The Dark Side of Achievement Culture in Digital Times
Byung-Chul Han paints a troubling picture of the impact the pressure to achieve and monetize life online leads to isolation.
We’re used to living in a digital world where our private and public lives collapse into social media feeds. Posting moments that were intimate in the early 2000s is second-nature to us now.
But one writer wrote a philosophy essay that sold quite well in 2013. In the Swarm describes the changes digital life has brought to our public square and the way we conduct ourselves. Byung-Chul Han opens with this observation:
“Respect forms the foundation for the public, or civil, sphere. When the former weakens, the latter collapses. The decline of civil society and a mounting lack of respect are mutually conditioning. Among other things, civil society requires respectfully looking away from what is private.”
It was a prescient description of the cancelling driven by social media in the mid to late 2010s. Rather than tolerating dissent like a functional open society, social media users would get an individual to trend and suffer consequences in real life. The offenses depended on the organizing group, but the real-life backlash was the same.
Cancelling was a new iteration of an old impulse to expel dissidents rather than accommodate them.
Information vs. Truth
One of the worst cultural mistakes we make is confusing the information we have available online with the truth we may perceive in one sliver of that information. Han draws an important line between information and truth:
“Information is cumulative and additive, whereas truth is exclusive and selective. In contrast to information, it does not accumulate like snow. One does not encounter it in drifts. There is no such thing as a mass of truth. In contrast, masses of information abound.”
It’s hard to read that and not think of the most passionate followers on social media. It’s one thing to like a podcaster or influencer, but many people seem to enjoy becoming tribal over their favorite online figures’ opinions.
For example, conspiracy theorists who bury their audiences in unanswered questions and anomalies convince their followers that they have discovered some unsettling truth. All they’ve done instead is overload their audiences with facts that sound bad together, but lead them about as far from any truth as they can be led.
Why Do We Hate Each Other?
Social media was originally pitched as somewhere to make positive connections with others. The state of Facebook, TikTok, X, and other platforms has long disproven that thesis. Social media is a great place for targeted outrage and skewed worldviews, but it’s not the kind of platform a healthy society can be built on.
Han ends one of his chapters with a searing indictment of a perpetually online society full of individuals competing to post the most impressive — and monetizable — achievements:
“Contemporary society is not a world of ‘Love thy neighbor,’ where we all realize ourselves in concert. Instead, it is an achievement society that enforces isolation. The achievement subject exploits itself until it collapses. It develops autoaggressive traits. Often enough, they lead to suicide. As a beautiful project, the self turns out to be a projectile that it now turns on itself.”
Anyone who reads In the Swarm will run across a lot of this kind of wordplay. But readers will also hear ideas that they may have felt but haven’t had words for. In the Swarm is a deceptively short book with food for thought on almost every page. It sounds trite, but 12 years later, Han’s book still holds up.