Biometrics and Paranoia
The modern digital environment is a cosmos of ruthless codification of the human being. It’s in the air: people are fragmented not just psychologically (as in the division into ego/superego), but biologically-separate parts of the human body stop signifying the person as a whole, becoming independent, self-regenerating machines. On the lips of those who remain is the silent question: “When will they start implanting chips in our hands?” Will it be that when we are resurrected in the flesh, our biometric passports and implants will be resurrected with us?
Of course, it all began long before the 21st century. One of the first to use fingerprinting in criminal investigations was Allan Pinkerton, the inspiration for the famous fictional detective and founder of one of the most renowned detective agencies of his time. The idea was brilliant-creating a database of criminals and matching fingerprints from crime scenes to likely suspects. Everything seemed perfect-according to the mathematics of the era, the probability of two people having identical fingerprints was extremely low, so nothing should prevent the use of such a wonderful, convenient, and. I forgot to mention: Allan Pinkerton was a Freemason. If you look at his agency’s logo, you’ll see an open human eye, the Eye of Wadjet, which is also the serpent of the spine, the kundalini, the fiery serpent.
Looking at the history of fingerprinting, it’s interesting to note that ancient fingerprint drawings were initially interpreted by researchers as part of a snake-worship cult. There are serious reasons to believe we made a mistake-we look at the history of fingerprinting and think it’s about fingerprints, not snakes. Because there’s clearly something off about fingerprints. For starters, there is no strictly scientific proof that fingerprints cannot repeat among different people. In fact, before the introduction of this biometric procedure, there was no concept of fingerprints as a mark, trace, or object. Later, thanks mainly to the Freemasons, this idea was introduced and is now seen as self-evident, axiomatic-which actually contradicts so-called rationality.
What’s Wrong with Fingerprints?
You’ve probably heard that printers, typewriters, and so on leave barely noticeable marks on paper, indicating which machine printed it. This points to the manufactured, man-made nature of the technology-for convenience and control. But it seems that humans are also like such writing machines or printers-whatever we touch, we leave an identifier of our body, invisible to us but accessible to those with the right technology. By this logic, the human body itself is a fabricated object. History is full of such ideas-Black Pneuma, various fluids in the body causing melancholy. Esoteric anatomy is rich with areas of the human body that never existed, yet were accessible to priests and oracles for manipulation.
It is not the accuser who must prove that two identical fingerprints cannot exist, but those who dispute this truth must provide evidence for their position.
Texas court, 1941
Opponents of the hypothesis must prove it doesn’t work. That’s brilliant.
So, the human body is a manufactured object, a classic man-in-the-middle hacker attack, where the person in the middle is a fabricated entity leaving fingerprints that, through unquestioned practice, are equated with the real person. By this logic, a free person should have the right to reject their so-called fingerprints, to admit they don’t truly belong to them. A human fingerprint is a spiral scream in a serpentine space, an ouroboros continuum, in that cosmos where this scream can be identified.
This leads to a classic narrative trap-we make a purely literary, intuitive conclusion about the true uniqueness of all fingerprints based on incomplete data. Who knows how many fragments of the human body don’t actually exist and never have. In the 21st century, something began to happen to human faces.
Faces
At some point, for reasons I can’t explain, my face turned into a cloud of biometric data.
The “faciality machine” is a concept introduced by Gilles Deleuze and FοΏ½lix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus. The faciality machine is a state in which the face, as an object, is not treated as a monad, a whole-but as something like graffiti, within which pre-individual becoming occurs; the face is only later found as the source of human subjectivity. In this sense, they predicted the situation provoked by modern biometric data collection technology. The face has ceased to belong to the person, becoming a stencil, a memeplex in a semantic game.
Hugo Conti from Argentina, analyzing Da Vinci’s paintings, found a mirror code-by placing a mirror on certain parts of the painting, he discovered implicit, implied faces. In the state of Other Noises, these streams of strange data temporarily became the image of God, a kind of icon within mirror neurons. Naturally, it’s not about Da Vinci-the modern era itself encodes this perception of faciality. Because of mirror neurons, a stream of strange data almost always becomes a face, mainly because of the observer. Reflection is a kind of digital mutation, a glitch in the usual data asymmetry, creating symmetry for just a moment, and symmetry always resembles a face.
Modern culture is characterized by a well-known myth-the myth of split personality, of several faces coexisting in one. Although this psychiatric invention doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, the very reflection on the theme of splitting and fragmenting the face is telling. The human being is analyzed based on graspable, alienable, digitized fragments separated from their true bearer. This leads to questions about the loss of subjectivity, those constant, puzzling “who am I” questions-we all know them well. In its most extreme forms, reflection on faces is expressed in conspiracy theories about political clones, where a famous political figure, based on oddities in photos, is split into many other people, or several are merged into one. For example, there’s a conspiracy theory that Osama Bin Laden and Barack Obama are the same person, with analyses of ear shapes and facial features. But of course, political clone conspiracies are just the beginning-the internet is full of stories about fake actors, singers, or even cosmonauts (who supposedly never died).
It seems that if you get up on the wrong side of the bed, a glitch will occur, and instead of faces, you’ll see strange data walking the streets.
One day, I really did get up on the wrong side of the bed. I suddenly wondered why ancient Greek philosophers’ busts lack pupils. Quickly figuring out that the pupils were originally painted on-but the paint later wore off-I wasn’t satisfied with this answer. After all, you can’t say for sure that the paint wasn’t a kind of rotomation, and that the true meaning of these busts wasn’t revealed only after the paint was gone. There are too many reasons to believe that the teleology of Greek busts was to be neuromantic ciphers, messages perceived by thousands on a subliminal level.
Because an ancient Greek bust without paint displays all the symptoms of an epileptic seizure: rolled-back pupils, white skin, a face frozen in a perpetual affect-all of this directly parallels epilepsy, which in Ancient Greece was called the “divine disease,” or morbus sacer in Latin. The aura of mysticism around it was due to the belief that the gods sent the divine disease to certain individuals, who in turn could see hallucinations. Psychologically, an epileptic is a person with immobile, sticky thoughts-perhaps this is the fate of all ancient Greek philosophers-to be perceived by us as immobilized, like busts. And on some level, they really do exist in a glyptotheque outside of time, frozen in an epileptic fit. In our mirror neurons, we experience the epileptic seizure of strange data as we pass by these busts: for two thousand years, thinkers have cultivated this myth of splitting, leading us to our current situation.
Because the social network itself, the entire form of collecting information about a person, the biometrics of their body or the gathering of data about their preferences-is nothing but a death mask, because this strange data is symmetrical. The modern network is a glyptotheque of death masks, and the divine disease is the same illness that, when Hugo Conti caught it, allowed him to see the face of God in Da Vinci’s paintings.