A sequence from THE UNNAMABLE PRESENT by Roberto Calasso: (UK) (US)
The move from Dadaism to Dataism, from Dada to Big Data, happened over exactly a century. And there are those who claim that Big Data will supplant Sapiens and drag him helplessly along like a straw in the mighty flow of information. We will then be close to knowing almost everything we don’t need to know.
The religion of Dataism, according to Yuval Noah Harari, is based on these dogmas: “Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not—indeed cannot—find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do.”
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.” A notion from which there is a corollary: “Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
THE UNNAMABLE PRESENT was a difficult book for me. Calasso, whose theme is the interaction between myth and literature, frequently comes across to me as a Christian conservative writer. (Note the use of pronoun “his” for Sapiens, too.) But his work is a kaleidoscopic mosaic of ideation and erudition, and, when in full flow, he is an almost unique writer and thinker. I’ve only read two of his books, and I suspect I will end up exploring the whole of his oeuvre with the exception of his retelling of the Bible. Difficult books are important for me. I need to push against what I think I believe.
Today, having power means knowing what to ignore. Calasso sweeps us down through a whirlpool of ideas and connections and opinions to land right on that simple true statement.
But there’s a trap in that statement. The framing leads you to assume “power” as externally projected. That’s not the point. It’s about the internal power to think, to focus, to reflect. To stop tending, as Venkatesh Rao phrased it, the Global Social Computer in the Cloud, just because it’s trained us with rewards for oiling its cogs with our heart’sblood. And everything is the Global Social Computer In The Cloud now.
It is, in fact, the power to write books like Roberto Calasso’s.