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Sometimes, seemingly unrelated issues bring us back to fundamental common concerns, to invariant structures of our societies and their dynamics. For example, the debate on name change and the debate on NFTs, so far apart, share a common concern: how to create diversity where there is uniformity.
The possibility of changing one’s identity more easily, now being debated in the French Parliament, after many other countries, is part of the conquest of freedom: everyone wants to be able to freely choose their first name and take their mother’s name rather than their father’s. More broadly, everyone wants to be more and more themselves, free of all inheritance, and to choose to be different from others. Some people even want to go further, to freely choose their family name, and even to escape the sex assigned to them at birth, to become what they think they are, even if this does not correspond to any pre-existing category: in some countries, other identities are considered as possible civil states, alongside the male and female sexes, by which an individual can claim not only to change his or her physical sex, but also to have no sex, or to change it mentally as he or she wishes. It is dizzying when it becomes legally possible to change one’s identity at will. Not just once in a lifetime, but as often as you like, like changing your car or your shirt. To become oneself. And to “become oneself” again. One can imagine how difficult it would be for a society to function, when it is nothing more than a collection of individuals who are so free that they can permanently decide what they want to be, for themselves and for others, which may not be the same thing.
This desire to be different is not limited to individuals. It can also be found in objects, which by nature are mostly mass-produced. And it is undoubtedly the most profound purpose of NFTs, these unforgeable signatures attached to digital objects (and not only to works of art or alleged works of art), to make it possible to give them a unique identity by assigning them an encrypted signature, which ensures their uniqueness by affirming their date of creation, the name of their creator(s), and any other characteristic that one may wish to attribute to them. We should not be surprised by this development, which is in line with the logic of the market economy: only what is rare, or better still unique, can be sold. What is not rare has no market value, even if it sometimes has great social value. And the dynamics of the market society lead to the replacement of acts produced by living beings by artefacts. So digital objects, like all other serial objects, all artefacts, must become as rare, and therefore unique, as possible in order to gain value. And to be unique, objects, like living beings, must be as different as possible.
This twofold trend towards differentiation is being undermined by a reverse trend: our societies will do everything to standardise, standardise, replicate identically, ad infinitum, free of charge, both living beings and artefacts.
Biological diversity is being reduced. Cultural diversity is collapsing. Gender diversity itself is shrinking, especially when, fortunately, the rights and duties of men and women become more uniform, reducing the handicaps that used to hinder their careers. In the same way, clothes, cars, foodstuffs, and housing are becoming uniform in their mode of production, materials, and colours; all the services that men render to each other, their bodies themselves, are being stuffed with artefacts that replace with mass-produced objects, uniformly, what used to be the differentiated services produced by people.
This battle between the dynamics of uniformity and differentiation now seems to be moving towards a victory for the differentiation of artefacts. And this is where the two will come together: we will be more and more different through our artefacts, which will one day be ourselves, integral holograms, unique or multiple.
But here’s the thing: the diversity of artefacts is not the diversity of nature. Until proven otherwise, artefacts have no sexual activity that would allow them to reproduce other than identically; for this to be the case, they would have to have a reproductive mode that would lead them to mix several of them to reproduce artefacts that are slightly different from their parents, as living beings do. Don’t be surprised: some are already working on this.
While waiting for this madness, which will also come, and which will complete the destruction of the living, humanity would have everything to gain by defining and safeguarding its specificity: namely love and the living. The love of the living.
j@attali.com