Introduction: Lost Unity, Generous Reward
摘要
This book argues that the digital revolution is not merely a technical, economic, or social phenomenon. Digitalization—comprising digitization (the uniform encoding of all things), universal access to data, and the digital management of human affairs (standardized tools that shape our actions and increasingly automate our decisions)—also operates at an anthropological level: the emergence of procedural man. Chapters 2–4 examine how we are entering this new language: “arithmos.” The next four chapters trace the origins of the paradigm of our combinatory society; it emerges from the collapse of the differentiation that once defined logos-based societies, in which clear lines separated truth from falsehood, good from evil, public from private, accessible from inaccessible, nature from culture, ruler from ruled, and God from man. Chapters 9 to 11 address a central question: Does arithmos dismantle the symbolization that mythos and then logos had established? Understanding symbolization requires a deeper insight into the relationship between being-with-others and being-oneself, that is, how political organization and individual psyches interact. This inquiry is crucial, as digitalization is ushering in a new psycho-social structure.