AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: (Catalogue) Centro Cultural Vila Flor DATE: January - April 2026
Perhaps it would be good…
… for us to stop and reflect on the intensity of our internet connections.
We are all aware that the decision to disconnect from the internet is debatable, and we even doubt that this act would contribute to solve anything, that is, whether several of our problems posed by the cybernetic space would be mitigated in their practical effects. If we were to accept the idea that, by paying closer attention to the negative consequences of the various things we do, one day it would be feasible to slow down the current pace of our interactions online, then it might be interesting to figure out the best strategy for managing the internet’s influence on our lives. However, this hypothesis, if it exists, still seems distant, since we all feel that the internet is actually much more complex and extensive than it appears on the surface.
We all find ourselves, as members of the human community, within a complex chain of events that are increasingly invisible and imperceptible in their processes, thus impossible to control, thereby causing systemic manifestations and effects. In this situation, when citizens realize that their communication channels have been, even if momentarily, interrupted, they react in a more or less dysfunctional and untimely manner, given that we have all been trained to live in a non-stop reality. This reality is imposing and invasive, allowing us neither the time nor the space to meditate on our decisions; and when we are forced to interrupt our daily routines at the speed of the internet, the continuity of our procedures is disrupted. In contexts of disruption, our acts become unexpected and sometimes even arbitrary, within a chaotic framework of action in which people are left completely adrift. When we are online, we are being routinely guided and disciplined by operative programs constantly exerting influence upon us, so that throughout time we cease to be able to imagine other ways of acting in radically distinct scenarios, that is, within dramaturgies which, because they are not imagined, anticipated or controlled by us, prevent us from discovering or creating new approaches and different solutions.
For when we are forced to stop, we realize we no longer know what to do.
In the realm of immediacy, all types of short-range knowledge prevail. In that sense, we must admit that a substantial part of our lives, as well as of the global world’s collective consciousness, is being influenced by narratives that the internet itself engenders, while at the same time adapting them to our personal features. These approaches are all extracted from the information produced by us, as well as from the patterns of our behavior. These patterns are subsequently utilized for strategic purposes in order to modulate our actions like if they were a malleable object, within a force field that activates decisions whose algorithmic devices serve to guide individuals.
Such systemic regulation of behaviors and discourses is achieved through the exponential growth of the interactive dimensions fomented by the internet, as a permanent connection that gives the user a sense of unity. This connection, however, is structured and processed from the outside, and is characterized by the fact that, despite being totally interconnected, users constitute nothing more than a fractioned, increasingly abstract, and interdependent reality. We are all subject to a unification process that is in many respects forced and artificial, developed through the power of cyberspace.
Despite the harmful effects of this conditioning program, the truth is that without guiding frameworks we become hostages to a communicational vertigo with that our online behaviors, given their complexity, cannot control. In the format of journalistic interviews it has become commonplace to ask which book or music piece the interviewer would take with them to a desert island. Regardless of our personal conviction or disbelief in the salvific qualities of certain literary, musical or artist works, at this moment in time perhaps the best answer to this question might be to say that we would bring a shipbuilding instruction manual with us: because there are no more desert islands, and the most important thing in any situation of isolation would be to learn how to escape this problem.
What has fundamentally changed around us is that, in the meantime, the internet has become an essential life support device.
Nowadays the world contains many other simultaneous worlds within itself, including imaginary ones – those we travel along a static trajectory, traversing trails of pixels on a computer or a cellphone screen, places that have become the inner refuge of a web of life-changing relationships. The introduction of fiber optics inaugurated new overture windows for other spaces of apprehension, in more open, more abstract, and more digital surfaces of visualization, which some authors call hyperreality. Milan Kundera once wrote that «we inhabit the planet of inexperience, given that we are incapable of valuing what has already happened.» When they are online, most people act as though events are happening for the very first time, even when those events are identical to other past situations or when they replicate previous events, permanently amplified by the quantity, continuity, and intensity of the time we spend online. In this sense, we can say that the cybernetic sphere where we live in constitutes a sort of «eternal present», a second life formed by a virtual reality that envelops us as if it were a «digital galaxy».
Jacques Rancière goes as far as to question whether «from this moment on reality will no longer exist, but only images or, conversely, whether images no longer exist, but only a reality presenting itself incessantly? These two discourses seem to be opposed. We know, however, that they inevitably merge in the name of an elementary reasoning: if only images exist there is no longer the other of the image; the very notion of image loses its meaning, there is no longer an image. Several contemporary authors thus contrast the Image, which refers to the Other, and the Visual, which only refers to itself.»
These processes have been depriving us of the living presence of the other’s voice – of the one who creates art or translates the world into language; of the one from whom the internet removes the possibility using our original, therefore human, language, and which only acquires materiality at the moment when we call upon the other. Nowadays we often use a voiceless communication, or a voice modulated by constraints in communication. We want to convince others, while at the same time increasingly and deliberately renouncing to communicate with them, since a substantial part of our relationships is mediated by technical devices within a process from which the other is practically excluded and dismissed as a presence with a voice of its own. In the end, we disregard the presence of the other and replace it with that of the algorithm.
Following the discovery of knowledge, learning became a sort of life-project for a solitary journey: something defined by a form of navigation by sight that will always be limited and relativized by the aspects we see and those we do not know. Oftentimes, however, this knowledge reveals itself to be circumstantial and subject to constant updates that we anticipate will never end, which allow us to say that we will never know enough in order to satisfy all of our needs.
Contrarily to what happens online, in life nothing repeats itself. Assimilation is a process that requires effort. The act of knowing is achieved exclusively through memorization based on repetition; and memorization presupposes a connection with the past. We only become potentially wise if we retrospectively absorb experience and information, and this retrogression is unconscious. Therefore, there is always a deficit in each one of our actions, an insolvable lack rendering us simultaneously knowledgeable and ignorant of the world around us. It is through this immediate and constant changes of contact that our connections, supported by all types of media devices and platforms, are converted into a widespread official version of truth based on an intermediated reality.
An event as strange, unforeseen, and unique as a power outage reveals that there is a different relation between life and technology that might transform a seemingly simple accident into a complex and uncontrollable crisis which we will be forced to learn to manage in order to ensure our survival. In the face of extreme situations such as this one we are invited to think boldly and speculatively, oftentimes going against the current of events and outside the standardized patterns of repetition characteristic of the cybernetic space.
For when we are forced to stop, we realize we are being offered the possibility of relearning who we are and what we do.
TRANSLATION: MANUEL JOÃO NETO
