Posthumanism, open ontologies and bio-digital becoming: Response to Luciano Floridi’s Onlife Manifesto

Abstract

In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era Luciano Floridi and his associates examine various aspects of the contemporary meaning of humanity. Yet, their insights give less thought to the political economy of techno-capitalism that in large measure creates ICTs and leads to their further innovation, development and commercialization. This article responses to Floridi’s work and examines political economy of the blurred distinction between human, machine and nature in the postdigital context. Taking lessons from early history of the Internet across the Eastern and the Western Bloc, it examines ideological underpinnings of development of information and communication technologies. The paper points towards the postdigital challenge of the rising importance of biological sciences, their mutual connection with information sciences, and the society at large. It introduces the concept of bio-informational capitalism, and closely examines the relationships between biology and information. Based on authors’ previous works the chapter introduces the concepts of homo economicus and homo collaborans, and claims that their mutual differences do not make a case for a dualist philosophy—instead, the two concepts should be understood as opposite poles of a continuum. However, it shows that the biological challenge is not a mere continuation of our existing (research) questions, and that it introduces new postdigital ways of understanding our reality. In conclusion, the chapter calls for developing a new, postdigital language of inquiry, which reinvents the digital challenge and invents its relationship to biology.