Alienation

(see consciousness, sympoiesis and other keywords)

A form of estrangement

The term alienation depicts feelings of disconnection from friends, family, or society. This usually also means a lack of shared values and a sense of isolation, whether at the personal (psychological) level or extending across a larger social order.

Marx's focus

Karl Marx famously applied the term to encompass the specific conditions that were causing alienation among factory workers. In effect, he concluded that the capitalist system was treating them merely as components within an allopoietic system of production.

Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. (Marx, 1844)

He identified four salient characteristics:

Alienation of the worker from their product
Alienation of the worker from the act of production
Alienation of the worker from their Gattungswesen (species-essence)
Alienation of the worker from other workers.

Could humanity transform itself by re-inventing the purpose and protocols of our universities?
They would emerge, re-combine and evolve - i.e. more like living beings than well-run factories.
In more precise terms, they should be modelled on autopoietic systems, not allopoietic systems.

Ancient notions of what is real

Pythagoras (560-480 BCE) is quoted as saying "all things are numbers", but there are anomalies in this claim.
Indeed, whether numbers are 'real' or invented remains a source of philosophical confusion (alienation?) for many human beings.
Similar issues attend Plato's (348/347 BC) observations about the standardisation and replication of manufactured products in assembly-line systems.
Plato claimed that the (geometrically) 'perfect' forms that one might imagine beneath the imperfect surface of these actual products are more 'real' than the tangible world.
This kind of alienation was further refined and endorsed by a succession of mediaeval and Enlightenment thinkers, including, Galileo, Euler, Newton and Descartes.

Some Post-Marxist Thoughts

The alienation described by Marx has acquired additional layers as a result of the mechanistic (e.g. digital) triumphs of the 19th and 20th centuries and beyond.
In his celebrated essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin outlines his concept of aura.
Benjamin's notion of aura can loosely be defined as a sense of uniqueness in material things that can only be apprehended directly.
In other words aura is diminished when a given object or phenomenon is perceived through an artificial medium such as glass (windows / lenses) or cameras.
This idea also chimes with Heidegger's notion of Dasein as a specifically situated moment of consciousness in the here and now.