Planetary Dysmorphia and Its Restructuring

In a two-part lecture, Laurent de Sutter and Geert Lovink will offer very different responses to the impending climate catastrophe and the digital transformation.

Laurent de Sutter’s lecture, “Infrastructural Earth: How Human Beings Have Made the Planet (and How They'll Have to Remake It),” argues “The planet is not the Earth.” Instead, we need to remake the planet in another image from the one that presently exists as a means to treat a global dysfunction now at hand. Implicit in this realignment is a reaction against the Anthropocene and the technical and neural-cognitive ontogenesis it fosters. de Sutter explains we need another planetary infrastructure, one that could reduce the dramatic consequences of the currently ill-designed one.

Closely aligned to the implications of our present infrastructural predicament are its effect upon our intelligence and mental state. The late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, himself the subject of a depression and later suicide, coined the term proletarianization to delineate the process by which the captivation of the consumer’s attention by the apparatuses of marketing produce a loss of knowledge (savoir faire). With the public introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991 came a radical shift in humanities milieu as our analogue machinic ambience was transformed into a digital one leading us towards absolute automation in which the extraction of knowledge, our processes of thinking and now of living together, were externalized. The days of comrades working together in close contact on the assembly line are now gone and, in its place, sits the isolated, lonely, remote cognitariat working from home glued to a screen. According to Stiegler, we are all becoming part of the machine as artificial organs, causing “a complete cerebral desertification” and permanent state of anhedonia (the inability to experience joy). Without comradeship and pleasure, elation and jouissance, we may personally and collectively fall into deep societal depression without hope.

This is where Geert Lovink’s lecture, “Copium Compendium: How Do You Cope in this Digital Age of Permacrisis?” takes off: “You feel bored and lonely now that your online friends no longer answer. How do digital souls survive when perseverance means nothing anymore?" Lovink’s passive response to the cause of this psychic demise is quite the opposite to that of de Sutter’s active approach. Lovink’s answer to our predicament is to engage the copium; a term originating on Twitch which combines the words "cope" and "opium." While the word copium is often used to describe the act of denyingreality or a difficult truth by clinging to a false or overly optimistic belief as if it were a drug, here it recognizes that for the cognitariat (as opposed to the proletariat) there is no hope for revolution against the bourgeoisie because there is no longer a bourgeoisie, only the ever more complicated invisible, entangled synapto-logical weights of deep learning artificial neural network sovereignty. This leads him to conclude by saying: “If today’s political goal is to reclaim the power of definition in the fight against populist right-wing meme hegemony, here is one: copium is the digital information intake that makes one temporarily numb, intoxicated and deprived of sensation when there is literally zero emotion on display.” Is this statement similar to the action of autonomous Operaismo's response to Fordist production in their refusal to work as means of negotiation with corporate power of the 60s and 70s? Is copium a form of refusing to mentally labor in Cognitive Capitalism?

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Sciences-Po Paris. He is the author of thirty award-winning books published into fifteen languages, covering issues from pornography and prostitution to law and logistics, drugs and anesthesia to piracy and police, Gilles Deleuze and William Burroughs to Jack Sparrow and Jean Eustache - all with a decidedly anarchist twist. Laurent also is the managing editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and the Perspectives Critiques series at Presses universitaires de France, a member of the International Board of the College International de Philosophie and an expert on wine and liquors. His "Superweak: Thinking in the 21^st Century" is forthcoming with Polity.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 he was a media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA. Since early 2022 he has been involved in support campaigns for Ukrainian artists, in particular UKRAiNATV, a streaming art studio network, operating out of Krakow.