Andreas Vlach

The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble, and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. A more stressed society will be less able to resist distractions. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

These conditions can obviously manifest themselves in contexts far removed from online forums and social media. But a simulation of the experience of power, understood as the collapse of the space between impulse and act, may be more generalized in online environments where a forgetfulness of the body is also a default setting.

The interval of hesit

In his work ‘On the Meaning of Life’ (1927), Schlick writes: ‘[T]he deification of work as such, the great gospel of our industrial age, has been exposed as idolatry.’ He argues that true meaning in life can be found only in those things that ‘exist for their own sake and carry their satisfaction in themselves,’ only in ‘free, purposeless action …