Scripted Culture

When looking at the public sphere of culture in digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges: cultural publicness is both exploding and imploding; the fundamental concerns of the Enlightenment are both resolved and endangered; platforms and algorithms are instances of self-determination and external determination; human behavior responds to codes of nature, culture, society, and machines. If culture must find new forms of public negotiation of values in digitalization, all these codes are at play. From DNA to robot control, from the most basic to the most advanced accounting, from the narrated to the calculated future, from the script in the narrowest to the script in the broadest sense – it always involves forms of the "writtenness" of history and stories. This realization follows from the overshadowing of old cultural techniques by new ones.