Being Human in the Info-World

A Review of Byung-Chul Han’s Non-Things

As a result, the unique situatedness and contingency of bodily life, which includes the tangible resistance and friction of real things, are “being replaced by the digital order,” Han laments, and “we no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud.”

Han is on to something. While of course we still live on the physical earth (at least for now!), our experience of reality is increasingly mediated to us through screens, devices, artificial intelligence software, and more. Google Earth gives us all-seeing eyes. We see our house from above, we map out our routes, avoid traffic, and obey the comforting voice dictating our every turn. We save all our files and pictures, not as tangible possessions, but on faraway servers in the form of ones and zeros incomprehensible in magnitude and which can only be decoded by proper digital devices, which in turn are also run by conglomerations of ones and zeros.

Google Earth and cloud computing are modern marvels to be sure. But they also carry with them an insidious underbelly that Han shocks us into seeing with his poetic yet punchy style that makes truth hit with more force. Non-Things provides a provocative picture of what happens when our things—and we ourselves—are turned into terminals for data and information.

The Rise of Infomatons

Han explains how physical things, and even our physical bodies, are being colonized by drives for information, data, and total availability. My smartphone stands always at the ready, serving my every whim, and even suggesting to me what my heart desires—all the while sucking up information about me like a pond leech stuck to my leg.

And then, worst of all, the leech comes to know more about me than I know about myself. Yet it is not only smart phones and computers, it is also automobiles:

the car of the future will no longer be a thing that is associated with fantasies of power and possession, but a mobile “center for the distribution of information,” that is, an infomaton that communicates with us.

Han puts this term infomaton to multiple uses throughout the book. One way he uses it is to refer to any internet-connected device, object, app, or software program that sends and receives data for or about us. But he also employs the term to refer to us. We are the infomatons, the data portals willingly telling all on social media—liking this, commenting on that, searching here, clicking there, all while mountains of personal data are being accumulated.

It is happening to our homes, too:

in a smart home, we are not autonomous conductors. Instead, we are conducted by various actors, even invisible actors that dictate the rhythm. We expose ourselves to a panoptical gaze. A smart bed fitted with various sensors continues the surveillance even during sleep. In the name of convenience, surveillance gradually creeps into everyday life [as we] become incarcerated in the infosphere.

Even new kitchen appliances are connected to the web, tracking our use, and telling us when it’s time to buy more milk.

The internet of things (IoT, software-driven objects that connect to the internet and send and receive data) and the internet of bodies (IoB, wearable or implanted data-gathering devices like Apple Watches that make our bodies info-terminals) convert us and our things into data portals that feed the ever-growing techno-structure of modern life.

The Artificial Production of Identity & the Question of Control

But it is not just that information about us is being collected by our devices; it goes much deeper. Our use of our devices is changing us. Han goes on to unpack how living in an informatized world distorts human self-understanding. The experience of constant connectivity, control, curation, and performance fosters an unhealthy sense of autonomy and an unbounded sense of capacity for identity creation. Han writes, “Things and places have less and less influence on the formation of our own identities.” Instead, our identities are primarily produced through information. “We produce ourselves on social media….We stage ourselves. We perform our identities.”

Yet, by constantly consuming information about others and producing information about ourselves, we aren’t actually increasing human connection or closeness, but are rather keeping our relationships in a buffered state—frictionless and risk-free, at a distance, as easy as swiping left or clicking like. People become consumer products to be used or passed over, rather than unique human beings to be loved and respected.

With such ease, comfort, and control from behind a screen, why go to the trouble of forming in-person relationships? It seems so much easier and more efficient to form digital bonds. Real human interaction entails too much friction—awkward silences; making eye contact; thinking of what to say. Worse, there is the confrontation with other human bodies. Do I shake his hand, or give a side hug? Do I touch her shoulder when consoling her? What if his breath is bad? What if my deodorant has worn off, or I start to sweat? The risks are endless. Easier to just stay behind the screen.

Han argues that the sense of digital control and comfort is ultimately a “digital illusion of total availability.” Are you really in control of your online relationships and communities? Or are you controlled by them? Going down algorithmically-induced rabbit holes on YouTube and TikTok. Doomscrolling Facebook and comparing on Instagram. Who posted what, and when? How many likes did you get, or not? And how is all the information you are voluntarily providing being used?
 

Recovering Relationship

Han goes beyond critiquing digital community to offer a positive vision of in-person relationships rooted in the inimitable role of the body for being human. “Without bodily touch, no ties can emerge,” he argues. “Community has a bodily dimension. Because of its lack of corporeality, digital communication weakens community.” Such corporeality is part of the mystery of being human and part of what can never be fully duplicated technologically.

It’s not only bodily touch that matters, but also, he writes, “the gaze stabilizes community.” Online, there is no gaze, no eye-contact with an other. Han summarizes, “Digitalization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsible for the loss of empathy in the digital age.”

We must recover touch and gaze. And that requires forming and fostering in-person relationships. It is not efficient nor is it easy. But it is beautiful because it is human. And it is what we all long for, even if we don’t realize it. Digital community is disengaged from embodiment and thus always falls short. It is in the “negativity of resistance,” as Han calls it—the friction and risk inherent to interacting with real people and real things—that real relationships are forged and that robust human living is found. Here is a call to invest in personal relationships, exercise hospitality, celebrate with conviviality, and most foundationally, create families.

Critiques

Before concluding, I’ll offer a few critiques. A good number of Han’s works are variations on a theme, and some of the same concepts and neologisms find their way into multiple books. For anyone who keeps up with Han’s output of short monographs each year, they can get repetitive. It seems that themes reappear as he holds them up like diamonds to the light and discovers new dimensions worth elucidating further and as changing circumstances provoke more reflection and unpacking.

And lastly, I wish that Han would unpack his arguments further, as his wide-ranging claims could be better understood with further substantiation. He drops bombs and leaves much of the shrapnel for the reader to sort out. But brevity and punch are intentionally his style, as he explained in a recent interview: “Why do you write a 1,000-page book if you can enlighten the world in a few words?”

His books usually come in at under 100 pages and are really compilations of short essays. On the one hand, this helps make his dense writing digestible in bite-sized chunks. Yet on the other hand, further development of his ideas would help show the reader how he arrived at them. I know what Han would say to this critique, because he’s already said it in response to someone else:

A journalist once wrote that my books are getting progressively thinner, that they will at some point completely disappear. I would add that my thoughts will then permeate the air. Everyone can breathe them in.

I think we all would benefit if we breathed in some of Han’s thoughts. But to do that, it currently requires reading his books—and I wish they were longer so we could take in a deeper breath.

Despite these critiques, Han’s work potently reminds us that it is possible to live life outside the machine, where things can just be things, and people can just be people. While I hesitate to be proscriptive, perhaps Han’s picture of what is happening in our digitized info-world is jarring enough to spur us to reject certain technological advances in our personal lives, homes, and churches, and to develop strong counter-cultural habits that will form and shape us towards higher and lasting goods.

Han also shows us how the techno-structures of modern life form us in ways that are inconsistent with human flourishing—and, I would add, inconsistent with the deepest reality of the cosmos, which is the Christian story. In our digitized and informatized world, reclaiming thick forms of Christian belief and practice that incorporate our physical bodies and physical places is necessary to withstand the onslaught of the machine and to rightly live as human beings, fully alive.