There is a worryingly heroic aspect to Heidegger’s notion of standing in a situation, grasping the nettle and taking responsibility for the self and world one finds oneself thrown into, which is questionable at best. But it is important that the ethical imperative he develops out of the condition of thrownness, which is built around the idea of fallingness from being, is not necessarily a redemptive one. The ins and outs of this ethics are for another chapter; for now what is important is that from a phenomenological perspective there is no point in trying to regain any kind of lost innocence associated with the pre-digital world, or in trying to attain a purer kind of being-in-the-world less contaminated by data. Fallingness and the alienation that goes along with it is a given; it is not just our default mode of experience but ontologically foundational. And that is what makes it possible to think of the kinds of states we often associate with digital media use – distraction, impatience, banal curiosity, affect-chasing – as starting points, not aberrations. Rather than accepting whatever compromised present we are served with, this simply means that there is no original sin for which we have to make amends. The ethics of digital media is not about atoning for what it has done to us, but about recognizing that the digital has always been within us, and we have always been within it. It is probably easier to think of the ethics of mutual constitutivity in the realm of relations between human subjects, and Emmanuel Levinas has been put to good use (see especially Pinchevski 2005a) in showing how ethics consists in the brute fact of co-existence, and not the intimate or attentive relations with specific others that may develop over time. Clemens and Nash similarly deploy Gilbert Simondon’s (2017 [1958]) model of the pre-individual6 to illustrate that individuation is anything but the emergence of discrete being: individuals exist in a perpetual, generative state of mutual transduction, and the same can be said of humans and their environments. The debate goes on about whether digital ontology is categorically novel, but the meaning of digital ethics is not built on shakier, more tainted ground than anything that came before. This is why arguments based on the intractability and unknowability of data, while useful framing devices, can only take us so far – the radical contingencies of the already-there world have always been constitutive of collective being-in-the-world and individual subjectivity in ways that cannot be made the objects of direct consciousness. They are, however, ready-to-hand, and their doing discloses a world of possibilities as well as strictures.
How then are we to think critically about digital life? There are countless concrete phenomena that demand to be called out as unethical: discriminatory usage of health data in the insurance industry, the prevention of the use of non-proprietary software and of autonomous infrastructural maintenance, the rolling out of AI-driven identification algorithms as non-optional standards, data surveillance carried out across ever-expanding parts of everyday life. These might all be said to revolve around notions of rights, consent or autonomy, but what do these terms mean in a digital world? The approach taken here is to reject any rarefied, abstract definitions against which we will necessarily be found wanting – there is nothing relativistic in claiming that such ethical terms have always emerged in media res, through and not in spite of the compromised, constraining environments in which they make sense. Digital ethics can only be meaningful to the extent that it originates from the mess of daily digital life, rather than being imposed on it from outside – hence the absurdity of reducing data consent to discrete acts of agreeing to a website’s terms and conditions. It is possible that consenting to the corporate collection of one’s data needs to be rethought in a more media ecological way – that is, as pertaining to the way we move through digital environments rather than what we know and think about this or that platform. This is hardly new: the proposition that ethical habits do not have to start from clear-headed decisions goes back at least as far as William James (2017 [1887]).
Autonomy in the digital age is a minefield because it is often conflated with choice. It is a basic phenomenological tenet that constraint is a necessary condition of subjectivity, not its preclusion – and yet there is something palpably unfair about a farmer locked out by software from the means to repair a tractor, or a dating app that constricts my ability to express my gender and sexual preference. Meanwhile there are familiar, longstanding theses about how there is little to be said for individual choice when all it does is outsource regimes of governmentality, or when the choices we are encouraged to make are so tawdry. The motives behind the constraint of consumer behaviour on a social media platform are a less promising ethical route than first appears to be the case. It seems intuitively appealing to expose the profit-seeking or surveillance motives that really explain the form and function of the digital environments we spend time in, but as with consent, awareness is not the route to autonomy when the latter is embodied and practical. It has been demonstrated (Devine 2015) that most users of music streaming services are completely unaware that the environmental footprint of this form of music consumption is far greater than with legacy media forms like the compact disc or cassette, and yet news stories about the topic gained no traction at all. If conscious awareness does not provide a viable basis for establishing the implications of our digital media habits, then current conceptions of media literacy may have to be rebuilt around the practical, manual knowledge of tool use. Kittler (1990) is quick to remind us that the belief that computers are mere tools at our disposal is a myth, that of homo faber.7 We are made through tool use as much as we make things with it, but this is not at all the same as arguing that we are the tools of technology. Mutual constitutivity is just that – mutual – and this shines a light on the far-reaching implications and possibilities of practical political concerns.
Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp’s influential book The Mediated Construction of Reality (2017) tackles the key question that arises from the existential grounding of digital media. In short, on what basis can we assess, critique and resist the influence of particular media organizations, and the digital industries collectively, on the rapidly changing parameters of everyday life? It is not enough to show that change is occurring, or even that it is happening without our awareness or consent. Instead, Couldry and Hepp foreground subjective losses, ways of being social that once gone cannot be remembered or reclaimed. In one sense this is inevitable: we cannot know genuinely what it was like to exist in relation to others a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. But the acceleration of change – and, they maintain, the way the structures underpinning the experience of daily life are being reshaped towards commercial and surveilling ends – means that it is imperative we take stock of what we stand to lose. There is a level of nuance here that is comparable to José van Dijck’s The Culture of Connectivity (2013): the question is not so much whether we now enjoy less privacy, but what privacy now means, and how that apprehension of privacy became normal and with what consequences.8 Such a line of inquiry does not imply that we have become less social or less authentic in our relations to each other – as Simmel (1971: 133, in Couldry and Hepp 2017: 4) puts it, there has always been an artificiality to the sociability that we work hard at sustaining in order to feel authentically human together. This collective work is society’s care structure, and it is far from a futile endeavour (Scannell 2014; cf. Bourdieu 1994); it provides not only comfort but also the grounding of empathy and solidarity. Simmel’s insight shows us that there is an eternal tension between our always fluid sense of who we are and the changing frameworks in which we enact sociability.
Couldry and Hepp’s thesis goes well beyond the nostrum that we have forgotten how to be social in the age of digital media. In fact most people are very good at it, adopting and adapting to new forms of sociality so that they feel endogenous. Rather, their thesis is that the functional units of collective social