The Ship of Fools

Museum of Post-Digital Cultures (online project), 2014 

Co-curated with Christophe Clarijs

Turn on, tune in, drop out. (Timothy Leary / Marshall McLuhan)

Conceived as an accumulative, chronological patchwork, The Ship of Fools proposes to trace its meandering course, from on-shore and off-shore, oscillating between the physical and the digital, utopianism and dystopianism, between sanity and insanity, and search for its critical resonances today. Connecting counterculture and cyberculture, The Ship of Fools will present a collection of time documents illustrating our alternating and often troubled relationship with technology.

The allegory of the ship of fools was first introduced by Plato, in his Republic, to warn against the ultimate consequences of a democratic state. In the story, all the crew’s members on a ship try to take control of the helm, even though no one on board – besides the captain – truly knows how to navigate the ship. Most of them even argue that there is no such thing as an art of navigation. Everyone tries to get hold of the helm, thus turning their course into some kind of perilous pleasure cruise without a clear destination.

In the Middle Ages, the ship of fools was used as a literary trope to legitimise criticism on the powers that be. Sebastian Brant published Das Narrenschiff in 1494, the immensely popular poem illustrated by Albrecht Dürer was quite critical of his time and a satire on the Christian rhetoric of salvation. It tells the same story of a group of people adrift at sea setting off from Basel, trying to reach the far-distant paradise of fools. The story has been taken up once more by Michel Foucault in his sociological study Madness and Civilisation (1964), to analyse the phenomenon of insanity and its perception in medieval society. The mad were extradited on a ship at sea, transgressing and challenging the norms and conventions of everyday life. The fool, Foucault argued, occupies a liminal and ambiguous position.

More remarkable, however, is the sudden, late 20th-century reappearance of the parable. This time, the ship is populated by minority groups who complain about and protest against the living conditions on it, without realising that they are all sailing towards the icebergs of the North Pole. Only the cabin boy tries to warn them of their fate, and suggests throwing some lunatics overboard and turning the vessel around. He is largely dismissed as being fascist, violent and immoral. Eventually, the ship got crushed between two icebergs and the whole crew drowned.

This adaptation was written in 1999 by Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the 'Unabomber’, responsible for numerous bombings in the United States between 1978 and 1995. While studying mathematics at Harvard, where he later obtained his PhD, Kaczynski was among the guinea pigs for the extremely stressful psychological experiments conducted by Henry Murray. His Ship of Fools can be read as a short parable of a radical, more lengthy manifesto he published in 1995, Industrial Society and Its Future, the ideological underpinning of his violent activities. Since 1971, Ted Kaczynski had retreated in a remote cabin in Montana, abnegating any electronic devices or facilities. After an extensive FBI investigation, he got arrested in 1996 in his cabin, and was imprisoned for life. His eco-anarchist manifesto can be read as a fierce warning against the increasing human dependence on what he calls the techno-industrial system. Technology is not something we can fully control, it is not merely a tool we can get our hands around, but rather an ungovernable vessel led adrift by nitwits and fools who pretend to possess the knowledge.

But who are the fools, really? The anarcho-primitivist terrorists, or the “ordinary well-socialised bourgeoisie” described by Kaczynski, who have fallen prey to the techno-industrial system? Kaczynski, along with his followers, have been deemed ‘madmen’ or ‘terrorists’ for their ultra-radical beliefs and actions, and this often rightly so. Nonetheless, their publications remain with us as testaments to their ideas on the dangers of innovation, floating around on the Internet regardless of the reckless actions they may have influenced. They are archived in our databases, picked up by our search engines and rediscovered by us in relation to current developments using most recent technology. It reminds us of important lessons that might still be drawn from their theoretical assumptions, revealing a truth that is highly relevant today. 

After an age of online optimism for both users and entrepreneurs, a certain uneasy feeling has settled in to several of us since the URL invaded the IRL. Gone are the days of the renegade web-existence, we now find ourselves on an entrapping vessel. Merely virtually secure with only the seemingly paranoid warning us about its invasiveness. Though, we might not have believed them at first, their constant harbingering has shifted our trusting attitude towards a more suspicious one and so we go looking for cause to turn the boat.