The Tower
The tower is an exploration of time suspension, intended as an uncanny coexistence of absence and presence, hubris and chaos, movement and paralysis.
The Tower (2021) is a virtual sculpture, a WebGL version is currently available here.
The tower is an architecture of bodies locked in perpetual data mining, transfixed in constructing their own temporal confinement.
The tower is a piece exploring digital labour and platform capitalism. The tower operates through technocracy’s technical language, producing a reality of extraction, efficiency and productivity.
The last two years of the pandemic have both accelerated and augmented the uncanny coexistence between the seemingly unstoppable and accelerating growth of productivity, and a sense of crystallisation, of a postponed present, a perpetual delay, of a future forever on hold, that is never to arrive.
The false sense of progress that hides behind this constant and incessant growth, reveals itself as a metastasis, spreading along an ethical, moral, spiritual paralysis.
A suspension and numbness has taken over bodies, but not over data and numbers.
The tower is an exploration of both presence and absence, hubris and chaos, in our increasingly accelerated, fragmented and uncertain present; the chaos, being the result of ruthless and relentless turbo capitalism, with its hyperconnected productivity and cacophonies, where slow, deep, meaningful exchange is lost.
If the pandemic created a global moment of suspension, one could also argue that the “suspension of time” intended as “real time”, was already in place. The pandemic has functioned as an accelerator, easing human lives into a total resetting of social spaces and temporalities. But as these changes take place, everything has to change in order to remain the same; and whilst our lives have been on hold and postponed physically, our digital selves have sunk and delved into deeper and deeper meta — mud.
The “reality” of time becomes exclusively “meta” time.
Our ability to communicate is fractured, disjointed, confounded and unhinged — in the timeless and contextless amalgam of the Metaverse.
The pulse of hyper connectivity and constant tethering flows through data extracting arteries, where the cacophony is jittering, flickering and contingent, yet producing a deaf void.
As we lose control, we are in a looping deadlock. The recent zoomification -zombification - of our social time has turned our social bodies into data-extracting, surveilled thumbnails.
In the meantime, as a vertigo of our present and future is waning into the abstraction of a suspended time-space ransom, capitalist technocracies’ profit quest to build and colonise the Metaverse is advancing and focusing on the “construction of the man who will be”:
“Our mission is to harmonise people and technology to create a better, more unified world. Our vision is to amplify the best parts of you and to advance the human spirit.” (from the Magic Leap Manifesto)
The tower is an architecture of oppression, a construction loosely inspired also by the ancient myth of the tower of Babel.
“The Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower ‘with its top in the heavens’. The Eternal disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.”
In the myth of the tower of Babel — which according to comparative mythology, is a story present,in different variations, across different and several cultures — the Eternal made it clear that when people are unified in purpose, they can accomplish great achievements, both noble and abominable. Spiritual unity and connection can elevate men. By contrast, having unity of purpose in worldly matters, ultimately, can be destructive.
The tower is not an expression of unity between various peoples speaking to one another from their diversity. Their unity is an expression of an oppressive and prevailing technical homologating model that repudiates diversity and complexities.
Profit driven “harmony” as intended by digital platforms of oppression, brings workers together in the shape of gig economy wage slavery, surveillance capitalism, and in culturally eroding, flattening and homologating sterilization; and that is not what is intended for divine unity in men.
According to some reading of the myth of Babel, it is written that in the gigantic construction site, the workers place bricks as large as human beings, each of which bears the name of the person who lays it engraved.
The bricks are the data, the bodies that feed the network of the tower.
“Over the course of forty-three years of hectic work, the men of Babel lay six hundred thousand bricks, reaching a height of ten thousand miles — without having yet reached their destination — that is, without having reached heaven. The scene described is that of an industrious and efficient construction site, where even women, the elderly and children carry out their duties of support to the workers with diligence, since no defections or slowdowns in the pace of work were conceivable”.
As humans become embodied data, the restless construction of the Metaverse requires thus that all the workers’ time is completely absorbed in digital labour time, meta — time , which is both visible and invisible. Workers are so intent on the construction work that they neglect everything else. The relentless and ever accelerating rhythm of production, can not be stopped or questioned. And the quest for a never satisfying thirst of achievements and satisfaction, leads to an inability to stop.
“By now it took more than a year to get to the top and exactly one year to get back down. If a man was injured or fell from that height, no one would notice, but if a brick broke or got lost, everyone would cry because more than two years would have to pass before it could be replaced”.
In the name of an all-encompassing productivity, humans have forgotten the meaning of their lives. The febrile speed of the construction of the Tower is timed by, sustained and fed by the lives of the workers. The tower prevails over the life of those who build it, in a general delirious hallucination in which this perverted architecture demands and devours the lives of its workers.
And it’s precisely the myth of technological inevitability and seemingly unstoppable progress, in the construction of the tower, that exercises its dominance and power over the time and life of the workers.
Reduced to mere flesh extensions to the demanding, cannibalistic tower, the inhabitants of Babel have forgotten about themselves. Their time, being measured and valued. Crushed by the incessant construction, the workers depersonalised data, flowing through the arteries of the tower. With nearly 3 billion users, Meta’s techno fascist /techno populist language and its surveillance capitalistic algorithm, have been responsible for driving profit ruthlessly, through influencing elections and contributing to hordes of fictitious accounts and trolls, propagating fake news, the extracting algorithms expanding and amplifying falsehoods, distortions and half-truths.
The ambition of world connection through sprawling global social media machines has ended in chaos (“wanting to put an end to confusion, in the end man got confused”) for the aim of profit. The pillars of the tower relying on the Meta code: an opaque, intricate conglomeration of algorithms, a building, a bundle made by innumerable intertwined threads, created by thousands of of workers, with bricks that bear their own signatures: personal data.
Has the suspension of time, during the pandemic, forced us to slow down and and making us face our humanity, our mortality, vulnerability and suffering — the limits and advantages of technology — and offering an opportunity to reconsider, in what is presented as a new non-negotiable reality — or did it just accelerate the digitisation of our meta lives, even more dependent on the energy extracting reliability, efficiency of the Tower…
Our bodies, stuck in confinement… temporary thumbnails, pockets of air. In an ever shrinking reducing space, our bodies redirected, our gaze, redirected, our hands and bodies mobilised. The timelessness of the Zoom experience, the thumbnail cells.. bodies separated, queuing, counted, arching, aching, locked in bodies..bodies in detention; fleshy appendixes to the data extracting scripts, in collapsing grounds, gasping in a frenzy dance, in the quicksand of stillness.
Has perhaps the most real and exciting moment of rupture been perhaps on October 4, 2021, at 15:39 UTC, when Meta and its subsidiaries, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, became globally unavailable for a period of six to seven hours? And was that segment of time, the only time in which real time has been back in synch even despite a short while..
Is our presence on the network, really ever revealing an absence?
On the tower and in the network, the identity of a man is the same value as that of the data, and the same as that of a brick: it is the brick that has a name, and each name is the name of a brick. The value of a human’s life lies entirely on its data and on his participation in the act of building, in his productivity. Accepting the reduction to being participants and creators of the construct, the inhabitants of Babel have forgotten about their humanity.
The reality of the Tower is the reality of the logic and language of value and measurement, where everything gets categorised, indexed, valued, every single space - micro financialized, and yet, nothing retains any meaning.
The proud and ambitious architecture feeds itself from bodies, replaceable units, mined, extracted and exploited for the construction. Bodies that forget to be bodies to become machines that measure, calculate, speak and resolve, in numbers.
According to the myth of Babel, the Eternal punished those men who turned into machines without noble effort and forgot the meaning of their lives, by confusing their language. Up until then, the language spoken in the construction of the ambitious building was a language of logic, statistics, measurements.Thus, the builders, who up to that moment had communicated solely using the language useful to build the construction, suddenly are unable to speak to each other on the simplest level, as human beings.
It is through the very obstacle of language, however, that the builders find themselves having to consider the other that they are next to - and that until then had been an impersonal cog inserted in a well oiled efficient machine. Only then, “the other” can become a subject to be considered.
The linguistic difference becomes paradoxically the instrument of a communication that was lost and paused when the construction took over the life of the builders. The technical language, the language of numbers, of data, created to build, to be efficient, productive, the language that defines and enslaves the workers.
In the myth of Babel, the punishment to obfuscate language is not arbitrary, but instead, it reflects the divine intent to force the workers to stop and think, the tower, having reduced them to serial mechanisms, information shreds in a system.
Our vulnerability is the thread that weaves through all human beings, where “the other” is not reduced to a means to profit, a cog in the machine, where diversity is a gift, where there is unity in diversity and solidarity, participation and in harmony, and not in systems of oppression. The punishment of confusion inflicted on the inhabitants of Babel could therefore be interpreted not so much as a punishing act, but rather a liberating one: from the tight chains of a technocracy whose language aims not to connect and unify, but to extract, measure and enslave.
