By Cécile Voisset, Londres
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The age of surveillance capitalism[1] can be described as the reign of a self-willed, undertaken confusion between truth and falsehood. Some self-interests aim and pretend to govern, to decide for all people: indeed lies, and liars, just propaganda.
In such an age of disorder (who can always and straight away detect fake news?), of darkness – a new obscurantism -, we can even confuse a fox with a badger (anyway, it’s still only stink).we can even confuse a fox with a badger: obviously because of a program that aims at darkness, maybe also because of stink.
But an epochal confusion only reveals a kind of sleepwalking age, a new opium for the people.
The spectators of the post-truth age are the same ones who want to make us think that money (sales) makes law would be the supreme rule, that there is nothing for free on this earth. What about a smile? Are we all on stage? If we are, are we there all the time?
Post-truth age: the discourse of an overall virtual existence according to a digital power that is a need for dominating, in this case of overseeing, in order to predict (a certainty dream).
Yet reality is more than virtuality, and plans to reduce the former to the latter fail in many cases. Experiences – the real, basic one, a common sense – deal with sense data[2]. Sense data – primary ones, individual ones – provide everybody basic contents of living: the hic & nunc of daily life. SENSE DATA, not DATABASE (as intuition, not counter-intuition).
Let us recall that TRUTH is a VALUE according to logic and its concern for statements’ validity.
Post-truth opinion looks like nonsense.
More generally, truth is a value: like goodness, beauty, justice and so on. And could there be justice without truth? Post-truth age or post-rights?
Post-truth? Really?
However it’s nothing but an order: an age of information when technology tends to sweep away culture (which means time, too): an age of confusion between immediacy and speed, between information and knowledge: an omission on truth as a whole that supposes a quest, at least an enquiry.
The post-truth view despises democracy. Its reign would be the reign of opinion, so demagogy, a slope towards populism, totalitarianism…
But TRUTH is not OPINION (belief, representation, fantasy…).
The post-truth age is consequently an outright lie in an era when the citizen cannot (cannot anymore) distinguish between WORLD and NETWORLD.
The post-truth age is a business opinion, an easy pragmatic-cynical one, a mere ideology of oblivion.
The post-truth age is a war age, an ante citizenship or contract age (the uncontract according to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), a previous knowledge with its doubts and trials, an abuse of credibility, hatred and death of liberty.
The post-truth age is a smooth world: a bad joke, a mimic, a true mockery. So, by ending with such a notion, I’ll add that there’s no scandal without truth: “The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty” (O. Wilde).
Bibliography
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Notes
[1] See my “Harcèlement moral, harcèlement économique”, a review of Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London, Profile Books, 2019), in the journal Trahir.
[2] As Russell indicates in his discussion of a theory of truth in accordance with the old philosophical tenet of adequacy.
Trahir 