Gramsci, Golem, Google: A Marxist Dialog with Rafael Capurro’s Intercultural Information Ethics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore in which ways and how far Rafael Capurro’s intercultural information ethics can be fruitfully articulated with Marxism. We analyse some of Capurro’s papers on intercultural information ethics and on robotics, along with Gyorgy Lukacs’s criticism of the philosophical categories of the universal, the particular and the singular. We link this approach with Terry Eagleton’s proposal for classifying and thinking about all Ethics amidst the three dimensions of human psyche (the symbolic, the imaginary and the real) according to Jacques Lacan’s schema. Finally, we use the legend of the Golem as a metaphor to think about the subordination of living labor to dead labor and the cultural rapports between intellectuals and the working class. These rapports are taken from Gramsci’s work. We believe that an intercultural information ethics can only be strengthened if it does not leave outside its borders the complex and not often obvious imbrications between ethics, culture, information, technology and social class.