/lit/ - Literature

I wonder what sort of future the world is moving towards. Today my friend told me that tech companies like google are working on devices to automatically translate any spoken language into another, theoretically enabling dialogue between people of all different cultures. This seems on the one hand utopian—the gulf of language that separates the world could be bridged by the raw power of computers, essentially a cybernetic extra brain. It could lead to a new level of understanding, and open up so much that was previously closed off to so many. But on the other hand, it seems like that ostensible benefit could also be its downfall. The world developed out of material conditions that caused languages to be shaped the way that they are, emergent from the regions, people, resources, that all once existed in a certain places and times. Increasingly it seems like technology strips away these materially situated differences, and flattens everything out into one “neutral” monoculture. Neutral being in quotes because it isn’t actually neutral—it comes from western, capitalist companies that we take for granted as being impartial, but at the end of the day they uphold the many of the values that keeps the whole system running. And if these people are calling the shots, and put something out there that shrinks the world, or rather erases the remaining traces of unique culture out in the world, what will be left? Culture worldwide will be reduced to iPhones, coca cola, the western products that have become the new icons of our time. Meaning derives from community, from culture, from language (language being itself a manifestation of a culture’s specific material roots, the content of its meaning translatable but its form, and essence, unique). With no distinctions between languages, there is no meaning. Meaning is replaced by the endless march of capital, the relentless pursuit of greater and greater profit through exploitation until the cheap resources inevitably dry out. Capitalism is literally a cancer on this earth, a machine that will wipe out culture, and possibly all life as we know it, if it is not stopped. As Benjamin says, fascism aestheticizes politics, and communism politicizes art. By the same token, in a less slogan-worthy way, capitalism drains the world of meaning, flattening everything out into a machine-minded monoculture that removes all difference, all imperfection, all spices of life. Language, art, cultural specificity, all create meaning, in defiance of the forces of capitalism. But it seems to be losing the fight.