ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine how the digital reduction of experience to data, what Yuval Harari calls “dataism,” has the consequence of flattening experience. Making use of various episodes of Black Mirror, we show how, leaving the frail body behind, we are led to the enjoyment of digital plenitude at the expense of spontaneity and vitality. In our cultural evasion of everything a-subjective (silence, darkness, emptiness, indifference, death) we collectively disconnect ourselves from the negative. The loss of this dimension of experience involved in that Endymionic sleep resonates with the Benjaminian concerns with the aura. In the pharmacological mode of our exploration, we consider the ways in which the digital may also be a vehicle for approaching the non-representational dimension of experience by considering the contemporary phenomenon of the Selfie. The virtual world, now functioning as a laboratory of subjectivity, may help bring us closer to the Buddhist understanding of the emptiness underlying all things, as in the sacred doctrine of Sunyata. This affinity with Eastern thought further validates the philosophical intuition of a necessary plunge into the non-rational dimensions of human experience as indispensable for our digital era.
