In and out of Wonderland: a criti/chromatic stroll across postdigital culture

The contemporary info-proliferation is taking the ideal of a solid technological rationalism to its extreme point: the depletion of all bodies into ’informational cuts’, orderable bits and pieces of data fabric. The present contribution will discuss this process of datafication, trying to avoid any polarization along the ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ dualism, and any consequent excess of enthusiasm or critique. For this purpose, the essay will take the form of a stroll across post-digital culture, alternatively under the effects of a ‘red and a blue pill’ as the two main points of view already exemplified, in 1999, by Morpheus in the famous sci-fi movie The Matrix. To these two points of view, respectively identifiable as digital critique (going down the deep rabbit hole, and seeing that computers are playing today a leading role in what Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari have called ’capitalist schizophrenia’), or digital potential (remaining in a world of numeric dreams, a world populated not only by humans but also by bots, autonomous computer programs that are becoming increasingly able not only to post, but also to understand content and interact with people and, most importantly, to take aesth/ethical decisions), a yellow one will be added, which can be recognized as that of ‘hacker culture’, at the same time suggesting that, instead of a dialectical contraposition between two different perceptual and cognitive modalities, post-digital culture can be more easily discussed through a multiplication of possible perspectives