“Digitalisation pervades every area of life, from shopping to climate change”

Dr. Dries, you’re a sociologist and work with philosophical approaches to issues such as technology and digital change. How does this all fit together?

There are of course many overlaps with philosophy in sociological theory – and many who worked at the boundaries, from Marx to Foucault… But a more persuasive answer to your question is: the process of digitalisation is a cross-sectoral issue. Both sociologists and philosophers as well as environmental scientists, legal experts and naturally technical subjects can contribute something to illuminating it. So it would almost be a mistake to look at such phenomena from just one perspective.

How is digital change affecting our relationship to the world and to ourselves?

Today we’re online all the time and carry out all sorts of activities using the smartphone – from banking to communicating with the family to obtaining information; that’s a marked change on how it was 30 years ago. But, in addition, as you know we don’t just gain something with the smartphone, but we also lose something – and it isn’t just our data but also our attention. Studies indicate that our mental state also changes permanently through constant use of digital devices. Furthermore we would be unable to pursue many professions if we blocked ourselves off from digitalisation – jobs are changing, we’re facing different demands. Ecological issues are also playing a part, for instance in the mining of rare earths for devices and the massive consumption of energy by server farms. In the end, every area of day-to-day life from daily shopping to global injustice and climate change is pervaded by digitalisation. And on top of this there is an ideology that promotes digitalisation and artificial intelligence as the solution to every problem…

How do you approach these issues?

I look at the entire range of phenomena and try to process them with theoretical tools. I always bear in mind Günther Anders’ axiom that technology is not neutral. An old concept was that technology is just a tool for the purposes of autonomous human subjects. Anders took the opposite view: modern technology is never simply a neutral means – it has a purpose in itself. So he even called it a “pseudoperson” who interacts with us. Considering the smartphone, we can now more than ever say that he was right…

You mention Günther Anders; you head the research centre that bears his name. Anders engaged critically with mass media and societal communications back in the 1950s. What can we learn from him today – in times of social media, artificial intelligence and fake news?

We could consider Anders’ famous essay “The World as Phantom and as Matrix”, probably the first philosophical text about television, from a time when the phenomenon had just arisen. In other words: Anders is a philosopher who wanted to have his finger on the pulse of his time; we should do this too. But we can also learn something from his writings on television which might help us today when thinking about social media: for instance, that we are living in a “post-literary” age which is plastered with pictures. The world is constantly being brought home to us, for example with the live broadcast of a football match. Somehow we are there – yet somehow also not. And we only see a specific section of a picture. On the other hand, the world also has to adapt to the needs of technology, for instance, stadia have to be suited to television cameras. The pictures that arise in this way, says Anders, do not therefore depict reality literally, but are always judgements in picture form that conceal the form of their judgement. The image presents a statement about the world to us – but only indirectly and usually unnoticed by us.

That actually sounds rather like Instagram…

Exactly, the picture appears immediate and apparently neutral, but is in fact highly composed and suggestive.

“Digital ethics” is one of the focuses of your work. What does it mean?

Digital ethics is a kind of umbrella term that covers a wide variety of issues. For example: how can I differentiate between true and false in times of social media, how can I find out who is actually talking there and financing it? So this also includes criticism of the material preconditions for the digital economy – whether it’s the exploitation of humans who work there, or our exploitation as unpaid suppliers of data and not least the ecological consequences of digitalisation. Basically, digital ethics is a kind of attempt to answer – from an ethical perspective – all sorts of questions that have been raised in association with digitalisation.

You yourself use YouTube for your content; you’re also still on X, previously Twitter, aren’t you?

These days I’m often asked: are you still on X, is it ethically justifiable? A perfectly fair question. And like other colleagues I am constantly considering it… But I want to continue to witness what goes on there, even now there are also always interesting exchanges with people of like minds. So you can decide to continue to risk it – that’s also an approach. Furthermore, Anders never said we should just get rid of the technology, that would in fact be totally illusory. You simply shouldn’t have any illusions about the role of the technology and in this case social media or in real terms X, that is, what they do with us.

Günther Anders also addressed atomic weapons, atomic energy and ecology, and warned against “apocalypse blindness”. That also sounds topical in view of the worldwide political situation and the climate crisis…

Exactly. It’s important to me to say that the research centre at the University of Freiburg is not a centre for museum-like research into Günther Anders. The core idea is to pursue research in the spirit of Günther Anders, and that also means: here and now – and thus of course these questions are extremely topical. As far as the apocalypse is concerned, one thesis of Anders was: if you don’t see the threat facing you, then you have to attempt “moral phantasy”. But apocalyptic scenarios can of course also dull you, he saw that himself. There are so many zombie series and films about the end of the world today – our awareness and our sense should in fact be so well trained that we act immediately, but the opposite is the case. Engagement with the apocalypse is tricky… On top of this: Silicon Valley types are in the end doomsayers, they are waiting for the great millenarian empire of the machine, transhumanism is their great ideology. That is, the idea of optimising people technically so that we can leave the troublesome mortal coil behind us.

And there we are back with digital ethics… Yes, it goes into deep philosophical questions of ethics and of anthropology. Anyway, Anders also drew on many other subject areas, not least methodologically, for example in the collage art of the 1920s; Dadaism and Surrealism were major influences. Therefore ideas like the concept that things act like humans, this transposition of subject and object is in fact a Surrealist concept. As an author, Anders always thought about who says something to someone. For a TikTok audience he would definitely write differently today – if he still wrote at all.