We have become executing agents, in many senses of the word.
It is one of these meanings that I wish to explore today: the first, the simplest, the bluntest, too.
In its computing sense, this EXE function that is added to the lines of code in order to implement what the command commands.
EXE: lines are added to the codes of our behaviors each time we reach for our phones or computers.
They have, over the years, instilled in us their own mode of operation.
Let’s look closer : these are heaps of protocols that we unroll as soon as we grab hold of these tools. A checklist where each item calls for the next one.
Can we observe what happens within us when the sequences of codes are linked together at high speed.
This inner technocracy, dictated by the machine, is not historically responsible for this logic of optimization, these obligations to comply with, in order to access…
It is the form taken by the generalization of this phenomenon to all spheres of our lives. We had already, before this insidious form of technological technocracy, the possibility to approach this logic through these administrative variations as well as in the coldness of its medical form.
It is not really a matter of questioning the virtues of optimization that normalization allows in the political and epidemiological fields.
It may be necessary to allow a few rays of light to contact the totalitarian nature of these processes penetrate our cognitive structures.
Indeed, in computing protocols, the alternative is the enemy. We comply with the obligations to follow the path drawn by the programmers (we submit to their pre-drawn patterns of behavior) since it does not offer an alternative and a submissive respect to pre-designed patterns it is in our interest (adhesion to the outcome).
Again, I note that the normalized sequencing of actions is a necessity of life as we know it.
If only to serve a cup of tea.
Simply, I invite the reader here to observe, to take the time to see the dazzling phenomena at work when we use these technological tools as well as what they program, code in ourselves in a cumulative way.
Layer after layer, how do they reshape us ?
©FJ May 2022 —
Groupe de Pratique
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Merci à tous
Notes & Silence 