notices all the smallest details of the environment at once, and this knowledge so distracts him (or her) that he (or she) is no longer able to grasp the whole, he (or she) gathers a large collection of photo cameras without any interest in photography. Such an accumulation of information leads to the emergence of a new hybrid consciousness, which combines inseparable, opposite, antagonistic fenomena and in general everything that the eyes can catch and the ears can hear. Hence a new form of artistic method and a new metaphorical apparatus of understanding reality emerges.
Mr. Ropolyi, what do you think, what kind of consciousness do these endless collections of fast impressions which we get from the Internet form?
I’d say that the huge amount of information we receive is not a new situation and we already had before the Internet was invented. We had a very chaotic stream of information long before. There are a lot of things we cannot control, grasp, follow or understand at all. The Internet appeared in this situation and its use has two different stages: before and after the crucial point of Internet development which was in the time between 2010–2015.
What did happen in this crucial point?
In this time one of the most important things happened — the emergence of social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
But they appeared even earlier. Maybe the most important reason is the appearance of cheap Internet connection and cheap smartphones, when billions of people could be present online around the clock.
That’s true. At this moment 60% of humans are using the Internet. That’s around 5 billion people. But this is not so important as the fact that in such a large network you can make direct contact between people almost immediately. And not between just individuals, but also between institutions and individuals. This led to the emergence of such a phenomenon as post-truth. Before this crucial point the Internet was a very convenient and effective tool of personal independence and democracy. Using the Internet you could reach almost every cultural entity, you did not have to go to the library or to the university. You could find all this online. The cultural sphere has become more accessible.
But the problem of the Internet is that you can never find one version of a fact or an event, because there is not only one version of facts there.
I would say that one version of the truth does not exist at all, and not only on the Internet. Each version is only an approximation of the truth. And we can never even come close to the point where one hundred percent truth is present.
That’s true. And people start to think: “I am not one hundred percent sure about it, but I can compare different versions that I can find on the Internet. I think, in my opinion, this is true, and this is not true”. This is a very common practice now, almost everybody does it today. But the problem is that most people want, but not ready to compare the different versions of the truth. In the library, university or school a teacher could explain to you which truth is closer to the absolute and which is further. A variety of cultural and educational institutions help a person navigate the endless flow of facts and various information. But the Internet has taught people not to trust any institutions. And so people began to search for the truth on the Internet on their own. The person decided: “I am fully prepared to decide for myself what the truth is and do not need any advice.”
So, people decided they can appreciate an approximation to the truth by themselves and independently of their competency level.
Yes, exactly. But the problem is not the competency, but personal identity. This is a very modern idea: “I as a person will decide on everything”. And in a certain sense this decision was successful: after all, some still preferred universities. When people decide about what is real truth independently of their competency, it is an ethical question: “I’m no worse than other people, so why can’t I decide?” That was the first stage. The second stage became when some people and institutions expressed a desire to influence people’s decisions. They say: “Of course, you are not stupid, you can decide by yourself, but I WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH!” And it works, because in social networks people are very sensitive to other people’s opinions, especially if it is your friend’s opinion. And this is a very important source of misinformation. State power would like to use this situation to influence people’s opinion, and it works like propaganda, but it is not really propaganda.
Propaganda is total. You have nothing to choose from. But the Internet is never total.
Yes, it works like: I try to convince you in this way and he tries to convince you in another way. So, people on Facebook can convince each other to help a state power in promotion of some ideas. Thus, we face an echo chamber or an information bubble with ideas shared within certain groups on Facebook. And all of this led to the post-truth era. From 2015 we are living in a completely new world.
I would start with 2010, because that’s when cheap smartphones and cheap mobile internet appeared, allowing billions of people to be online 24 hours a day.
Probably you are right, it has a meaning, but according to the analysis the official starting point is the Brexit campaign and President Trump election campaign. During these campaigns there were a lot of misinformation campaigns on social media. The power started to use fake news, conspiracy theories and so on.
The position of the artist always depends on the degree of trust in reality.
Romantics and realists of the premodern period only trust what they can see.
Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage to touch everything with his own hands, and Mr. Pickwick “with a spyglass in his coat pocket, and a notebook ready to take to his pages any discovery worthy of attention” is simply obsessed with observations and fixing an existing one.
Modernists trust only what they cannot see.
Malevich and his many colleagues and followers saw meaning only in the reproduction of a non-existent reality, the symbol of which became his famous the Black Square. Adolf Hitler believed in a non-existent Jewish plot and Joseph Stalin in a mythical class struggle.
Postmodernists trust nothing.
Samuel Beckett, who was hiding from the Gestapo in Natalie Sarrot’s house, wrote his novel “Watt” not about fascism and anti-fascism, but about the reality that had finally lost its meaning, and the language had turned into whitening. That is why any words now sound equally unconvincing.
Metamodernists trust everything.
Everything that happens in Wes Anderson’s films is true. The dogs and the foxes really talk, all the events are connected by a complex pattern, and all the objects move in a symmetrical fashion and nested ninety degrees in exquisite nolling.
Mr. Ropolyi, do you agree that the metamodern kind of mind trusts everything? And which consequences could it have?
We are living in the era of ending modernity. The modern world view, the modern culture are collapsed. All these were inherent in the XX century.
Do you mean collapse of positivism? Collapse of this idea that science and technology can bring happiness to human kind? Like in Jules Verne’s “Captain Nemo” novel: it is enough just one submarine to get independence from society etc.
It was a kind to return to modernity, but it was unsuccessful. And I think it is impossible to return to values of classical modernity today: like hopes for scientific progress, technologies and rationality. Because people don’t trust anymore in modern values. The loss of faith in rationality occurred after the 20th century, when people started two world wars and the Holocaust precisely in the name of rationality. After that, people began to consider modern values unacceptable and abandoned them. Some people would like to return to positivism, but it was not successful. From the middle of XX century this led to the plurality of world views which we call “postmodernism”. Postmodernism is a response to the crisis of modernity. As modernity was broken, postmodernism is about a broken reality. Instead of rational reality we use the concept of virtual reality. The Internet is a kind of production of postmodern views. The metamodern is kind of the name of the postmodern modernity.
Actually the postmodern did not destroy the modern system. It only destroyed its dominance. For modern culture that is a very important concept of singularity: there is one world, one logic, one truth… and our task is to find them.
And it gave birth to totalitarianism.
That was one of the sources of totalitarianism. This fear against modern singularity which led to totalitarianism is one of the sources of postmodern thinkers. They declared that we should have to avoid one world, one logic, one truth, because if we accept them, somebody will come and introduce totalitarianism. So we need plurality because of political reasons. It is very dangerous to believe in only one reality. So we have many realities and many truths.
As a consequence of that you can convince people of anything.
Yes, and one of the most important postmodern concepts is individuality. That means that you can have the individual truth.
Personal Jesus.
It is also a part of the business: “Ok, I can convince you and you can find the truth, that does not mean that there is no truth at all, but there is a lot of truth. Everybody has his own truth”. There is a question of how to find unity in this complex world. The new totalitarianism uses this situation to its advantage. Peter Pomerantsev’s books “This is not propaganda” and “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible” are absolutely necessary for understanding this phenomenon.
Metamodernism is always counterintuitive.
If you think you know something exactly, it is not true at all. This is the radical contradiction or metamodernism with romanticism, which used to rely entirely on some intuitive “insights”. Google and the careful documentation of reality by millions of people put an end to all insights. Everything is now verifiable, and the accuracy depends on the number of checks.
Getting stuck in the romantic and modernist traditions raises many problems. Some countries and individuals still exist in the paradigm of romanticism or modernism, while the rest of the world is in the paradigm of metamodernism. The modern metamodernist person will always shock the bearers of the romantic ideal. To exist in a situation of metamodernism is very uncomfortable, because it is counterintuitive, and a person of the era of romanticism is passionate about intuitive knowledge and fully relies on it, even if it contradicts the facts. Therefore, in order to acknowledge modernity and escape from the sweet and comfortable captivity of archaic consciousness, one must constantly make a substantial effort that the Romantics are not capable of, because it looks like an affront to their idealistic model.
Mr. Ropolyi, do you agree that the metamodern and everything related to it, I mean everything that exists in the metamodern times, including politicians, events, culture, is extremely difficult to understand because of its confusing and chaotic nature. Even when you think you understand it, some detail appears that completely destroys your picture.
In this situation, we must realize that reality is a human construct. At different times, different cultures try to construct their own versions of reality. And we have to find the technology that would allow us to build our own reality. And it will be a version of reality based on pluralism, individualism. The only question is how exactly we will build a common understanding of reality, which we will have to assemble from individual realities. How do we unite this pluralistic world? In the times of romanticism, mankind did not have such a need for a common reality. Then many individualisms coexisted quite normally with each other. But now we cannot afford such a luxury. Because we became too dependent on each other.
The question is how we will find a methodology, because there is always a statistical approach in determining reality. Thomas Bayes suggested an approach that today we call bayesian. Bayes believed that probability is not an objective aspect of the world, but a subjective decision of people. We can create a complete picture of the world if enough people have a shared idea about the probability of truth. The Bayesian statistical method tells us that it is possible to create a common perception of reality and truth, which is based on the individual views of people.
Triad of uncertainty
Much of the conflict in the modern world is the result of a misunderstanding of its nature, which changed dramatically about ten years ago. The main features of the nature of the modern world are three, which I would call the “Triad of Uncertainty”. The metamodern program offers three conclusions about reality:
1. There are no longer things that can not be funny.
2. There are no such things as are defined in such a way that they can be said to be certain.
3. There are no things that can be said to be in place.
Mr. Ropolyi, do you agree that the metamodern completely deprived things of their usual places, where they were usually located, and now no one has not only the right, but even an idea, where they can exactly be? I mean, that today we don’t have anything usual.
The main postmodern features are also present in metamodernism: virtuality, pluralism and relativism. This means that everything in our life is relative: places, values. And if we are aware of this relativity, then we can build a strategy for survival. In the last 30–40 years, we have been observing the development of virtual reality. A computer can give a person the impression that he is not here, but in some other place. Virtuality is a concept that shows that reality is relative. Last year, Australian philosopher David Chalmers published the book “Reality+”. The central thesis of the book is that virtual reality is genuine reality. This applies both to full-scale simulated universes, such as the Matrix, and to the more realistic virtual worlds of the coming metaverse. Since every reality is real, we can talk about the degree of reality in different situations: this is more real, and this is less real. Everything is real in a sense. It is necessary to avoid a single and unique vision of reality.
Fast notion about Metamodern
In order to quickly get a fairly accurate idea of the metamodern, one has to imagine the inhabitants of a certain house, who threw away all their belongings in the trash, and instructed the artist to create something of value, but necessarily with the use of each thing and so that everything would not look like a collage or an assembly, but would remind of something new and quality that had just been purchased at the store. The artist says to this, “Have you gone mad? Who will believe that this is a new and quality thing?” “Take it easy,” said the owners of the thrown things, “we will believe. You just wash there, wipe it … here, see, the rag lies? Wipe with the rag. To make it shine a little and look like new.” — “But you will recognize your things!” — the artist wonders . — “We won’t recognize,” the owners of the things respond, “because we’ve forgotten how they looked. There’s an old man here. He remembers something. But nobody listens to him.”
Mr. Ropolyi, do you agree that metamodernism is based on people’s poor memory, which simply does not have time to process and keep in mind a huge number of facts and memories, which are so mixed up that now even an experienced person finds it difficult to distinguish something in this pile?
Since, as I said before, we live in a time of crisis of modernity, all cultural values are changing. And therefore memories of these modern values are no longer needed and will be lost forever. But we have many tools to create new memories to replace the ones we failed to keep.
Even false memories.
Yes. Even Freudians in the 20th century believed that we can create false memories, regardless of postmodernism and all modern technologies. We know this from the practice of psychoanalysis. But today we have the phenomenon of the so-called “deep fake”. We can create false memories by altering photos, audio recordings, and even videos. Google’s technology can create entire speeches of a certain person with only a three-second sample of his or her voice.
Therefore, it should be noted that memories are not some kind of independent thing. Memories are also one of the constructions that people make, consciously or unconsciously.
The Russian Federation uses GPS spoofing technologies near the exit/entrance from the Russian port of Novorossiysk. A powerful transmitter is installed at the Russian Gelendzhik Airport. It jams the AIS signals of all tankers, substitutes its coordinates for the real ones, and distorts the tracks of tankers with Russian oil and petroleum products (as you know, all this is under sanctions in the form of EU and G7 embargoes). The goal is to make the receiver of the signals incorrectly determine the location of the tanker. How does it work? — The presence of the tanker in the port of Novorossiysk is not recorded in maritime services. As a result, for example, the monitoring services show that the tanker left the Italian port of AUGUSTA, departure time 2023–03–25 and goes directly to the Italian port of TARANTO, where it plans to arrive on 2023–04–15 (that’s right — between two Italian ports, a distance of 600 km, a tanker covers this distance in 20 days).
Why is this done? — the fact is that many agencies (both world information and marketing) analyze the movement of tankers with the help of special programs that use information from the same world maritime services. — So they will see the Italian ports of Taranto or Augusta instead of the Russian port of Novorossiysk. And then news comes out in these agencies that oil traffic from the Russian Federation is decreasing, tankers are not violating the embargo, so everything is ok. And this information spreads, is copied by thousands of mass media, is added to analytical reports and, as a result, distorts not radio signals, but political conclusions.
Mr. Ropolyi, I see here how modern technologies distort reality, if we only agree that the reality is streams of information as well. Do you agree that we should get used to living in this permanently distorted reality and check literally everything today, because everything could be a lie? So, today we have to be more distrustful of reality than 10 years ago. Would you agree that the degree of distrust in what we see has increased significantly?
I would agree that distrust is an absolutely necessary position in the case of the events that you mentioned. But distrust is present in our society. Distrust is a more natural position in the modern world. But can we develop trust in some way and how can we do it? I know one modern and technological tool which helps us to create trust. This is a blockchain. I see that the blockchain technology was created just for that, so that we could have something in which we have to trust.
But I have no idea how we could achieve trust in social relations, in politics, in journalism. Of course, we have such a practice as “fact checking”. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post fact-checked Trump’s public appearances and found that he produced more than 20 pieces of fake news every day he was in office. In total, he produced more than 30,000 fake news. It takes a large team of fact-checkers to verify such a large number of claims. If you do not have such a team, then you will have to think very critically yourself.
