Einstein, the networks and our drug trafficking

Several people use their cell phones in the vicinity of the Glorieta de Insurgentes, in Mexico City.Galo Cañas / Galo Cañas

The time of social media would destroy all of Einstein's dreams.

Well, the same and not all, if we pay attention to what Alan Lightman writes in his unclassifiable

Einstein's Dreams

.

It's 1905, the German physicist lives in Switzerland and works as a bureaucrat in a nondescript, but depressing patent office, while shaping, in his imagination, the theory of relativity.

It is then that this other imagination, that of Lightman —theoretical physicist, novelist and professor at MIT— decides to meddle and write about the dreams that Einstein would have had during the nights that divided the almost 80 days that the German needed to have his conception of time.

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Every two, three or four nights, a world in which time is governed, that is, has a different way of passing: a place in the center of which the raindrops hang motionless, the pendulums float halfway, the buttons of the flowers have not just opened and whoever moves away from there walks more and more a little faster, because time travels in concentric circles, towards the outside.

A place where everything seems to be the same as the world we live in, except for one detail: you can't read, you can't talk, you can't cross a street or walk through a park without seeing the passage of time, because time is visible everywhere; a place where time is double or, rather, there are two times: one mechanical and one corporal, one rigid like metal and another flexible like wet paper, one predetermined and another that decides "on the fly."

A place where time is like a flow of water that, from time to time, finds a stone that makes a stream of time separate from the main stream and connect, again, further back or further forward; a place where time passes faster the closer to the center of the planet, so that all human beings seek the top of the mountains; a place where the day when time is to end is known in advance; a place where time stops at the moment when we are happiest.

A place where everything happens, simultaneously, in three chains of events, since time has three dimensions, like space: in the same way that an object can move horizontally, vertically and longitudinally, a being can participate in three futures perpendicular — each becoming is actually three becoming, for example: marrying, eloping with a lover, and becoming celibate; a place where memories do not exist; a place where you don't have the ability to imagine the future. And, of course, a place where causes and effects are totally erratic.

The latter - that of the place where causes and effects are erratic, that is, where sometimes the former precede the latter, but at other times the latter precede the former, the place where the cause may belong to the future as much as the effect can belong to the past and where, therefore, future and past are intertwined — it is Einstein's dream that social media could not destroy. And they could not destroy it because they would destroy themselves: social networks are that place, that world where causes and effects are always erratic: what someone writes may have been read before by someone who will hardly read it; what is read can be read even before it is written by the person who will write it.

In that place, in that world in which judgment fades together with the present, because only prejudice exists and, incredibly, a kind of post-judgment - regardless of which of those happens first and which happens later, that is, regardless of the fact that, for example, post-judgment happens before prejudice - in that world that Einstein, he said, would have dreamed of on May 3, 1905 - always according to Lightman - and to which we would have given life and autonomy almost a century later. For example, things only happen without explanation, without hindsight, and worse still, without any unpredictability or unpredictability.

“In this world without a cause, scientists are helpless. Your predictions always turn into nominations. His equations, always, in justifications, his logic in lack of logic. Scientists fret and curse like gamblers who can't stop gambling. Scientists become buffoons, not so much because they are rational as because the universe is irrational. Or maybe not because the universe is irrational, but because they are rational. Who could say what is the case in a world without a cause?

If the present vanishes, as in social networks, if the causes and effects are interchangeable, what need is there to give it its place and to know the past and what need is there, likewise, to give it its place and to measure the consequences. In the end, only prejudice and post-judgment, or post-judgment and prejudice, matter, because it is not either that there is any order between these: what you will say, already decided, whoever heard it beforehand, what it will mean.

Of course, a time without a present, in a way and following Laurent de Sutter, in his book

Narcocapitalismo

(the anesthesia society)

—in Mexico it is normal that, when reading a word like this, that is, narcocapitalism, one thinks in the economy of drug trafficking, but de Sutter refers to the capitalism of the narcotization of the subject— it is an excited time -

ex-citare

, it means to take "out of oneself" -.

A time, then, that seeks to expel the being from the limits of being, through an equation as perverse as it is precise, in which, in addition, the lack of logic between effects and causes is reaffirmed: drugged, by one substance or another, For more than two centuries, beings have remained in a depressed or manic state.

And there is no, there is no better space for excitement, that is, for our part "outside of ourselves", for our part manic, than that of the networks, where the individual, again, "outside of themselves", becomes , first, in anyone and, later, in none.

After all, the space that Einstein dreamed of on May 3, 116 years ago, was also that of the passage from ontology to its opposite.

An antionthology in which the abandonment of being is the only characteristic.

The only cause in a world without causes.

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