Beyond Digital Escapism

At least two discourses remain powerful in contemporary Northern and Western societies and live in parallel in our academic institutions. The “Geos” discourse of the Anthropocene, supported by the system sciences, warns against the unprecedented magnitude of human activity and the resulting ecological damage. The “Bios” discourse of the Digital Revolution, fuelled by technoscience and industry, imagines wonderful new and virtual worlds. Some—the European Commission, for example—believe in the happy marriage of these two discourses, imagining a twin digital and green transition to sustainability. In these times, what duties should we attend to as public intellectuals? I argue for the importance of hope. Respecting the scientific fact of limits to growth, however, false hopes should be rejected. To the extent that hope has to be connected to an idea of progress, it would be seen to lie in other domains than those of material consumption, wealth or power. Hope should be sought in the moral and spiritual domains, counter-acting polarization, greed and violence by finding, showing and walking avenues to connectedness, love and compassion with the humans and other living beings of our beautiful planet. Recalling that information and communication technologies are technologies, the question would then not so much be whether they can be described as part of the human environment, but if and how they can be employed along such avenues, in service to the beings of the real world.