Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

In an increasingly digitized society, digital artifacts are progressively replacing non-digital mediums across many aspects of man’s life. In a literal sense, digital artifacts are more permanent, everlasting, and durable than their non-digital counterparts. So long as any one of the hundreds of servers a file is uploaded to exists, the file will be preserved. A file can be copied indefinitely without a loss in fidelity, whereas an original physical volume, photograph, painting, or film is constantly in a state of decay. But in their reproducibility, editability, and format of presentation, digital artifacts lack formal stability and are not resistant to use or change. They are thus phenomenally and formally impermanent. For Hannah Arendt’s framework as posited in The Human Condition, the kind of durability, stability, and permanence that mankind depends on to share a common world is impossible in a world governed by digital artifacts.

To Arendt, man’s existence in “reality” relies on his coming into contact with the individual perspectives of others. These are essential to life because they are part of what constitutes “reality” as the intersubjective space in which we act, speak, and appear to each other. Arendt’s “reality” depends on the presence of a plurality of simultaneously appearing individual perspectives upon a shared common object. And a common object grounding appearance can only exist if it is durable and stable. In this reality, man enters a common world shared with others.

For men to share a common world where they can appear to each other as individuals, it must be the case that their perspectives are “always concerned with the same object,” because “if the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least of all the unnatural conformism of a mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world.” Without a common object in the public realm, among which men relate and against which they separate themselves, individuals are deprived of a common world. Without a common world, other beings do not appear to an individual, and thus one is alone with their perspective. In this state, without a world, one cannot and does not distinguish himself from others, and one’s individuality is defined merely by the necessities that sustain his life. However, in the presence of a common object, a multitude of perspectives are possible (58). Like it were a table at which men sit, the same object is a common ground allowing men to relate to each other and distinguish themselves. This is the public realm of appearances.

The common object sits between individuals as the space by which they can separate themselves from each other. The common object of the public realm requires durability, stability, and relative permanence. In its durability, the common object of the public realm acts as a table around which men appear to each other. Durability ensures a common object can persist over time and act as a “stage of appearance” upon which men are recognized, remembered, and seen by others. In its “stability and solidity without which it could not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature which is man,” the durable, stable, and permanent object creates the human artifice (136).. Arendt states, “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced” (95).

Conversely, the private sphere is defined in contrast to the public—where the public is the space of appearances, reality, individualization, and relation to others, the private sphere, in its purest sense, is the space where individuals meet the human preconditions for appearing in the public sphere, i.e., biological necessities. In Ancient Rome, man once felt sheltered by the private realm to achieve and sustain the preconditions that enabled him to appear in the public space. The roles and affairs that belonged to the private and public realms were delineated sharply. In Ancient Greece, where it was seen as primarily a privation of appearance, the private realm was defined as a negation of the public realm. The difference between Rome and Greece is the concept of property, which is apparent in Roman thought; hence, the private realm is defined in positive terms: as a shelter. However, in both, the public and private each served clear and distinct functions.

Only when man encounters a multitude of perspectives on a common object does he enter reality. Without a common object, there is no aboutness, no intentionality of men’s perspectives beyond what they share in biological necessities and the social norms borne out of them. And from these social norms and biological necessities that all men share, man cannot individualize or separate himself from other men. In social norms and biological necessities, there exists a standard of measurement, a common denominator that unites and “answers” these objects. In other words, even if multiple perspectives are possible regarding social norms and biological necessities, there is normativity about these perspectives—the perspectives are not meaningful in themselves, but only in relation to which perspective matches the standard.

The loss of a common object in the public sphere means the dismantling of the distinction between the public and private spheres. Without a common object in the public sphere against which men individualize and differentiate themselves, man turns inward to the private sphere in search of a space where he can appear and distinguish himself as an individual. This searching makes the objects of the private — i.e., the responsibilities of biological necessity — visible and collapses the separation of mutually exclusive activities once delegated to the public and private spheres. What was once the private sphere — a privation of individuality and a temporary refuge from reality, i.e., the world, as in the Greek world — is now the only space in which individuals can seek individuality and a separation from others. The biological necessities that dominate the private realm become the social norms by which individuals relate to one another and comport themselves. As such, the private realm becomes visible. The collapse or flattening out of the private and public spheres gives rise to a blurry, undifferentiated sphere where men cannot individualize or share a world. This space is the social.

The world-alienated social, functioning as a flattened, indistinguishable, conformed mass, lacks the meaningful plurality of the public sphere. Individuals are inseparable from each other, convention, and biological necessity. From the rise of the social, biological processes and man’s sustenance predominate and structure human appearance. Without a stable, durable, common world for man to inhabit, life is subsumed under the cyclic, unending stream of monotonous recurrence.

Digital artifacts fail to fulfill the role of the common object by virtue of their transient nature and their presentation through algorithmic structures. Despite their resistance to normativity, in that there is no standard or instrumentality by which these artifacts are judged, the instability and disposable nature of these artifacts mean they cannot facilitate the development of common sense or support a common world. Their lack of permanence in how, if, and when they appear to men is a privation of their ability to possess the world-supportive quality of a common object that anchors the public realm.

In the algorithmic presentation of content to users, objects of relation and separation are quantified and hierarchized. Through algorithmically designed arenas of interaction, users are world-isolated through the fragmentation of spaces in which they appear, spaces in which users appear to each other by virtue of the alignment of their perspectives. Individual distinction is largely determined by a calculus imposed upon them by a force external to their space of appearance. Further, this calculus acts as an unstable, ever-changing force that violently destroys any semblance of permanence that may appear to the user. The objects that center interaction are presented to users and subsequently seized from them by algorithmic processes, consequently engendering withdrawn and obscured modes of interaction.

Should one, through this algorithmic process, be inspired to create anew something that may transcend the impermanence and calculatedness of this digital, procedurally-governed public space, one must withdraw from this space. Since the fundamental structure of this digital space is one of process, consumption, and transience, one’s creation will exist within this framework and

appear to others according to it, i.e., the algorithmic procedural process. Instead of the space of appearance being co-constituted by actors appearing to each other among a common object, it is mediated and ordered by an external system that determines what is visible, to whom, and under what conditions.

Should one, through this algorithmic process, be inspired to create anew something within this space, their creation will exist as an object liable to edits, reproduction, erasure, manipulation, and mutilation. Rather than entering a shared and lasting reality, these creations are absorbed into ongoing processes of circulation and consumption, where they function as transient elements within a system rather than as durable points of reference for plurality.

By rising out of biological life, man creates a story. He is mortal insofar as he separates himself as an individual from nature and other men and, as such, is limited by a beginning and an end. In man’s distinction and individualization from others, he is defined not by his status as an instantiation of his species, but by his speech and actions that separate him from his species. Without separating himself from his species through speech and action, an individual is a stage in the indefatigable natural cyclical movement of the species. Like in the animal world, each being is merely a part of the species, and their life entirely consists of the biological processes by which they are bound. For two reasons, each being’s life has no beginning nor end: (1) in that each being is merely a part of their species, beings’ births and deaths are but occurrences or instances in the recurrent cycle of nature; and (2) stories are necessarily narrativized and require speech and action. Speech and action are what interrupt biological processes and make life narratable. Only in the presence of others are one’s actions able to be gathered, recounted, and recognized. And only in language can one’s stories be retold and made intelligible. And only in a durable, public sphere can a story endure and be interpreted as meaningful by those to whom it appears.

Despite speech’s and action’s abilities to proliferate in the digital medium, actors within the medium are unable to interpret stories as meaningful, and the medium itself is not equipped to support or preserve stories. Words, deeds, and narratives are swept up into continuous flows of transient information that are continuously displaced, erased, or recontextualized. Users, confined to their algorithmically generated homogenous spaces, are fed morsels, each unrelated to any other. While the content of these morsels may be a story, and one may encounter and witness stories of other individuals, one does not have the stable, permanent, durable human artifice that characterizes the public space and that can offer context and buttress the story so that one might interpret meaning from it.

No longer sharing a world means men no longer appear to each other as common men. In the anonymity of the digital space, man does not disclose himself to other men and thus does not appear to them. Though all speech and action reveal an individual’s unique personal identity, the disconnection between an individual and his respective digital user profiles renders speech and actions performed through these user profiles not necessarily his. Man encounters other men in these digital spaces through the intermediary of his user profile and is thus obscured in his appearance. The spaces themselves are transient, and man’s actions in these spaces are relatively impermanent, editable, and abandonable. Users’ appearances in these spaces are deliberate, rehearsable, and reflectable, and as such, one’s appearance in digital spaces is willful and purposeful (179). Thus, users’ appearances are dissimilar to the daimon in Greek religion. One’s daimon is only visible to others, being that it looks over one’s shoulder. True disclosure of who one is is like that of the daimon.

Like society, ruled by the social, digital spaces preclude action, in that “society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to 'normalize' its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement” (40). By virtue of obscuring one’s activity through digital user profiles, unrehearsed spontaneity — i.e., the miracle of beginning — is structurally inhibited, and only through unrehearsed spontaneity does one disclose oneself to others. One’s behavior and activity are nearly always visible to them in digital spaces by way of their activity being mediated by their digital user profile. As such, one’s daimon does not appear to others, as others are presented with the user profile, not the actor who controls it. Such a space cannot be public, as it is constituted not by individuals or even beings appearing in the space but by expressions of convention and “mere talk,” i.e., simply material for circulation and consumption. Further, unrehearsed spontaneity that may appear in this space is absorbed and destroyed in this space, as the framework within which the miracle of beginning may be expressed is inherently designed such that nothing is durable or permanent or stable. What remains is not a public realm of action but a socially regulated space of behavior in which human activity persists without achieving the reality, permanence, or meaning that arises only when individuals act in concert within a common world. In the absence of action, there is no appearance; and where nothing appears, there is no world.

Work Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.