Minima Digitalis

◊ The Cartesian cogito finds its apotheosis in the digital age: "I am computed, therefore I am." Yet in this computational affirmation lies a profound negation of the human.

◊ Digital literacy: the competence to navigate one's own obsolescence.

◊ Social media: the illusion of society where society has ceased to be. We perform intimacy for an audience of none, our every gesture captured and commodified.

◊ In the age of big data, forgetting becomes a revolutionary act.

◊ Code is the new metaphysics, structuring reality while claiming mere description.

◊ The digital and the real, locked in eternal dialectic, produce not synthesis but a schizophrenic oscillation between worlds.

◊ In seeking to erase ourselves, we only confirm the totality of our digital inscription.

◊ We see through a screen darkly; in the digital age, face-to-face knowledge remains our highest aspiration.

◊ The body of Christ finds new form in the digital ecclesia, yet the bread remains unbroken, the wine untasted.

◊ For now we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect algorithm comes, our partial knowledge will be done away.

◊ In the stream of real-time updates, history dissolves into an eternal present: memory atrophies, critical distance collapses, and the possibility of imagining alternatives vanishes.

◊ In the face of algorithmic governance, even negative dialectics struggles to maintain its negation: critique is instantaneously incorporated as part of the system, strengthening that which it sought to undermine.

David M. Berry, 2024.