Thoughts on Dean

It seems to me that one possible extension of Dean’s logic is to have the technologies not only believing for us, in an ideological sense, but having them knowing for us as well, in a technical sense. The more our collective and individual knowledges are uploaded to web servers and online communities, the more technologies become a receptacle for not only our beliefs but also our knowledge. Extending this logic, there would be no need to know. The technologies would know for us.

This relinquishing of not only our capacities to believe but to know is exacerbated by the move from a “critical” to a “consumerist” mode of agency. It is consistent with an age in which spectacle has replaced deliberation that the predominant characteristic of the public should be one of entertainment. It is certainly questionable just how much more “democratic” or deliberative or indeed informed access to the technoculture and its technologies makes us. Since it is “precisely those technologies that materialize a promise of full political access and inclusion [that] drive an economic formation whose brutalities render democracy worthless for the majority of people,” it then becomes (partly) a question of agency and of the willingness to retain our own critical capacity for full participation in a public, and to retain our knowledge and beliefs.