Conviviality after Social Platforms

Toward an Amateur Way of Dealing with the Internet

Abstract

In this essay, we discuss social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as the main ways of socializing during the social isolation consequent to the pandemic. We offer Illich's insight that contingency, as Aquinas understood, created the modern way we deal with both tools and naturalized hierarchy. In this way, Illich proposed an ontology of tools, which makes it possible to understand modern humans as power tools, on the one hand, and beings with need, on the other. This created a homo miserabilis, the iatrogenic body of modernity. As the Age of Systems appears, the iatrogenic body becomes part of the cybernetic text, turning the social platforms into the agent of the current times. In opposition to this, we propose to understand the Internet's conviviality narrow possibilities as playful and amateur ways, like Agamben's profanations.