The Ethos of Digital Environments; Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy; First Edition

While self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems have received a great deal of attention in media and research, the general requirements of ethical life in today’s digitalizing reality have not been made sufficiently visible and evaluable. This collection of articles from both distinguished and emerging authors working at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory, media, and technology does not intend to fix new moral rules. Instead, the volume explores the ethos of digital environments, asking how we can orient ourselves in them and inviting us to renewed moral reflection in the face of dilemmas they entail. The authors show how contemporary digital technologies model our perception, narration as well as our conceptions of truth, and investigate the ethical, moral, and juridical consequences of making public and societal infrastructures computational. They argue that we must make the structures of the digital environments visible and learn to care for them. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction: From Solving Mechanical Dilemmas to Taking Care of Digital Ecology Should a Self-driving Car PART I: Digital Ecologies Today 1. Three Species Challenges: Toward a General Ecology of Cognitive Assemblages PART II: The Ethos: Description and Formation 2. Viral Storytelling as Contemporary Narrative Didacticism: Deriving Universal Truths from Arbitrary Narratives of Personal Experience 3. Authorship vs. Assemblage in Digital Media 4. The Logic of Selection and Poetics of Cultural Interfaces: A Literature of Full Automation? 5. Ghosts Beyond the Machine: “Schizoid Nondroids” and Fictions of Surveillance Capitalism PART III: The Ethos: Entanglement and Delegation 6. The Zombies of the Digital: What Justice Should We Wait For? 7. Just Machines. On Algorithmic Ethos and Justice 8. Automation: Between Factuality and Normativity 9. How Agents Lost their Cognitive Capacities within the Computational Evolution of Market Competition 10. Thinking about Google Search As #DigitalColonialism PART IV: The Ethos: Thinking, Computing, and Ethics 11. The Light of Morality and the Light of the Machine 12. What Do We Call “Thinking” in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Moral Machines? 13. Can a Machine Have a Soul? 14. The Chiasm: Thinking Things and Thinging Thoughts. Our Being with Technology Index