What shape is the crowd? Answer: the crowd has no form, it is unrepresentable, it cannot be drawn, sculpted or photographed; nor described in detail; someone will always be missing. An abstraction. However, all political, artistic, religious or commercial systems claim to address that multitude – they call it the people, the masses, citizens, the faithful or simply consumers. The only form that the multitude can have is the one that results from the operation of each one of us being counted, numbered, and then statistically managed. Such means, medians, modes and other resulting mathematical parameters are what we are – trends -. Thus, the shape of the crowd will be the way in which the different ideological systems will handle these data at their convenience. What differentiates political parties, religions or markets from each other is the plasticity with which they will give us statistical form.
We believe that we have an identity, a self that we solidly assign to ourselves, but we all have hundreds of selves that circulate in the digital world. We give away personal data and the different algorithmic computing systems combine them according to their purposes – ideological impact, religious, spiritual, leisure persuasion, etc. – in order to assign us virtual identities. I know that there are hundreds of Agustines Fernández Mallo, my identities modeled by big data processes, circulating without me knowing it, doing operations on the Internet that I will never see, selves of myself that I neither know nor will know. I call this statistical identity. Any romantic feeling that arises, for example, between Facebook profiles is built on the algorithmic management of data stored on that platform; I call it statistical love. And the move from the accounting -individual- to the statistical -collective- generates a quantitative leap in the relationships and ontology of things. New religions appear, such as new age syncretisms -spirituality on demand-, or public opinion -using simple opinions as arguments of scientific authority-, or the supreme mandate of leisure, which states that enjoying free time is obligatory for the morally correct citizen – but leisure and being on vacation is always working for others. Or data as a religion, dataism: the greatest colonialism that has ever existed is that in which – like indigenous people in the past gave away money without knowing its value -, with each like we give away our data so that the world market can extract dividends from them. Material and sentimental colonialism that works 24 hours a day.
“When you read too fast or too slow, you don’t understand anything.” That phrase from Pascal, translated as a simile to capitalism, promotes the idea that, in addition to monetary capitalism – the one we know as pure capitalism -, there are two other capitalisms that are there, operating at full power but that we do not see because one operates in times too short for the human brain to perceive, and the other in times too long. We call the one that works in infinitesimally short times -nanoseconds- capitalism of infinitesimal time. The one that, with all kinds of our data, through bots and algorithms, operates in the markets and in advertising at such speeds that the human brain cannot access these operations in real time. This is a new capitalism, a strange anthropological leap: for the first time humans have created a tool that they cannot access. It shapes us in a new way.
The other capitalism, which I call anthropological capitalism, operates over such long periods of time that we have already forgotten that it has always been shaping us. The thesis is that the human being is an incomplete entity, the human being is missing something that he does not know what it is, and, furthermore, paradoxically, it is about the lack that we never had of something, hence it can never be restored. However, the attempt to restore such lack is our driving force, which since prehistory leads us to exchange all kinds of materials and food with our habitat; also symbolic exchanges, creating science, art, myths, fictions. We call all these vain substitutions for the lack prostheses. What are religions if not the creation of an imaginary and symbolic system to which we give something to receive something, pouring into a non-human being the problems that we cannot solve so that He can solve them for us; Isn’t that what we ask of artificial intelligence today? The first AIs were religions. We are talking, in short, about material and symbolic exchanges, not monetary but ultimately exchanges, and whenever we talk about an exchange we can define it as an economy. Hence anthropological capitalism, inherent to humans.
This and many other things are about The Shape of the Multitude (capitalism, religion, identity), 1st Eugenio Trías Essay Prize.