Essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard: “…When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about alienation in the 1840s—that’s nearly two hundred years ago—they were describing workers’ relationship with their work, but the consequences of alienation spread into their analysis to include our relationship to nature and to existence as such. One term they used was “loss of reality.” Society at that time was incomparably more brutal, the machines incomparably coarser, but problems such as economic inequality and environmental destruction have continued into our own time. If anything, alienation as Marx and Engels defined it has only increased.
Or has it? The statement “people are more alienated now than ever before in history” sounds false, like applying an old concept to a new condition. That is not really what we are, is it? If there is something that characterizes our time, isn’t it the exact opposite, that nothing feels alien?
Alienation involves a distance from the world, a lack of connection between it and us. What technology does is compensate for the loss of reality with a substitute. Technology calibrates all differences, fills in every gap and crack with images and voices, bringing everything close to us in order to restore the connection between ourselves and the world. Even the past, which just a few generations ago was lost forever, can be retrieved and brought back…(More)”.