The essence of technology

Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. It’s infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world storable and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal ‘they’ whom we never meet and cannot locate. Dreyfus was writing in 2001: since then, the internet has become even more intrusive and so ubiquitous that we can hardly find an angle from which to think it through: it is the very atmosphere that many of breathe all day. Yes surely we ought to be thinking about it — about what sort of beings we are or want to be in our online lives, and what sort of Being we have, or want to be.

Sarah Bakewell