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Algorithmic Invasion
Jordi Pigem
March 19, 2025
“AI” calls itself “artificial intelligence,” but it is not intelligence (which always requires understanding), but rather mechanical calculation.
In his book on the art of photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes recounts this comment made to him in a café, referring to the other customers: “Look how dull they are; these days, images are more alive than people.” How is it possible that the image, the copy, is more alive, or more
real, than the original? What is presented to us in our experience at the moment, the image re-presents , perhaps altering it to make it more striking and spectacular. And in this way, the representation, the spectacle, ends up eclipsing the immediacy of the original.
Today, millions of people retouch their selfies before posting them to Facebook or Instagram, because the image is valued more than reality; what is represented counts more than what is present . Accustomed to sophisticated representations, chosen to shock, the authentic presence of things or people can seem like too little.
Paris syndrome affects tourists every year, especially Japanese tourists, deeply disillusioned because in the city on the Seine, idealized as the quintessential romantic city, they no longer find the enchanting people and places they had imagined through Robert Doisneau photographs and Chanel advertisements. Paris syndrome, which can involve anxiety, vomiting, and hallucinations, was initially diagnosed by a Japanese-born psychiatrist, Hiroaki Ota, in 1989. And it doesn't only occur in Paris.
We live in a world dominated by representations, a society of the spectacle. At the beginning of a work of this title ( The Society of the Spectacle , 1967), Guy Debord lamented: “ Everything that was directly lived has become distant in a representation . ” Representation is always distant and secondary: it distances us from full presence, from immediate experience, from the heartbeat of living. In a world filled with representations, we cease to be fully present. The loss of presence entails a loss of direction and makes us more manipulable.
Classical totalitarianisms took advantage of this, as Hannah Arendt saw. Totalitarian propaganda replaces the real world with a grand ideological representation , in which there is no room for nuances. The grand representation of totalitarian propaganda also does not allow each person to find their own meaning in their lives. According to Arendt, one
key to Hitler's and Stalin's totalitarianism was the fostering of senselessness . Totalitarianisms are systematically constructed from rigid premises that are at odds with the dynamism of reality. That is why they are, in an expression often repeated by the German philosopher of Jewish origin, " a piece of prodigious insanity . "
What may be surprising is that the madness or insanity of these ideological systems is based, as the philosopher explains, on “the very logical character ( logicality ) with which they are constructed.” Clinging to their internal logic, totalitarianisms ignore nuances and evidence that don’t fit with their fixed ideas and proceed with implacable coldness: a steely coldness, if we think of the technologies of the time; an algorithmic coldness , if we think of the technologies of today. Totalitarianisms, like fundamentalisms, disregard facts and common sense. They display what Arendt repeatedly describes as a “ contempt for reality . ”
Boris Souvarine, a friend of Lenin and Trotsky, a witness in Moscow to the “extraordinary madness” of the Stalinist purges, wrote from France in 1938:
The USSR is the land of lies, of absolute lies, of comprehensive lies. Stalin and his subjects always lie, at all times, in all circumstances, and, by lying so much, they no longer even know if they're lying .
Shortly after, France itself sank into totalitarianism under Marshal Pétain, a Nazi collaborator. As Koyré explains in his essay on lying:
A totalitarian regime is essentially linked to lies. And never has there been so much lying in France as since the day when, inaugurating the march toward a totalitarian regime, Marshal Pétain proclaimed: "I hate lies."
But this process of contempt for facts, erosion of honesty, and decline in the sense of reality did not begin in the 20th century. In 1843, exactly one hundred years before Koyré denounced that so much lying had never been done, the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach deplored the loss of interest in reality. He noted that the illusory was beginning to be valued more than the true, "the image more than the thing, the copy more than the original, the representation [ Vorstellung ] more than reality, the appearance more than the essence." This constitutes, he protests, a "deception" and a disaster beyond comparison (an "absolute annihilation": absolute Vernichtung ).
And this process has only gotten worse. New technologies are giving it wings. Another philosopher writing in German, the Korean Byung-Chul Han, now claims that digitalization is weakening "the very awareness of reality . "
It's not just that immediate reality is weakened: its content is also distorted. This is what it means to live in a world dominated by representations, in a society centered on spectacle. Representations are presented to us everywhere; images come to shape the reality that surrounds us. And today, the majority of images that dominate digital media are images of violence: physical violence, sexual violence, violence against beauty, goodness, and truth, against common sense, against the wonder and sacredness of life. Mental contents are what lead the world to collapse.
In Greek mythology, Circe is a being with extraordinary powers of seduction and deception. Today, bewitched and entangled by the data and images circulating on our screens, we find ourselves facing the seductions of Circe 2.0 . They include the promises of digitalization, robotization, the metaverse, and transhumanism. They include placing more value on likes and retweets than on genuine relationships. They include the way we happily allow algorithms to capture our data, track our movements, besiege our professions, and invade our relationships and our space, both interior and exterior , with so-called “AI.”
AI calls itself "artificial intelligence," but it isn't intelligence (which always requires understanding ), but rather mechanical calculation. Dizzying, but without experience or awareness. It isn't intelligence, but it can imitate it using algorithms. That's why the acronym AI would be more accurate as "Algorithmic Imitation." Or "Algorithmic Invasion," if we consider its repercussions.
• Extracted from chapters 5-6 of Jordi Pigem, Consciousness or Collapse , Fragmenta, Barcelona, 2024, pages 20-25 (references are found on pages 130-131).
About the author
Jordi Pigem holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He was a professor in the Masters in Holistic Science program at Schumacher College (England). His most notable books include a recent trilogy on the contemporary world: Pandemic and Post-Truth (2021), Technique and Totalitarianism (2023), and Consciousness or Collapse (2024). Since 2025, he has been a Fellow of the Brownstone Institute and a founding member of Brownstone Spain.