ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

From Solving Mechanical Dilemmas to Taking Care of Digital Ecology

chapter |2 pages

Should a Self-driving Car

part 1|22 pages

Digital Ecologies Today

chapter 1|21 pages

Three Species Challenges

26Toward a General Ecology of Cognitive Assemblages

part 2|69 pages

The Ethos: Description and Formation

chapter 2|13 pages

Viral Storytelling as Contemporary Narrative Didacticism

48Deriving Universal Truths from Arbitrary Narratives of Personal Experience 1

chapter 4|21 pages

The Logic of Selection and Poetics of Cultural Interfaces

A Literature of Full Automation?

chapter 5|17 pages

Ghosts Beyond the Machine

“Schizoid Nondroids” and Fictions of Surveillance Capitalism

part 3|71 pages

The Ethos: Entanglement and Delegation

chapter 6|15 pages

The Zombies of the Digital

117What Justice Should We Wait For?

chapter 8|10 pages

Automation

Between Factuality and Normativity

part 4|65 pages

The Ethos: Thinking, Computing, and Ethics

chapter 13|19 pages

Can a Machine Have a Soul?

chapter 14|18 pages

The Chiasm

Thinking Things and Thinging Thoughts. Our Being with Technology