Wealth based on the individual
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NoonJanuary 28, 2023 – 09:55
Of Paul Ricci
The cries of alarm that echo in the South about the absence of decent work and the evident inequalities will not find easy answers. The Church is mobilizing, having understood the danger of a certain inertia, and so is the community with a part of it, albeit small, made up of the many realities of the third sector. But that’s not enough. For several years we have been witnessing a very difficult crisis which now makes visible the gradual affirmation of the dividual subject with the connected loss of the individual subject. From the complete and undivided subject, which lives an existence made up of errors and corrections, we are about to arrive at the incomplete, atomized, reputedly infallible subject. Societies, mirroring each other, do not react by uniting, in an attempt to give common answers, but they divide, exacerbating competition and antagonism. The very hypothesis of differentiated autonomy inevitably appears as the cause and effect of the incarnation of a particular, of a separatist, selfish idea of human and social relations. Economic production continues to favour, sometimes even with the complicity of a feel-good rhetoric, a growing power of radical control, in particular of algorithmic control, which by its nature is based on the division of the person and of society. A way of producing that makes a few richer and entire generations poorer.
We can consider that the central metaphor today is represented by big data, and by the idea that everything can be governed, from feelings to behaviors, from data; how the latter are collected, stored and used increasingly assumes an absolute priority, being the basis of every decision, public or private. It is no coincidence that the European Union recently intervened in legislation on the matter. Value coincides with data, data is, at the same time, a condition for generating wealth, and wealth itself. This is possible, from an economic point of view, through the supremacy of algorithms, power is concentrated on knowledge and ownership of data. Artificial intelligence, just to give an example, can be achieved using knowledge that feeds precise algorithms, with specific purposes, capable of excluding certain objectives to the detriment of others. With the help of artificial intelligence, it is argued by many, it will be possible that the companies and companies of the future can even tame fears and anxieties.
The relationship between theory and practice has transformed, with a clear prevalence of the second over the first: it is not necessary to elaborate theories but more simply to adapt practice, to force it: the facts, which are its substance, are directed towards the needs of wealth, regardless of where and how it is created and distributed. And so ideologies continue, in this picture, to lose their meaning, better to do without them, better to do without an ideological complexity capable, according to the dominant thought, only of hindering production in the material sense. The well-being of society is no longer based on the individual, a complete and inseparable subject, but on the dividual, a subject that can be dismantled and devoid of its own critical conscience, its own ability to relate, only apparently at the center of interactions, many of which are virtual. This way it is easier to induce desires and needs. This increases dependencies and inequalities, makes the ability to organize collective responses much more complex, and often completely useless. Condition that makes us lumps, sociologically little or not at all relevant. In this state, consumption, a necessary premise for stimulating combinations capable of generating value, is obtained by self-learning and by monitoring the behavior of others, by means of a technological spiral that downgrades politics to a completely secondary, almost irrelevant tool. A gradual downsizing begins, until the disappearance, of the ability to reason alone and with one’s own head.
In essence, an exclusion from the decision of the individual power takes shape. All this is clearer in the South. A tired society that essentially lets itself be guided without thinking and in which those in charge do not always seem aware of what is really needed to transform. The North and the South should extraordinarily unite, unite, prepare together for the great challenges, giving weight and strength to the elaboration of common responses inside and outside the country.
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January 28, 2023 | 09:55
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