BRUNO BERTEZ
23 Septembre
The problem of fakes has become extraordinarily complex, inasmuch as disinformation, once a technique of marketing, has become a mode of government.
The manufacture of false opinions, false perceptions, false images, false reasoning, and false desires—in short, of a false world—is now an invasive process.
The path that has been chosen, that of repression, merely substitutes one problem for another, since the so-called fact-checkers are themselves remunerated by the very emitters of fake news.
The verifiers convey the desires of their masters.
In a world dominated by economism and lucre, there is no place for the disinterested, for the wise, or for pure intellects.
Moreover, old age, experience, and the long term are systematically depreciated in favour of the ideology of youth-worship and its complement, presentism.
The creation of imaginary, false, and biased worlds advances as techniques permit—that is to say, very rapidly; and it will accelerate considerably with the banalisation of artificial intelligence.
Even before becoming fully operational, AI has already been militarised, placed in the service of force, of power, of business, of influence, and of control—in the service of the conquest of minds.
Artificial intelligence will make it possible to implant false causalities and false associations, to impose false self-evidences. It will employ metaphor, metonymy, repetition, and displacement, and it is the very functioning of the human mind that will be affected—not merely the results of thought, but the mode of thinking itself.
It will reinforce the dictatorship of appearances, of deceptive proximities, of mere occurrences.
Artificial intelligence does not attack words alone; it strikes at the deepest, most radical level: at meaning itself.
Trump confirmed this a few days ago when he insisted that one must press forward whatever the risks. And even had he not confirmed it, it was already evident. It was written into the very conditions that gave birth to AI.
It was cursed at the baptismal font.
The stake of artificial intelligence is no longer the progress of knowledge or the well-being of humanity. It is already power, domination, productivity, and the plunder of the world’s surplus product.
In short, the stake is the order of the world—both interior and geopolitical.And this is only the culmination of a long process in which plutocratic classes seized control of the democratic process, inverted it, and twisted it toward the manufacture of consent and toward the fabrication of a new man, docile and formatted so as to render less costly the reproduction of the system.
The destruction of the category of the True, the promotion of lies and propaganda, the relativisation of everything, the destruction of values, the depreciation of the past, transgression, and the censorship of dissenters—all of this belongs to a vast movement of capture by the bourgeois Imaginary, by the bourgeois code, by the bourgeois representation of the world: first of the economy, then of politics, and finally of civil society itself.
What is underway is a colossal regression, for human intelligence is not being placed in the service of humanity’s adaptation, but in the service of a fraction of humanity—and not the fraction most laden with the future.
EN PRIME
Trump: “I am the code.”
Trump has put it bluntly: he is the code. Almost academic
Trump’s recent formula—“I am the code”—is less a boast than a statement of method: power no longer merely uses the apparatus of meaning; it claims to be that apparatus.
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Trump confirmed as much only days ago: one must press forward whatever the risks, he insisted—and, more revealing still, that he himself is the code. Even without the confession, it was already written into the conditions of AI’s birth.
