[Column] Harari’s 2030s: A new age of repressive desublimation

(Reuters/Yonhap)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

In his short talk “By 2030, the World Will Be Unrecognizable,” Yuval Noah Harari presents his position on how the explosive development of AI will affect our lives in such a clear and succinct way that his talk offers itself as an object of critical analysis. He provides a quite detailed vision of our world in 2030, which he characterizes as “unrecognizable” for those of us still rooted in traditional notions of humanity — however, to make my point brutally clear, I think that the reality of 2030 will be unrecognizable also for those who endorse Harari's vision of 2030.

Harari's premise (which I share) is that what is going on today is something most of us are not fully aware of: the end of humanity as we knew it from around 10,000 years ago, when Stone Age tribes began to use language. 

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, language is no longer a tool of humans for their communication and interaction; it acquires full independence and begins to function as its own agent, cutting off the umbilical cord that linked it to vulnerable apes called humans. (Here I encounter the first problem: does a language without subject(s), a language which acts as its own agent, still function as language? Furthermore, can language really be reduced to its two functions, intellectual calculation and expression of emotions? But I've dealt with this elsewhere.) 

It is thus not enough to complain about how the growth of AI undermines the separation between facts and fictions, and it is also not enough to celebrate as a new freedom our ability to smoothly transition between facts and fictions — we see clearly the catastrophe of such “freedom” in much of today’s politics (Trump, Putin, Israel) where a new discourse is emerging which doesn’t even aim to be truthful in the traditional sense. 

At the ontic level of reality, we should insist more than ever on factual truth, but we should remain aware that at a more basic ontological level the distinction between truth and fiction gets blurred.

Although Harari is well known for his constant warnings that the human era is over, he is here all too optimistic, painting the picture of the near future (2030) in which individuals will be able to engage in emotional relations with actual and digital persons. This is happening now already when individuals spend hours in conversation with ChatGPT, but imagine a much more developed system where I put on digital glasses and engage in a conversation with my deceased father who virtual person was reconstructed through my own and others' memories and other kind; of material traces (recordings, etc.)? 

But who controls this game? What about being controlled from within, with thoughts and false memories implanted into my mind without me even knowing it? Imagine a memory is implanted into my mind of being raped by my father, which I experience as authentic. So what if a new class of masters emerges who can read our thoughts and intervene in them but are not themselves open to Neuralink? What if those excluded are not just marginalized inferiors but the elite group of masters who control and manipulate the inhabitants of a singularity?

As for Neuralink, Harari imagines that an individual will be able to freely choose which collective minds to join (scientists? poets?) — really? Will my individuality survive its immersion into what is called “the singularity”? Since the implants that regulate my contact with a Neuralink are mechanical devices, it is evident that the control is exerted by the one who connects or disconnects the implants? 

I am not a naive leftist who thinks AI is a neutral machine whose social implications depend on social circumstances in which it operates: there is a tendency towards technological control and domination inscribed into the very formal structure of AI. This is why it is difficult to imagine a happy, emancipated community of human individuals who dwell together in a singularity: in a singularity, there is no sex, no jokes, no communication in which the other remains obscure.

The conclusion that imposes itself is that every big technological breakthrough opens up a path towards new barbarism: its pseudo-liberating effect ends up in what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation” (a term he introduced in his “One-Dimensional Man” from 1964). One can argue that Theodor Adorno was the first to point in this direction in his analysis of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (“Stravinsky and Reaction”), part two of his “Philosophy of New Music” (1949). Adorno perspicuously noted how Stravinsky's modernism, his musical imitation of the rhythm of brutal industrial production, takes as its content old Russian barbaric violent sacrificial myths.

According to Marcuse, “repression” in late capitalism does not operate through control and denial but through allowance and expression: all pleasures are allowed — in commodified form — leading to the controlled expression of all desires and wants. 

In other words, today repression operates through the desublimation of desire, wherein no desires are forced underground: pornography, sex work, drug culture, BDSM, furries, gay culture, lavish living, trans culture, and the like are no longer seen by society as negative or pernicious lifestyles. The pursuit of these is now sanctioned and celebrated: being a member of these types of forms of life is no longer a subversive action or lifestyle — it now perpetuates capitalism via the value-form.

Today’s explosive growth of AI agents has brought repressive desublimation to a new level unimaginable till now, in all its dimensions, from the post-truth universe to the blurring of the distinction between public space proper and private space, not to mention digital control of what we do and think. AI media also play a crucial role in how, in the last decade, brutality and shameless obscenity invaded public political discourse: not just in their words but also in their acts (public declarations of how prisoners are tortured), the US and Israel now practice repressive desublimation. 

Trump and Netanyahu (not to mention Hegseth and Bin Gvir) often speak in public in a way that was till recently imaginable only in private conversations or in private email exchanges. Their speech is quite literally a speech of repressive desublimation: it is definitely desublimated (brutally open with no limitations that safeguard dignity) and at the same time repressive (announcing no less brutal mistreatment of those who are perceived as enemies, inclusive of annihilating a whole civilization). 

We are not dealing here just with the effect of AI, but with a very specific set of social circumstances within which AI is operating. We are still searching for a proper name for this new set of circumstances: digital neofeudalism, liberal fascism, a new mode of Bonapartism, etc. We are well aware that these names circulate around a phenomenon which is definitely real and whose heavy weight we all feel. The functioning of AI cannot be disconnected from the neofeudal class struggle best symbolized by the pernicious quintet of Gates-Musk-Thiel-Bezos-Zuckerberg.