Polymechanos ghenos - The fate of the cybernetic west, between technology and humanities

Èthos anthròpoi daìmon, asserted the great Heraclitus. If the philosopher of Ephesus had placed his farsighted and prophetic gaze on the weltanschauung of the Faustian West (as from the Spenglerian lexicon), he would have rectified his famous maxim by converting it this way: tèchne anthròpoi daìmon: there is no doubt, in fact, that the civilization that characterizes the post-modern, and which emerges in the aftermath of the brief century (as denominated by Habsbawm), rooted its founding status within an imaginative frame dominated by the overshoot impetus of crossing the boundaries of the space-time horizon. And yet, an inescapable task of every thought capable of presenting itself as divergent and pro-demystifying, consists in catching the dynamics underlying these symbolic superstructures, marxianally unmasking relations of force and political-economic hypostatization of the cultural-historical becoming, understood as a not merely chaotic dimension. First and foremost, an irrefutable element emerges: from the industrial society of surplus value to the anesthetized one of social medias, a leitmotiv that is not difficult to discern is shown, and grafted onto the common base of social control, as well as the productive profit achieved through of a domesticating containment of civil society. I.e. from the capitalist logic of proletarian exploitation to systems of technocratic inhibition referring to the apparatus of cultural industry (to borrow the Adornian syntax), the difference only consists in the greater level of surreptitious ambiguity and in the representative hypocrisy used by today's masters of cosmopolitan establishment. In fact, the same control strictly implemented at the social level on the productive forces of the proto-capitalist era through the imposition of rigid working hours aimed at achieving the greatest possible profit, is manifested today, more subtly, with the containment of the political activism and rebel public opinion by means of the meanderings of virtual social-medias, able to canalize on established and programmatically directed tracks insurrectional pushes considered pernicious or conflicting energies. And intellectual anesthesia is complementary to a constant and dizzyingly increasing activity of economic profiling, which is very invasive and now also performed at home with the most recent software developments of operating systems for the statistical determination of television preferences; in fact, the pervasive and reticular withdrawal of personal information obtained through the use of digital devices and social networks appears so evident that it would be unnecessary to spend more words. Therefore, in this study, we intend to proceed to the examination of the different and controversial outcomes deriving from the implementation of the "cybernetic gene" in the Western man's DNA.