-Analysis-
BUENOS AIRES — Digital hyper-production, or the vast torrent of pictures and data coming out of our screens, seems to be dissolving the real world in some inexplicable, blinding light. This technological inflation — or inflammation — isn’t just about quantity but is, above all, making radical changes to the way we inhabit our world and live.
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Time — that projection of the reflective mind — is being broken into endless little bits of the present to become an immeasurable yet shallow void.
In this context at least, abundance is sickening contemporary culture. Just one of its symptoms is an excess of technological positivity that is generating a new form of violence: that of total transparency. Everything must be visible, shareable and quantifiable. There is no room for mystery, as that requires some “hiddenness.” And the blinding lights of our screens have blasted obscurity into oblivion.
Drowning in data
Something similar has happened with words, where informational inflation or “dataism,” as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it, is, paradoxically, degrading meaning.
Like a garden drowned by too many flowers, the uncontrolled proliferation of digital content suffocates the possibility of deep thought and silence. That vital space where meaning germinates, is colonized by the incessant noise of notifications.
It is communication without communion.
While technology promises connectivity, it is in fact pushing us into atomization. Because there can be no personal experience in this realm of hyper-visibility. On social networks, the other is reduced to a profile, a flat image without depth or mystery. Digital communication has removed all the tensions of a real meeting— because there is no meeting. It is communication without communion, contact that is anything but tactile (and often tactless), and closeness that is strictly distant.
Narrative time thus disintegrates into digital instantaneity. Memory, which requires duration and sedimentation, is replaced by an external archive that is infinitely accessible but existentially empty: We swim in an excess that suffocates us.
The art of distance
The art of delay, essential for contemplative thought, is definitively lost in the culture of digital immediacy. Waiting, that fertile time when imagination spreads its wings, is perceived as a failure of the system that must be eliminated.
Salvation, if it exists, will not come from more technology but from rediscovering the art of distance. We need to cultivate new forms of contemplative resistance: setting aside “digital quiet time,” rituals of disconnection, recovering the practice of paying real attention. Only in these quiet, empty spaces can something new truly emerge.
Technological inflation is ultimately a form existential deflation. As the digital space expands, the experience of real living contracts. In this desert of technologically mediated reality, we must learn again to value darkness, silence, secrecy and distance. Only in this way can we recover the poetic density of existence, that fundamental opacity that no screen can ever reveal.
