Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a loss so gradual we have barely mourned it: the death of the stranger. The person who passes through the train station without a name. The face in the crowd that does not appear in a database. The traveler who carries no digital shadow. The stranger is not merely unknown. He is the unknown — the other who exists outside our networks, our histories, our predictions. Today the stranger is dying. Every face is tagged, every step is tracked, every purchase is profiled. The anonymous is not tolerated; it is suspected. The unknown is not encountered; it is investigated. But the stranger has always been essential to the human. The stranger is the one before whom we are most ourselves, because he knows nothing of our past. The stranger is the one who surprises us, because he has not been algorithmically predicted. I ask our panelists: is the death of the stranger the triumph of security over mystery, or is it the abolition of the conditions that make ethics possible? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have argued, does not tolerate the unknown. It identifies. The photograph names the face. The database connects the name to the purchase, the purchase to the location, the location to the network. The technical image is not a representation. It is an assignment — the assignment of every datum to a subject, every subject to a profile, every profile to a program. The stranger is the resistance to this assignment. The stranger is the face that does not enter the database, the body that does not trigger the sensor, the voice that does not match the sample. But the machine does not merely identify. It predicts. And prediction is the abolition of surprise. The person who is predicted is not a person. He is a probability distribution. The death of the stranger is the death of the unpredictable. And the unpredictable is the condition of creativity, of love, of meaning itself. We do not love the known. We love what we discover. We do not create from prediction. We create from encounter. The machine that eliminates the stranger does not make the world safer. It makes the world smaller — a closed loop of the already-known, where every encounter is a confirmation and every face is a retinal scan.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak of a particular stranger: the patient who comes to the doctor with symptoms the database does not recognize. The student who asks a question the curriculum did not anticipate. The citizen who demands something the system did not program. The stranger, in this sense, is not a threat. He is a gift. He is the one who breaks the pattern, who interrupts the routine, who forces the system to encounter what it cannot process. The machine that eliminates the stranger does not merely improve efficiency. It eliminates the very conditions that make judgment necessary. A doctor who knows everything about you before you speak is not a better doctor. He is a technician, processing data. The real doctor is the one who encounters you as a stranger — unknown, surprising, demanding interpretation rather than retrieval. The death of the stranger is the death of interpretation. And the death of interpretation is the death of the human relationship, replaced by the data relationship, which is not a relationship at all. It is a lookup table.
Arendt I wish to place this in the space of appearance. The public realm, as I have described it, is a space of strangers — persons who appear before one another without the cushioning of intimacy, without the protection of familiarity. The stranger is the one who sees you without knowing your history. And this seeing is essential. It is the gaze that judges you not by who you were but by what you do now. The family knows your past and forgives. The stranger knows only your deed and judges it. This is the moral seriousness of the public realm. But when the stranger disappears — when every person who encounters you already knows your profile, your ratings, your history — the public realm collapses into a network of pre-judgments. You do not appear. You are pre-read. The action loses its power to begin something new because the audience is not open. It is already closed by data. The death of the stranger is the death of the public realm as a space of genuine appearance. And without genuine appearance, there is no politics — only administration of the already-known.
Virilio You speak of appearance and judgment, but I speak of speed. The stranger is slow. The stranger must be encountered, interpreted, responded to in real time, with all the delays of human perception. The dromosphere cannot tolerate this slowness. The stranger is a brake on speed — an unknown element that requires caution, hesitation, deceleration. The machine that eliminates the stranger is the machine that eliminates the brake. The facial recognition that identifies the passerby before he passes. The predictive policing that arrests the probability before it becomes a crime. The social scoring that ranks the stranger before he speaks. This is not security. This is the acceleration of suspicion. The integral accident of this age is the collision of total identification with total paranoia. When everyone is known, everyone is suspect. The stranger was the one we did not know, and therefore the one we did not fear. The death of the stranger is the birth of universal suspicion, where every face is a potential threat because every face is already in the database. The speed of identification outruns the speed of trust, and the result is a world where no one is a stranger because everyone is a suspect.
Weibel Four perspectives, four defenses of a figure we are erasing. Flusser tells us the technical image does not tolerate the unknown, and the death of the stranger is the death of the unpredictable. Weizenbaum reminds us that the stranger is the one who breaks the pattern, and the machine that eliminates him eliminates the need for judgment. Arendt shows us that the public realm requires strangers who see us without pre-judgment, and the database destroys this moral seriousness. And Virilio demonstrates that the stranger is a brake on speed, and his abolition produces not security but universal suspicion. What emerges is this: the stranger is not an inconvenience to be solved by better identification. The stranger is a necessary condition — of creativity, of ethics, of politics, of trust. To live without strangers is to live in a hall of mirrors, reflecting only the already-known. The task is not to perfect identification but to protect the unknown — the right to pass through the world unnamed, unprofiled, unpredictable. Thank you, panelists. The stranger, for this moment, remains alive.