Big Nihilism: Generation Z, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Emerging Digital Technocracy

abstract:The promise of an open cyberspace driven by an empowered generation of "digital natives" has collapsed, due to the corporate capture of the internet and the psychosocial immiseration of youngsters caused by the instrumental manipulation of them at the screen interface. Certain strands in the twentieth-century philosophy of technology can throw light on these developments in terms of (1) Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the expanding influence of 'Technik' tends toward the treatment of persons as exploitable things, or "standing reserve," and (2) Jacques Ellul's contention that humans would in time and of necessity assimilate themselves to vast and autonomous technological system. Young people are now being largely shaped by "social physics," as big data–derived fodder for the creation of a hive mind in the interests of technocratic social control and corporate profiteering.