The Age of the Non-Thing: Why Our Obsession with Data is Costing Us the World
1. The Silent Disappearance
In Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, the inhabitants of a nameless island suffer a quiet, relentless erasure. One day it is ribbons; the next, hats, emeralds, roses, or birds. These objects do not merely vanish; they float away like disembodied voices, and the memory of their purpose withers along with them. Today, we inhabit a similar winter of forgetfulness. We are not being robbed by a totalitarian regime, but by the “de-reifying” force of digitalization.
As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests, we are witnessing an upheaval of our “lifeworld.” The “terrestrial order”—the world of physical things that Hannah Arendt noted “have the function of stabilizing human life”—is being eclipsed by a digital order. We are transitioning from an age of things to an age of “non-things”: information and data. The world is becoming intangible, cloud-like, and ghostly. As we trade the solid, calming presence of the thing for the flickering intensity of the screen, we lose the very anchors that ground us in being.
2. We Are No Longer Owners, We Are “Infomaniacs”
Our identity is undergoing a profound shift from “possessing” to “experiencing.” In the modern sharing economy, the sedentary stability of ownership has been replaced by the frantic mobility of access. We no longer want to be tied to a specific chair or a family heirloom; we want the temporary freedom of the network. This change has turned us into “infomaniacs” and “datasexuals,” compulsively consuming information faster than we can gain insight.
Unlike physical things, which act as the “calm centers of life,” information is inherently destabilizing. It thrives on the shock of the new, the ephemeral surprise that vanishes as quickly as it appears. It lacks the “solidity of being” and instead operates on a cosmology of contingency. This constant need for stimulation keeps our cognitive systems in a state of permanent agitation, preventing us from ever truly “dwelling.”
“The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system.”
By prioritizing the “Cloud” over the earth, we lose the narrative continuity of our lives. Things allow us to retrieve our identity by relating to the same objects over time. Information, by contrast, is additive rather than narrative; it can be counted, but it can never truly be recounted as a story.
3. The Smart Home: From Conductor to Inmate
The digital utopia promised by Silicon Valley depicts the interconnected “smart home” as an “electronic orchestra” where the inhabitant acts as the “conductor.” However, Han reveals this vision to be a “smart prison.” In this environment, objects are transformed into “informatons”—information-processing actors that do not merely serve us but process us.
An informaton deprives reality of its character as “resistant” (obicere). Your car “speaks” to you; your bed monitors your pulse. They are “efficient informants” that facilitate a panoptical gaze. Most importantly, the smart home promises a life that is sine cura—carefree. But in Heidegger’s ontology, “Care” (Sorge) is the very essence of human existence (Dasein). By surrendering our care to algorithms that optimize our present and eliminate the contingency of the future, we become “carefree” at the cost of our humanity. We are no longer conductors; we are inmates of convenience, surveilled by the very tools meant to liberate us.
4. From Hands to Fingers: The Rise of Phono Sapiens
Historically, the “hand” was the organ of work and history—the tool through which the human being interacted with a resistant, material world. Heidegger argued that the hand is what allows us to “handle” reality. Today, we are witnessing the rise of phono sapiens, a “handless” human being who no longer acts, but merely chooses.
The frictionless slide of a fingertip has replaced the grip of the hand. While the hand breaks through the present to create history, the finger merely swipes to satisfy a need. This “freedom at your fingertips” is a consumerist illusion. It offers us choice (consumer selection) rather than action (political change). In this state of play, we become sedated by digital circuses, losing the power to genuinely intervene in the world. We no longer “handle” things; we only touch the smooth, unresisting surface of the non-thing.
5. Why Your Smartphone is an “Autistic Object”
It is common to view the smartphone as a “transitional object”—a digital version of a child’s teddy bear. But a true transitional object is “soft”; it is a bridge to the “Other,” fostering empathy and a dialogical space. In contrast, Han argues the digital object is “hard” and narcissistic.
The smartphone is an “autistic object.” When we manipulate it, we do not feel the world or another person; we feel only ourselves. It creates a narcissistic bubble that screens us off from the “negativity of the other.” By reifying people into digital icons that can be swiped away, the smartphone destroys the “gaze” that builds primordial trust. It turns every “You” into an “It,” trapping us in a state of hypercommunication that only deepens our loneliness.
6. The Alchemy of Silver vs. The Mathematics of Data
Analogue photography was once a “certificate of presence.” It was an “ectoplasm,” a mysterious alchemy where light reflected from a loved body was preserved in silver grains. As a fragile thing, the analogue photo ages and decays; it is a medium of mourning and, as Roland Barthes suggested, a “prophecy of the glorious body.”
The digital selfie, however, is a non-thing characterized by “exhibition value” and a hollow “digital cheerfulness.” It lacks the “aura” and “melancholic beauty” of the portrait because it is not a secret to be kept, but a message to be shared and then deleted.
“Photography… has something to do with resurrection.”
Where the analogue photograph was a “That-has-been” truth—a monument to a singular encounter—the selfie is mere information. It transforms the human countenance into a commodity, stripping it of its history and replacing it with a standardized, hyper-real mask.
7. Artificial Intelligence: Fast Computing, Zero Heart
Artificial Intelligence may compute at lightning speeds, but it is incapable of “thinking.” Thinking is a decidedly analogue process that requires “pathos,” “mood,” and a “fundamental attunement” to the world. Thinking begins with “goosebumps”—an emotional being-gripped that AI can never experience.
AI is “event-blind.” It learns from the past to compute a probable future, but it cannot experience the “negativity of rupture” that allows for a genuinely new beginning. Furthermore, AI is “too intelligent” to achieve the “idiocy” that Gilles Deleuze identified as the prerequisite for philosophy. The “idiot” is the one who bids farewell to all pre-given facts to leap into the “altogether other.” AI merely continues the “Same” through more efficient computation. It has zero heart because it has no access to the “divination” and “heartfelt knowing” that measure the spaces of the human soul.
8. Conclusion: The Saving Power of Stillness
The “upheaval in the lifeworld” has left us in a world poor in silence and “otherness.” To recover our humanity, we must rediscover “things close to the heart”—those ritualistic anchors that give life rhythm.
Consider the jukebox, an object Han reflects upon with deep affection. Unlike the bodiless sound of a digital stream, the jukebox is a “counter-body.” It possesses “thing-noises”—the rattle of the mechanism, the buzzing of the record changer, the “roaring sound” of the valve amplifier. It creates a site, a gravitational center that gathers people and imparts “presentness” to the ordinary.
Rituals are to time what things are to space; they are “time architectures” that make life inhabitable. In a world of rushing information, we need the “saving power” of stillness and the “magic” of objects that do not simply function, but exist.
In a world where everything is available at a swipe, what have we lost that can only be found in the slow, resistant, and silent presence of a thing?