ABSTRACT
This chapter consists in the aesthetic critique of the constitutive element of digital life, “the pixel”. By contrasting its technical features with those of the constituents of material life (e.g., knots in a carpet), the chapter bares one of the major sources of digital insignificance: the illusion of technical perfection. Through the alluring image of a smoothly orderable world, digital marketing is stripping everyday life of the surprise of imperfection. In the pre-digital world, art consisted in the asymptotic effort to master a recalcitrant matter; in the digital era, instead, the world is presented as something that, as the philosopher Levinas would have said, is endowed with a cold façade but lacks any proper visage. The insignificance that digital bureaucracy injects in everyday life, the chapter concludes, consists in surrounding people with an artificial environment, whose aesthetics is strikingly at odds with that involved in the perception of nature.
