passages I marked in
The Reenchanted World: On finding mystery in the digital age
by Karl Ove Knausgaard,Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
Harper's June 2025
...It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That's because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can't be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes....It was the lifeless matter that spoke. Now that voice is everywhere. On trains and subways, planes and ferries, and at home in people's living rooms, and even though it is warmer and individualized and more humanlike, it comes from the same place: it is dead matter speaking with our voice. And if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us. The products in the supermarket, the self-checkout machines there, the games on the computers, the dashboard in the car, the kitchen appliances, the billboard screens in the cities, the feeds on Instagram and Spotify and Facebook, the algorithms on Amazon, not to mention all the online newspapers and magazines, podcasts and series.
...Alienation involves a distance from the world, a lack of connection between it and us. What technology does is compensate for the loss of reality with a substitute. Technology calibrates all differences, fills in every gap and crack with images and voices, bringing everything close to us in order to restore the connection between ourselves and the world.
...Images draw even the most distant things closer, but their presence is illusory; it is a fiction. This perhaps applies to nature as a whole—we see it as an image, as something we aren't part of, something that's out there and that at the same time we have been drawn toward and are close to, familiar with. The ambivalence of the image—showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and non-fictional at once; both near and far—can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren't entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world. When I recognize, for example, that forests are disappearing, species are going extinct, the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are getting warmer and rising, deserts are expanding, fires are ravaging ever-larger areas, there is something unreal about it all. I know that it's happening—it's not that I don't believe it—but at the same time it's like it isn't happening. It has a whiff of the abstract about it. And although I'm horrified, I'm not connected to it, not really. It's something out there that I see in here. I'm not a part of it; I'm standing outside it, watching. Surely the most precise word for that condition is "alienation"? The loss of the world.
...In the Nineties, for example, I studied literature, art history, and aesthetics, completely convinced that what I studied was about human nature, life, and the true fabric of existence, while the poor souls over at the natural-science department were instrumentalists fiddling with dead matter and numbers. Back then, much of literary studies was about structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism. In many instances, this meant that texts were understood to be isolated objects, with all ties to the world around them severed, including those to the author. They were a kind of closed system of signs whose meaning arose in the differences between them, rather than in the extratextual reality they pointed to. It was fantastic. Signifier and signified, signifying and signification, phenotext and genotext, denotation and connotation! But it was signs that we sat hunched over, it was signs we related to, so that what we were doing was basically a kind of encoding and decoding, while it was the poor souls at the natural-science department who were out at sea or in the woods or out in the fields, learning about biotopes and ecosystems, about blood and nerves, galaxies and flower meadows. They were the ones who cut into bodies, programmed machines, scanned brains, researched dreams and trees' symbiosis with fungi. Their approach toward nature may have been reductive, but at least they were looking at it. How did I not realize this back then? How could I have been living under the illusion that I was the one in touch with nature, with human nature, when in fact I was just messing around with signs and abstractions?
...the era Homer describes, when the understanding of the destiny of men and the properties of things was based on the presence of invisible divine powers.
...It was essentially a two-thousand-year-long cult dedicated to the eco-mystery. It was about conquering death through the relationship to the earth—since the universe is built around cycles, there's no such thing as death; it's just a kind of endless recurrence of life in various forms, and there's nothing to be scared of. That was understood through the process of initiation and mystery, and teachings about the natural world that reconnected people. It was really urban people, all living in Athens. It was about understanding the earth and the cycles and their responsibility toward it."
..."Right," I said. "The very basics. We take computing for granted, but if you went back two hundred years and looked at what we're capable of now, it would seem like a miracle. What is it, really?" "It's just counting," James said. "It's practical mathematics. Manipulating symbols to make representations of the world and then performing specific operations to change them. The example I always use for computing is the weather forecasts. You take a representation of something—for example, all the temperatures in Europe in all the different cities on one day—and then you do some kind of operation on them, in order to understand them in a particular way, or to project them forward. It's just about processing information and turning it into something else for a specific purpose. To predict or analyze something. It's a system for understanding the world. It's definitely not a mystery!"
... that, like everything else, is something that has been done consciously and unconsciously, is my feeling. It's been done deliberately by those who trade in it. To make themselves seem powerful, to protect corporate secrets, to be able to charge a lot of money for what they do, and so on. At the same time, the education system doesn't teach us ways of thinking that help us understand these things.
...Digital computers are fundamentally disconnected from the world; they are operating entirely on the abstraction of it. They are being fed pictures of the world. It is like someone living in a box and knowing the world only through photos of it. It is two fundamentally different things. It is incredibly easy to manipulate, and incredibly reductive. And therefore, what comes out is a reduced version of the world as well. Computers are fantastic for some tasks, but their cultural dominance is entirely misguided. They are fascinating, brilliant, and incredibly powerful. And infinitely interesting. But when they are plugged into large power and cultural systems, then strange things happen. And the violence it results in is really terrifying."
...One of Stafford Beer's more famous and brilliant phrases was 'POSIWID,' which stands for 'the purpose of the system is what it does.' It's a kind of maxim of cybernetics.
... The weight you see lift off people when you do that is extraordinary. It transforms it from being this completely unknowable force that just acts on their lives into being a thing in their lives that they can see the edges of and conceptualize a little bit better. I call it technological literacy. For me, learning to code was what did that. A feeling of competence in the face of very complex systems. This is something that we just aren't taught—generalized problem-solving, inquisitiveness, or how to learn.
...it is quite obvious that one of the problems with everything is that humanity largely has moved away from that relationship with the world. Really, really obvious, but how do we deal with it? One way is to come into the awareness that everything you think you know about the world is some kind of abstraction. I have no problem with the scientific method as a way of knowing the world. As long as you remember that it is only one way, and then can see it through another lens as well, then it very much changes your relationship with the world. That is something I'm really struggling to articulate at the moment."
...It's like the Eleusinian mysteries. There is no mystery to what happened there. But it is unsayable. It's two different things. The reason we are in the hopeless state we are in is that science doesn't believe that what is unsayable is real."
...But how to see the world from the outside when there is no longer an outside? That had been my question. The world was unpredictable, but all our systems were about predictability, which closed it off. James's thought is that we are surrounded by myriad forms of intelligence other than our own, forms that we have shut ourselves off from, and James's interest in organic computers and other experiments that attempt to introduce randomness into technological apparatuses came from a desire to open up the world.