Big Data and Psychopolitics. Escape Route: from Calculable Life to Life as a Work of Art

Abstract

The Big Data is a fundamental element for the constitution of what authors like Byung-Chul Han call "psychopolitics". Han says that the society in which we live has two fundamental characteristics that complement each other: ours is a "society of transparency" and also a "digital society". These two features have dire consequences for the man who lives there. Following Foucault and Deleuze, Han considers that the human being will be able to escape the slavery imposed by itself if it manages to transform the qualitative weight of its actions. That is, if it achieves that its actions, instead of being perfectly predictable and calculable, become events in the full sense of the word: unpredictable creations that contribute in Nietzschean terms, to its self-improvement and, therefore, to make of its life a work of art.