The future of work in times of the “Electrical Ego” – Is unemployment becoming an expensive luxury?

Michael Stemerowicz
(Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

Abstract:
This presentation aims to look at a possible reevaluation of the concept of work in the background of Heidegger’s thought on modern technology. In recent times our world has been inconspicuously flooded by a plethora of technological devices, which are increasingly determining and shaping human everyday life. Our immersion in a digital world based on electricity has reached a point in which it has become questionable whether the devices used to access it, still qualify as mere tools and not rather as digital and electrical extensions of our self. However, every activity mediated by technological devices which are enabling us to navigate the digital realm is potentially subject to financial exploitation as it generates additional value in the form of data that can be accumulated, classified and sold. In other words, the digital world requires the electrical self to undergo a process that reduces it to a resource which may be the subject of some further utilization. Therefore, it may be argued that in the digital world the classical division between leisure and work is challenged as the self never leaves the cycle of production. Even when it is concerned purely with consumption the self is still at work as it is itself being the product. Thus, the question can be asked whether in contemporary times the attempt to withdraw from the digital world and the refusal to participate in it through modern technological devices can be considered a form of unemployment. A form of unemployment that is paradoxically becoming an expensive luxury as the possibility of withdrawal itself is becoming a product.

Michael Stemerowicz is a PhD student at the Graduate School for Social Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His academic interest focuses mainly on the philosophical discussions of questions concerning technology. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation that aims to evaluate the technological phenomena of our contemporary world on the basis of the conceptual framework of Martin Heidegger’s thought on modern technology.