Digital Life. Tim Markham
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thing to do over dinner, and yet it can be registered as both absurd and as grounding the ethics of co-existence. And the same can be said of our relations with digital technology: ultimately what matters is not how well we understand how it works and with what political and material consequences, but the practical, at-hand, embodied knowledge that this or that technology is both the way the world is disclosed to us, and at the same time a way. It remains important to work towards better public understanding of the way people’s consent is secured, their data monetized, their identities profiled, and with what economic, political and environmental implications. It is also important for us to understand what is revealed in the way people move balletically through digital spaces, seemingly accepting their proclivities and impositions as just the way things are now – this is how you get to know and to be. It turns out that their existential investment in such spaces is intuitive and yet restless enough to be open to other ways of being. There is a fundamental lack of absolute final commitment and resolution that both discloses the world as a world on the go, and makes known that it could, and will, be different in time.
All of which brings us back to Couldry and Hepp and the laudable attention they give to the consequences for individuals’ everyday experience of the ‘world-making strategies of governing institutions’ (2017: 163). They take issue with Bruno Latour on the question of digital traces, and in particular Latour’s insistence that these give us direct access to experience. Instead, they counter that such directness cannot be assumed since those traces are dependent on the technical architectures and processes of institutions. Looked at another way, both perspectives are correct. It is undoubtedly right that we pay heed to the commercial and programmatic structuring of digital meaning-making practices, but if we take Heidegger’s account of thrownness seriously there is nothing less real about the meaningful experiences that emerge from such practices. Further, this generative inauthenticity does not commit Heidegger – or, I would argue, any of us – to accepting the status quo unquestioningly, nor does it absolve us of the responsibility for improving the (digital) world as we find it.
Lagerkvist (2018) has argued that the rise of distinctly troubling phenomena including trolling, automation, panopticism and big data warrant a new digital media ethics. The model she proposes does not derive from either the scale or unknowability of datafication, instead taking human vulnerability as its starting point. She stresses both the depth of uncertainty that is the condition of existence, and the basic drive to seek meaning and security as the fundamental motivation of everyday life, such that the ‘existential terrain’ of contemporary digital culture is co-founded by a combination of the profound and banal, the extraordinary and the mundane. Butler makes a similar claim in Precarious Life (2006), and it is implicit in Levinas too that the bottomless frailty of human existence provides the quickening spark of ethics. There is clearly a lot to be said for this position, and if we take Lagerkvist’s point that we increasingly turn to digital media to shore up this existential flimsiness then it makes sense that a digital ethics would seek to protect that quest for security from destabilizing exogenous forces. But I would suggest that there is rather less at stake in most digital encounters, and that it is this less meaningful realm of experience from which ethics should proceed. Lagerkvist’s point is that the profundity of existential contingency combines with rare moments of revelatory clarity in everyday life to provide unique insights into how 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