Por Serkan Fırtına
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| Image by Sumaid pal Singh Bakshi. |
One of the greatest dogmas of the recent past is rapidly losing its validity: the mechanical “coding craze” that converted every educational institution into a STEM center, alongside the dream of purely technical knowledge stripped of philosophy, is coming to an end. As areas such as coding, mathematical modeling, and data analytics become executable by digital systems within seconds, plain engineering knowledge is swiftly becoming commonplace.
New-generation production technologies inherently learn from statistical aggregations of past data. Therefore, when the guiding intellect remains weak, they produce merely an “algorithmic conservatism” that repeats the clichés of the past. As Byung-Chul Han puts it, they create a smooth but soulless world purged of negativity. If you attempt to make these systems rewrite those existential silences in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the resulting text is grammatically flawless yet artistically dead melodrama. For the imperfection produced by the machine is not the result of lived experience or historical trauma, but a plastic roughness simulated by mathematics.
In this era of technological standardization, the force that will create qualitative differentiation is not engineering optimization, but the theoretical memory of philosophy, sociology, and art. The new subject capable of marrying this memory with digital possibilities is defined as the “intellectual operator.”
Asking the Right Question, Not Rote Learning
The prompt design given to a system by two different users facing the exact same dataset summarizes the upcoming war of meaning. When someone acting with plain instrumental reason tells the machine, “Analyze the urban migration data and show me a bar chart,” the system fulfills this concrete request within seconds. The output is practical, yet shallow. However, an intellectual operator trained in social sciences and art gives the following prompt for the very same data: “Read these same data through Karl Marx’s theory of alienation and the indifferent attitude created by metropolis life in the human mind; describe a stage design reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre.”
The difference between these two prompts lies not in the processing power of machines, but in the epistemological quality of the question. While the first input treats technology as a simple calculator, the second forces it to process the layered conceptual frameworks of human memory. The fundamental capital of the new era will be shaped not by those who know information by heart, but by minds capable of formulating the right question.
Adorno and Horkheimer referred to the transformation of culture into a manufactured commodity as the “culture industry.” Although today’s digital tools of production seem like the pinnacle of this industry, the rule of political economy applies: the cheaper and more standardized a tool of production becomes, the more decisive the intellectual weight of the force directing it becomes. The world of the future does not have to be a dystopia where technology eradicates human depth. As techniques become standardized, that aesthetic distinction defining humanity will shine brighter than ever as a vital force. The future will belong not to those who mechanically memorize formulas, but to the “intellectual operators” who can whisper human stories with philosophical depth into the system.
Serkan Fırtına is a Turkish dramaturg, playwright, and culture writer. Fırtına serves as the Artistic Director of Efeler City Theatre, and their essays have appeared in various UK and international publications (including BritRock Heaven).
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