Gérald Bronner: “Cognitive Apocalypse” – Culture

The author replies on page 139 to those who want to prematurely classify this book in the genre of the flourishing literature on catastrophes and apocalypse: He smiles at the thought of being able to prove the reader was wrong. Because by “apocalypse” he doesn’t mean the end of the world, according to the original meaning of the word, but a fundamental revelation: that about the human species and its wild cognitive voracity, as it comes to light today under the conditions of a deregulated market in data overflow and social media.

The author and his game shouldn’t get away with our expectations that easily. As a sociologist, anthropologist and neurologist, he shows how we are on the way to unimagined possibilities and dangers thanks to the brain time that has been freed up by digital technologies. Behind his description of our idling in the sea of ​​data, into which 29,000 gigabytes of new data pour every second, there is always a glimmer of hope for an awakening of reason.

Currently, screens take up half of our brain time

In the course of his development, thanks to organization and technology, man was able to free up a considerable part of his brain time for things other than mere survival, writes Bronner in an anthropologically sweeping recourse. The first push came 12,000 years ago with the culture shock of the Neolithic. Since the human brain can hardly manage more than 150 close relationships with other people, this was the time of the social division of work and responsibilities and thus the emergence of the political. It was the moment when the hunter, dependent for his subsistence on the coincidences of the daily routine, began to organize the world.

In the brain time freed up as a result, the author sees “a kind of war treasure in the field of attention” with important consequences. Building houses, a sense of art, an interpretation of the world had become possible. This process has recently accelerated many times over. In France, in addition to working hours and a good eleven hours spent sleeping, eating and personal hygiene, the physiological time that has become available is currently five hours a day. That’s 35 minutes more than in 1986. In contrast, sleep time is rapidly decreasing. At the beginning of the last century people in our area slept an average of nine hours, today it is hardly more than seven hours a night. Children and young people are particularly affected. And that’s where the problem begins.

The aim of civilization is to make the enormous amount of brain time that has been freed up – according to Bronner, a total of 1.139 billion years for today’s France – productive for the younger generation. And again the author reaches far back into the past in order to characterize our current situation after the changing successes of school education since Charlemagne. The decisive novelty is the practically unrivaled attraction of the screens. Sleep time, dead time, dream time are suppressed with the addictive substance of permanent digital variety. Screens currently take up half of our brain time. The smallest break in the daily routine is for looking at the cell phone. Boredom must not be.

A side casualty of this is the chewing gum industry. Instead of sweets, small children are sedated with the movies on mom’s cell phone, and the positioning in the supermarket directly in front of the checkout no longer works because nobody is looking there anymore. In the subway, the attractive advertising spaces are no longer on the platform, but in the aisles of the trains. The new human’s gaze is directed downwards, prompting cities like Tel Aviv to mark traffic intersections for the “smombies” with light strips on the ground. The author presents sex (one third of the videos consumed worldwide), fear-mongering about health or the environment and collective anger at all sorts of things as the main bait in the cognitive cacophony. As a specialist in conspiracy theories and populist movements, he can draw on thorough preliminary work in this regard.

A gluttonous creature with a weakness for cognitive fast food – that’s man

The strength of his book lies in the fact that, in his striving for scientific objectivity, he refrains from sounding the alarm or coolly downplaying the problems and also spares us the argument of the lazy to think that the Internet itself is neither good nor bad, it only depends on the right use . The author resolutely opposes John Perry Barlow’s utopia of total freedom in cyberspace and sets his vision of a “realistic anthropology” against their naïve image of man, which takes man for what he is: a gluttonous creature with a weakness for cognitive fast food.

There are different explanations as to why the freeing up of human brain time has resulted in a civilization of half-knowledge, fakes and permanent distraction instead of a civilization of knowledge and wisdom. Bronner picks out two stories in particular – and deals with them critically. Those of the “alienated” people who, following the Frankfurt School of Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Noam Chomsky, see the system of capitalism behind all human weaknesses, he accuses of ideologically whitewashed unscientificity. In his earlier books, Bronner has already examined in detail the narrative of the neo-populist movements, which insists on allowing the alleged will of the people to prevail against all institutional and cognitive mediation instances. He accuses both of disdain for scientific accuracy and rational objectivity. With this, however, his analysis reaches its own limits.

The shortening of anthropological research to the measured values ​​of brain time that has been freed up and to the dozens of sociological, behavioral-psychological, and neurological laboratory experiments that have been provided testifies to a certain scientistic one-sidedness. People readily agree to the demand for regulation of the cognitive market in the competition for our attention. However, how this is to be done in our societies based on individual freedom remains open. And that our likeness, gazing out at us today from the distortions of the cognitive apocalypse, could bring us to our senses like Medusa’s water-reflected and softened gaze once did, is a bold conjecture.