Financial technology concept. FinTech. Foreign exchange.
Click, like, share, and subscribe are the new currencies of rent-seeking digital capitalism, where rapid consumption of digital content is driven by number of views and subscribers of the video shorts and clips. The relationship between digital content and its consumers is defined by quick browsing and the pursuit of instant fun, infotainment, pleasure, utility, satisfaction, or rejection. Such ideals in everyday life influence interpersonal human relationships in the real world beyond the digital sphere. Social life and relationships are becoming like instant coffee. These essentialist aspects of relationships are not new; they have existed throughout all stages of human history. Historically, human beings have sought relationships to survive and to avoid loneliness in everyday life. This very nature of human need forms the foundation of the desire for all forms of relationships.
Friendship is a social, emotional, cultural, religious, moral, and ideological bond rooted in the aims, aspirations, needs, desires, and values of human beings. A relationship based on friendship promotes trust, understanding, and mutual support in everyday life. Friendships are often formed and sustained through shared hobbies. The idealism of friendship moves beyond the narrow silos of class, caste, gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality and territorial identity. It breaks all such barriers to uphold the values of timeless friendship. Friendship can exist within all types of relationships and can also transcend them. Both sinners and saints have friends in this world, which highlights the universal and indispensable nature and power of friendship. The nature of friendship shapes the character of society and the relationships within it. Whether a society is democratic, feudal, patriarchal, capitalist, hierarchical, egalitarian, or progressive, it is friendship that ultimately defines its nature, essence and spirit.
Philosophically, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, addressed friendship systematically for the first time. He identified three different, but interconnected types of friendships based on utility, pleasure, and perfect friendships grounded in virtue. The first two—friendships of utility and pleasure—are essentialist yet foundational in human history, evolving according to mutual needs. Such friendships can be temporary or enduring, depending on the utility or pleasure individuals derive from each other. In contrast, friendships based on virtue tend to be longer-lasting and more stable, though they can also change if the underlying virtues change. Regardless of type, every form of friendship plays a crucial role in holding all human relationships together. Therefore, the 13th-century natural theologian and Italian Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas regarded friendship as a habitus of charity—the very core of human life and society.
The rise of private property, as well as agricultural, commercial, industrial, colonial, and digital forms of capitalism and its culture of commodification, has eroded the collective foundations of friendship by atomising societies, individuals, and their needs, desires, and competing aspirations as consumers and their supercilious free choices and freedoms. This transformation has been further accelerated by the deepening digital capitalism, where social media connections and online presence form the basis of digital lives, rendering friendships as transient as browsing web pages in different platforms. The instantaneous nature of these online friendships and relationships mirror the short attention spans of digital consumption—click, like, share, and subscribe—driven by utility, pleasure, and profit. Organic bonds of friendship are largely absent in these digital spheres. Yet, digital platforms hold the potential to transform such fleeting connections into meaningful human relationships, provided that impersonal algorithms and corporate logic do not dominate them. All forms of domination undermine friendships; therefore, meaningful, democratic, egalitarian, and progressive friendships cannot exist under feudalism, patriarchy, or any form of capitalist conditions in society.
All earlier forms of capitalism and its barbaric culture exists within digital capitalism which further deepening of everyday alienation, atomisation, and the commodification of human life and its relationship with the natural world. They create monetised and marketised social, political, economic, cultural and spiritual conditions that are unsuitable and inhospitable to meaningful friendships. Capitalism and friendship are incompatible with each other. Therefore, every effort to ensure meaningful friendship is, in essence, a struggle against capitalism and its inhuman and anti-social values.
Friendships in the age of digital capitalism are a combination of instantaneous connections based on utility, pleasure, and certain virtues, but they do not constitute perfect Aristotelian, timeless friendships. Seeking friendship in the digital world of capitalism is like trying to find drinking water in the salty ocean—the more one drinks, the thirstier and lonelier one becomes. Friendship can never be founded merely on commodity pleasures, or commodity based transactional relationships led by markets. Therefore, it is crucial to reclaim collective ownership of the digital world from platform capitalists and democratise digital society, creating meaningful friendships rooted in utility, pleasure, and virtue, grounded in the celebration of collective foundations of human life, love, livelihood and society.
0 Comments
LEAVE A COMMENT
Your email address will not be published