The end of the mirage

Abstract

This article is an approach to the interpretation of today's world, a world that is written in the key of Totalcapitalism. In times when the culture of instantaneity turns many analyses into pure cacophony, it is urgent to situate any process of interpretation of what is happening in a genealogical gaze that cancels out the misery of thought when it succumbs to the totalitarianism of the instant. The line of argument on which the analysis proposed here rests is anchored in the concept of “engineering consent” (Barneys) as that which can make us understand the social drift from the consciousness of an “us” to its dissolution into an “I” modelled on credulity. This stems from a fundamental crisis: the criteria of verification, rather than truth, have been suspended in order to keep pace with a world governed by the triumphant model of societies of control. These are, in turn, the fruit of the evolution of devices, both in the sense of apparatuses and in the more properly Foucauldian sense, which have given life to the world 2.0, to the algorithmmocracy and to the great defeat of the democratic foundations by dissolving the citizen-subject into a pure profile. The triumph of the society of predictable individuals (the profiles) supposes the success of the most perfected model of control that replaces the old Panopticon with a more effective and efficient system of domination.