Slavoj Zizek. The Future of Europe. 2009 7/12
Talk · European Graduate School Video Lectures ·
2009-03-07 · 0:09:54 · 1,385 words
ecology-climatetechnology-ai-cyberspaceeconomicssubjectivityideology
Žižek argues that traditional market mechanisms are inadequate for addressing radical contemporary threats like global warming, intellectual property, and biogenetics. He posits that the logic of knowledge-based economies operates on 'rent' rather than 'profit,' creating irrational market dynamics. Furthermore, he highlights how biogenetic and neural technologies are fundamentally altering the definition of human subjectivity, raising terrifying possibilities regarding neuronal warfare and the erosion of free will.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 6
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Marx's posthumous revenge”
The ironic realization that Marx's critique of capitalism is vindicated by the modern difficulty of applying private property logic to knowledge, which resists market commodification.
as “rent vs. profit”
The distinction where modern wealth (e.g., Bill Gates) derives from imposing universal standards to extract 'rent' rather than generating 'profit' through production costs and competition.
A form of conflict involving the mechanical reproduction of electromagnetic brain waves to induce panic or control in targets, bypassing physical weapons.
The utopian/sci-fi scenario where humans become 'eternal virtual entities' downloaded between hardware, representing one extreme of biogenetic transformation.
as “society of knowledge”
The fashionable notion that modern societies are defined by knowledge, which Žižek critiques as insufficient because we have too much knowledge without understanding its meaning.
The dystopian fear of the 'end of humanity' due to technology, which Žižek rejects as an incomplete understanding of the current shift in human nature.
Stories he reaches for 1
An NYU experiment where a rat's neural signals are connected to a computer, allowing it to be directed like a remote-controlled car while the rat still experiences the action as its own free will.
“So that rat is running around freely... you can literally direct a rat.”
People invoked 4
Military Psychologists (US) positive
Cited as sources for the reality of 'neuronal warfare' and the ethical dilemmas of neural control experiments; Žižek notes they are 'not crazy leftists.'
Referenced only as a cultural shorthand for physical disability/assistive technology ('proverbial finger') to contrast with direct neural interfaces.
Bill Gates positive
Used as a neutral economic example to illustrate the shift from profit to rent; Žižek explicitly states 'nothing against him personally.'
Karl Marx positive
Cited as having 'posthumous revenge' because the nature of knowledge resists private property, validating his critique of capitalism.
Transcript 7 turns
unknown
What I think is that
What I think is that
Slavoj Žižek
market works through competition, test and trial. But the threats we are facing today are simply too radical. With global warming, you cannot say: "Okay, let's see if it fails, we will try that," and so on. We don't have a chance, because if it fails, it really fails. It can destroy us all. The stakes are too high, to put it simply. Uh, so we have ecology. Then we have the problem of intellectual property. I spoke with some economists who are otherwise conservative economists, and who admit that maybe this will be Marx's posthumous revenge when everybody thought it's all dead. There is something, to put it naively, in the very form of so-called intellectual property knowledge which resists the form of private property. And this is felt on the market. How? That market is becoming irrational. Look, take a person, nothing against him personally, like Bill, like Bill Gates. How can you become in years, from a nobody who is putting together some things in his small garage, to the wealthiest man in the world? You cannot say, even in a Marxist way, you cannot say it's exploitation. Whom did he exploit? Not any workers that he employed, all of us or whatever. There is
market works through competition, test and trial. But the threats we are facing today are simply too radical. With global warming, you cannot say: "Okay, let's see if it fails, we will try that," and so on. We don't have a chance, because if it fails, it really fails. It can destroy us all. The stakes are too high, to put it simply. Uh, so we have ecology. Then we have the problem of intellectual property. I spoke with some economists who are otherwise conservative economists, and who admit that maybe this will be Marx's posthumous revenge when everybody thought it's all dead. There is something, to put it naively, in the very form of so-called intellectual property knowledge which resists the form of private property. And this is felt on the market. How? That market is becoming irrational. Look, take a person, nothing against him personally, like Bill, like Bill Gates. How can you become in years, from a nobody who is putting together some things in his small garage, to the wealthiest man in the world? You cannot say, even in a Marxist way, you cannot say it's exploitation. Whom did he exploit? Not any workers that he employed, all of us or whatever. There is
unknown
something in intellectual property which
something in intellectual property which
Slavoj Žižek
resists it. Like, there
resists it. Like, there
unknown
is no inherent
is no inherent
Slavoj Žižek
logic as with other commodities, you know. You produce shoes, another guy does, through competition, some price is stabilized. Not here. You cannot, when, for example, you cannot in any way root or connect the price of Windows program to some market movements. It's a totally different logic. If we use the old economic terms, I think that the source of Bill Gates' wealth is not profit, it's rent. The key is that to impose yourself as universal and then you are gaming rent. Rent is crucial category today on both extremes: knowledge and at the opposite end. More and more today profit in the strict sense standard capitalist. You produce, you sell it more than it costed you. I mean, for example, even with oil industry, the price has nothing to do with production costs and so on. Production costs are irrelevant for oil. It's also not only demand, it's more complex. What I'm saying is that all these changes like propos of intellectual property, how to deal with natural resources and so on and so on, I don't see how this can be resolved through, in the long term, even through market mechanisms. Then another, another element: biogenetics. And if we are again here in a forum on culture, knowledge, I want to say that I am not saying that there will be a catastrophe in we will all become post-humans or whatever. I'm just saying that things are going on here which are not only economic changes, not even this superficial civilizatory changes we pass from one civilization to another. They even affect, and we don't know how, what does it mean to be human. For example, to give you one or two just very briefly of my favorite examples. Recently I know already that, one experiment I know is this NYU, New York... oh, sorry, University of Pittsburgh. They already can do what? They succeeded in connecting some apes directly to a computer, their neural network. It's still at the very primitive level. It works so that the computer can decode very elementary neural signals like up, down and so on. And then they already tried it on humans. The result is what? That you can, you don't even need that proverbial finger of Stephen Hawking. You can directly by thinking moving around because you know, you connect your neurons to a computer, computer let's say to some machinery and it's like you know, I think it happens. It's something frightening here, it's almost divine. Why frightening? Ah, because unfortunately it goes both ways, you know. If it goes outwards, it can also go inside. And I talked with some military psychologists in United States who, and they're not crazy leftists, absolutely not. They told me, but they told me that even they are afraid. You know that this is now the latest hit. We all talk about still North Korea, atomic weapons. They told me "blah blah blah, that's nothing". The real thing in now is neuronal warfare, they told me. What do they? For example, they isolate, you know, when you are in a panic, your brain emits certain electromagnetic waves. Then they come to the obvious idea, this is not even very complex. What if we do it the other way around? It's relatively easy to reproduce mechanically those waves. We bombard you with them, you are in a panic. And I was told this is the mega-hit today. Basically, like how the future war will be totally, you know, it's really futuristic. It's just you press the button and not to mention about all these topics we know all of them. How do you control, manipulate your properties, not only this by changing genome but other things which are more scary. For example, a couple of years ago I saw it, it was frightening, it was even reported on TV. At NYU University, they succeeded connecting directly to a computer this simple neural signal of a rat. So that rat is running around freely, then you it's you can change already a rat into a remote-controlled car. Then you click, activate it, and you can literally direct a rat. And they told me, I contacted these guys and it's immediately clear I was right. What is their true target? It's frightening one. They told me, of course we want to do it on humans now, no? But with one crucial dilemma. And they were pessimists. They told me the result will probably be terrifying. Their question is the following one: when you will be like a rat controlled, like I talk here, you are let's say symbolically the bad guy, you click and I talk around but you direct me like a remote-controlled car. How will I experience it? Will I feel it as a compulsion like, you know, "oh my God, I cannot control myself," or will I not even notice it? They claim that their limited experiments show point in the second direction. That's the true horror, no? I will still think "oh I'm just running around freely," but I will, I mean, I will not even know. I will still experience it as free will. So what I'm saying with all, I don't want to scare you and so on. It's not as I am an apocalypticly imposed, but how to put it? A moderate long-term apocalyptic guy, no? What I'm saying is that is that things are ongoing now, my God, which change the very, in a way, the very definition what is to be human. Our basic identity of a human is based on a fact that I think, I'm here, reality is out there. If this gap falls, we are no longer the same humans and so on. And again, precisely the danger is precisely to avoid both extremes. On the one hand you have this techno-gnosis scenario, "oh wonderful, we will be changed into eternal virtual entities just being downloaded from one to another hardware". On the other hand you have this robotic pessimism, you know, "the end of humanity", whatever. No, it's neither of the two. But what it is? We don't know. We only know that as it were, human nature as such is changing. And here, here we need more than ever now, just to conclude, I'm coming back to what I said, here we need, here we need, here we need knowledge. In what sense? It's fashionable to say and it's true that today's societies are societies of knowledge. Knowledge matters and so on. But at the same time the problem I see today is not that we don't know enough, we know too much, but that that how to put it, we have too much knowledge, more and more, in the sense that in spite of all our knowledge, we don't know what this knowledge means, we don't know what to do
logic as with other commodities, you know. You produce shoes, another guy does, through competition, some price is stabilized. Not here. You cannot, when, for example, you cannot in any way root or connect the price of Windows program to some market movements. It's a totally different logic. If we use the old economic terms, I think that the source of Bill Gates' wealth is not profit, it's rent. The key is that to impose yourself as universal and then you are gaming rent. Rent is crucial category today on both extremes: knowledge and at the opposite end. More and more today profit in the strict sense standard capitalist. You produce, you sell it more than it costed you. I mean, for example, even with oil industry, the price has nothing to do with production costs and so on. Production costs are irrelevant for oil. It's also not only demand, it's more complex. What I'm saying is that all these changes like propos of intellectual property, how to deal with natural resources and so on and so on, I don't see how this can be resolved through, in the long term, even through market mechanisms. Then another, another element: biogenetics. And if we are again here in a forum on culture, knowledge, I want to say that I am not saying that there will be a catastrophe in we will all become post-humans or whatever. I'm just saying that things are going on here which are not only economic changes, not even this superficial civilizatory changes we pass from one civilization to another. They even affect, and we don't know how, what does it mean to be human. For example, to give you one or two just very briefly of my favorite examples. Recently I know already that, one experiment I know is this NYU, New York... oh, sorry, University of Pittsburgh. They already can do what? They succeeded in connecting some apes directly to a computer, their neural network. It's still at the very primitive level. It works so that the computer can decode very elementary neural signals like up, down and so on. And then they already tried it on humans. The result is what? That you can, you don't even need that proverbial finger of Stephen Hawking. You can directly by thinking moving around because you know, you connect your neurons to a computer, computer let's say to some machinery and it's like you know, I think it happens. It's something frightening here, it's almost divine. Why frightening? Ah, because unfortunately it goes both ways, you know. If it goes outwards, it can also go inside. And I talked with some military psychologists in United States who, and they're not crazy leftists, absolutely not. They told me, but they told me that even they are afraid. You know that this is now the latest hit. We all talk about still North Korea, atomic weapons. They told me "blah blah blah, that's nothing". The real thing in now is neuronal warfare, they told me. What do they? For example, they isolate, you know, when you are in a panic, your brain emits certain electromagnetic waves. Then they come to the obvious idea, this is not even very complex. What if we do it the other way around? It's relatively easy to reproduce mechanically those waves. We bombard you with them, you are in a panic. And I was told this is the mega-hit today. Basically, like how the future war will be totally, you know, it's really futuristic. It's just you press the button and not to mention about all these topics we know all of them. How do you control, manipulate your properties, not only this by changing genome but other things which are more scary. For example, a couple of years ago I saw it, it was frightening, it was even reported on TV. At NYU University, they succeeded connecting directly to a computer this simple neural signal of a rat. So that rat is running around freely, then you it's you can change already a rat into a remote-controlled car. Then you click, activate it, and you can literally direct a rat. And they told me, I contacted these guys and it's immediately clear I was right. What is their true target? It's frightening one. They told me, of course we want to do it on humans now, no? But with one crucial dilemma. And they were pessimists. They told me the result will probably be terrifying. Their question is the following one: when you will be like a rat controlled, like I talk here, you are let's say symbolically the bad guy, you click and I talk around but you direct me like a remote-controlled car. How will I experience it? Will I feel it as a compulsion like, you know, "oh my God, I cannot control myself," or will I not even notice it? They claim that their limited experiments show point in the second direction. That's the true horror, no? I will still think "oh I'm just running around freely," but I will, I mean, I will not even know. I will still experience it as free will. So what I'm saying with all, I don't want to scare you and so on. It's not as I am an apocalypticly imposed, but how to put it? A moderate long-term apocalyptic guy, no? What I'm saying is that is that things are ongoing now, my God, which change the very, in a way, the very definition what is to be human. Our basic identity of a human is based on a fact that I think, I'm here, reality is out there. If this gap falls, we are no longer the same humans and so on. And again, precisely the danger is precisely to avoid both extremes. On the one hand you have this techno-gnosis scenario, "oh wonderful, we will be changed into eternal virtual entities just being downloaded from one to another hardware". On the other hand you have this robotic pessimism, you know, "the end of humanity", whatever. No, it's neither of the two. But what it is? We don't know. We only know that as it were, human nature as such is changing. And here, here we need more than ever now, just to conclude, I'm coming back to what I said, here we need, here we need, here we need knowledge. In what sense? It's fashionable to say and it's true that today's societies are societies of knowledge. Knowledge matters and so on. But at the same time the problem I see today is not that we don't know enough, we know too much, but that that how to put it, we have too much knowledge, more and more, in the sense that in spite of all our knowledge, we don't know what this knowledge means, we don't know what to do
unknown
with knowledge and so on and so on.
with knowledge and so on and so on.