“The hand acts” [Die Hand handelt]: such is its essence, according to Martin Heidegger.1 However, Heidegger does not understand action in terms of vita activa. Rather, the “properly acting hand” is “the writing hand.”2 In other words, its essence does not manifest itself as a manual operation [Handlung] but in manuscript form—as handwriting. For Heidegger, the hand is the medium of “Being,” the wellspring of meaning and truth. The writing hand communicates with “Being.” The typewriter, which involves only fingertips, draws us away from Being:
The typewriter veils the essence of writing and of the script. It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man’s experiencing this withdrawal appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.3
The typewriter leads to manual atrophy, the deterioration of the writing hand. Indeed, it entails the oblivion of Being. Undoubtedly, Heidegger would have said that the digital apparatus only worsens such atrophy.
Heidegger’s hand thinks instead of acting: “Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.”4 Thinking is handi-craft. It follows that the manual atrophy produced by digital technology is making thought itself deteriorate. It is interesting to note how Heidegger removes the hand from the sphere of action and situates it in relation to thought. Its essence is not ethos but logos. Heidegger conceives logos in terms of a farmer, a grower, picking out what has ripened—a hand that “reads” [lesende Hand eines Bauern]: “Without this gathering, without a gleaning in the sense in which wheat or grapes are gleaned, we should never be able to read a single word.”5 As such, Heidegger presents logos as the bearing of a peasant or farmer. It is a matter of cultivating, plowing, and tilling language like the soil—communicating with the earth, which conceals and hides itself away, and encountering its incalculability and depth. The farmer’s task is to hearken to the earth [auf die Erde hören] by paying it heed and obeying [gehorchen]:
If hearing, in the sense of hearkening and obedience, does not immediately concern the ears, this is so because there is something peculiar about hearing and the ears. … We have ears so we may hear heedingly and, in so hearkening, hear the song of the earth, its trembling and quaking, which remains untouched by the enormous racket that humankind sometimes makes on its worn-out [vernutzt] surface.6
Heidegger’s world of “earth and sky, mortals and divinities” is also the world of the peasant or farmer. As a “mortal,” man is not one who acts [ein Handelnder]. Human being lacks the natality of a new beginning. Heidegger also conceives God as a deity of peasants, who hark and pay heed. God has a seat in the “altar corner” [Herrgottswinkel] of the “farmhouse in the Black Forest,” thanks to “the dwelling of peasants” [bäuerliches Wohnen].7 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger describes the shoes painted by Vincent Van Gogh as those of a peasant. This amounts to a transfiguration of the agrarian world:
From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. … The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field.8
Today, instead of that raw wind over the field, a digital storm is blowing through the world—the Net. The hurricanes of the digital make Heideggerian “dwelling” impossible. The “earth” of Heidegger’s fieldworker is diametrically opposed to the digital. Heideggerian earth embodies the “essentially undisclosable” and “essentially self-secluding.”9 In contrast, the digital produces the compulsion for transparency. The earth escapes all transparency. Its seclusion is fundamentally alien to information. By nature, information is something that either lies open or is supposed to lie open. The imperative of the society of transparency holds: everything must lie open, ready and available for everyone. Transparency is the essence of information: this is the way [Gangart] of the digital medium.
Heidegger’s “truth” loves to hide. It does not simply lie there, available. First, it must be “torn” from “concealment.” The negativity of “concealment” dwells within the truth as its “heart.”10 In its very essence, negativity belongs to truth, which is surrounded by the concealed as a forest clearing is surrounded by dark woods. In contrast, information lacks the inner space, the interiority, that would permit it to withdraw or conceal itself. No heart beats within it, Heidegger would say. Pure positivity—pure exteriority—is what defines information.
Information is cumulative and additive, whereas truth is exclusive and selective. In contrast to information, it does not accumulate like snow. One does not encounter it in drifts. There is no such thing as a mass of truth. In contrast, masses of information abound. But without negativity, the positive massifies. Information also differs from knowledge because of its positivity. Knowledge does not simply lie at the ready. One cannot just find it out there, as one can information. As a rule, lengthy experience precedes it. Its temporality is wholly different from the temporality of information, which is extremely short and short-term. Moreover, information is explicit, whereas knowledge often assumes an implicit form.
Earth, God, and truth belong to the world of the farmer. Today, we are no longer cultivate the soil; we hunt. Tracking prey, information hunters scour the Net like a digital game preserve. In contrast to fieldworkers, they are mobile. There is no farmland that they must settle. They do not dwell. During the machine age, people still had the habitus of peasants insofar as they were tied to a new master—the machine. The machine forced them to function passively. The worker would always return to the machine, like a vassal to his lord; the machine occupied the center of his world. But the digital medium has brought about a new topology of labor. Here, the digital worker stands at the center. Or more precisely, a middle no longer exists. Instead, the user and the digital apparatus form a unit. The hunters of today do not function passively, as parts of a machine; they operate actively with their mobile, digital devices—the equivalent of Paleolithic hunters’ spears, bows, and arrows. In so doing, however, they encounter no danger, for the hunt for information occurs by means of a mouse. This is what distinguishes them from Paleolithic hunters.
Power and information do not get along. Power likes to veil itself in secrecy. It invents the truth to enthrone and inaugurate itself. Power, like secrecy, is marked by interiority. In contrast, the digital medium is deinteriorizing. Instances of power strike information hunters as barriers blocking information. That is why they adopt the strategy of transparency.
Mass media such as radio create a power dynamic. Listeners are passive, at the mercy of a voice. Hereby, communication is one-sided. Asymmetrical communication of this kind is not communication in the proper sense. It is like a proclamation, an annunciation. That is why mass media have an affinity for power and rule. Power pushes asymmetrical communication forward: the higher the degree of asymmetry, the greater the power. In contrast, digital media generate a genuinely communicative relation—that is, symmetrical communication. The receiver of information is simultaneously its sender. It is difficult to set up relations of power in symmetrical spaces of communication.
According to Vilém Flusser, the media hurricanes of our day are forcing us to become nomads again. Yet nomads are herders. They do not have the mentality of hunters. In fact, the line separating the past from the present does not run between settlers and nomads but between hunters and farmers. Today, even peasants act like hunters. Bearings such as “patience,” “renunciation,” “diffidence,” “reserve,” and Gelassenheit define Heidegger’s farmer, but they do not belong to the ways of the hunter. Information hunters are impatient and unabashed. They lurk instead of “waiting.” They “go for it” instead of letting things ripen. The aim is to capture prey with every click. Their temporality is total presence. Anything blocking the view is to be removed, and right away. The word for this panoramic view of the digital game preserve is transparency. Transparency society is inhabited by hunters and gatherers—of information.
Digital information hunters go on the prowl with Google Glass. These data eyepieces have replaced the spears, bows, and arrows of Paleolithic hunters. Google Glass connects the human eye directly to the Internet. Its wearer sees all, as it were. The device is inaugurating the age of total information. Google Glass is not a tool—not Heideggerian “equipment” that is “ready-to-hand”—for one does not take it in hand. The cellular phone—Handy, in German—might still count as a tool. But Google Glass gets so close to us that we perceive it as part of our body. It completes the society of information by making Being and information fall into one: if something is not information, it is not. Human perception achieves total efficiency thanks to digital optics. Prey is seized not just with a click but with every look. Seeing the world and grasping the world coincide. Google Glass totalizes the hunter’s way of seeing, which disregards everything that offers up no prey—that is, information. And yet, the real joy of the senses, including sight, is a matter of inefficiency. It means casting a gaze that lingers among the things of this world without preying on them.