2020
by F. Wirtz
The Internet is a different kind of machine. Machines are supposed to be closed systems or aggregates of systems. But the internet is a machine that feeds on machines: a meta-machine. And, above all, it is a cloudy machine. Other machines have a function. The Internet itself has no function. It is simply ‘availabilities’. I would like to call this amount of availabilities ‘Data-trash’. It means a virtual repository of digital garbage. If the internet were thought of as something abstract, just as German idealism thought of consciousness as something abstract, then the web is that, a decentralized system of non-functional data. Useless information. This information is, on the one hand, pure availability, ready to be implemented. For example, there could be no machine learning without these availabilities. But underneath them are also insolvent data. That is trash. The trash is a requirement of the revolution because it is the periphery of the machine. However, trash should not be confused with a philosophical concept such as “rest” of “differánce”. Derrida speaks of the rest to criticize the “carnophallogocentrism” of modern capitalism. No wonder it does. The danger is that it is always possible to fall into metaphysics and there is also a metaphysics of the rest, that is, a metaphysics of deconstruction: a metaphysics of anti-metaphysics. Purity is the rest, beauty is the ghost. Many refined terms of “substantiality” have been tried: nothingness, rest, Dasein, etc. The problem of metaphysics, however, is not purely terminological. The true metaphysical danger is its filtering into the daily life of thought. It is an ancient danger that Hume already warned about. Transforming into causal relationships those which are not. Metaphysics is nothing else. In this sense, trash is the lowest possible category of ontology. It is sub-ontological, but ontological at the end. In this sense datatrash is not digital, but post-digital, since the post-digital rehabilitates the ontological, the hardcore ontological strata of technology. Perverse, polymorphic. Inaccessible. It is impure, it will never be anyone’s salvation.
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