Digital Ghosts, Achievement Society and Information Fatigue — On Byung Chul Han’s In The Swarm

Toward the end of Byung-Chul Han’s slim survey that describes digital culture’s underlying panoptic structure and its erosion of civil society, privacy and collectivity, he outlines the prevailing religion of our times — Big Data — by quoting a Wired article: Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to socioloy. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With…