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I focus on —and who we are becoming—as human beings living in a hyperconnected age. These core matters of identity and selfhood are approached through both Medium Theory and the philosophical frameworks of phenomenology and Kantian and feminist ethics. Together these perspectives foreground important correlations between media usages, selfhood, and our preferred political and social arrangements. And, as indexed by changing practices and theories of “privacy”, Western societies are shifting from individual-rational notions of selfhood, as these have correlated with the emancipatory politics of democratic processes and norms, including equality—towards more relational-affective notions of selfhood. Historically, relational-affective selves correlate with non-democratic regimes and hierarchical societies. Hence a core question emerges: how far do these shifts towards more relational-affective selves imply a loss of democratic processes and norms?

I explore this question by way of recent empirical and philosophical work that suggests that individual notions of selfhood may well survive in an age of (analogue-) digital media. Nonetheless, taking Confucian models of democracy, as resting on relational notions of selfhood, as examples—the democratic norm of is threatened. I conclude by arguing that our media choices and thus the kinds of selves we thereby choose to cultivate will determine in large measure whether our future societies will be more democratic or non-democratic, and more egalitarian or non-egalitarian.

The post-Westphalian Nation State developed by becoming more and more an Information Society. However, in so doing, it progressively made itself less and less main information agent, because one of the main forces that made the Nation State possible and then predominant, as a historical driving force in human politics, namely Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), is also what is now making it less central, in the social, political and economic life of humanity across the world. ICTs enable and promote the agile, temporary and timely aggregation, disaggregation and re-aggregation of distributed () groups around shared interests across old, rigid boundaries represented by social classes, political parties, ethnicity, language barriers, physical and geographical barriers, and so forth. Similar novelties call for a serious exercise in conceptual re-engineering. We need to understand how the new informational multiagent systems may be designed in such a way as to take full advantage of the socio-political progress made so far, while being able to deal successfully with the new global challenges (from the environment to the financial markets) that are undermining the legacy of that very progress.

This chapter investigates the influences of hyper-connectivity on our society. To do this, it first shows that the analysis of social networks cannot be reduced to a study of the topology of connections, but has to take into account the social processes and their reciprocal dependences, e.g. their synchronicity or precedence relations. To approach the social dynamic, it proposes to view institutions as processors that have tasks at their disposal. Then, it draws a parallel between the states of the social dynamics and the classical classes of parallel machine architectures. In particular, it shows that the present state of the society corresponds to a grid computing architecture and not at all to a digital Agora that is SISD. After this general introduction, this paper presents three concrete examples of hyper-connectivity. The first explores the way common knowledge is built in a collaborative encyclopedia, namely Wikipedia, which greatly leverages on the properties of hyper-connectivity of the network. The second illustrates the new forms of solidarity that emerge in a networked society, with a very particular example, which is the surprising evolution of patients’ associations due to the improvements in communication technologies. Lastly, we deal with social recognition, which is the ultimate hope of humans, in a society where the abundance of information blurs the contributions and merits of all kinds. We show how the notion of digital halo, which is similar to the Benjamin’s aura, helps to approach the phenomena of social recognition in a hyper-connected world.

I focus on —and who we are becoming—as human beings living in a hyperconnected age. These core matters of identity and selfhood are approached through both Medium Theory and the philosophical frameworks of phenomenology and Kantian and feminist ethics. Together these perspectives foreground important correlations between media usages, selfhood, and our preferred political and social arrangements. And, as indexed by changing practices and theories of “privacy”, Western societies are shifting from individual-rational notions of selfhood, as these have correlated with the emancipatory politics of democratic processes and norms, including equality—towards more relational-affective notions of selfhood. Historically, relational-affective selves correlate with non-democratic regimes and hierarchical societies. Hence a core question emerges: how far do these shifts towards more relational-affective selves imply a loss of democratic processes and norms?

I explore this question by way of recent empirical and philosophical work that suggests that individual notions of selfhood may well survive in an age of (analogue-) digital media. Nonetheless, taking Confucian models of democracy, as resting on relational notions of selfhood, as examples—the democratic norm of is threatened. I conclude by arguing that our media choices and thus the kinds of selves we thereby choose to cultivate will determine in large measure whether our future societies will be more democratic or non-democratic, and more egalitarian or non-egalitarian.

The concept of “grey ecology” was introduced by P. Virilio in 2010 as a way of thinking about the by-products of the digital revolution on the human mind. Virilio argued that, just as risks and accidents are intrinsic to technological innovation, so pollution is the side effect of progress, to some extent its “normal” but unacceptable companion. While some risks of the digital era are well known (e.g. the end of privacy, state control, viral attacks, network meltdowns, data theft) and active efforts are made to reduce their occurrence and limit their effects, there is little thought about, or concern for, the effects of digital pollution. Defining pollution as the slow degradation of natural resources, this chapter suggests that, in the digital era, this concerns one of the fundamental human resources: our attention.

This chapter discusses two issues that might appear unrelated, but both call for re-engineering and re-invention. The first section describes how the digital era opens tremendous possibilities for real-time feedback, frequent polling, and even online voting for virtually anything and from anywhere. It is argued that “direct democracy” (everybody gets to vote about everything) will create chaos. Within the context of hyper-connectivity, grand challenges are discussed: (1) how to identify and engage the right stakeholders for every particular situation; (2) how to design and implement systems, which guarantee wise and fair outcomes for everybody involved; (3) how to protect the authenticity of citizens’ opinions and their anonymity; and (4) how to achieve true and not elusive equality among all citizens. It concludes with policy implications. The reflections in the second section may become more relevant within longer-range horizons than the rest of the concepts considered in this volume. Nevertheless, people alive today have been tremendously fortunate to witness a number of scientific advances (the internet, cloning, and stem cell- and nano-technologies) that have already transformed our understanding of life and lifespan to such extents to justify revision of what it means to be “alive” or “immortal” in the computational era. Different pathways to Immortality are summarized and challenges for sustainability considered. The section concludes with discussion of policy implications with respect to (1) life extension, (2) authentic participation in governance, (3) accessibility of technologies, (4) privacy in a globally connected world, and (5) the right to digital euthanasia.

The challenge to locate responsibility in ever more entangled and dynamic socio-technical environments is a key concern of the ONLIFE Manifesto. This contribution focuses specifically on responsibilities in processes of knowing, a topic which is discussed under the heading of epistemic responsibility in philosophy. I argue that two perspectives regarding epistemic responsibility should be distinguished: (1) the individualistic perspective, focusing on individuals as knowers within increasingly complex and dynamic socio-technical epistemic systems and (2) the governance perspective, focusing on the question how systems and environments should be designed so that individuals can act responsibly. Different fields of research have offered valuable insights for the development of a notion of epistemic responsibility in a hyperconnected era, most notably the fields of (social) epistemology, philosophy of computing as well as feminist theory of science and technology. From those insights, two major challenges can be deduced: (1) To acknowledge the socio-technical entanglement of knowers while at the same time striving to support responsibility assumption and attribution and (2) to be attentive to power asymmetries within entangled socio-technical environments.

This chapter examines the legal challenges of the information revolution in terms of governance, spontaneous orders, and design. An increasing set of issues, such as connectivity and availability of resources, affect the whole infrastructure and environment of current legal systems and, thus, have to be tackled at international and transnational levels. Moreover, the intricacy of these issues is often increased by the emergence of spontaneous orders and the technicalities of design mechanisms, , the principle of “privacy by design.” In light of these issues, the purpose of this chapter is to stress that governance actors, as game designers dealing with the twofold features of generative ICTs, ought to preventively understand the nature of the field in which they aim to intervene, , “Onlife,” and consider the use of self-enforcing technologies as the exception, or a last resort option, for coping with the impact of the information revolution.

This chapter describes the implications of the computational turn for the formation of publics in constitutional democracies and argues that legal protection by design should prevent the erosion of fundamental rights in the Onlife world. In the first part the notion of the computational turn is described in reference to the increasing usage of artificial intelligence in a variety of contexts, highlighting a pervasive employment of predictive analytics to pre-empt human intention. Once such ubiquitous proactive computing becomes a defining characteristic of our environment we begin to live Onlife—assembling the online world into our lifeworld. In the second part the consequences of all this are investigated with regard to the public and the private sphere, concluding that we need space and time for public performance, private exposure and opacity of the self to sustain the preconditions of constitutional democracy. Part three explains how legal protection by design, as proposed in the current version of the General Data Protection Regulation, should protect and enable a plurality of publics, a choice of exposure and places to hide from the unwarranted gaze of the other(s). This should help to articulate a new hybrid social contract in the Onlife era.

The digital transition brings us to a point where it is critical to unveil the shortcomings of the excessive centrality of the notion of control in knowledge and in action. Omniscience and omnipotence, if pushed too far, crowd out any sense of freedom, purpose and meaning, even if it is in the name of the best intentions. Hannah Arendt’s notions of natality and plurality, by anchoring human freedom in beginnings rather than in sovereignty, provide grounding for revisiting the human condition in a hyperconnected era and approaching the related ethical issues with modesty, confidence and . This operation, called “Arendtian axiomatic reset” allows reclaiming distinctions such the one between public and private or the one between agents, artefacts and nature. That renewed perspective opens a space to shape a digital literacy, which can enable flourishing life experiences in a hyperconnected era. I shall also propose to consider policy-making, not only in terms of seeking control over the future, but also in being responsive to new meanings and providing the tools to allow agents to orient themselves in the world as it evolves and live a decent life.