Our Times

Along these lines, one recalls, too, Arendt’s warning in the prologue to The Human Condition: “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it w

Other drugs that are not considered to be harmful and are used regularly—caffeine, for example—are accepted as enjoyable accoutrements to life, as helping us get along with, or at the very least bear, our daily tasks. Social media is not just accepted—it’s also seen as something functionally beneficial, something that not only supports but also ena

the self is no longer a subject but a project . The self is something to be optimised, to be maximised, to be made efficient, cultivated for its capacity for productive output. The worry is that all life activities become viewed as lines on a résumé. Knowingly or otherwise, we risk being constantly governed by the question How is what I’m doing rig

The clearest impact of technology on teen development to date has been starkly negative. According to psychologist Jean Twenge’s 2017 book, iGen, smartphone use has caused a spike in depression and anxiety among people born from 1995 on, and a diminution in sociability and independence. An excerpt of her book in The Atlantic was aptly titled, “Have

We of the age of the machines,” Henry Beston wrote in the 1920s,

“having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhap

Was in anderen medialen Zeiten ein John F. Kennedy, eine Mutter Teresa, ein Nelson Mandela oder in Frankreich Simone Weil waren - anerkannt über die politischen Lager hinweg -, solch eine Person wäre heute Ansporn und Auftrag für die digitalen Hassfabriken der ganzen Welt.