Ned Rossiter and Geert Lovink, interview by Shintaro Miyazaki.
We start with the end, the final words Bernard Stiegler wrote in the last English translation before he died, The Age of Disruption (2019): “In order to do politics today, we must dream.” We cast techniques of dreaming in relation to the media question that underscores cultures of computational capitalism. Social media users, particularly the younger ones, increasingly struggle to dream. They actually do not dream or simply cannot remember. It is not relevant here whether brain scans scientifically prove that they actually do dream. The resting brain can no longer make sense of the overload of images, likes, and updates, numbing the early 20th century realm of repressed desires. If the dream was once characterized as a “rhapsody of life,” today’s ecstatic feelings are overruled and distracted by constant scrolling and swiping. The future of the next generations is shredded in a context of climate catastrophe, chronic social stagnation and precarious working conditions, viral contagion, mental crises, war, and stultifying extractivist platform conditions, literally suffered by billions. This is causing a “strike” in both individual and collective imagination.
Full text can be found at Counter-N, with pdf archived here.
