Harvard Review of Philosophy Lecture: Babette Babich (Fordham University), "Günther Anders’ 'Promethean Shame': Technological Ressentiment and Surveillance"

Abstract: Gunther Anders’ philosophy of technology, particularly his complex notion of ‘Promethean Shame,’ or technological ressentiment, may be brought to bear on surveillance and questions of AI ethics. A hermeneutic phenomenologist in the lineage of his teachers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Anders was also one of the original members of the Frankfurt School. As a critical philosopher of technology, radically so, his emphasis on the negative or downside of technology distinguishes Anders’ thinking on technology from the future-focussed and mainstream accounts of technological messianism. Key to Anders’ notion of ‘Promethean shame’ was his observation that we affectively adapt or suit ourselves to our technology, not the other way around.  Provocatively, Anders argued that where the populace in the past — he was referring to Nazi Germany — required the techniques of mass psychology for the purposes of manipulation and control, we today do this work on ourselves, in our own time, in our own space, using devices and subscriptions we pay for.  As we ‘do this to ourselves,’ we actively ‘program’ ourselves in an ongoing digital practice, constantly and in real-time, providing, all by ourselves, the means for our own surveillance.