Finished reading: Infocracy by Byung-Chul Han 📚

Well, this is a fun and timely book. Calling on old favourites McLuhan, Habermas, Plato et al, Han charts the end of politics through the accelerationism of a digitally-mediated public realm where feelings and the sensorium has structurally vanquished slower, older forms of researched and consensually-derived knowledge. A series of chapters each address stages of this, from the impact on the individual, the nature of discourse, how we understand truth and its position in time, to the political and spectacular, ending on Trump and COVID conspiracy theories. Inevitably with Han there feels judgement throughout, (perhaps this is the German to English translation) though while tracing the route from pre-digital existence to the now, the sense of inevitable determinism pushes us through. It is not a work that dwells on alternatives, rather brings up the consequences of where we find ourselves.