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Gian Maria Tosatti
We can measure the value of certain cultural elements by observing their spread through popular literature. In recent years, the concept of the avatar, for example, has transcended the boundaries of the digital-technical world to which it belongs, and become a point of great attraction for cinema and above all, TV series, which have become a contemporary version of the serial novel. That is, the literary genre that made it possible to record, with incredible precision and richness of detail, the nineteenth century and its industrial revolution. Today, however, we are in the midst of what you have called, in a book of the same title, ‘the fourth revolution’. On digital platforms, which are the counterpart of the old newspapers and magazines, we have a new video-narrative genre, in which the concept of the avatar, popularised and spectacularised by a forerunner such as James Cameron in his 2009 film of the same name, is among the most frequently discussed themes. You coined the neologism ‘onlife’, so I’ll ask you what an avatar actually is, and what relationship it maintains with the identity-matrix that produces it.
The avatar is a further projection of ourselves. A ‘presence elsewhere’, which ‘embodies’ us in a digital space. It is an identity that stands in a hybrid position between the public social dimension and the private, intimate one. Let us begin by saying that the first reason to embody oneself in an avatar is the desire to go into a digital place that is, at the same time, a public space. I am speaking, here, about social networks and the metaverse. From this perspective, the avatar is a means of social interaction. From another point of view, however, the avatar is the quintessence of an identity that you can shape as you wish. In this regard, it proves a little more detached from other forms of representation we give of ourselves, including on the Internet. In general, indeed, it is very difficult to change your identity on platforms such as LinkedIn or other social networks. To do so, you would have to falsify a lot of information, in combination across interconnected networks, from Facebook to Instagram, and TikTok. The avatar, on the other hand, is an instrument that allows you to make a leap, to enact a kind of separation between the human being and the sprawling verification system that social networks require. In doing so, it exploits all the potential for the designability of the self that such a thing can allow for.
But something else is notable in this representation of the social world. Those who have designed and are designing digital platforms still belong, predominantly, to a generation who made their first steps in the analogue world. For this reason, in part it sets programming logic according to the schemas of a pre-digital sociality. However, as time passes, the new engineers and designers in the metaverse are starting to be digital natives. This leads us to think that with them, the habitability of digital space will perhaps also change, coming to look ever less like physical space. The evolution of social media offers hints in that direction. LinkedIn, which you mentioned, is deeply rooted in the physical world in terms of its relational dynamics. The same applies to Facebook and the more ‘archaic’ social networks. Whereas TikTok, a more recent invention, develops connections between users which reflect relational logics different to those which insist on our real identity. All this is to say that the metaverse’s potential will probably soon be dedicated to rethinking ourselves in a space ‘elsewhere’, rather than being at the service of our ‘worldly’ (professional or personal) relationships.
In truth, I believe that the broad freedom in which the dimension of the avatar can move today owes precisely to the friction between these two possibilities in the digital world. Given that the metaverse is still strongly linked to a network that functions according to analogue dynamics, the avatar plays a contrasting role: it is a space for redesigning the self, within a perspective of great constructive capacity.
However, as a series of combinations of interlocking data form around the avatar – ones which may have a different dynamic from today’s, but will remain somehow connected to our physical identity – then we will also see that the room for self-redesign will also encounter constraints. The most obvious example is that of purchases made in the metaverse. As long as my avatar goes around the metaverse without consuming anything, everything goes just fine. But when it so happens that I need to consume products – even digital ones – then I realise that the possibilities of the avatar, understood in absolute terms, face limits corresponding to my physical identity, my bank account, whether it is denominated in traditional currency or in digital cryptocurrencies. Thus, the great flexibility of the avatar, at this moment, is the fact that the metaverse is still largely in construction. But the more advanced its state of completion, the more limited our capabilities for designing the avatar will be. To put it a little strongly: memory (as the presence of recorded information) imposes constraints, limiting the malleability of one’s identity. But all this is, after all, similar to the experience we have in real life as we age. While at age fifteen we can imagine and represent ourselves and our futures in various expressions related to our own desires, as we grow older the options become fewer and our path becomes binding. Here, I get the impression that the avatar, in its technological evolution, somewhat mirrors the dynamics of life. It was born only recently and still has many possibilities. As technology becomes more ubiquitous, the links will become title and it will be more difficult to be anyone other than ourselves.
It seems to me that the concept of the avatar in the digital dimension is taking up, from a certain point of view, the revolutionary legacy of those who wanted to change the world and in order to do so had to change man. This was a recurring theme in the ideologies that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To overthrow the old world and leave behind feudalism (still present in rural Russia) and industrial capitalism, Soviet socialism designed another model of man and woman. A man who took collective responsibility onto himself, a figure who almost dissolved his individual identity into that of the community. Socialist man, as exalted and monumentalised by Soviet propaganda, was ultimately an avatar. And his identity was a hybrid space between reality and desire. The same thing, with decidedly darker hues, happened during Nazism. With it, the will to change the world passed through the idea of having to change man first – with a real idea of redesigning his physiognomy and identity. The contemporary avatar emerges from virgin territory, as did as post-feudal Europe or post-Tsarist Russia. The metaverse is still an unstructured field, from the point of view of the society it inhabits. In all the cases I mentioned, I think we can see an ideal need to want to change a world that somehow hems us in, and to start doing so by changing man, the man who gives shape to that world through his social manifestations. I have the impression that this tension can also be seen outside the digital universe. Think of the wide range of forms of sexual identification we have been getting to grips with in recent years. All this speaks to a ‘concern’ about being, which cannot be separated from the desire to be.
This is an interesting perspective, I had not considered it that way. It brings me back to the idea of change as one of the three fundamental concepts of power. Power, in fact, is exercised by creating, changing and controlling. A god, for example, can create a lizard, can change a lizard into a dove, and then he can decide to fly the dove in one direction rather than another. The reading you give of our relationship with the metaverse points in that direction. The avatar is something that is created, which transforms something into something else and which, as we said at the beginning, places it in a social context that is deliberately chosen. This superimposes the concept of avatar on the very idea of power, making them coincide. I see it from a different perspective. For me, the avatar is closer to the theme of freedom. It exists, after all, to free us from our constraints. This makes it something fairly open and variable.
This is also true.
Yes. So, the deeper nature of the avatar seems to me to lead us away from the circumstances we have been thrown into by life. And this gives a slightly different view to the idea of
changing the world by changing ourselves. It is more a will to change determined by the rejection of the limits imposed on me by the current order of things, e.g. how I look, what
are my tastes, my sexual preferences, my political orientation, and so on.
They are perspectives seen from different standpoints: one is typical of the individual, the other represents the way society behaves when moving together, through formal representative structures
(political parties, states) or else informal ones (capitalist corporations, lobbies). However, according to the vision you propose, it seems to me that the yearning for freedom you speak of represents something more than just a desire for escape. For within it we can also see a liberation from the condition of creaturehood, instead taking on creative power for ourselves. The two examples I offered before, of Nazism and Soviet communism, are about times when we freed ourselves from the idea of God. In Nazism, at a certain point, men took to wielding the tools of the creator. Similarly, the Soviets got rid of God by declaring that man could suffice for himself. To that end, they used more traditional tools, such as philosophy or propaganda, whereas the Nazis took more horrific and decidedly more radical paths. And yet, none of these paths had the true power possessed by the digital dimension, which has produced a real spillover, a leap of species. It is like being able to do the same thing with enormously evolved tools.
There is an important difference, though. The examples you mention concern utopian modes of constructing the individual. Utopia ends up being a constraint, because once it is achieved there is no possibility of change. No improvement is expected because the peak has been reached already. Any significant change would be a downfall, from the perfect moment into imperfection. In this sense, perfection always becomes intolerant of what is not perfect. Here, in my opinion, the concept of the avatar tends a little to break down the idea related to the achievement of something complete, something final, something utopian. It seems to me rather that the avatar pursues a dialectical identity.
I think the difference between the historical examples I cited your idea of an avatar boils down to the dichotomy that opposes utopia and desire. The dimension inhabited by the avatars we are taking about, the metaverse, is, in fact, a dimension whose design is based on desire. On the other hand, it is precisely the participatory possibility, characteristic of metaverse engineering, that makes it tend more towards the libertarian logic you speak of than the political dynamics I described. And desire, indeed, is changeable. We know that. It changes with time, with age… desire changes with experience. But what seems crucial to me is that it constitutes the mortar that holds together the bricks that make up the digital.
More precisely, we are talking about the desire for the plausible. That is what in philosophy we call ‘hope’. When we discuss avatars, the metaverse, digital reality, we are referring, essentially, to technologies of hope. But consider that traditionally the management of hope has been the prerogative of theology. And, if we look at the language with which these digital realities are presented, the vocabulary which we can draw from their advertising materials seems, in fact, to refer, almost, to a religious dimension: these created places have quasi-heavenly aspects.
I think it is really interesting to look deeper into this area. Especially if we take into account the blows that today’s international political reality has inflicted on our consciousness as an evolved species. With a war in Europe, it’s a bit like waking up from a dream and finding our aspirations in the mud where we left them eighty years ago. Yet, at the same time, humanity attempts to build a world that rests on other pillars, no longer the ancient marble columns that support our institutions, but celestial columns, stood on clouds or, better, on ‘the cloud’. And all this must hold up a world that is based on hope, that needs hope. I sincerely believe that worlds built on hope are dangerous. But also truly fascinating.
To tell the truth, these worlds require a certain mutual balancing of forces in order to exist. Hope and interest are the two driving forces of the human being, both in individual actions and in grand historical transformations. If they are to play a constructive role, these forces must be in balance. A Hobbesian society, in which each individual has his own interests, pursues them as far as he can, stopping only when there is something that can harm he himself – this, too, is dangerous, and reflects a natural state of brutal violence. But such a social model does rather resemble the way capitalism has evolved. Thus, the introduction of an element such as hope at the heart of the digital dimension can create a positive balance. My concern is rather more that today interest tends to invade the fields of hope. We see this in advertising campaigns for consumer goods, which aim to sell desire rather than representing interest. If this dynamic is replicated even in the digital, if even the space of the metaverse turns from a place of hope to a ‘marketplace of hope’, it will be difficult to escape from the logic of capitalist consumerism that is devouring humanity and the world.
When we started this conversation about the potential of the avatar, you immediately mentioned some possible constraints and, as a first example, set out the need to link one’s identity digital to a bank account. And it is symptomatic that the first constraint that came to mind was money – a ‘driver’ which holds much responsibility for the existential disorder of the capitalist world. But there is one element on which it may be interesting to reflect. Money, in fact, is a very ancient technology. The earliest evidence of human writing is an Assyrian tablet of 5000 years ago, in which an exchange of cows for money is described. And, in general, we can state that we rarely use such ancient technologies today. Perhaps this demonstrates the reasons that lie behind the limits our civilisation is coming up against. Probably in our system there is a component that is too backward, a set of cogs that are too worn-out to move others in the right way. This is a self-evident fact, and it is even more glaring in the digital age. We have a rather obvious example in the contemporary art world, looking at the great mystification that saw NFTs at the centre of things. There was a kind of craze for these tokens. Even Damien Hirst recently destroyed real works after creating NFTs, as if the one thing could replace the other. I will emphasise that an NFT is simply a certificate of authenticity. If you asked a person what they would like to buy, between a painting by Van Gogh and its certificate of authenticity, well, it would be interesting to hear the answer. It would help us to understand what we are becoming, with respect to the compromising presence of an obsolete driver in our system such as money. We have become people who, between a kiss and a piece of paper saying ‘this is worth a kiss’, are likely to prefer the piece of paper, because that, at least, is a guarantee. But it is precisely in such a radically capitalist society that we realise that alternative dimensions, escape routes from a world we do not like, are also quickly infected by the same dynamics we want to escape from. Money has entered the metaverse since its first inception, breaking through all the backdoors. The problem is that, perhaps, the metaverse could really build an ‘elsewhere’ in which the purpose this ancient technology served was no longer necessary.
This offers us a way into a very important line of argument. The dialogue we are developing around the concept of the avatar is to be attached to the classical idea of sovereignty. Even before it relates to the idea of statehood, this is an idea rooted in the individual, as Locke already argued. But let’s continue the discussion from the simplest context to address, the one regarding national sovereignty, defined by borders and the internal control on the population, on resources, laws, the use of force, and the money through which goods can be traded and marketed. Today, this order seems turned on its head, as if it were no longer sovereignty that controls money, but money that controls power. This makes money the principal force, the ultimate force, on the planet. But what does this actually entail? And what might the solution be? Firstly, the attribution of an economic value to everything also produces the commercialisation of everything. And here we come to the confusion of the kiss with the piece of paper, or Van Gogh’s work and its NFT certificate. The solution is to make things free. We should build a space where everything is free for the user. This does not mean that there are no costs, but that their value is not traded for money. Of course, everything has a price. Every resource has production costs. But it could be made free for use, as with the National Health Service. Here, I think this idea should be recovered a bit, brought back to the centre of how society is organised. Even the digital itself essentially started out that way. When I was young, and this whole thing was just getting started, digital was free. Or rather, it cost a lot of money, but the world of academia and the military put the money in. In 1990, I did a project with UNESCO and, at the time, for the few who had access, the Internet was free. The mistake, perhaps inevitable, there was when, after Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web – another gesture made for free – the commercialisation of the Internet space began. In truth, we as a society should have had the political courage to take on this cost. Now, the trend seems already decided. The metaverse is, in fact, in private hands, and will be 100 per cent commercialised. I do not know whether this is reversible. But if there is one thing that art should do, and always has done, it is to break established schemas. And perhaps artists more than anyone else should devote themselves to breaking this model. The artist producing the NFT has not understood anything from the point of view of logical consistency: he is doing exactly what it should not do, by hyper-commercialising what ought to be free.
From a certain perspective, we can say that we have taken the paths we have, taking the risks that this involved, to become what we are as artists or philosophers. If today we ended up contradicting what we are, bending to market forces and turning into its emissaries, we would also be contradicting the efforts and costs that our journeys entailed. When I think of my works, which are themselves extremely complex and expensive machines – but when I produce them, they are always free for the public – I realise that the real cost of those works goes far beyond their economic value, and corresponds to the lifetime that I have invested in them. So, if they are then treated with a commercial logic, it is a bit like selling the desire that set everything in motion. It may be that I, too, am not so young anymore, but I can still remember when the Internet was born. I was a teenager and the Internet was almost all free and, indeed, commercialisation was perceived as immoral, to the point that if a service became charged-for, the digital community would stop using it and migrate towards something else. All this had generated a philosophical paradigm shift. Thinking back now, seeing that that this revolution has been reabsorbed into the established order of the market, it’s something to be regretted, considering the great possibilities that had been glimpsed in that new path. And, perhaps, those of us who we are over forty years old, we are the only ones who are fully aware of what we have lost and of what the new world of digital could have been before the Moloch of money asserted its dominance over it…
We lost the fight. I’m sorry because, apart from anything else, we didn’t even take any lessons from it, and so we will end up losing the next one as well. We lost the battle over the Internet, we are now losing the one over the metaverse and artificial intelligence. Every time we think the market will bring order. But the market only knows how to do one thing: create wealth. It does not know how to exercise self-control over fair distribution, and the damage that can result from its operations. But, above all, it is literally absurd to proceed by reducing our historical dynamics to the lever of the market alone. It means abandoning both art and politics, which are two of the highest expressions of human thought. It is as if we deliberately reduced our three-dimensional space for manoeuvre to a one-dimensional perspective. As if we only had the hammer in the toolbox. If you try to hammer a screw into wood, you will get a fairly rough result, and if your goal is to unscrew it, the hammer is no use at all. The idea of one tool to solve everything is risible.
This is the point. We have lost control of the triad that holds values in balance: the value of aesthetics, the value of ethics, the value of the market. Keeping them in balance prevents one of them becoming a subject of idolatry. And if we do not rebuild a balance, it will be like being on a slippery slope towards collapse.
Maybe not, maybe we are not headed toward collapse. But blowing up this relationship of complementarity and crushing everything into a single parameter, may, even in the best of cases, impoverish human lives immensely. Surely, we could continue to live like this. But why do so? Why not have a better life? A society in which three fundamental values are harmoniously counterbalanced is, indeed, a far better one, in which everyone would like to live. Why didn’t we make the community in which we live reflect this perspective? Let’s say we committed a blunder. It can be straightened out, yes, but not by continuing to indulge in market dynamics, not by producing NFTs as if they were the solution to artistic creativity. Otherwise, we will again miss out on a big opportunity.
Philosophically, I must say that in recent years I have been very impressed by how Maurizio Ferraris tried to take stock of the need for a return to values which have a backbone in the absolute. I think that his recognition of the emergence of a new realism, which rejects the soft legacy of the postmodernism and its relativism, is an important signal. After all, I think that it has been postmodernism, with its easy discrediting of values, that has produced the ideal climate for the discouragement, that moral disengagement which then led to a slide towards reducing everything to a market mindset and the dumbing down of ethics and aesthetics.
There is much more than this to be found on the contemporary philosophical horizon. Even with respect to fundamental categories we think we have come to terms with – power, hope, interest,
identity – we realise that there is still a lot to explore. It is a great opportunity that the digital has confronted us with. This discussion we are having proves it. If when I was twenty or thirty years had told me that we would have to redefine fundamental categories on identity, I I would have laughed, I would have said that, after two thousand years of reflection, they were sufficiently
well-established. Today, however, this possibility has opened up again, it is as if we are looking inward with new eyes. And it is exciting.
But I believe that, in this historical phase, precisely to counterbalance the power of the market, those who deal with aesthetics and ethics, artists and philosophers, must become allies again. It’s often happened, in recent generations, that both of them have gradually excluded themselves from the political debate. And I think that society cannot do without these voices, even beyond outside the enclosures in which they have been contained, the world of academia and museums and galleries. And I believe that the power of the economic Moloch can only be cut down to size if these powers coalesce together. That is, in the awareness that society must constantly subject itself to a resignification process regarding its own categories, not in a conservative perspective but an evolutionary one. This would be exciting. And it is such enthusiasm that should guide us.
Above all, we must see that the contest is not over.