Phantasmal Chaos

“As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ stands to be sublated…in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, ‘somewhere’ already means ‘anywhere’.”

As the age of global economic governance makes way for a new age of “economic distancing,” two different but complementary trends take center stage. On the one hand, the neoliberal model of minimal government inaugurated in the 1980s has started to cohabitate with renewed forms of regionalist, quasi-Hobbesian statism, as the totalitarian capitalism of the “crystal palace” (“the global dream” of “a transparent, enlightened space without borders”) buckles under the pressures exerted by its own unwieldy globalist logistics. On the other, at the very moment when “countries turn inward and global companies shorten their super-efficient but highly fragile supply chains,” digitization seems to be reaching a new zenith in its long career, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, centered around artificial intelligence, threatening to replace the sprawling “car cities” of yore with distributed “cyber cities”, which will purportedly “transcend geography” as such. What the simultaneity of these trends reveals is the illusory nature of the “turn inward,” which is better understood as a synthesis between formerly salient opposites. As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between “somewheres” and “anywheres” stands to be sublated (to use the polysemic Hegelian term) in turn—in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, “somewhere” already means “anywhere.”

What our brave new world brings to the fore may well be the consummation of what Henry Adams thought would be the Ethereal Phase of human history, when “a change from the material to the immaterial” enables the contingent and the solvent to maximally intersect. What this would mean in terms of metaphysics is the final immanentization of an old deific motif. As Walter Russel Mead put it recently in his marvelous essay on the possible rise of the cyber city: “Like the description of God sometimes attributed to the philosopher Empedocles, the distributed city can be compared to an infinite circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. The city and the countryside will be integrated, with human beings able to live anywhere from dense urban cores to remote rural retreats while fully participating in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of urban life.” The infinite circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, seems to have entered the lexicon of the modern West in the age of Giordano Bruno and later, Blaise Pascal, when it was first applied to nature instead of God. Since then, it has arguably served as the descriptor par excellence of the Faustian insatiability and limitlessness of modern subjectivity. The cyber city would complete the metaphorical evolution by finally integrating the limitless into the punctum of everyday life (as previously only totalitarianisms have tried to do, albeit unsuccessfully).

Central to this evolution, as intimated earlier, is the rollout of advanced artificial intelligence, the prospect of which has already ensorcelled the rising Dionyso-promethean coalition. Influential organizations like the World Economic Forum have been singing the same tune a while longer, emphasizing the pivotal role that “paradigm-shifting” developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) will play in the coming transformations of industry, employment, and urban life more generally. As we continue our ascent to ethereality, the Midas touch of AI (and digitization more generally) is expected to affect more and more facets of our human condition, extending the logic of “civil society” (bürgerlichen Gesellschaft) to every as yet (miraculously) untouched nook and cranny of the modern lifeworld.