Jorge Carrión: “Emotion, therapy and self-help are economic and cultural agents of the first size”

I can’t help it Jorge Carrion returning to Buenos Aires and goes back to finding new bookstores, and revisiting those who have affected him on previous trips. That’s also where he was inspired: “I feed everything I’m interested in and everything I intuit might be interested in me. I read a lot about science, technology, I watch a lot of series, documentaries, I go to bookstores, libraries and museums, especially in contemporary art and now science museums ”, he told Clarín.

He arrived in Buenos Aires – where he also participated in the Book Fair, which closed its doors on Monday – to showcase his novel. Lamad (Gutenberg Galaxy). It is a fiction anchored in the year 2100, a text in which an artificial intelligence writes the catalog of a 21st century Museum and in which each chapter describes a room in the museum. The novel brings together fragments of a scientific, artistic, political archive and evokes fear, almost fear …

–Lamad It has a horror novel …

–Lamad It was born in a pretty weird way, I thought the genre was going to be speculative fiction, there’s an artificial intelligence from the future that speaks and tells what happened in the 21st century. The fiction part is probably less important than the fiction part. The form is in a museum catalog and there is a lot of theoretical load and sociological, technological, philosophical essays, etc. The plot of the novel, how artificial intelligences gradually take control of reality, led me to dystopia and to fear, in the sense that they are storytellers, pretty awful and wild characters. It is an inhumane novel, narrated from the post-human place of algorithms, in which people, who have been the main characters of literature for three thousand years, are here the antagonists. And that’s pretty scary. At some point the novel becomes fantastic, where there is a possible alien ship and aliens.

-In your novel you present the museum of the 21st century. Today, museums have a new, controversial role as they begin to cross paths with other genres and with other actors than traditional ones.

-If I need to select a feature of current museums is the integrationn. They become inclusive machines and capture everything, from other languages ​​and other artistic skills or not. Suddenly the science museum contains contemporary art and this one contains biology. Became a pedagogical space, in a therapeutic space: andHe MoMA organizes meditation sessions, others have become community centers, very connected to the neighborhood, social, even working with the homeless. Malba’s public programs, the Reina Sofía, the Pompidou, are centers of high -level academic and discussion, they absorb everything. Some of them bet on digital expressions and they also assume that the screen is one dimension, an important room in the museum.

“Museums have become inclusive machines and capture everything.”

Jorge Carrion

Spanish writer and literary critic.

–What has changed and how are emotions expressed today? An issue enhanced by the technological world.

-Emotional capitalism is very strong, it has become a great market, emotions, therapy and self-help are economic and cultural agents of first magnitude. This is what Eva Illouz called “the culture of therapy and funny how we seek emotional experiences in cultural consumption, not just intellectuals, not only narratives, but also strong emotional connections, especially with the characters. And there one of the great products of our time is the series this is us. Almost every chapter you cry, the tears are intense. And somehow it shows that the well -developed characters are polyhedral and infinite.

-Musk bought twitter for the figure equivalent of Argentina’s debt to the IMF, now he seems to have withdrawn. There are theories that are not very paranoid, quite realistic, about what will happen to this network.

-I don’t think it’s good or bad, it seems a bit absurd to be outraged when it’s a corporation. Twitter isn’t yours, your profile is from twitter, your tweets are from twitter, and it’s even more horrible, for example, that at one particular moment we went from everything published by people we follow, until you start to see what that algorithm decides you should see in the order it decides and posting tweets from people you don’t follow. That was much more outrageous in terms of reception, now that the owner change, if you don’t agree then you can leave. That he is suspicious of many things, without a doubt, that he must have a hypertrophied ego, I think that too, but ultimately it is a corporation, a business and therefore they have policies that are foreign to popular opinion, although twitter believes we value our opinion, this operation shows that it is not.

-What about other networks? There is a lot of talk about the decline of facebook …

-Yes, Facebook is going down, no doubt, the networks are very volatile, they are quickly burning the stages. They are all together facebook will last, because a lot of people, socialize there and feel comfortable there. To think that everything can grow without limit is ridiculous. In other words, everyone has an expiration date, or at least a moment of stability, which seems to be happening on Netflix. For the number of subscribers to grow forever is impossible. Nothing can grow without limit. The danger for me is in Linkedin: it monopolizes the world of work, there are more serious problems there; no longer does Elon Musk buy twitter.

“Everything has an expiration date, or at least a moment of its stability, which seems to be happening with Netflix. It’s impossible for the number of subscribers to grow forever,” Carrión reflects.

-Facebook seems to be for older people, instagram for the youngest, teenagers only communicate via instagram and whatsapp …

-It’s curious that YouTube and WhatsApp are the less obvious social networks, they have a different nature. The one that worries me the most is whatsapp, because we have no idea what will happen there. It is a constant flow of information on emotions, communication, misunderstandings, lists and fake news, many people get information exclusively through whatsapp, that is, they only read the links or memes they receive from to their acquaintances. and it was completely opaque and dark, without scale, we didn’t know what was going on there. It is fascinating in its own nature.

WhatsApp. “It’s a constant flow of information, emotions, communication, misunderstandings, lists and fake news,” he thinks.

-It is also a space where some more intense political expression is moving …

-Of course, the cause of traffic is division, it is confrontation, and it is disinformation and hatred and that is what caused extreme rights and populism to grow so rapidly around the world.

-And also, in some respects, it is connected with certain religious expressions.

-Yes, well, it is finally the feeling of adhesion is a very religious feeling. Sa Lamad I’m doing the topic of how a belief virus spreads, right? Richard Dawkins spoke about how ideas spread like viruses. Strong religious ideas like viruses. my artificial intelligence Lamad they have a religious vocation and in fact they know the Christians, who are in the catacombs. They are hidden on the internet. They are smart now, in 2022 and because they believe that if we discover them we will cancel them, kill them, they are hiding, they are waiting for their moment to spread their truth and their message.

-What do drones symbolize? They seem to have a divine in the sense that you come out of the balcony and a drone comes out of the sky …

-There is a work by Spanish actress and writer Alicia Cop, a project called speculative intimacy. This is the love story between a dancer and a drone and the drone has a double dimension. On the one hand the erotic, the angel of the cupid that seduces, on the other hand the awful, the biocontrol and the almost military presence. Drones are also weapons. Sa Lamad the drone is an important figure because there is a character named Ben Grossman who is an Israeli drone pilot who suspects that drones started killing regardless of whether people pulled the trigger. And there began a whole terrorist revolution against the machines. And the creators of the 21st Century Museum have an army of drones. Just like the drone, the equivalent of a human rifle or pistolas a weapon of artificial intelligence. In fact, it must be the first weapon in history that has received information and has the characteristics of a robot. The robots on Mars are our correspondents and our space messengers and the drones on earth are, on the one hand, the algorithmic look, the aerial look, and on the other hand, killer machines.

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