Heidegger, Marcuse, and Ellul warned against the rise of a technological mass culture. Philosophy of technology has since turned away from such dystopic views, promoting instead the view that we shape technologies just as technologies shape us. Yet the rise of Big Data has exceeded our worst fears about Big Brother, leading us to again question whether technologies are empowering us or enslaving us. Rather than engage in endless debates about whether technologies are making us better or making us worse, Nolen Gertz investigates what we think “better” and “worse” mean, and what role this thinking has played in the creation of our technological world. This investigation is carried out by using Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism in order to explore the ways in which our values mediate how we design technologies and how we use technologies. Examining our technological practices—practices ranging from Netflix and Chill to Fitbit and Move to Twitter and Rage—reveals how our nihilism and our technologies have become intertwined, creating a world of techno-hypnosis, data-driven activity, pleasure economics, herd networking, and orgies of clicking.
Author
Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, and the author of Nihilism (MIT Press, 2019), Nihilism and Technology (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014). He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research in 2012. His research interests include applied ethics, social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics. He has written for the media analyses of military robots, humanitarian drones, and Facebook. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and on the ABC Australia website. He has been interviewed by the BBC World Service, Austrian Public Radio, Ireland’s National Independent Radio, and France’s Philosophie Magazine. He is the Coordinator of the 4TU Task Force on Risk, Safety and Security, and a Research Associate in Military Ethics at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University. He is on the Editorial Review Board for Rowman & Littlefield International’s book series Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society.
