Digitalisation

The big black line running through digitalisation – the spanner in the works – is society. But what does this line mean? It is visible, but not legible. It is a reference to the reality that runs parallel to every digitalisation process, and it is as continuous as it is resistant. It refers to the reality that runs parallel to every digitization process and is as continuous as it is resistant. Society and human consciousness, the body and the mind operate according to their own rules. What happens when digital data is fed back into an analogue reality? In his new book, Dirk Baecker tests a theory of digital media from the perspective of the social sciences. Learning data and predictive models are at the heart of his profound attempt to describe our communication with computers.

The vanishing point of Baecker's analysis is constituted by a concept of stochastics that not just current artificial intelligence programs but also society and its theoretical analyses. According to this concept, stochastics is not only the study of probabilities, a kind of »theory« of statistics, but also a doctrine of the increase in reality that comes from linking coincidences with coincidences. Baecker's original assessment of digitalization leads us right into the heart of society's understanding of itself – and of a new, »alien intelligence« that we have barely begun to comprehend.