Non-things

Upheaval in the Lifeworld

Author
Byung-Chul Han
Translator
Daniel Steuer
Publisher
Polity
Year
2021
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“We are becoming blind to small, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary—the things that do not attract us but ground us in being.” This, like Byung-Chul Han’s other short treatises, is a compact, power punch of a book, arguing for a re-embodiment and re-reification of the world, away from the “non-things” of screens and towards solid, stable, restful “things.” Han describes the digitalized world as one that produces “hunters,” people always searching, seeking, vigilant; always available and responsive, unable to resist any stimulus, to hold steady or be still. At the same time, he refuses the over-commodification of things, recognizing that ephemeral, fleeting, disposable things are just as unstable as the non-things we swipe away. The book is overall a call to pay attention, to ourselves and to the world.

Reading notes

De-caring

The impulse to doomscroll is a kind of vigilance to danger: we know, instinctively, that trouble is near, and so like the hare aware of a fox nearby, we look and listen with all our senses. But unlike the fox, the stream never tires even as we tremble with exhaustion, unable to look away.

Crises are moments of intense unpredictability. A crisis is, by definition, a rupture with the recent past, making any projection of the likely future a fool’s game. Screens promise to relieve the discomfort this brings about: the unending stream, the servile virtual assistant, the fully optimized day—all are designed to make things predictable, to resolve the anxiety of not knowing what could happen next. But what is lost when we soothe that anxiety, instead of attending to it?

Artificial intelligence is currently busy completely de-caring human existence by optimizing life and doing away with the future as a source of care, that is, by overcoming the future’s contingency. If we have a predictable future in the form of an optimized present, we need not care.

Han, Non-things, page 4

This is not an accident; the intent of these tools is to anesthetize the users, to control them by controlling their entire interface with the world. The obsequious personalities are a saccharine cover for a takeover: when you can’t read or think or act on your own, but must ask the bot to do it for you, you are not free. Freedom requires uncertainty.