Quote of the day, yay!

"This should not surprise us, given that the Feuerbachian project of humanist essentialism proceeds by installing Man in God’s place but otherwise leaving its conceptual foundation in place. Like the Roman conquerors who replaced the heads on local totems with the visage of Caesar while leaving local rituals intact, the religion of humanism preserves the inherited, social relations of truth as it found them. Instead of an implacable, Abrahamic God, the symbolic effects of embodied, socially situated, and culturally lived subjectivity are now collapsed directly into sheer data, as the basis for a new regime of truth.

Ultimately, the universal, unconscious material paranoia of the data harvesters is reflected in the particular, oversensitive mania of the data providers. The imaginative faculty, its aptitude, is reduced to a claustrophobic sense that the world is already predetermined and that there exists a sacred code by which everything is connected, but in a way that can only be guessed at using mere cues and proxies. In such a scenario, artificial intelligence is often paranoically perceived as a kind of a new, self-governing Behemoth, which is, as we know from Schreber, merely the same old God of voluntary servitude to, and dependency on, phantasms of power and domination."

-- Antonia Majaca, "Little Daniel Before the Law: Algorithmic Extimacy and the Rise of the Paranoid Apparatus", e-flux Journal #75, September 2016.



Thanks to artist Brian Fuata for directing me to this.