The Nietzschean notion of superman and the very real effects of the virtual, the networks, the digital image and the video game in human interrelationships: a striking essay resulting from the posthumously defended thesis of Benjamin Lavigne (1981-2020), which draws up a singular, committed and rigorous critic of the technological foundations of contemporary society.
Based on Nietzsche's philosophy and contemporary theory of game design we'll see the video game player as a superman : the video games as an easy way of emancipation, the superman for all. Then we explain the link between the superman of video games and the transhumanism, the cybernetics superman : the easiest pathway to become a superman. Faced with the increasing need to quantify, rationalize, regulate and govern the World, mankind found itself bound to archive an incommensurable amount of information. The resulting databases and their subsequent establishment of the World as a colossal dataset is made possible by ubiquitous computing powers. Various data types can be quantified, collected, stored and analyzed, might they be so at an individual level or at a larger population scale; e.g. academic and professional evaluation, political and social polls, or even the global economy. We will see that humans have grown fond of playing an indexing game of the World via the revolution of smartphones as a way to control it.
