On the limits of modern cyberhumanism

The article analyzes the problem of the influence of cyberreality on social life. Today, the imperatives from the media towards consumers are becoming more and more rigid, peremptory, requiring unconditional obedience. Artificial in- telligence allows technologies to become “smart”, which implies their autonomy, lack of control, the “right” to have their own judgments about social life, up to making legal decisions. The history of television, which the author has been studying in recent years, allows us to assert the supremacy of visual communication in modern processes of communicative expansion. Television, despite the fact that it has already ceased to be the main means of mass communication, especially among the youth audience, has left its indelible mark on the development of communication technologies. Visual images, separated from the empirical practice of the audience, create a new ethics of communication, in which uncritical obedience to the proposed meanings becomes the “normal” state of a person. Information consumers turn into “ego-media” that simultaneously distribute and consume their own content. Such people are an ideal embodiment of communication ethics, since they are absolutely subordinate to the imperatives of the media. Today, it has become commonplace to lose human appearance, minimal conceptions of shame and humanity for the sake of ephemeral popularity in social networks. The article proposes a new look at the ontological significance of the game phenomenon. Today, it is not just an explication of cultural practices, but a constant process of searching for boundaries between real and virtual realities. The game, provided with artificial intelligence and advanced technologies, becomes a more attractive reality than the gray, nondescript everyday life. An analysis of foreign studies on visual technologies, as well as the author's own empirical data, allows us to speak about a new, modern quality of communication processes. Today, the main focus is on identification technologies. This identification, in turn, increasingly becomes an image imposed on a person, but not suffered, acquired or immanently inherent in them. In addition, the technological capabilities of identification are increasingly being used to physically destroy a person, and “killing with a glance” is one of the types of modern information warfare. Communication technologies have gradually lost their most important purpose - to inform and unite people. Today they are increasingly used to suppress dissent, to unify social processes. In his conclusions about the prospects of social and communicative antagonism, the author adheres to an optimistic point of view. Humankind has repeatedly experienced attempts at totalitarian suppression of dissent, the transformation of hundreds of millions of people into a homogeneous mass. However, each time these attempts ended in a fiasco, and society acquired new perspectives for reflection.

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