Abstract
This essay argues that through a new and radical relationship with digital technologies that are oriented towards networking and automaticity, humans have become estranged from what philosopher Arnold Gehlen termed the ‘circle of action’ (handlungskreis) that expressed our ancient adaptation to tool use and constituted the basis for our capacity for reflective consciousness. The objectification of the material and analogue relationship that enabled humans to ‘act’ upon the world and to construct the basis for our collective endeavours, this paper shows, is beginning to redirect the social orientation that tool use enabled, back to a form of individualism I term a ‘post-modern vanity’. Computer-driven automation on a networked and global scale is engendering a new illusion regarding our relationship with technology. Greek philosophy, later religion, and then the Enlightenment all saw our relation to technology as evidence of either our ‘specialness’ or our inherent ‘mastery over nature’. These perspectives resulted in our acquiring a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ wherein for the individual life had meaning and was ontologically tolerable—we thought ourselves to be of a realm beyond raw nature. Automation, however, to an unprecedented degree, objectifies and exteriorizes the processes of technology use, alienating the individual (and society) from the ‘circle of action’. This process is throwing us back to another form of what this essay terms a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ where we increasingly believe that we no longer need each other so much. The cult of computer efficiency and the virtual sphere of the network that it has spawned, I argue, is a largely barren sphere of radical individualism, a post-modern vanity, where we exist at a borderland closer to nature and to the animals than we have been for thousands of years.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adamec, B. (2010). “Anthropology of the Entrepreneur”. Unpublished Thesis, University of Vienna. http://othes.univie.ac.at/9651/1/2010-05-11_0226108.pdf. Accessed 20 Jan 2014.
Anderson, P. (2000). Renewals. New left Rev, 1, 5–24.
Ashworth, W. J. (1996). Memory, efficiency and symbolic analysis: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and the industrial mind. Isis, 87(4), 629–653.
Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualisation. London: Sage.
Bell, E. T. (1953). Men of mathematics. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. The information age: economy, society and culture, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cayley, E. S. (1830). Commercial economy. London: James Ridgeway. American Libraries Online: https://archive.org/details/oncommercialeco00caylgoog. Accessed 22 July 2013.
Clarke, A. C. (1973). Profiles of the future. New York: Harper & Row.
Deuze, M., Blank, P., & Speers, L. (2012). A life lived in media. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6(1), 1–15.
Fischer, J (2009). Exploring the core identity of philosophical anthropology through the works of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen. European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate IRIS, [S.l.], p. 153-170, May. http://www.fupress.net/index.php/iris/article/view/2860. Accessed 22 Jan 2014.
Freud, S. (1961). The future of an illusion. New York: Norton.
Gare, A. (1996). Nihilism Inc. Sydney: Eco-logical.
Gehlen, A. (1980). Man in the age of technology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gies, F., & Gies, J. (1995). Cathedral, forge, and waterwheel: technology and invention in the middle ages. New York: Harper Collins.
Gray, J. (2002). Straw dogs. London: Granta.
Gray, J. (2013). The silence of animals. London: Allen Lane.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Hassan, R. (2003). The Chronoscopic Society. New York: Lang Publishers.
Honneth, A. (1988). Social action and human nature. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jameson, F. (1996). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.
Jaynes, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Jessop, B. (2006). Beyond the regulation approach. Northampton: Edward Elgar.
Kittler, F. (1996). Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kołakowski, L. (2012). Is god happy? London: Penguin.
Lash, S., & Urry, J. (1987). The end of organized capitalism. London: Polity.
Lomas, D. (2000). The haunted self. New York: Yale University Press.
Marx, K. (1968). A contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. Moscow: Progress.
Marx, K. (1982). Capital (Vol. 1). London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2004). Selected writings. London: CRW.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste. London: Verso.
Ong, W. J. (1992). Writing is a technology that restructures thought. In G. Baumann (Ed.), The written word: literacy in transition (pp. 14–31). Oxford: Clarendon.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Riesman, D. (1961). The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Roszak, T. (1986). The cult of information. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sayal, R. (2013). Google tax whistleblower says he was motivated by Christian beliefs. Guardian Online. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/12/google-tax-whistleblower-christian-beliefs. Accessed 15 Sept 2013.
Schiller, D. (2000). Digital capitalism: networking the global market system. Cambridge: MIT.
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thakkar, J. (2010). Why conservatives should read Marx. The Point, No. 3, Fall. http://www.thepointmag.com/2010/politics/why-conservatives-should-read-marx. Accessed 12 Aug 2013.
Turkle, S. (2010). Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.
Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics. New York: Semiotext(e).
Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber: essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wolf, G. (2013). Quantified self. http://quantifiedself.com/author/gw/. Accessed 14 Aug 2013.
Yen, H. (2010). Income gap widens: census finds record gap between rich and poor. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/28/income-gap-widens-census-_n_741386.html. Accessed 21 Nov 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hassan, R. Our Post-modern Vanity: the Cult of Efficiency and the Regress to the Boundary of the Animal World. Philos. Technol. 28, 241–259 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0160-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0160-0