2028 – Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (essay documentary 2015)

A Film by Isabella Gresser

An Essay Documentary Film narrated by and featuring Korean-German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han talks about the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Burnout Society’. He raises the question of how we want to live today, and uncovers the underlying themes of an achievement-oriented digital society.

Read more by Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books) available on libgen.is (YT)

interview with Byung-Chul Han

interview by art review with Byung-Chul Han

review in LARB of Burnout Society

Without reading none of his celebrated books, I still have a big reluctance of what I regard a well-qualified but still blatantly anti-technological stance that Byung-Chul Han professes. To me, that smells too much of Martin Heidegger and too little of Marshall MacLuhan. There is also the feeling that there is too much convergence with the current (fully digitized) mindfulness. In a sense ‘smart’ technologies themselves offer nowadays an improved default mindfulness setting, as if in agreement with what Zizek once called a ‘decaffeinated’ version, a new sort of Decaf Reality. Mindfulness apps abound. Remains to be seen if these are just adjustments on the go – another sign that there is more and more need for what is perceived as “growing disillusionment” with future prospects and what feels more and more like a ‘labor camp’ type Googlag working environment. Tang ping is another term that is being coined completely independent from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of post-Fordist malaise, but has a lot in common with his ideas about the current threadmill.

I also think that Byung-Chul Han’s emphasis on Panopticon is still much too imprecise and tributary to Foucault’s own predilection for early modern examples, so it risks (in my mind) missing out on the current shift of digital governance from Foucalt’s older ‘panopticon’ to the (particularly in China but also Gaza Strip/Israel) new model of ‘panspectron’ (as highlighted by Gabriele de Seta and Rogier Creemers.

By posting this documentary essay that I quite like, it is important on Byung-Chul Han – a star philosopher of recent years. Yes, I consider his ideas timely, zeitgeisty and appreciate very much his slide from studying metallurgy to philosophy and art theory. I also think that anything that might help slow down or throw some light on the nature of time (of Money) transformations under financial capitalism, or on the ideology of work, on the workings of ‘hustle culture’ and the gig economy, on ‘death by overwork’ (過労死, Karōshi), for qualifying the so-called Asian economic miracle as capitalist mode of hyper-production, and on paradoxical modes of incomplete, non-utilitarian, Taoist (emptiness philosophy inflected) non-productivist, non-optimized living speaks to this very moment of tiredness and widening depression. His own wanderings trough both East/West and his necrosophic musings within cemetery grounds and poetry (as seen in this documentary) brings him very close to my own orientation and others that I have been collaborating with over the years. He also makes a very cool reference to the Momo novel by Michael Ende that turns out to be one of the most precious and timely books on accelerationism or today’s burnout society.

Special thanks to Felix P for sharing the books of Byung-Chul Han and especially this documentary.

1851 – books mentioned in the Coded Bias documentary

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

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