Thoughts on technology, global interconnectedness, and violence

Communications technologies are enabling individuals to connect regardless of the physical distance and political barriers which separate them. I’ve always presumed this to be a good thing, although recently I’ve been led to question my presumptions and think hard about the what happens when traditional separation barriers — the ones designed to keep people from escaping — are broken down and replaced with new sorts of barriers (both virtual and physical) designed to prevent people from coming in.

The segregation of people is the reality of economic globalization, and many of the humanitarian crises that just seem to keep popping up all over the world — the ones we hear about in bullet point headline form, coupled with disheartening and brutal images, endorsed by celebrity personalities and philanthropists like Sean Penn, Wyclef Jean or Bill Gates who  helping put out urgent appeals for charitable donations, these sorts of conflicts liberals love to espouse as driving mission in live — seem to have actually been caused by the very system that was supposed to prevent violence.  

“In the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism,” writes Žižek, “it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled.” The violence we perceive with our own eyes constitute a “subjective” violence, and it is the very process of reproducing such violent images that masksthe underlying causes of the violence. “Objective” violence, in other words, is rendered invisible while the traumatic, gut-wrenching, visible “subjective” violence dominates the airwaves.