Post-Technology

Sometimes we wonder what the deeper critique of technology might look like; and for starters, it would seem obvious that it requires a renovation of all forms, until nothing has the identity primed for form, the notion of a repetition, waiting in the wings. To say that there is a big difference between civilization or domestication and wild nature is to reify two forms of life that actually (really) speak inside one another. There are feral cats within civilization; and there are repetitive structures outside of civilization. Being outside, then, implies that one is differentiating by way of another binary. Not the binary then of Nature and Domestication; but the difference between chaos and containment. Nature and Civilization are similar by way of containment; the truth of the matter is that both contain chaos. And of course, this is Agamben's point in the notion of the outside/inside state of the exception; the one being named as the sovereign, the other named as that which falls outside bios. We might make the point in a different way by pointing to thanatos, or, the death drive of society and its negativity, and the chaos in everyone, the chaos of the virus, the chaos of adapting by making new legislation.

That is, it is presumed in contemporary scientific ideology that the individual conforms to the world; that harmony is the desire of the system; that balance is the move. And yet, it would seem obvious to this writer that nothing is adapting to anything because nothing is a stable something to which one might adapt. Everything is unfolding into whatever. Even thinking that there will be a bad kickback for a plethora of bad, presumes that order is the point. But what we are really saying is that we can contain the disorder that becoming has always been.

Technology is the containment of whatever being into something legible; into something bound by law; bound by identity. If we say that decomposition is the technological critique, then it will become apparent that the rupture of everyday life by the death drive of capitalism will be within our desire; and this is a point that we cannot deny. The destruction of everything for immediate gain is a delightful proposition for the disorder to come. We do not deny that we find it thrilling to see the capitalists managing the nothing they create. And we see it as sad to see our comrades fight for the nothing that the capitalists have created. Society is nothing worth fighting for. Being able to adapt is the ticket; and their monies will never get anyone there; for their forms were always simply technologies of containment that stave off the disaster of life. To live in the disaster then. To adapt to the disaster. Even better: to create the disaster by which one adapts.