You don’t have to be a scholar to notice how certain contemporary phenomena are relapsing into obscurantism. It’s a sign that we’re dealing with a utopian, if not a millenarian, movement that #MeToo metastasized into a form of digital pillory, while enthusiastic climate disciples have escalated towards doomsday fantasies. And, just as medieval flagellants indulged in self-chastisement, decolonization theorists indulge in cultural self-flagellation—a movement that, in eliminating rationality, must seek salvation in its phraseology, if not in paedophrasticism that plucks truths from the mouth of babes. In paving a way to fantasy land, climate movements such as The Last Generation or Fridays for Future evoke memories of medieval Children’s Crusades, while Big Business’s green-, pink- or whitewashing resembles medieval indulgence sales, and the zeal of LGBTQIA+ advocates for tackling gender issues is charged with a potency reminiscent of the debates once held over Angels’ genders.
Meanwhile, as realities dissolve into speech codes, an empowered inquisitorial language police believe themselves to be the avant-garde of a great purification—through the elimination of all the apostates, deniers, and heretics expressing doubts about the toxic system. But how was it possible for a society that has broken away from its religious roots to birth a secular religion even more zealous than the one of its Christian ancestors’?
Climate movements evoke memories of medieval Children’s Crusades, while Big Business’s green-, pink- or whitewashing resembles medieval indulgence sales, and the zeal of LGBTQIA+ advocates for tackling gender issues is charged with a potency reminiscent of the debates once held over Angels’ genders.
Criticism on its own is not sufficient for understanding this development. In the absence of promising future perspectives, we are primarily dealing with forms of resentment exhausting themselves in memes, clicktivism, and tribal mobilizations. And while unquenchable resentment has always been a characteristic of the overburdened, the novelty is that now even highly respected institutions, as well as academic discourse, get infected, too.
This must therefore be a shifting social paradigm—a devaluation of values leaving only a will to power. As the phrase reveals, virtue signalling or symbolic politics isn’t about materiality but performance. Recalling C. G. Jung’s “psychic inflation,” we can see that this bubble formation is primarily the issuer’s discharge of an inflated nothingness.
In isolated individuals, it bursts without effect, whereas in group formations, it draws strength from the verbal dissolution of boundaries. While this collective absorption may provide its group members with a powerful aphrodisiac, the danger is that we are dealing with a collective loss of reality. If so, we would have to classify many of today’s discourses as unquestionably psychotic—their essential impulse doesn’t lie in coming to terms with reality but in denying its unwanted certainties. Under this assumption, the #MeToo movement’s performative logic becomes more comprehensible. Choral speaking fulfills the function of drowning out the individual’s quiet doubts.
We would have to classify many of today’s discourses as unquestionably psychotic— their essential impulse doesn’t lie in coming to terms with reality but in denying its unwanted certainties.
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy highlights this connection by succinctly placing the chorus in the foreground. In Beyond Good and Evil he tells us: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages, it is the rule.
Follow the Money
So, what does this have to do with the inhabitants of the Middle Ages? We have built a psychosocially similar structure. Early in the 12th century, medieval people were confronted with a new Universal Machine bursting like an extraterrestrial comet onto their closed worldview, called the Wheelwork Automaton—just as we are facing ours in the computer-embodied Digitalwork. Although this medieval epistemic upheaval did not initially lead to abandoning traditional beliefs, it inseminated the age with what some historians call the “medieval industrial revolution”. This revolution did not start in the cities but in the first Cistercian forest monasteries. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s theological wake (“work is prayer”), a nascent notion of meritocratic achievement began spreading, initially through the emergence of a milling technocracy, and then as the Gothic cathedrals’ rising intellectual and administrative requirements morphed into the universities. Ideas of ascension slowly catapulted medieval people’s power of imagination to unimaginable heights, eventually leading to a retraining of their God as the watchmaker, replete with all the psychoplastic implications of that new conception.
Under the cathedral’s shadow, the division of labor soon became a necessity—and, as clocks began ticking, time became money. Then, as feudal princes, seeing the course of general monetization, felt compelled to issue coins, society soon found itself confronting unexpected consequences. Because wherever the money was lent, it demanded interest, introducing an uncanny, foreign body—revealing that the mechanical clock’s proto-capitalism was creating a new alien psychotope with an accompanying experience of shrinkage and loss, followed by a placeless resentment.
Following Aristotle’s teachings, the Scholastics never tired of claiming that it was unnatural for coinage—as sterile wealth—to bear its own offspring in the form of interest. Their main objection was that the usurer was making money work at night and on Sundays. He wasn’t just stepping out of the human order but was also stealing God’s time, thus acting as time’s thief (an argument we still see when parking meters don’t charge fees on Sundays). That argument overlooked that interest can just as easily be read as an increase in rationality which inevitably occurs with the ticking clock (exemplified by the division of labor, specialization, and the like).
This cognitive dissonance is even more astonishing within the schizoid double reality emerging at the time. While Church leaders eloquently condemned interest, they also demonstrated remarkable intellectual and moral agility in using this emerging monetary economy. Their clear awareness that this new economy couldn’t be banned prompted a desire for peaceful coexistence. The first step towards containment was for the Church to claim possession of a moral treasure trove beyond all worldly goods. This trove was none other than the monetized source of merciful grace composed of the martyrs’ deeds and two precious sources of unending value—the Virgin’s sinless state and the ultimate expression of God’s merciful love: Christ’s mysterious self-sacrifice as His Son—whose infinite potency could pay for all of Christianity’s missteps and sins, or even the entire world’s, depending on the theologian.
As the churchmen soon realized, this moral Fort Knox transformed the Church into the ultimate financially profitable institution. While the initial rationale behind Indulgence Letters was to give sinners a chance of absolution even in the absence of a priest, the clergy soon saw that their flock’s sins were convertible assets, with these letters serving as instruments. Because these assets sold like hotcakes, counterfeiters soon emerged who also wanted to profit from them—effectively making the Church a centralized spiritual bank, necessitating the issuing of indulgences with serial numbers. So it’s unsurprising that, structurally speaking, the letter of indulgence anticipates the American dollar: In God we trust.
Level Breakage
It’s precisely here that a comparison with our current circumstances may shed light. Just as the Gothic Middle Ages were confronted with a spiritual foreign body, we are also undergoing a recoding of our psychoplasm as we become “digital natives”. That is why it is essential to be clear about the consequences, as this change in the social operating system poses new questions. In our case, it’s no longer the medieval Who owns the money?—but Who owns the data? Here the digital intrusion becomes visible in the erosion of traditional certainties, as our inner socioplasticity shifts from representation to simulation. We could speak of transitioning from a material to a post-material society—from a centralized (top-down) power to a decentralized, rhizome-like form of rule. However, the more precise and detailed our description is, the more we risk underestimating the change’s disruptive force.
The digital intrusion becomes visible in the erosion of traditional certainties, as our inner socioplasticity shifts from representation to simulation.
If the value crisis becomes generally articulated as a form of uncanniness, the devaluation process is clearly seen in the question of work. While our ancestors taught us that works confer value and dignity in equal measure, those tenets are beginning to falter. If all work, once digitized, enters the Museum of Work as Stored-Attention, this is a privatization process of the first order, a degradation even more profound than the classical humiliations (the loss of the geocentric worldview, the theory of evolution, or the discovery of the unconscious). While the logic of Anything, Anytime, Anywhere has been attributed to globalization, advances in machine learning make clear the extent to which human labor faces a new competitor. Just like medieval interest, with its ability to generate added value at night and on Sundays, human labor’s digital shadow is one of never-ending productivity—and its asymmetry with human work couldn’t be more significant. While human time and attention are limited, our digital shadows (according to a basic formula of x=xn) can proliferate and scale at will—being blessed with superhuman patience and endurance. Inevitably, this imbalance shifts work toward digitalization, while the physically unplugged person awaits release (and degradation).
Although contemporaries may bravely tell themselves that they have an authentic form, human nature itself is increasingly coming under fire. Studies of American patients show they consider conversing with a bot to be a better-quality experience than advice from a stressed-out doctor. Bearing in mind that text-based chatbots will take on the form of human-like “meta-humans” in just a few years and—as telematic counterparts—will be virtually indistinguishable from live call center employees, it is obvious that the service sector’s heyday is already over.
Although contemporaries may bravely tell themselves they have an authentic form, human nature itself is increasingly coming under fire.
Just as assembly lines and robotics devalued craftsmanship, intellectual work will also be at risk of devalorization—with much of what previously required academic training falling victim to digital economic rationalization. That these threats (having proven their virulence since the 1980s) have not been addressed leads to the conclusion that this imminent paradigm shift has left our intelligentsia in shock and paralysis. They maintain digital illiteracy by striving for “data protection”, indulging in fantasies of resuscitating a romanticized lost paradise: Unplugged! Authentic! Great Again! Just as the Middle Ages responded to emerging proto-capitalism by conjuring up outdated certainties of faith, the Zeitgeist is taking refuge in a formulaic approach whose sole purpose is to ward off digital imposition.
Postmodern Revenants
It isn’t just human labor that is under threat of devaluation; institutions are also subject to this seismic shaking that, since the end of Bretton Woods, marks Capital’s loss of its home in capitals, as it follows faceless global financial markets, thus embodying the nation-state’s deep depotentiation. And so it may happen that (as Thomas Bernhard put it) a country is not even worth the paper its maps are printed on. If money has become detached from gold, and nation-state central banks have lost control over their monetary growth (or entrusted themselves to a zombie economy’s negative interest rate), then this can be taken as evidence that state treasuries have become obsolete.
However, it also challenges the authority which has guaranteed money as a sort of nothingness rendered valuable because it is kept scarce, and which has thus secured the status and order of things. It’s no coincidence that we’ve been talking about living in an attention economy for some time now—the consumer’s scarce attention has taken the place of gold. But if the post-material age has created a new, psychologically underpinned Fort Knox, we must remember that attention cannot be read as an isolated anthropological quantity, but is inextricably linked to those instruments capable of storing attention.
And once stored attention is the decisive capital, the question becomes: Who ensures that the attention economy doesn’t lead to a downward spiral—but continuously spirals upward toward a consistent upgrade of our common good? And isn’t the opposite much more likely? Don’t sex and crime and the desire for scandal lead us, blessed with a dwindling attention span, to descend straight into a limbo economy? In this sense, Mark Fisher’s remark that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism might be understood as a sort of deceptive wishful thinking about the spiritual abyss of our times—making millenarianism, that apocalyptic enthusiasm for catastrophe, the intellectual drug par excellence—because it frees those who have found their home in this way of thinking from the burden of reality.
Mark Fisher’s remark that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism might be understood as deceptive wishful thinking about the spiritual abyss of our times
This evocation of a return to the Middle Ages isn’t meant to paint the present in dark colors. Instead, it aims to analyze the structural similarities associated with the emergence of a new mental continent (or psychotope). The Middle Ages can be understood as a distant mirror helping us decipher our present-day calamities—a shattering world view that is experiencing what Nietzsche called the devaluation of all values. But the digital intrusion reaches far deeper—it affects our cultural viscera: Work, Wages, Dignity, and Identity. And just as medieval people sought to mobilize their old certainties of faith against a new credit order, our contemporaries are trying to salvage what can be rescued from the old, collapsing psychotope—as they become bogged down in reality constructions where desire becomes the Father of Thought (and the Mother of Delusion). But it’s precisely in these strange constructs—that are less like solutions than thought embarrassments—that we are kindred spirits with those Scholastics who were able to make their world beautiful using the most audacious intellectual constructions.
Meanwhile, Realpolitik, which is mindlessly sending visionary thinking into the realm of psychopathology, isn’t much wiser than the enthusiasm for catastrophe. Thus, questions about digital capitalism’s future which lead nowhere, or, more precisely, to the absence of even an imaginable social design, make us kindred spirits to the 14th century. Because, if the intelligentsia is content with confronting the present only in the form of lamentation (exemplified as painting horror pictures on the wall of a looming techno-feudalism), they have neither grasped the paradigm shift’s depth nor that they are the problem whose solution they think they are. But above all, we don’t realize there’s no way backon the wallthat our lamentations only work towards that Mephistophelian force where we insidiously establish the exact thing we claim we’re fighting against.
Questions about digital capitalism’s future which lead to the absence of even an imaginable social design make us kindred spirits to the 14th century
When Oscar Wilde characterized the sentimentalist as someone who wants the luxury of an emotion without wanting to pay for it, he was describing only poorly camouflaged nihilism. And, while it may be a pardonable collective harm to accept every and any imaginable sacrifice, from the presumption of innocence to free speech, in the fight for justice for any good cause, this is where the real danger lies. Because it is to be feared that many high-flying, weasel words conceal nothing more than a profound nihilism.
