Peter Giger

When Voltaire’s fictional character Pangloss stated that “we are living in the best of all possible worlds”, he gave root to the concept ‘Panglossianism’. Panglossianism means that everything happens for the best, which could be viewed as an optimistic view of determinism. The viewpoint is given in the novel Candide and the character Pangloss is an irony of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It has always baffled me that this view is called ‘optimism’. Leibniz asserted that God had created the world in the best possible way and since God is good, this way must be good in the sense that a better world is out of the question.

I find this view of optimism repugnant. Optimism has to do with the possibility for change. Feeling happy or content with a predetermined society, has to be the ultimate slave mentality. Panglossianism is the death of creativity.

Once, someone labeled me as a technological optimist. Technological optimism is generally understood as the doctrine that a growing number of technological improvements in such areas as food production, environmental quality and energy will sustain life as human population soars. I am a technological optimist, but only in the following sense:

1. the technology of today is not sustainable
2. the people of today will not agree with technological reduction
3. the only hope is better technology

I am a technological activist and hopist. An optimist in the panglossianist sense, is a person who are against both technological progress and reduction.

The structural flatness of web 2.0 represents a hope for a better future. This hope does not originate in technology, but in communication. Communication is the key to the future, and flatness is the key to communcation, and web 2.0 technologies are the key to flatness.

To exemplify, in an academic mindset the paragraph above might lead to resenting questions as “who are saying that web 2.0 represents a hope for a better future?”. This resenting question has to do both with the objectivity problem and the hierarchical viewpoint. Since an academic voice is supposed to be the voice of objectivity, the claim does not have any location and therefore has to be referred to a “real” location. In the hierarchical play this usually means looking upwards, or sideways, for a location. The problem is that the reference is also a voice of objectivity, and so it goes on in an endless play of empty locations. There is a simple remedy to the inclination of a “culture of no culture”, simple and still so almost unbelievable difficult. The remedy could be to view the spokesperson as a person, instead of mr Nothingness. It would seem like a person would be a reasonable location for communication. It would also be reasonable to regard features as gender, age, race and religion as objectivity striving, intrapersonal features instead of viewing them as destabilizing parameters in a cult of ostensible objectivity.