Confessing

When the internet became accessible to the public, that is, in the mid-1990s, there was the phenomenon of people putting their deepest secrets on the internet. Anonymity, simplicity and speed were seductive. The confession quickly made, anonymity largely preserved, and perhaps there was even this little thrill that someone one knows might read the secrets without knowing who was behind them. These tele-confessions were cathartic. Today this has reversed: Everyone should see what one does without finding out what one really thinks. The matter of anonymity has changed too.

Writing something without using one’s own name has something similar about it. Of course anyone could discover the identity through the domain owner, but that is not the point at all. What is exciting is public writing. Placing one’s own I in the background and letting thoughts organize themselves. Perhaps it is even a kind of meditation, which is also very much about overcoming one’s own I-consciousness to some extent and immersing oneself in a larger, collective one. The internet radiated this fascination at the beginning too. In the 1960s it was cybernetic systems that prompted these thoughts.

Many science-fiction books and films rest on this technical plane of networking: Dune, Matrix, Neuromancer… There is, of course, an entire literary history of network literature. In Silicon Valley, a ‘technological spirituality’ of radical rationality in the spirit of Ayn Rand developed from this, in the form of a technological building of the Tower of Babel. It has turned into a dystopia in which the individual becomes a slave to technology. Giorgio Agamben wrote about Homo Sacer. Our ‘soul’ becomes an economic object.