Agustín Fernández Mallo (La Coruña, 1967) is a poet, novelist, essayist and nuclear physicist, among many other things. He participated this weekend in the Formentor Conversations, held in the Pyrenean Canfranc, with a praise of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which he warned: “It is no longer the artist who wants to mold the human like a sculpture, but the scientists who want to make a powerful human.” His latest book is The Shape of the Crowd (Gutenberg Galaxy).
What is the origin of this essay?
Part of two main ideas. One is that between what the human being thinks or theorizes and what he then experiences there is a gap that can never be bridged. What we theorize we can never bring to experience and, vice versa, what we do in experience never finds a completely satisfactory theory. And into that infinitely deep abyss is where life goes. What every human being and society tries to do is fill that hole and we never can. The construction of societies, religions, science, art… all of that is trying to fill that gap in vain.
And the second idea?
The thing is, when you go from analyzing the individual to analyzing a crowd, that scale changes everything. In the Internet world, we pour our data into the networks on many platforms and places where with those pieces they build a self of ours, which is not us, but acts as if it were, it is what I call the statistical self or the statistical identity. And I think that is an anthropological leap.
But we had always handled statistics, right?
It is different. Before we said: the average Spaniard consumes an average of 25.3 kilos of chicken per year, although that individual does not really exist. But now what is done is, with all these statistics, to particularize each one of us. Big data is that. Algorithms tell us what we are.
You have a certain reputation for being apolitical, but this essay is not.
There is an important distinction for me, one thing is political or non-political, and another thing is ideological. I am a politician because everything I do speaks of my time. What I am not is ideological, I have never tried to shepherd any flock, because I believe that people are intelligent enough. This book is not anti-capitalist at all, nor is it pro-capitalist, it is a book that tries to expose a dynamic, it makes you see things that you had not realized and in which you are immersed.
But it does analyze capitalism.
Apart from monetary capitalism, which is what we all call capitalism, which I barely talk about, there are two other types of capitalism that we do not see, opposing ones. One is what I call infinitesimal time capitalism, which is that which has realized that, using the algorithms and bots that operate on the network, with our data operations can be carried out in nanoseconds in such a way that the human being can already cannot access that time scale, that seems to me to be a very important anthropological leap because we can no longer control that time, it goes outside the human scale but nevertheless it has a lot of influence, because that is how you operate with stock market values ??or with your data or mine to think that we have a political tendency that we have never really declared but that is extrapolated. Capitalism has realized that this is an infinite source of income. There was classic colonialism, the Spanish or British empire went to places to take objects (gold, silver) that the inhabitants there were not even aware of having value. Well now colonization is for all of humanity, with our data. We are the indigenous people who are given colored beads, and that has us hooked.
And the other capitalism?
It is precisely the opposite, in the sense that it occurs on a time scale so large that we have forgotten what it is. It has existed since humans have been human. I call it anthropological capitalism: the human being is incomplete, he has a lack, a lack that can never be filled. That is why we exchange symbolic materials, we build religions, it is a capitalism that is not monetary but of intangible goods. A dog is always in balance with his world, but the human is not, he is always in unstable balance, that is why he creates a language, because he is missing something.
It details the operation of the algorithms, highlighting their autonomous operation, and the impossibility of finding a culprit for what they do.
In the past we blamed the gods. Then, only one god. Then, to the State. Then, to the large corporations, as if they were Dr. No turning an evil crank. But what is handled in the Internet world depends on the world of complexity and there is not a single creative agent of those statistical selves or those parallel selves that speak for us. It is like an overlap of a multitude of algorithms, a multitude of robots and a multitude of companies, but there are so many that it is impossible to know exactly who is to blame or not for all of this. Statistical identity is no longer assigned to us by a specific entity, but rather by a complexity in which it is impossible to point specifically to someone.
What is hemocapitalism?
Until the end of the 20th century, any power applied coercion, what Foucault called monitoring and punishing, they forced us to do things. There is a moment in which power – be it the State, commerce, the market, the school, the university… – realizes that the best way for us to do something and be happy is by managing our emotions. Then they no longer force us to do anything, we do it because we want to and for this they seduce us. This implies an infantilization of society. Hemocapitalism is that: sowing in you the desire for what gives them returns. That can lead to frustration because it is infinite and, when you realize that you cannot have what you had thought, there can be attacks of hatred and aggression.
You affirm that this new world we live in is incompatible with romantic nationalism.
Of course, romantic nationalism is typical of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is based on the idea of ??a determined and common origin and destiny, that is, a community. That is totally incompatible with the world of complexity, since individual identity is no longer possible for us to assign to ourselves; it will be the world out there that tells us how we are. What matters is how the rest of the world is going to view, conceive and treat you. It doesn’t matter how you feel, what the algorithm says is what counts.
Identify capitalism with a religion.
Clearly. Since capitalism eliminated the gold standard, a 20 euro bill no longer has an external reference to anything. It is faith, you believe that it is worth 20 euros but, suddenly, it is devalued and is no longer worth 20 euros or, on the contrary, it is worth 100. Since you have faith that you have thousands of euros in the bank, but you have never seen them and surely they are not there. The banking system is the high priest. The word credit comes from belief.
