Recently, I saw on the news that the River Seine has reopened to swimmers after 'century-long' ban. This reminded me of an essay I recently wrote for my application to a school focusing on complex social and computation systems, with the theme of 'Data, Democracy and the New Social Fabric'. My academic journey has reached a point of profound disillusionment, disgust and unfortunate encounters. In the field I have tried to establish myself, I find myself suffocated by the weight of intellctual pretension, (read this with Werner Herzog voice and accent) as overwhelming as blue cheese. Yet despite this atmosphere, I cannot achieve even the most basic success or recognition. I have lost faith and any real strategy for staying afloat.
Nonetheless, here is my essay below, written in honor of the great Stefan Zweig.
In Paris, the distance from Place de la Concorde to the banks of the Seine is barely a hundred meters. This distance, shaped by the physical world, was likely no different on January 21, 1793, as King Louis XVI took his final steps toward the guillotine at the heart of the square. Yet distance is not merely a spatial measure; it is also historical. And the distance that history has drawn between these two sites stretches farther than all the pilgrim roads ever traveled.
In this grand closing scene of the 18th century, it is this distance –physical, historical or symbolic– that casts its dust upon the stage. Stefan Zweig describes this distance in one of his most influential essays: Angler an der Seine. As Louis XVI approached the scaffold after four years of upheaval, the fishermen on the Seine ignored one of humanity’s most staggering historical turning points. Indifferent, they gave their attention only to the corks floating on the surface of their nets.
What emerged as indifference at the end of the French Revolution –Zweig’s (citing an anonymous historian) account of fishermen turning away from the scaffold– was, in fact, a visible symptom of overstimulation. Saturated by years of upheaval, the senses collapsed inward, not from ignorance, but exhaustion. In our century, overstimulation has reached the deepest valleys of the human mind. It is no longer episodic; it is permanent. I conjecture that the internet, as the final site of the public sphere’s (sensu Habermas) migration, has intensified this condition into a structural feature. Today, silence no longer registers. What once collapsed inward now spills outward –not as reflection, but as performance. We have entered a political culture where expression replaces responsibility. Speech is constant, but meaning thins. Participation is diluted into performance.
In this regime of frictionless visibility, the public sphere transforms into a strange medium of circulation. The shift from production to consumer capitalism drives this change, fragmenting the sphere into a market of impressions, each competing for the shortest possible unit of consciousness. And thus, expressions become optimized for visibility; attention fragments; performance overtakes deliberation. As a result, the public sphere no longer orients, it circulates. In such a space, the citizen becomes indistinguishable from the consumer; ‘the vote’ and ‘the click’ blur. As this dynamic takes hold, the public claim –the connective tissue of democratic life, the ethical and symbolic foundation that makes collective life and democratic disagreement possible– begins to erode. It does not disappear, but persists like a fossil: form intact, substance transformed, no longer able to carry a common purpose. Since democracy depends on a functioning public sphere, and the public sphere on a living public claim, what remains may still resemble democracy but only on the surface.
Much has been said about the transformation of the public sphere, and with it, the erosion of the public claim. But perhaps the shift runs deeper. Perhaps we are no longer dealing with transformation, but with absence. The ethical and symbolic core that once made democratic disagreement possible may no longer be deteriorating –it may be gone. What remains is a shell. Society no longer moves with orientation or shared purpose, but drifts through circulation and reaction. The political die is no longer fair; each turn lands more frequently on the same crude forms that travel far: populism, racism, fetishized pasts… Burned by constant input, the senses no longer reflect –they perform.
And so we return to the Seine. Today, we are not standing beside a river but inside a current carrying infinite signals, infinite turns of attention, and infinite scaffolds passed without pause. The corks still float, but no one looks up.