Gulliver between Laputa and the digital swarm

Almost 300 years since its publication, Gulliver’s Travels remains a powerful tool of political analysis. More precise than the abundant studies by “experts” that flood us. What Jonathan Swift criticized in 1726 – the disconnection of elites from society, absurd polarization and technical dehumanization – resonates with resounding force today.

Swift knew his book was so politically incendiary that he feared arrest. To protect himself, he used the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver and delivered the manuscript clandestinely.

The text was left on the door of publisher Benjamin Motte by an intermediary in the middle of the night. Swift even wrote a letter to Motte under the name “Richard Sympson” (Gulliver’s supposed cousin) offering the book, as detailed in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swiftedited in four volumes by David Woolley. These letters detail Swift’s elaborate precautions to conceal his initial authorship.

Borges says that Swift “had set out to prosecute the human race” and he did so through a book of travel adventures that many considered true, as recorded in a letter from his friend Alexander Pope.

In Liliput, perhaps the best-known journey in the book, we can see the politics of extreme triviality in action as it occurs today. There the political factions (Tramecksan and Slamecksan) are divided over something as insignificant as the height of the heels of their shoes and the war with Blefuscu breaks out over how an egg should be broken (whether at the wide end or the narrow end).

It is the perfect metaphor for polarization on social networks. Swift describes how societies fracture into “tribes” due to superficial details or minimal ideological differences that, through the algorithm and the echo chamber, become reasons for hatred. It represents politics converted into a spectacle, where the shapes (the “heel”) matter more than the substance.

Another emblematic place in the novel is the floating island of Laputa. A fortress inhabited by the elite and that served as inspiration for the castle in the skyalso Hayao Miyazaki.

The base of the island is made of diamond and floats with a powerful magnet. Laputa is the most current satire on blind faith in technology. It represents elites disconnected from material reality (Silicon Valley and the global financial world, for example) who seek “complex” and algorithmic solutions to basic human problems, ignoring the real needs of the population. Does it sound like that rich people’s club known as the Davos Forum where the elite decide what is “best” for the world? Furthermore, the island that floats above the plebs and can crush them if they do not pay tribute is a powerful image of economic inequality and digital control.

Byung-Chul Han says that we live in an era in which digital self-exploitation isolates us. Elites design algorithms from their technological “islands” ignoring the friction of reality. It would seem that life management has become a mathematical operation, forgetting that, down on earth, houses are built crooked because the plans are perfect, but reality is rough.

In these days of narcissism and financial speculation that create wars in the name of humanity, perhaps it would be worth reading this adventure book again. The edge of its irony could help us dissect the new fascist colonialisms, the criminal supremacies, the hypocrisies complicit in extermination.

George Orwell considered this book too pessimistic. He maintained that although Swift did not possess common wisdom, he did have a “terrible vision” capable of turning a vision of the world into a great work of art.

Anyway, it allows us to find the communicating vessels between the floating island of Laputa and the digital swarm in this era that Byung-Chul Han considers psychopolitical.

Swift’s satire has not aged in three centuries because stupidity, arrogance and the fever to appropriate what belongs to others are constant in our societies. Technology has given them speed and global reach.

The polarization we experience is not an accident, it is a system design that makes us argue over an eggshell while the island of Laputa continues to float threateningly above our heads.

Gulliver’s Travels It reminds us that technological advancement is not synonymous with moral progress. As long as the floating islands of privilege exist and we continue to fight for ideological eggs, we will continue to be, as they say, the king of Brobdingnag, that race of “little and hateful insects” that Swift so feared and, at the same time, so longed to save with the scalpel of his satire.