“Empoderamento digital”? Suas implicações no ethos e na atividade política atual

Abstract

This article intends to reflect on the capacity of influence and control of man when he is in possession of equipment, artifacts and efficient information systems in the production of data about nature and about man himself; in this sense it addresses the Questão da Técnica (1932) thought by Martin Heidegger as a phenomenon that defies human freedom in the most essential sense. According to the thinker, we are facing the possibility of losing ourselves in the horizon of technology, in the sense that we base our existence on the premise of calculated control of natural resources and “human resources”, producing a horizon in which we become strangers not only to each other. others, but ourselves, making us unable to recognize the dignity and humanity of our fellow men. The reflexes of the technical instrumentality present around us, associated with the pragmatic desire to want to seek everything that guarantees personal well-being and immediate satisfaction, ends up making objectification available to us, that is, leading to the loss of value in ourselves “ontifying us ”. In the process of understanding this danger, we bring the contribution of Immanuel Kant in his works Antropologia de um ponto de vista pragmático (1798), Ideia de uma História universal do ponto de vista cosmopolítico (1784) and Fundamentação da metafísica dos costumes (1785) and Pierre Levy in his work O que é o virtual? In the first Kantian work we deal with the passions of civilization which (together with virtualization) configure “digital empowerment”, in the second we saw the possibility of human improvement, possible above all at the level of species and which reveals the historical conquest of man as he transitions from animality towards civility, highlighting in this condition the present virtualization of all instances, constituting a multimedia culture. Finally, we seek to reach a better understanding of the possibility of progress in humanity based on Pierre Levy, who emphasizes the merits of a networked society, whose purpose is to make possible the production and shared access (virtually) of knowledge built collectively and globally. Levy's enthusiasm for the development of new technologies and the new way of human interaction, carried out virtually in a networked society, allows us to imagine the fulfillment of the expectation of progress “prophesied” by Immanuel Kant in his work Ideia de uma História universal do ponto de vista cosmopolítico (1784). Here, the human species would reach the most advanced stage of development with regard to the fulfillment of the necessary anthropological ends - the stage of morality, that is, the historical condition in which the evaluative consideration of each rational subject is manifested as an end in itself, with respect and mutual responsibility. In this sense, the great challenge is to question the limits and conditions of possibility of this “digital empowerment”, a phenomenon that initially seems to invert the order of priorities, making man subservient to his own technological inventions.