The verb for history is to act [Handeln]. Hannah Arendt understands it as the capacity to make a new beginning, initium.1 Action means performing a deed that inaugurates something unprecedented, something wholly other. Natality, being born, provides its ontological condition. Every birth promises a radical beginning. Likewise, acting means making a new start, opening up another world.2 In view of the automatic processes to which the world is subject, action amounts to a “miracle.”3 It is a wondrous “capacity … bestow[ing] upon human affairs faith and hope.”4 The soteriological dimension of action, Arendt observes, “perhaps found its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”5
Is action, in the strong sense, still possible today? Isn’t everything we do so fully at the mercy of automatic processes that even the miracle of a radical new beginning can no longer break their hold? Are we still subjects making decisions for ourselves? Haven’t the digital and capitalist machines formed an uncanny alliance that annihilates all freedom of action? Aren’t we living, today, in a time of the undead, when not just being born but even dying has been rendered impossible? Natality stands at the foundation of political thought, whereas mortality represents the stark fact that first sparks metaphysical thinking. Viewed in this light, our digital age of the undead is neither political nor metaphysical. Rather, it is postpolitical and postmetaphysical. Bare life—that is, life that is to be prolonged at any cost—knows neither birth nor death. The time of the digital is a postnatal and postmortal era.
Vilém Flusser, in a prophetic declaration, claimed that today’s human being, equipped with digital apparatuses, is already living the “immaterial life” [undingliches Leben] of tomorrow. “Manual atrophy” characterizes such an existence. Digital technology is making human hands waste away. For Flusser, this is a happy event: it means liberation from the burden of matter. In the future, he claims, humankind will no longer need hands. The new man will no longer have to handle or work on anything: he will have truck not with thingly things but only with unthingly information. Fingers will take the place of hands. The new man will finger instead of handling—or acting—and seek only play and enjoyment. Leisure, not work, will define his existence. In the immaterial future, the human being will not be defined by as a worker, Homo faber, but as a player—Homo ludens.6
The “handless, fingering human being” of the future—Homo digitalis—will not be a man of action. “Manual atrophy” amounts to the inability to handle anything at all. Handling things and working with them presuppose something that resists. Action must overcome resistance inasmuch as it pits what is new or other against the standing order. Action is animated by negation: the pro it sets forth is also a contra. But now, our society of positivity is steering clear of everything that offers resistance. In so doing, it is doing away with actions. In their stead, only varying conditions of the same prevail.
The digital realm provides no material resistance that could be surmounted by work. In this regard, work is, in fact, approaching play; more and more, it resembles a game. However, and counter to what Flusser envisions, immaterial, digital life is not inaugurating a time of leisure and ease. Flusser fails to note the principle of performance, which undoes the connection between working and playing. The performance principle removes the ludic element and turns it back into labor. Now, players dope and exploit themselves until they are destroyed. The digital age is a time not of leisure but of performance and achievement. Counter to Flusser’s dream, “handless, fingering man” does not mean Homo ludens. Playing the game amounts to yoking oneself to the compulsion to perform optimally and achieve maximally. Manual atrophy is followed by digital arthritis. In fact, the utopia of play and leisure yields a dystopia of achievement and exploitation.
Leisure begins where work ceases entirely. The time of leisure is a separate time. The neoliberal imperative to perform transforms time into working hours [Arbeitszeit]. It totalizes a belabored temporality. Breaks represent only a phase of the working day. Today, we know time only as time for working. And so this temporality follows us not only on vacation but even when we sleep. That is why we are sleeping so fitfully. Exhausted achievement-subjects can rest only in the same way that a leg falls asleep. Even relaxation amounts to a mode of labor: it occurs to regenerate working power. Recreation is not the other of work but its product. So-called deceleration cannot generate any other time, either. It is also a consequence, a reflex, of the accelerating working day. It only slows down time for work—instead of changing it into another kind of temporality.
Even though we now are free from the machines that enslaved and exploited people during the industrial age, digital apparatuses are installing new constraints, new slavery. Because of their mobility, they make possible exploitation that proves even more efficient by transforming every space into a workplace—and all time into working hours. The freedom of movement is switching over into a fatal compulsion to work everywhere. During the machine age, working time could be held in check and separated from periods of not working, if only because the machines could not move or be moved. One had to go to work on one’s own; this space was distinct from where work did not occur. Today, however, this distinction no longer holds in many professions. Digital devices have mobilized work itself. The workplace is turning into a portable labor camp from which there is no escape.
The smartphone promises more freedom, but it radiates a fatal compulsion—the compulsion to communicate. Now an almost obsessive, compulsive relationship to digital devices prevails. Here, too, freedom is switching over into compulsion and constraint. Social networks magnify such compulsion to communicate on a massive scale. More communication means more capital. In turn, the accelerated circulation of communication and information leads to the accelerated circulation of capital.
The word digital points to the finger (digitus). Above all, the finger counts. Digital culture is based on the counting finger. In contrast, history means recounting. It is not a matter of counting, which represents a posthistorical category. Neither information nor tweets yield a whole, an account. A timeline does not recount the story of a life, either; it provides no biography. Timelines are additive, not narrative. Digital man fingers the world, in that he is always counting and calculating. The digital absolutizes numbers and counting. More than anything, friends on Facebook are counted. Yet real friendship is an account, a narrative. The digital age is totalizing addition, counting, and the countable. Even affection and attachments get counted—as likes. The narrative dimension is losing meaning on a massive scale. Today, everything is rendered countable so that it can be transformed into the language of performance and efficiency. As such, whatever resists being counted ceases to be.