By raising questions about the secrecy that cryptographic technologies must protect, and about the decentralization of data storage infrastructure presupposed by distributed localization, NextLeap argues that, in terms of law:
- We cannot impose total transparency without then falling into the totalitarianism of computational totalization, which dissolves the individual into the calculable and computable whole, where everything finds itself reduced to pure calculation – carried out at two thirds of the speed of light – which would be to bring back what Alexander Zinoviev described as the very basis of Stalinism.
- At the same time, we cannot eliminate – and this is the same question – locality and localization, which, as what develop, if not in secret, at least in a space that is protected and local in this sense, are the basis of what I will describe here as neganthropological noodiversity.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. Open Humanities Press, 2018.
We are captured by the state every time we make ourselves intelligible. Whether demand, political subject, or formal organization, each intelligible form can be recuperated, represented, or annihilated.
And so the question that is posed concerns the refusal of intelligibility. Contemporary arrangements of power have abolished the silence that once accompanied the dark ineffable desires of queerness and destruction. Rather than an injunction against speech, the power of biopolitical democracy is specifically to make us speak. Cybernetic relationships ensure that each of us as a speaking subject has the ability to name ourselves, aestheticize ourselves, deploy blogs and social networks and avatars to represent ourselves. The contemporary function of power can be understood as one unending move toward intelligibility—one of moving what had been blind spots into new subjects to be marketed; new identities to be surveilled.
Queer Nihilism.
The only kind of thought - but an abject, objective, rejective thought - which is capable of thinking the end of the domus, is perhaps the thought suggested by techno-science. … Much more complete, much more capable of programming, of neutralizing the event and storing it, of mediating what happens, of conserving what has happened. Including, of course, and first of all, the untameable, the uncontrolled domestic remainder. End of tragedy, flexibility, permissiveness. The control is no longer territorialized or historicized. It is computerized. There is a process of complexification, they say, which is initiated and desired by no-one, no self, not even that of humanity. A cosmic zone, once called the earth, now a miniscule planet of a small stellar system in a galaxy of pretty moderate size - but a zone where neg-entropy is rife. The domus was too simple, it left too much remainder that it did not succeed in taming. The big techno-scientific monad has no need of our terrestial bodies, of passions and writings used to be kept in the domus. What it needs is ‘our’ wonderful brains. When it evacuates the dying solar system, the big monad, which is cosmically competitive, will not take the untameable along with it. Before imploding, like the other celestial bodies, with its sun, little Earth will have bequeathed to the great spatial megalopolitian monad the memory that was momentarily confided to the most intelligent of earthly species. But the only one of any use for the navigation of the monad in the cosmos. So they say. (198-199, Domus and the Megalopolis)
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman. Stanford University Press, 1988.