This was the first book in Jared Henderson’s book club, and I benefitted from having already this one. Here are my rough impressions.

This is the only Byung-Chul Han I’ve read, but I feel I now know what to expect from any of his works. He seems to have a lot to say, but he doesn’t really argue for anything or defend his points. He just kind of vibes and riffs on ideas from various philosophers in an idiosyncratic, poetic style that seems to delight in turning common words and phrases on their heads. When you are on his wavelength, vibing with him, so to speak, he’s great fun to read. But if you’re not already kind of there, he’s not going to be able to persuade you or help you see his point of view. It’s just vibes all the way down.

To be clear, his writing can be intriguing and evocative. Try

The handless human beings of the future use only their fingers.

for an example from the first chapter.

Things and non-things

Han’s central idea is that while we produce more physical stuff than ever, it’s taking a backseat to digital information, which he calls “non-things”, in a way that has destabilising effects on our psyche, memory, and freedom. In the opening chapter, he asserts that physical things provide stability, a sense of narrative and extended temporality, and give us the freedom to act via their use as tools. On the other hand, non-things give us informational chaos, a disjointed sense of time, and only freedom in the sense of choice and play. That is the sense of the above quote — we are free to tap away at choices with our fingers in a manner that feels like play, but not free to use our hands to create and act. He calls these playing handless humans Homo ludens, and our current stage, Phono sapiens, is a step along this path.

There’s much that feels truthy in that basic premise. We do spend a lot more of our time concerned with “non-things” on our screens than physical things around us. But it’s very difficult to pin Han down on details. For example, there is a sense in which digital information is highly stable, and can be highly organised rather than chaotic. What he seems to be concerned about then here is not digital information per se, but more to do with the designs of particular applications and the business models of their proprietors and the way this information comes to us in the form of content, and is extracted from us in the form of personal data.

I do think this opening chapter is strong (by which I essentially mean, I vibe with him) when it comes to the temporality of these digital apps and the kind of subjects they construct. Here are some quotes (all emphasis his, he loves a bit of emphasis):

When bits of information come in quick succession, we have no time for truth. […] Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding and commitment are all time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics.

and

Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. […] Lingering on things in contemplation […] gives way to the hunt for information. […] In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.

While Han is talking about a form of life rather than a feeling, I certainly relate to this at the level of feeling. When I get sucked into content machine — when I cannot stand stillness and must always have something in front of my eyes or in my ears — it is profoundly unsettling.

Possessions

I’m also more or less with Han in the second chapter, which is on “Possession”. Here he discusses ideas related to the idea of possessing physical things. In his view, to possess something is not merely to own it, but to have made memories with it, thus becoming a thing “close to [your] heart” with an “intense libidinal tie”. However, possession in this sense, being of the “paradigm of the thing” (“thing” perhaps best read with a capital T, here), has been supplanted. We now want experiences and novelty. He claims that we now seek “things” for their “informational content” — through marketing, branding, and cultural cache, things now arrive with their own emotional content rather than the emotional bonds we build with things organically.

Today’s consumer goods are indiscreet, intrusive and over-expressive. They come loaded with prefabricated ideas and emotions that impose themselves on the consumer. Hardly anything of the consumer’s life enters into them.

It’s clear here he’s juxtaposing “things” with informational non-things here as in chapter one, but the sense of “information” has changed. He isn’t talking about digital information when he talks about the informational content of commodities — he’s talking about cultural information like brand recognition. This is again one of those things that makes Han hard to pin down and come to terms with. He is not fully consistent with definitions. Especially as a few paragraphs later, he’s back to contrasting things with digital information:

An e-book is not a thing, but information; […] Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. The book has no age, place, craft or owner. […] One cannot have, for instance, a personal copy of an e-book. […] E-books are faceless and without history. They may be read without the use of the hands.

Smartphones and selfies

In the next two chapters, Han is curmugeonly about phones, and digital photographs.

Han really doesn’t like digital photography, especially selfies and other photographs that are used primarily as a messaging format rather than as art. That is the only take-away from the chapter about digital photography.

Han on AI

This chapter was actually interesting, once I understood what he was trying to say. He references Heidegger a lot here (whom I have not read). For Heidegger, the ability to generate concepts depend on our moods and dispositions.

Before capturing the world in concepts, thinking is emotionally gripped.

Han liberally uses the term “fundamental attunement” without explaining what it means (thanks, Han), but from what I can gather, a fundamental attunement is a basic emotional core that informs your entire worldview. An example might be depression or anxiety. If I am anxious, this will inform where my attention is drawn, which will inform the kinds of concepts and thoughts I am capable of constructing.

The world disclosed in a fundamental attunement is subsequently articulated in terms of concepts. Being gripped precedes comprehension, the work on the formation of concepts. […] Such being gripped however is possible only from out of and within a fundamental attunement […] “All essential thinking demands that its thoughts and utterances be newly extracted each time, like an ore, out of the basic disposition.”

But so Han’s argument goes (and this is probably the closest he gets to a substantial argument in the book!), since AI has no fundamental attunement, is incapable of attention, and incapable of forming thoughts and concepts. Hence, AI will never be intelligent. AI might be able to remix pre-existing facts given to it, but without the raw, essentially emotional, experience of being in the world, it can never generate new facts:

The affective totality that is given with a fundamental attunement is the analogue dimension of thinking that cannot be represented by artificial intelligence.

and

… artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking because it cannot access the totality that is thinking’s point of departure.

In his most poetic articulation:

Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps.

Views on things

This is the longest chapter, and also perhaps the most frustrating and meandering. It starts off with a section on the “Villainy of Things”, in which he seems to argue that things have lost their menace. We (apparently) used to imagine that things had a life and mind of their own, that when they presented a danger to us, it was because they were villainous. But no more

We are no longer maltreated by things. They are not destructive. The sting has been taken out of them.

The examples he gives are old slapstick comedies and cartoons, in which things take on the form of “infernal contraptions” and cause all kinds of mischief.

Doors, chairs, folding beds or vehicles can at any time turn into dangerous objects and traps. There are constant crashes. They are a permanent source of frustration.

Now things are portrayed as obedient. I will admit, this is something I have noticed in a lot of the media my eldest child watches. So many shows such as Paw Patrol, Firebuds, Go Jetters, Mojo Swaptops, and Octonauts portray technology and artifacts as perfectly obedient, making everything effortless and operating more-or-less flawlessly. In these shows, it is always technology that saves the day. In Firebuds, one of the characters can literally conjure new physical structures by using an app on his tablet, and the vehicles move like gymnasts, not like physical objects at all. In Han’s words:

In this way, children are fed the idea that there is nothing that cannot be done, that there is a quick solution, an app, for everything and that life itself is nothing but a series of problems to be solved.

What is frustrating about this section though is that it seems to contradict some of his previous feelings toward things. Things are supposed to be objects of stability and comfort, now he’s missing the days when they were perceived as agents of chaos and destruction?

He goes on, lamenting, essentially, that we no longer perceive things as being alive and having their own wills.

They no longer represent a counterpart to humans. They are not opposing bodies. Who, today, feels looked at, or spoken to, by things? Who perceives the countenances of things? Who detects a living physiognony in things? To whom do things appear to have a soul? Who suspects that things have lives of their own? […] Do today’s children still tiptoe around dimly lit rooms, their hearts pounding. while tables, wardrobes and curtains pull wild faces at them?

To which I can only reply “I don’t know dude, did you try asking any?” I have no idea whether what he’s talking about is a real phenomenon, or whether, like, Han is just an adult now and has noticed that he and the people he knows no longer imagine that things have faces! As I say: if you’re not vibing with him, he seems to be talking nonsense.

But then he goes on to say more that I do vibe with.

Today’s world is very poor in gaze and voice. It neither looks at nor speaks to us. The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality. [The other, as a secret, as a faze, as a vooice, disappears. The other, deprived of otherness, is reduced to an available, consumable object.

He then links this lack of other — essentially loneliness — to the spread of depression. Not an original observation, perhaps, but he does frame it in some interesting ways:

Because it makes everything gapless, digital communication destroys both nearness and distance. The relation to the other requires distance. Distance ensures that the Thou is not reduced to an It. In the age of gaplessness, relation gives way to contact without distance.

But all this is mixed into a confusing, rambling chapter that seems to present no central thesis. We’re just back and forth through different ideas he seems to find interesting.

Stillness

As the book begins to wind down, we’re back to his thoughts on temporality, and how the fragmented fast-paced information we encounter every day is destroying stillness.

Stillness emanates from what is unavailable. What is not available stabilizes and deepens our attention; it brings forth a contemplative gaze.

Remember, for Han, availability is the overarching “good” of the information age.

Stillness is alien to information […] Information steals the silence by imposing itself on us and demanding our attention. Stillness is a phenomenon of attentiveness. Stillness is created only by deep attentiveness. Information, however, dissects attention.

Again, I do not find it clear here what is meant by “information”. All information? Or just the historically contingent form of information that arrives to us via “smart” gadgets? A library is packed with information. Yet the information therein could hardly be described as “stealing the silence” or as lacking “stillness”.

And yet, there can be no doubt, we are losing stillness. Endless feeds and streams of content, our attention never having to linger too long on any one thing.

Final thoughts

Anyway, perhaps this was a rambling post, mostly just getting some feelings out of my head. But maybe that’s because it’s a rambling book, that just kind of poetically meanders through different topics, rarely landing on an idea long enough to thorough dissect, argue, or explain it. I suppose it was an interesting text to kickstart a year of reading about technology because it touches on so many things. Truth, privacy, communication, loneliness, attention, artificial intelligence, stability… whether he lands on sound (or even coherent) points on these topics is one thing… but there’s no doubt that these are the anxieties of our age when it comes to our relationship with technology.