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The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 2 quotes · Reality, Pop Culture, Simulation

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The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact Quotes

“Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness. Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral reality or freedom: these are all unbearable. In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs. Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence. The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge. This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident. Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions. And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe.”

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Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensory relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and the brain, the malfunctions which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that priority belongs to the network and not to individuals implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the Virtual, so that you cannot be pinned down anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high' that takes the place of happiness. But virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference from it. It gives you everything, but it subtly deprives you of everything at the same time. The subject is, in a sense, realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, it automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.”

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Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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