The Predictable Universe: On the Law of Attraction and New Media

Abstract

Every transformation comes with giddiness. Within the terror in newness the tendency will be to order what was disordered. In the sum of individual and collective behaviors, describing and discerning assert an overall attention towards strangeness, making sure that cultu- ral spaces still move on their endogenous axes. Outside of science’s methodology emerge parallel discourses that are incorporated in the cultural mesh, in a process that Yuri Lotman described as the natural incorporation or contamination of texts from non-texts. The Law of Attraction is one of those discourses that fill the communi- cation space with algorithmic truths, their propagation and recognition manifesting a strange gravitation around new tenets. This essay proposes a questioning of the Law of Attraction, regarding it as a discourse and operati- ve mechanism. Both dimensions result from new media’s materiality and what it adds to communicability: a semiotic investment and a pre-programmed logic where the individual aims towards customizing its attributes and devices. Capitalism’s qualities and the overall complex experience amidst technological progress generate the proper conditions to join discourses which have in their foundations the capitalist dynamic per se: abstraction and miscegenation of what circulates in the same space, where the exterior is supposed to be condensed. New media correspond to the maximum security mediality in minimum distance: they mirror the assertion that we are what we want to be, that is, what we attract.

aw of attraction | new media | abstraction | contemporary