All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is anti-social, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration. As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we ... See more

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.” 

... another reason for the crisis of community, which is a crisis of democracy, is digitalization. Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.  This has highly deleter... See more

After the pandemic, what is most in need of recovery is culture. Cultural events such as theater, dance and even football have a ritual character. The only way in which we can revitalize community is through ritual forms. Today, culture is held together solely by instrumental and economic relations. But that does not found communities — it isolates... See more

We greet information with a fundamental suspicion: Things might be otherwise. Contingency is a trait of information, and for this reason fake news is a necessary element of the informational order. So fake news is just another piece of information, and before any process of verification can begin, it has already done its work. It rushes past truth,... See more

Pieces of information do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration.

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves.

Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time.