In Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), Martin Heidegger takes the verb “to be” in order to distinguish it into two parts: that of Being in the sense of existence (Sein) and that of the nominal where one is a living being (Dasein, which is translated as “being there”). Heidegger fixates upon Being to show what makes beings understandable as beings, but as his argument develops we come to understand Being as time. It is from this text, among others, that existentialism took root where Dasein is the idea which implicates the human as not being isolated from the world around her and from which we operate from a sense-making capacity . In other words, Heidegger advances the notion that we operate in the world alongside others and our only means of accessing these Others is through our senses and language, which is what Heidegger posits as “the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein.” For Heidegger, time is at the core of all meaning and iteration through which culture mediates how we act in the world, to include with Others:
By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too. This being-there-too with them does not have the ontological character of a being-occurrent-along-“with” them… By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. (154-155)
Heidegger is clear that being in the world is about concurrence, sharing, and “with-ness,” if you will. My thoughts travel to Heidegger frequently in recent years as I undertake my readings and writings of the current cultural wars of which I have touched upon in many of my articles here. In short, to what end is the battle of ideology and the toppling of social convention more about creating a not-with world whereby being through a communal language and the sharing of ideas cease to bring to the fore the “with-ness” of listening and responding? And of tolerating, fundamentally, intellectual difference.
We are living in an era where we have so much information readily available to us without having to take public transport to the nearest library, yet paradoxically, factionalism and the denigration of knowledge has replaced learning with a superficiality of a hypothetical Trivial Pursuit for the Wokest of Woketown. Today, facts are being replaced by feelings and the Dasein of cultural and linguistic mediation has been preempted by narratives of suffering often based on fictions and non-statistics. We have been thrust amidst this torturous narcissistic culture which disavows community and places individualism at the alter of the new church of “hypertrophic subjectivity” while relying on the abstraction of knowledge that rests upon individual feelings and which posits selfhood as truth. The problem with this early twenty-first century vogue of self-affirmation is that individual perceptions of the self can never replace objective knowledge or science.
Yet, here we are, almost three decades since the Internet became accessible to the public and we have moved from finding the web utilitarian in order to avoid postal lines to being able to extract economic benefits by purchasing printer cartridges for a steep discount. From Archie queries in the pre-browser days, to the mid-1990s when Yahoo was the best search engine available, to several years later when Gmail accounts were available by invite-only, we have embraced communication technology in full force, allowing it to permeate every aspect of our lives down to the sexually and emotionally private spaces from which even close friends are barred access. Today we use the Internet for email correspondence, consumer price comparisons, and practicalities of booking hair cutting appointments. Most of us also use it for our private and professional research where a family tree searches for some turns into accessing whole genome sequencing services for others, and for law enforcement a combination of the two where GEDmatch has been the key to cracking many cold cases in 2018.
Despite its utilitarian functions and many benefits, the Internet has become a place of toxicity for interactions on social media and discussion boards ostensibly established to exchange ideas. A forum where information abounds, the Internet today is the locus of myriad contradictions where fake news disguised within slick sounding prose seems "real" and where real news is often so surreal that we have to check with Snopes to ensure that the story is in fact accurate. Conterminous to this, expressing an informed opinion about the news will necessarily thrust the subject into a modern-day Inquisition where those who question group think are told to repent. While the Internet has been mixed blessing for us all, knowledge has been its greatest casualty.
I remember from the mid 1990s when people would express their individual “selfhoods” and passions on their newly constructed homepages. These were typically white or grey backgrounds made of simple HTML with a neon flashing sign created through nascent free website building prototypes superficially allowing the user to get stuck with a page which read simply: “hello world.” WordPress was a lifetime away as people would simply put their name, their profession, and hobbies and then call it a day. Hypertext was an ongoing discussion through which HTML was eventually born, a language that only the geekier-than-thou would thrive in elaborating. Today with a website builder or a free WordPress site, anyone can put up a phenomenally beautiful and intricate website within an hour or two, all meant to showcase a persona, a business, or new trend. Missing from this process is the language cryptic to novice users who would rather click through esthetic options working from a template where individuality as “unique expression” is somewhat attainable. Still this comes at the expense of understanding how the user arrived at point Z and necessitates the necessary fashion upgrades every so many years. In this way, form not only meets content, it trumps entirely.
Skip to the birth of social media where the experimental esthetic pavement of web design in the 1990s ran headfirst into the social forums of political ideology in the 2000s. Suddenly, that idealized “virtual community” that people spoke about in the 1990s quickly became the the echo chamber for a neoliberal conformity and anyone who expressed opposition to the echo chamber was quickly banished and contrary ideas were deemed anathema to the spirit of the online forum. The cheesy animated GIFs once embraced as “awesome” today stand in stark contradistinction to the codification of what must not be said online. With the recent banning of numerous accounts on both Facebook and Twitter for expressing unpopular ideas, such as The Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media, among thousands more, we are living in an era where the Internet has become a tool to police thought, to restrict different opinions, and to flatten out political analysis into “bad” or “good.” One can have all the outdated flashy neon GIFs that the heart desires, it is just unacceptable to express any skepticism regarding the reasons behind climate change or to use the “wrong” pronoun.
From Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay which conceptually predicted the world wide web through the evolution of the Internet today, Hypertext has demonstrated one crucial truth linking technology and culture: that language is integral to not only how we communicate with each other and how we codify history, but it is paramount to how we think as individuals. And once language is seized and mandated, our ability to cogitate individually is diminished if not entirely removed. How we conceive of ourselves and the world, similar to Heidegger’s elaboration, is embedded within language. Our intelligibility to and of the Other is essentially part of a larger linguistic structure whereby who we are is evoked primarily through language as discourse. Or as Heidegger writes, the “intelligibility of Being-in-the-world—an intelligibility which goes with a state-of-mind—expresses itself as discourse.”
Here we are at the end of December 2018 about to enter yet another numerical fiction as infective ideology which decides who is worthy of being silenced dominates the virtual sphere. From the almost 600 million fake accounts shut down on Facebook earlier this year to the more recent crack down on Instagram of fake likes and comments, it is not exactly clear what kind of speech act is acceptable, nor to whom certain ideas are acceptable. What is evident today is that we are firmly at the intersection where political ideology has crossed over into religious zealotry—albeit this new religion has replaced a god figure with wokeness.
Meanwhile, the ex-communicated of social media and those staying under the radar are rethinking how to maintain the dialectic of debate. As our lives are granted meaning through personal and political acts which end up being recorded on various digital, analogue, celluloid, and other plastic formats, all these media are inevitably constructed of various languages that put form and sense together. How disingenuous a world where academic publications embrace slurs as acceptable responses to critical debate and where the material reality of history and of the present are wiped away in favor of the new catechism: “It’s all about my feelings.”
For 2019, let’s work together to tolerate difference—and I don’t mean the blue-haired, special-pronoun, six-qualifiers-before-one’s-name difference. I mean let’s embrace actual difference—that is the difference of opinion—which is the natural outcome of any number of disparate humans coming together to discuss a wide range of topics. The repression of robust, nuanced debate which accommodates disagreement is the hallmark of religious zealotry. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly this “religion” postures to the masses about its supposed virtues or its "inclusivity"—the outcome is the same: it is exclusive of anything that does not fall within its orthodoxy while it promotes the end of knowledge.
