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Drawing empirical evidence from the internet hence becomes a ritual of trusting the mimetic, corruptible, mediated and disintegrating digital reality. As our life continues to increasingly become dependent on digital technology, it is therefore also being subjected to digital entropy, or the gradual degrading, decomposition of the substance of digitality. The world that opens up to us through our screen, while being very real (I challenge anyone who doubts that to publicly post their credit card data online), is not truthful in that it is reproduced virtually, its empirics can be easily manipulated and its contents are rapidly disintegrating. Instead, a different logic is therefore at play here, which is capable, as if per a trick of a magician, to generate presence from zero, and the other way around. This without doubt enables digital culture to incorporate irrationality and paradox as a naturalized intrinsic part of its epistemology. Therefore, there is a circular causal relation between the rise of technology and the production of post-truth. Taken as a whole, post-truth is hardly a novel phenomenon. In somewhat positivist fashion, Lee McIntyre provides a popularly held interpretation of post-truth as "the political subordination of reality", in which political will and appeal to emotions rather than scientific and factual knowledge dictates what is considered true. (McIntyre, 2018, 174) In that sense, post-truth has been with us since the times of the early charismatic leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or perhaps King David, whose power and political influence largely relied on the affective, convincing qualities of their personalities and deeds. Meanwhile, less heroic practices like trickery, sophistry, propaganda, emphasis on emotional rather than factual arguments in political debates, even "bullshit" as articulated by Harry Frankfurt (2005) had been followed politics through centuries as well. However, in times of social media, digital marketing, different forms of propaganda and psychological warfare, the digital world attacks our senses with such power that we are no longer fully capable of controlling our attention — which in turn becomes a commodity. We lose control of our own attention, on one hand, as this attention becomes an object of commercial exchange, on the other (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Under such circumstances, it is quite difficult to expect a different result when it comes to political culture than reliance on the impulsive, heuristic, intuitive, emotional and a-rational side of our psyche. The mediatization of the political has long reached such extents that no one who would ever consider having a political impact, could ignore digital technologies. Every political actor will have engaged in the performative transformation of empirical reality through social media, graphic manipulation, or online advertisement, into an emotionally engaging spell to be cast at us via emotionally engaging "content". Again, engaging emotions in politics is certainly no novelty. Never, however, have these processes been digitalized and subjugated to technological processes to such an extent as now. Political will becomes detached from experienced, empirical reality and can rely on synthetic digital reality, while still maintaining popular support. As a result, we are now able to not only manipulate empirically manifest reality, or at least appearances thereof, but also to synthesize political will in form of "participatory disinformation, gain traction and maintain a community of people who are willing to disregard the fact that our political message is not empirically grounded beyond the digital world." (Starbird et al., 2023) If empirical evidence stands at the basis of the processes employed to establish what is true or not, successful falsification of said evidence can generate the reality required. In some Kafkaesque process, this reality is capable of reproducing itself ad absurdum, while still maintaining mimetic semblance to enlightened processes that were once considered rational. The advance of scientific, technocratic, consumerist enlightenment was supposed to maximize the human potential, cast away the mists of falsehood and rid the world of myth and superstition for "men of science" to inhabit in very significant comfort. In a morbidly humorous and paradoxical way, however, we yet find ourselves in a world where the enlightened modernity is being gradually discarded, subverted, and substituted by the very technological tools that were used to build it. In fact, technology — especially digital technology — has long stopped being a "tool" to be used for our benefit and become a necessary condition for our society to function, to which our society becomes ever more deeply addicted in a very unenlightened way. Meontology Meontology as a term defines presence outside the ontological. In that sense, just as the etymology of the word suggests, meontological being is, paradoxically, non-being. What this paradox means to us exactly depends on what tradition of ontology we entertain. There are different treatments of the question in Western philosophy, from Protagoras and Plato to critiques of Aristotle's potentialities in the Jewish tradition, to existentialist explorations of being and its opposite. But perhaps even more significantly, non-being and nothingness is expressed in the Daoist tradition, where, at least in Tao Te Ching, non-being (wu) is conceived not only as the source and the end for being (yu) itself, but also as the vast limitlessness, outside being (Chen, 1973). Merging Western and the Daoist philosophical traditions, Kitaro Nishida works with different levels of non-presence. The "true nothing" (shin no mu), according to him, is tantamount to the opposition-less non-being, which, not unlike the Daoist wu, transcends the dialectic co-dependence with ontology. (Nishida et al., 2012: 20–22) In terms of Western thought it could perhaps be related to the absolute origins and nature of the divine, outside of both presence and non-presence. Either way, this absolute nothingness would mean being "not of this world", which, paradoxically, creates and moves said world. Such condition of existential non-immanence, or transcendence of immanence, constitutes the condition of it (non-)being absolute, which on its turn brings it closer to the Western notion of the divine. In early Heidegger, the relation between being and absolute non-being could be interpreted so that nothing (Nichts) appears as opposed to the being (das Seiende) which emerges of it and goes into it. The being (das Seiende) hence manifests, but the truth of the being remains absent, or in other words, resides in the nothing: 'mit dem Sein nichts ist' [there is nothing with being] (Heidegger, 2015: 244). The nullification of nothing hence takes place within the being itself (Heidegger, 1967: 12). Meontological non-being is therefore an integral and necessary "shadow" part of the being, which also substantiates the conditionality, the finitude of the being. It is here that we discover a different kind of non-being, that is, the meontological yet immanent non-being (tairitsuteki mu). In Nishida's philosophy, it assumes a form of absence of existence in relation to other entities of the world (Nishida et al., 2012: 20–22). It is hence relative and determined by the dialectic opposition to being. In that sense, meontological non-being drives closer to the notion of antithesis. However, it must be stressed that unlike in the case of the Hegelian thesis and antithesis, non-being is not opposite to being, but rather is a negative mirror-image thereof. The "non-thing" shares the (me-)ontological properties of form and kind with the "thing", with the core separation being Otherness, fallacy, the lacking. Meontology can perhaps be therefore compared to an ontological mirror reflection, which does not exist as an object of the physical reality, yet it is dependent on ontological reality and can be (mis-)recognized as a being. According to Nishida, however, this can only happen if there is a consciousness, within which this (mis-)recognition happens. Such understanding of non-being is also presented in The Sophist, where Plato contradicts the idea of meontology being excluded from immanent presence, which would otherwise provide it with some other presence of its own. Instead, Plato formulates not-being as something that is ontologically tied to being through otherness. This gives way for Plato to argue for the possibility of ontological falseness and illusion rather than self-sufficient presence of meontology, which is important when considering the nature of virtuality as phantasmic presence outside the real yet inside the immanent. Finally, since we established that meontology and non-being are non-present beings, they could then also be understood as the lack of something, and entail, or rather, be determined by a potentiality of being: "it is not there — but it could be!". Non-presence and meontology as potentiality is explored in the Judaic philosophical tradition, although, here it is similar to the use of the term 'potentiality of being-otherwise' (Kavka, 2009: 93) and merits a separate discussion. Regardless, it is worthwhile noting in our case that potentiality is also the core, moving aspect of the liminal transition, as without it, the transformation would not happen in the first place. Meontological Metaphysics: From Miracle to Magic We therefore deal with two orders of non-being. The first one signifies the transcendent category outside immanence. It is the wu, the nothingness that at the same time is absolute and omnipresent, and in being so can perhaps be seen as divine, or, as Federico Campagna (2018) calls it, the ineffable. In a pre-modern world, the metaphysical reason for world's processes would be sought in the great paradox of transcendental omnipresence (or nothingness). The divine interventions or miracles would be observed and represented in the immanence, but the source of these divine manifestations would be only grasped intuitively and expressed symbolically. Consequently, political life would be perceived as structured in accordance to the cosmic order, which has transcendental intentionality. It is under such divine intentionality that the legitimacy of kingship would be established in feudal Europe, and the Jewish nation is chosen as the chosen people of God. This intentionality would use meontic forms (apparitions, signs, omens, visions, etc.) as a medium — to convey a message, structure fate, perform a miracle or grant gifts and blessings. (Eire, 2023) I will, however, focus on the second order of non-being, as it is this memetic world of potentialities, potent non-beings and simulacra that defines the meontology of the virtual, the liminal, and the magical, and, of course, of the digital modernity. I will call this kind of non-being meontological, as it signifies things, beings that are not 'there', although they perhaps "could be". In an alchemical act of deconstructing the theosophical worldview, modernity embraces this second-order, meontological non-being, and treats it as the only possible metaphysical reality (Horváth, 2021). To put it in Nishida's terms, the tairitsuteki mu substitutes shin no mu. The perception that there is no possibility of the second (the absolute, divine, ineffable, the wu), and therefore only the first one (the immanent, meontological potential metaphysics) is valid, paradoxically leads to treating meontology as the absolute, not just immanent metaphysical reality. The Invisible Hand of the Market, Human Rights, the Capital, Laws of Newtonian Physics, Nationhood, Evolution and many other meontic gods and demons of the modern world assume the role of the Prime mover, the wu or the First Cause. Naturally, these are theories and ideas, or perhaps memes and ideological frameworks, not actual "gods and demons". However, these human conceptualizations, conceptual potentialities popularize, they are being enacted, and thus attain political power. Through the actions of those who participate in these ideas they therefore attain performative agency. The secularized, technical thought thus removes the transcendental, ineffable element from the equation, but in its stead absolutizes the meontic sphere (Campagna, 2018). Instead of being an act of grace or a miracle, the manifestation of this new meontological metaphysics can be compared to a magical trick. Indeed, magic is substantially different from miracles or other (divine) interventions because of three main reasons. First, it is an act of technique. In Alfred Gell's (1994) terms, the magical, enchanting effect is reached by performing certain artistic techniques and crafting practices. Even a professional magician, performing tricks of skill and illusion, is capable of generating the experience of surreality in the consciousness of the audience and thus pertaining affective power. Second, magic is a performative art; it must take place in the public. In this sense, following Nishida's line of thought, any ontic phenomenon, magic included, can only manifest at the intersection of consciousnesses. It is a public event, a spectacle, it is material. While a miracle might take place inside one's own consciousness, contextually, as an event in life that only makes sense to the person experiencing it (e.g. a stroke of miraculous luck, an unexpected gift of a childbirth, a life-changing epiphany), magic operates within the field of publicity, materiality and meontological performativity. Finally, unlike in the case of miracles, magic is vested in utilizing and mobilizing secular, social or political power. Spells and incantations, techniques and illusions are cast as to attain an effect or power over life, physical or social environment. The hierarchical relation between the absolute, the divine and the person is non-present; magic is cast horizontally, from and towards the world. It is the performative techniques that produce the magical effect (like a super high resolution advertisement screen in Times Square creating an optical illusion of a falling skyscraper to sell you insurance). As such, he who is in possession of those techniques, gains power upon the audience, ex nihilo, without the divine intervention. The absolute raison d'être in this meontic act is reduced to an immanent, technical causality. We may observe how these qualities of magic — namely, technicality, performativity and power manipulation — are very similar to those exerted by digital reality. Void as Meontic Non-Being In terms of meontological representation, the digital world also coincides with the sphere of ritual, sacrifice and other practices of performative, generative power. All of these share the performative element, public participation, symbolic (meontic) representation, and the act of bringing about, conjuring, the potentiality, the non-presence into the ontological realm. There are many ways to achieve that, be it through provoking communication with the meontic powers (as in blood sacrifice), utilizing techniques and tricks to create illusions that convince the observers of the ontological reality of the meontic phenomenon (as in grandiose performances of power), creating visual representations that affect the viewer (different artistic practices), or other. The incredible, paradoxical power that meontic representation can have has therefore traditionally been hidden and protected by secrecy, taboo, ritual and esotericism. Horváth and Szakolczai (Horváth & Szakolczai, 2018) relate the human experience of entering the void of the Lascaux caves and discovering the painted images there to the experience of representation, in which out of nothingness, an imitative reality emerges. The notion of a cave or void implies a notion of the nulla, the zero. Horváth (2010: 53) argues that this nothingness is definitive of the modernity and the source of liminal situation of in-betweenness. As we can now observe, the void that Horváth refers to is ontologically not the same as the absolute nothingness (wu). In fact, this void is meontological, proactive and capable of power projection. But how does this meontological trick happen? The key emphasis here falls on representation. Representation means "standing in" instead of something that is not present but should or could be. (Szakolczai, 2021, 162) Since the collective populus is unable to participate in a political debate, it delegates its representatives. Since we are unable to materialize real, live birds, or trees, or a can of Campbell's soup, we represent these things via drawings, depictions and modern art. And since there is no material reality in virtuality, we utilize a binary code of ones and zeros to represent it. The depiction, representation, therefore, entails a world-fabricating property, in which represented non-presents attain their meontic existence. What emerges out of the void, according to Horváth and Szakolczai, turns out to be the very first conscious meontic act in recorded history: the human-made images in form of palaeolithic wall paintings. In this sense these meontic representations are similar to the stuff of the virtual world, the ontological substance of digitality. It is out of ones and zeros, meaning, out of the representations of being (animal-likeness) and non-being (animal-distortedness) that the virtual world emerges meontologically, as an act of conjuring, depiction or performative recognition. By "performative recognition" I mean that meontic beings are brought into existence not only by virtue of depiction, but also by virtue of observation. Not only do they emerge by the act of mimetic simulation or representation, but also by the reception of this representation, a response of the consciousness of others, who "read" this represented reality as ontic. In a similar way our consciousness ontologizes, brings into presence digital realities (pixelated vistas, online human relations, social dramas, digital commercial trends, etc.) as if they were ontological beings. The liminal transition between being and non-being is thus at the root of digital world-making as much as of artistic representation. Entities are being brought into existence, in a digital space that initially was void, like a blank sheet of paper, and they are received into existence as such by the public. This also means that the representations are stand-ins, shells without ontological substance of that which they stand in for, and in this way they represent something that is lacking, and yet, if they are "realistic", meaning, mimetic enough, they convince the viewer of their own meontic reality, gaining power, and, thus — virtual presence. This principle of meontic emergence could be applied to different cases of deep fakes, conspiracy theories or digital trends that end up generating enough clout to start real, actual political processes, from phenomena like various TikTok trends and challenges that affect public life, to more extreme cases like the QAnon and the Capitol Riots or Russian fakes affecting public opinion on the war in Ukraine among the audiences in Global South (Tolz & Hutchings, 2023). This way we can directly experience the magical possibility of conjuring something out of nothing, meaning that no previous ontological substance, and only techniques of representation are required for the act of convincing, affective apparition, as the act of representation ex nihilo becomes its reason. Meontological Representation A magic or digital trick, however, does not happen without consequence. The meontological non-presence can now present (sic!) and represent itself as a positive, world-making entity, a shell existence, a spectre, a simulacrum, or a form without presence, a pure representation. Furthermore, it possesses power to shape reality around itself. Structurally it acts as if it was "the real thing". The rabbit that is being pulled out of the hat, while technically being produced by other means, publicly, politically and phenomenologically participates as the real rabbit ex nihilo. Ontologically, digitality is generated out of mediated stand-ins, symbols and referrals, all of which, taken together, produce an almost tangible reality, but even more importantly — they are perceived as such and thus are able to project actual power. There is one caveat in the process, however. The coming into presence by the meontic entities necessarily takes place via a mimetic simulation of if not qualities, then the ontological status or structural positions of the one that is being represented. This condition of being not that but standing in as if you were (like having an avatar), entails limitations to what the representation can "do". But if representation is misrecognized for being what it is, which is a stand-in, and if it is treated as the ontological entity itself, the representation attains power through delegation. The stand-in representation manifests as if it did in fact have ontological substance. At the time when this paper is being written, it is not fully clear whether Vladimir Putin is alive and well, and there are many speculations about his health, him having doppelgangers and even about him having died (Evans, 2023). Regardless, his political representation functions and is treated as if he is alive and well in person. The empirical reality of whether that is indeed true or not does not matter that much, however, as far as his digital representation is capable of exerting and manipulating power. It is therefore in the representation's "interest" to be treated as an ontological entity, and in the "eye of the observer", so to say, to grant power to the meontic reality. The meontic representation as the act of bringing the non-being into existence must be a social act. In Nishida's terms, just like a mirror image, a consciousness needs to become the object of the consciousness of somebody else in order to exist, to enter the realm of meontological presence alongside the ontic beings. This is why the act of representation is only effective if conducted in public, among others. It requires other consciousnesses to attain performative power. This way, meontological power is only able to generate political, social reality where consciousnesses intersect, and in this sense is like theatrical reality in Szakolczai's analysis of the modern public sphere (Szakolczai, 2015). In the context of the digital culture, to take a most straightforward example, it is the views, clicks and popularity that defines the meontological value, weight, size and influence of "content" — be it a video, a meme, a merchandise, a personality or a political issue. Long before the rise of digitality, taboos or esoteric practices prohibited representation. Across the world many iconoclastic traditions contain representations of saints, deities or even living beings in general, which have been ritualistically curbed with greater or lesser severity. Such representations would be treated as idolatry in Islam's Hadith, for example, which forbids artistic representations of live creatures on the basis that creating images of life is the act of the divine, which should not be meontologically recreated. The result of the imitation of the godly act would mean the generation of meontic non-beings that one would have to face on the Judgement Day. If considered in a non-religious circumstance, however, the meontic realities we create in the virtual world (the substance, so to say, of the Big Data about us) are also in a sense stored in the memory of the world, to potentially affect us in the future, when a group of hackers decide to use our ills and weaknesses to wreck our finances and reputation. Memetic Political Reality There does remain, however, a question of intention: who or what is the primal mover, the will behind the creation of digitality? A Daoist logic would suggest that it is the void, the nothingness itself that initiates apparition. However, since the modern transition of consciousness removed the transcendental element from the equation, we need to search for the source of meontological apparition this side of the World. Indeed, if we observe properties of the void as vacuum, we will discover that it does have a property of drawing the world into itself, of initiating a concentric movement, with the intentionality of "filling" it (Horváth, 2021, 160–161). In his articulation of a-theological world-making, Jean-Luc Nancy calls this emergence self-creation ex nihilo, in an effort to articulate the emergence of being without the divine, transcendental intervention. He defines meontological emergence, in which the world grows out of nothing (the void) retaining its only existential purpose and meaning hermetically, within itself. It is this way that the digital world can also be understood. Because it is a shell of infinite self-imitation, it is very much world-like, yet void and meaningless beyond the technological purpose of self-reproduction (Campagna, 2018). This void becomes its most profound principle as both a source of its unreality (or virtuality) and infinite self-reproduction or self-imitation. As such, just as all other meontological reality, digitality is also intrinsically performative. Through the act of rhetoric, a meontological act of existential utterance without ontological meaning, it produces and can perpetually reproduce presences of virtual existence, just like the one of an online influencer whose falsified representations of their ordinary life situations and product consumption is generative to voyeuristic audiences, on their turn attracting advertisement and further vlog entries. Representation, imitation, theatricality are hence not mere reflections of or stand-ins for reality. They constitute meontological presence by infusing, penetrating and assimilating reality, performatively restructuring it. This way, the Void is capable of generating matter — phenomenologically very real and present, yet ontologically void of meaning and empty shell-like. It is an alchemical gesture that became not only widely used, but prevalent in all spheres of modern life, from advertisement and branding to mass politics, digital communication, and most importantly — digitality. While the virtual world is comprised of stand-ins, representations of non-virtuality, its meontological nature is also capable of generating its own memetic presence. A meme here is the object of representation, towards which the act of mimesis or representation is directed, producing the shell-like form of meontological reality. Internet memes are a perfect example, as not only do they inherit the nominal semblance, but also all three qualities of the memetic entity: (1) a representative reference to a recognisable cultural idea, (2) a stand-in simulation of the idea through signification (a meme is a sign), and (3) performative life of its own as a cultural object. Their performative power, however, is only manifest if they succeed as the function of digital content. Digital content is hence the memetic "dark matter", or "stuff" — to utilize the metaphor of the void — of which meontological cultural and political forms emerge. It is capable of becoming any media entity needed — a text, a film, a figure, a colour, a moving picture, etc. — while in itself being completely void of meaning. The ontological status of forms that are rendered content are of no importance whatsoever. A piece of genius classical music is as good and as much a content as a picture of a unicorn in a flashy car. This is because the meontological function of digital content is not to be in a sense of entailing value of itself, but to be used performatively to generate clout, to attain power through drawing, capturing and maintaining attention. This capacity to manifest performatively and to control attention of the public substantiates not only the logic of e-commerce, but also of digital politics, culture and society. Memes as meontic public objects exert power through capturing attention and discourse. Their effectiveness as memetic objects lies in their capacity to conceptualize, represent and mis-represent the world. When contextualized, memetic narratives are able to constitute convincing stories, structure worldviews and produce alternative realities that are shared digitally among different peers. This way the power dynamics in the memetic reality is being structured by the alchemic process of voided cultural shells that are filled with digital content that captures human consciousness (or spirit) and thus attains performative power to shape narratives of truth and knowledge. By means of digitalization, this meontological reality is fundamentally involved in most late modern spheres of life, from personal life (like relying on digitality for navigation, scheduling, maintaining social bonds, storing memories, etc.), intimacy and friendship (from social media or gaming community "friendships" to speed dating and pornography) to the political life, democratic processes and decision-making (including online surveys, big data-driven strategies, propaganda and algorithm-targeted advertisements, etc.). As a result the late modern digital world is governed by a memetic logic that differs starkly to the enlightened truth regime that is still at the base of much of our everyday life. This, however, provides insight into why and how our modernity is splitting our social, political and cultural life at different junctures. Conclusion This article discussed the ontological state and cultural functioning of digitality, which over the past few decades came to dominate all spheres of modern life, from politics to intimacy. Digitality is profoundly influential; it generates power and does so at an inhuman speed and breadth. In fact, digi
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This post has NOT been generated using AI. Like most of those who I believe would be reading this blog, I run my own home lab. My setup has, over the years, evolved from an old laptop running just my media centre, only accessible on my home network. Today, it is a more elaborate setup with containers running on two hosts on my local network, a third host running local LLMs, and a fourth (thin) host in the cloud running a reverse proxy. The reverse proxy forwards requests to services running in the hosts on my local network, allowing me to access some services from anywhere. I like the setup. In essence, it is quite simple. All I have to deal with is a container engine (I use Podman Quadlet) and my reverse proxy, outside the actual services deployed in the lab. I have avoided jumping into the Kubernetes (or similar) bandwagon, as I still don’t think the overhead is justified as yet.
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