Democracy must be where our BODIES are
Not in any “metaverse” or “cyberspace”.
Please consider those (freely rearranged) points from “Democracy is about our bodies, not just our minds”:
- The fact that we have a body is how we are identified as a citizen, how we are held responsible for our actions and how we are qualified to vote. Our bodies are important in a democracy because it is how we are counted.
- Online clicktivism is one thing but… Democracy involves more than our minds, more than our opinions, it involves our very existence and to be truly political we need to show up in the world.
- [Instead] Urban living, the increasing virtuality of cyber space, and our minds' capacity for self-delusion are all combining to promote disconnection from reality.
- If we lose sense of this, we risk living in a dangerous collective fantasy unconnected to the fundamentals of our survival.
This is all more important when you realize that…
The fourth point above may be an excellent definition of today’s social media. What is important, however, is to realize that:
- rather than freeing man, digital identities as we have today restrict individual freedom and agency
- those restrictions are even more dangerous because they are mostly invisible, without any physical violence
- and in any case they still apply to our bodies, that is where real democracy is, not just our “avatars”. As in “pay your mortgage late, and I will block your CAR”, just for everything, always
and that all this really gives us is:
- a digitization and virtualization of identities, but mostly in forms that enhance control on bodies, that is on democracy
- at the same time when social media and/or metaverse, exalt, encourage and indulge any demand of individualism and distancing from reality via those identities, no matter how unfounded
Disclosure: the points in the second part of this post are my interpretation and rewriting of some notes I took by an online conversation, but without including the source. If you recognize your words here, just let me know and I will add the proper attribution.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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