Pure Exteriority
A billionaire tech entrepreneur recently bothered the psychoanalysts by exclaiming on live TV that introspection was an outdated turn of the century affair, that it was Viennese, invented by Freud, and essentially useless, and slow, bad for business and bad for the home, and that he, the tech-entrepreneur, whose large, bald, weirdly egg-shaped head leaned away from his compacted face, never gave any thought to his interiority, nor his motivations, nor his past, and that he valued above all, unthinking, uncritical action. Go, don’t look back, just go. Why have to think when the market does it for you? The algorithm is god and we can just outsource cognition to the data center; price action tells us if we are correct or not. Human culture is literally worthless except when it proceeds upwards and to the right. Following a public outcry from those persons who still value mental-life, the tech entrepreneur doubled down on twitter: no important person in history ever thinks about anything; and which produced a flurry of think-pieces and editorials listing a long history of important persons who did, in fact, engage in long bouts of introspection, like Socrates, St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and so on, thinkers all, but whose thoughts have now all been ground up and pulped by AI so that you no longer have to think about, or remember them, ever again.
