digital media interactions, infrastructures, institutions and industries should be scrutinized, but only if we accept that ontological security should be the ultimate goal of governance. An alternative guiding principle such as solidarity suggests a different way forward.
This book takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s insight that the inauthentic world into which we are perpetually thrown, full of idle chat about everything and nothing as it is, is every bit as ontologically generative as any ‘deep’ apprehension of the human condition. Rather than the peripheral whispering of the void motivating the quest for meaning in everyday life, then, that locomotion is propelled by little more than affect-seeking and shallow curiosity. The performance of identity is similarly driven by the transient buzz of recognition, rather than realizing some final moment of subjectification. It can and has been argued that all of this meaningless digital stuff is a distraction from the human project of seeking enlightenment in relation to the questions of who we are and why we are here. The phenomenological endeavour, however, began by asking whether existential ethics would be best served by bracketing out such metaphysical concerns altogether. Thus, any serious consideration of what a digital ethics might look like should start from the ubiquitous distractions of our cluttered lives rather than seeking to take an abstracted position outside of this endless noise and light. Starting in media res, it soon becomes apparent that the low-level anxieties of digital life – not intimations of the abyss but generalized feelings of listlessness and dissatisfaction – are not problems to be tackled but that which keeps us in motion. And it is above all motion that comes to establish everything that a digital ethics should promote and protect – commonality, difference, complicity and responsibility in the here and now.
None of this is intended to suggest that we should not take very seriously issues such as discrimination, privacy, consent and accountability in the digital realm. Rather, the point is that we should do so not in order to protect the sanctity of the existential quest for meaning and ontological security, but in the name of those mundane everyday practices that look inconsequential but over time reveal what is at stake in our co-existence with others.19 The world disclosed by those practices is the starting point for a new ethics, and their temporal affordances and implications should be assessed on that basis, not in pursuit of a higher truth. Lagerkvist is surely right to want to safeguard Dasein, which she characterizes as ‘the subjectivity, sociality, agency, ethical responsibility, spirituality, suffering and search for meaning springing from human thrownness’ (2017: 5). Heidegger insists, however, that there is no prelapsarian home for Dasein that it is our responsibility to reclaim. Dasein is perpetually thrown, it is unremittingly of the world we go about discovering. There is a practical aspect to this nicety, in that the quest for existential security might be jettisoned in our ethical thinking in favour of something more humdrum – homeostasis, the feeling that things are more or less the same day to day. This is, to be sure, distinct from a defence of conformity, but it is what defines thrownness – making the world more familiar and predictable, not trying to reach some goal of clarity but finding a security that consists in making our way about, open-endedly. What we do through and with digital media might not carry the burden of delivering a deep sense of existential security beyond the phenomenological realm, but how such media disclose the world we co-habit – as we know it, not in spite of our limited apprehension of it – is the beating heart of it.
Definitions and chapter overview
As an adjective, ‘digital’ refers to that which is associated with computations built on discrete binary operations (Floridi 2017). It is not counterposed to the physical, nor is it framed by an opposition between the virtual and the real. What makes an image digital is that it is the manifestation of chains of discrete yes-or-no indications rather than continuous chemical processes of photographic production; those computations are as much of the world as the negative bathed in developing fluid, even if the digital image is, say, an abstract animation rather than a representation of something ‘real’. Digital practices encompass not only participating in digital cultures by clocking, reacting, ignoring and creating, but less obviously social acts such as setting an alarm, noticing a push notification, asking Alexa to play a podcast, emptying email trash, calling an Uber and buying clothes from ASOS. The movements of fingers and the voice commands that accomplish these acts are indissociable from them, not earthbound analogues to things that happen in the digital world, since the world of bits and the world of atoms are the same world. A digital process might be about encoding and rendering an image visible to a user with the relevant kit, but one of the defining features of the digital age is the pervasiveness of processes that are unseen by human subjects, or at least by most of them; for example, high-frequency trading, algorithmic consumer profiling, and autonomous facial recognition. These all involve more human intentionality and labour than is sometimes assumed, and it bears emphasizing that what makes them digital is not that they have a tendency to be absent from the consciousness and agency of the majority of us – rather, again, it comes down to 1s and 0s. Digital mechanisms include apps and the devices used to access them, but also the corporate governance and legal frameworks of big tech. Digital environments include online extremist forums and Netflix, but also urban spaces covered by Wi-Fi, 5G and CCTV, mapped by Google and used as backgrounds for Instagram posts. Digital infrastructures include unnoticed data centres, electricity grids and undersea cables, but also everything that makes digitally afforded experiences possible and meaningful in everyday life, from economic and political systems to educational establishments, Foxconn factories and yttrium mines.
Digital life is the condition of existing amongst and through these manifestations, processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures. That gerund is important: there is no pre-digital existence that the digital has happened to. At the personal level, many of us remember what it was like to live in the pre-internet era, but these memories are not of the past; they are phenomena that we make and remake in the present, through practices that are of a world that is permeated, constrained and enabled by the digital. At the level of the social and political, history of course matters, but is made meaningful by all the things we find ourselves doing in the relentless present that is our constant origin. This means that we should not think of selves who go out into the world and use digital technologies; they are always already part of the world in which we are forever emerging, in the countless acts of subjectivation through which we make that world and ourselves familiar and navigable. The focus of this book then is not on how people feel about digital technologies, or even how they affect them, strictly speaking – there is no ‘them’ prior to the affecting, after all, only ways of being afforded by the contingencies of now, and it was ever thus. There is nothing necessarily amnesiac or myopic about digital life: how we got here, what our possible futures are, and what we can do about them are of vital importance. The point is that we come at understanding and answering these questions by way of the at-hand resources – at once enabling and debased, revealing and complicit – of everyday experience.
Chapter 2 addresses the care deficit said to be endemic to the digital age, specifically the argument that our digital lives are so full of affective distractions that our capacities for compassion and solidarity are diminished. Through an exploration of Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and the concept of mere-feltness, it is suggested that the distracted, ambivalent experience of digital multitudes may over time amount to a more substantive, reliable form of subjective recognition than focused attention on individuals. It thus lays the groundwork for thinking differently, but nonetheless ethically and politically, about social relations in a digital age in which connections have simultaneously proliferated and become ephemeral. Chapter 3 develops this into a positive agenda, drawing on Tim Ingold’s notion of life lived alongly, as well as Heidegger’s concepts of thrownness and findingness, to suggest a model of ethics in motion. It fleshes out how those proliferated and ephemeral encounters are experienced in everyday digital life: on the move, amid the rhythms and routines of ordinary existence. This is not a degraded mode of being in the world but precisely how that world is disclosed, along with its immanent stakes; as such, what constitutes an ethical relationality is nimble, dextrous navigation rather than pausing and thinking hard about the other.
Chapter 4 moves on to the territory of subjectification, and what
