The digital turn means that we are leaving the earth—the terrestrial order—for good. But will this free us from the gravity and incalculability of the earth? Won’t digital weightlessness and fluidity plunge us into free fall? Heidegger was the last great champion of the terrestrial order: “Earth … causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction.”1 But now, the digital order is totalizing calculation, the purely additive. In contrast, the terrestrial order rests on firm foundations. Its law is called nomos:
Upon the holy lord
Of men and gods I call,
Heavenly Nomos, who arranges
The stars and sets a fair limit
Between the earth and the waters of the sea;
It is his laws
That ever preserve nature’s balance,
Obedient and steady.2
The digital order is dispelling the nomos of the earth once and for all. Carl Schmitt praised the earth for its solidity, above all, which enables clear demarcations and distinctions. The terrestrial order comprises walls, borders, and fortresses. Stable “character”—which flexible Homo digitalis lacks altogether—also belongs to the terrestrial order. The digital medium equals the “sea,” where “firm lines cannot be engraved.”3 The digital has “no character, in the original sense of the word, which comes from the Greek charassein, to engrave, to scratch, to imprint.”4
Categories such as spirit, action, thinking, and truth belong to the terrestrial order. They stand to be replaced by the categories of the digital order, where action yields to operation. Operations take place without any decision, in the strong sense of the word, having been made at all. The hesitation or wavering that enters into and constitutes action counts as an operative disturbance. It is detrimental to efficiency. Operations are actomes—atomized actions within a process that is largely automatic. They lack temporal and existential breadth.
Thinking—again, in the strong sense—is not a category of the digital, either. Today, it is giving way to calculation. Steps in a calculation follow an entirely different course than thinking; their gait, or pace, is not the same, for they have been secured against surprises, breaks, and events. Even truth seems anachronistic when compared to transparency. Truth lives from the negativity of exclusion; falsehood is posited together with it. In one and the same stroke, decision establishes what counts as true and what counts as false. Even the dichotomy of good and evil rests on this narrative structure. It is an account. Unlike truth, transparency is not narrative. Although it makes things see-through, it is not illuminating. Light, in contrast, is a narrative medium. It is directed and directing. Thus, it shows ways. The medium of transparency is lightless radiation.
Love is also tied to the negative tension of hate. It belongs to the same order as true and false, or good and evil. Negativity differentiates it from pressing the like button, which is positive—a matter of accumulation or addition. Facebook friends and “frenemies” lack the negativity that distinguishes “friend” from “enemy” as Carl Schmitt understood them. Closeness and remoteness belong to the terrestrial order, too. Digitality abolishes both in favor of crowding—that is, the simple elimination of distance. Crowding represents a positive quantity: it lacks the negativity that defines closeness. Remoteness is inscribed in nearness. Digital communication knows nothing of “the pain of the nearness of the remote.”5
Spirit awakens in view of the other. The negativity of the other is what keeps it alive. Whoever relates only to him- or herself, or remains stuck where she or he is, lacks spirit. Spirit is marked by the capacity to “endure infinite pain, the negation of its individual immediacy.”6 The positive, which strips the other of all negativity, degrades into “dead nature.”7 Only a spirit that breaks out of its “simple relation to itself”8 experiences anything. Without pain, without the negativity of the other, and with an excess of positivity instead, no experience can occur. One travels wherever one wants but without attaining experience. One counts without end, yet one can account for nothing. One sees everything, yet has no insight into anything at all. Pain—a threshold feeling when facing the other—is the medium of Spirit. Spirit is pain. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes a via dolorosa. In contrast, the phenomenology of the digital knows nothing of the dialectical pain of thinking. It might be called the Phenomenology of “Like.”