Our Post-modern Vanity: the Cult of Efficiency and the Regress to the Boundary of the Animal World

Abstract

This essay argues that through a new and radical relationship with digital technologies that are oriented towards networking and automaticity, humans have become estranged from what philosopher Arnold Gehlen termed the ‘circle of action’ (handlungskreis) that expressed our ancient adaptation to tool use and constituted the basis for our capacity for reflective consciousness. The objectification of the material and analogue relationship that enabled humans to ‘act’ upon the world and to construct the basis for our collective endeavours, this paper shows, is beginning to redirect the social orientation that tool use enabled, back to a form of individualism I term a ‘post-modern vanity’. Comput..