While driving, one night, Chris got distracted by a notification on his phone and provoked the car accident that killed his fiancé. Smithereens is centered on the idea that digital devices are constantly calling for our attention and that their design makes their use addictive. This happens because big internet companies are earning a fortune through a new economic model based precisely on the managing of attention and the extraction of behavioral data. This chapter looks at the reasons and strategies (...) behind the monetization of attention and considers the dynamics through which a pathological use of online platforms and digital devices is forced on the user. (shrink)

‘À quoi sert la littérature?’, Deleuze opens his book on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with a question that this paper will pose again, trying to propose an answer to it, and to put to test the methodological approach that can be obtained from that answer: what are the uses of literature and, more specifically, how could the philosopher use literature, what could be done with it? To this end, this paper will focus on Deleuze’s symptomatological conception of literature. The second part (...) of the paper will be dedicated to the reading of two novels, 1984 by George Orwell and The Circle by Dave Eggers. The novels will be put in in a relation of resonation with two concepts sketched in Deleuze’s Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle: Foucauldian disciplinary societies and control societies. These novels will be considered as signaletic material, symptomatologies of two conditions of society, from which this paper proposes to extract two types of signs: Signs of Order and Signs of Suggestion. These signs will be made react with the concepts of Foucault and Deleuze, in order to see if they can produce the ground for a therapeutic. The paper will therefore combine literary symptomatologies and philosophical aetiology, in the attempt to make them react together, Foucault and Orwell, Eggers and Deleuze, to extract and describe signs from the literary material considered that may be brought to the fore only after the consideration of the causes of the most important symptoms of discipline and control. (shrink)