The Mediated Self

• In Event: Searching for the Human: Technology, Democracy, and the Politics of Modernity

Abstract

This paper frames technology as a loss of sovereignty. I focus on three kinds of sovereignty: political sovereignty, or the ability of the democratic sovereign to rule without impediments; epistemic sovereignty, or the ability of individuals to control their understanding of their own environment; and sovereignty over self, or the ability to control one’s future. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and David Grewal, I argue that 1) technology undermines all three kinds of sovereignty, 2) liberal democracies need all three kinds of sovereignty, and 3) contemporary approaches to the question of technology neglect the challenge that this tension poses. I then defend the formation of spaces of non-technological socialization as an assertion of popular sovereignty — that is, as an assertion of “ancient freedom” in a domain where “modern freedom” fails us. Technology, I argue, represents a force so fundamental to our collective interactions, to the nature of our public square, and to the social fabric in which we all participate, that political communities qua political communities must address its implications beyond individual choices.

Author

• Mathis Bitton