Digital technology increasingly teaches us to see human life as a store of value: measurable, calculable, and ready for market. This is true for all of us.
Freya India points out that girls often commodify themselves as products, whether on Instagram or dating apps. OnlyFans is not a huge step forward from what already existed before it. And all of this is voluntary, encouraged, and framed as entrepreneurial. Men likewise see themselves as a commodity, a human resource. In fact, around 60% of Gen Z want to be influencers, according to a 2023 Morning Consult study.
We are all products, commodities. Digital technology thus not only trains us to see ourselves and the world around us as standing-reserve ordered for economic gain; it increasingly makes us the product of exploitation itself.
We become the product.
Martin Heidegger began to see this late in his career. In his “The Question Concerning Technology,” he spoke of how technology’s essence lies in enframing. This enframing structures how the world presences itself to us, and how we eventually see ourselves as just one more resource ready at hand to be exploited.
Yet this latter observation would be taken up by one of Heidegger’s spiritual disciples, Byung-Chul Han. For Han, enframing serves as one reason why a young girl would value herself as a commodity, or why a young man would see his worth by the size of his paycheck.
“Enframing,” explains John Richardson, “is the most refined and perfected ability to presence things; it does so by settling them precisely within the scientific and technological schemata.” He continues, “We take for granted that everything is what it is just as it is determined by science’s considered account of it, and by its functional role in our organization of things. Each of us defers to those larger, social schemata, and through them participates in their ultimate presencing of things.”
Heidegger is concerned about how our basic mood towards the world changes how it becomes present to us. In ways similar to Hannah Arendt in her The Human Condition, Heidegger sees a changing world around us as something that truly changes us. Both get there by different paths. But a similar point remains: The way we enframe the world, both by setting it in order and by scientifically describing it, changes how the world shows up for us.
Mary Midgley called this the myth of science. Since scientific description works well in physics, we assume that this level of certainty can be applied to all spheres of life; and since it “works,” we assume that this mode of reasoning really does answer all of our questions.
For example, Heidegger points out that while the Rhine River may have powered trade over the years, older technology adapted to the shape and power intrinsic to the river. A bridge crossed the river; it did not reorder it. Modern hydropower, by contrast, structures itself over the river and stores its energy as electricity. The river is challenged forth (Herausfordern) to yield power. It now appears primarily as a standing-reserve of energy.
That stored energy can then be released for further exploitation of resources, through power drills or machinery that requires electricity to extract value from the earth. The change here is not merely one of scale. It is a change in ordering. Modern technology orders nature in advance, determining how it must presence itself before any particular use takes place. Earlier techniques, by contrast, often had to conform themselves to natural power in order to work properly. Just think of the windmill.
The way in which we order nature around us, store its energy, and summon resources from the earth through stored power (for example, electricity) changes not only the scope of modern technology but also how we see the world. A mountain is a huge obstacle—until it is something we can blast through. A river is powerful—until we harness its force, count its power in units (watts), store its energy in batteries, unleash it in oil extraction, or redirect that same stored power toward tanks and war. Power becomes an abstract thing, a unity of supply, stored, and not something that naturally lies around us, as part of our way of being in the world.
None of this is new per se, but the way in which we see natural resources is new. We increasingly see everything as a resource that stands by to be used, ordered, and exploited. We even call employees Human Resources. Workers appear as standing-reserve, ready to be summoned and deployed to set things in order for corporate use.
This is the kind of thing Heidegger points out in his essay on technology. But what makes his argument compelling is not a historical thesis; we can always challenge historical narratives. Rather, his argument is that the essence of modern technology lies in enframing (Gestell), a term that describes not what something is, but how it presences itself to us at all.
He already saw that using the Rhine in order to produce power changed how it became present to us. But then we even create tourist guides to the river that describe the same sort of enframing. It becomes all-enframing.
Thus, the essence of modern technology, according to Heidegger, lies in enframing. This ordering of all things for use changes how objects are presenced to us—and how we are presenced to ourselves.
And further, Heidegger points out that modern technology cannot be neutral, not merely because of how we use it, but because it is a mode of revealing (Entbergen). Technology discloses the world to us in a particular way, determining in advance how things can appear as meaningful. Modern technology, through its mode of calculation, reveals the world as things to be counted, used, and exploited for economic ends. But that is not always how the world has presented itself to us.
For any reader of Byung-Chul Han, resonances should already ring in their ears. Han borrows Heidegger’s definition of Being and Stimmung (mood), although with his own twists. He sees something akin to enframing happening in the digital age. In his 2022 work Non-things, for example, Han spends a considerable amount of time interpreting Heidegger.
For Han, thinking precedes concepts. It flows from “Being in its totality” and an affective medium, called mood. Being, for Han, often refers to the way we are in the world and the way things become meaningful to us. Additionally, our mood or attunement to the world is a cause or underlying reason for our thinking.
But if we lose our basic attunement to the world as it used to be and substitute it for a world of digital information that lacks stability and otherness, then, Han thinks, the world discloses itself to us in ways approximate to the digital. “The human being, as ‘Dasein’,” explains Han, “is always already thrown into a specific world [bestimmte Welt]. The world as a totality is pre-reflexively disclosed to humans. Dasein, as being-attuned, precedes being-aware.”
And our attunement to this digital age makes us like the information we handle. The smartphone, for example, means that we have “the world firmly in my grip” and it “has to accord with my desires.” This total availability of all things, all of the time in the way we want all of the time, turns us towards ourselves. We become narcissistic as a rule. This inward-focus means we turn away from others and the concrete things of life. Information as a non-thing captures our imagination, makes us see the world as a standing reserve, ready for our frictionless use.
We also participate in the digital economy. As Byung-Chul Han explains in his Burnout Society, we are exploiters and exploited at one and the same time. We are entrepreneurs of ourselves; our fuel is soul; our product is flesh. OnlyFans illustrates one way in which some young women are enframed by our technological age. Our flesh becomes a stand-reserve, ready to be exploited for gain.
But this logic extends well beyond such extreme cases. Social media influencers—and even ordinary users—market their lifestyles as products. We simply live this way in the digital age. We sell marriage lifestyles, travel lifestyles, BookTok lifestyles, and more besides. We host profiles on LinkedIn to market our success, experience, and life as assets, ready to be sold to companies prepared to deploy us as human resources in the service of capital production.
While the smartphone is not the only digital technology that presences the world to us in this way, it is an important one. “The smartphone,” explains Han, “is a ‘Ge-Stell,’ enframing, in Heidegger’s sense: a Gestell, the essence of technology, unites in itself all forms of placing [Stellens] that make available, such as ordering [Bestellen], presenting [Vorstellen] or producing [Herstellen].”
While Heidegger did not live to see digital technology reach this zenith of exploitation, his pattern of thinking helps us see how enframing in digital technology changes how all objects and persons are made intelligible and show up for us.
This basic insight gives us important language to criticize, and perhaps to escape, the harmful effects of this way of experiencing in the world. Knowledge is a kind of power. It is the power to see otherwise. Or in Heidegger’s words, “Questioning builds a way.”
Byung-Chul Han wrote his dissertation on Heidegger and mood (Stimmung). Han’s writings are therefore saturated with Heideggerian concerns about Being, even when this is not immediately apparent. Yet those who cite Han often fail to register this influence. (I include myself here; for years, I missed this obvious point.) They treat his observations about society as if they arise from a neutral standpoint. They do not. Han does not understand Being as one might in the Western tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Paul, and Augustine.
As a reader of Han, I am largely comfortable with this. Heidegger’s and Han’s shared focus on Stimmung (i.e., mood or attunement) does illuminate human experience. Yet a key divergence appears here. For early Heidegger, the fundamental mood is Angst, the anxiety that discloses our finitude through being-toward-death. Later, he explores other moods (e.g., boredom). For Han, the fundamental mood is friendliness (Freundlichkeit). This difference is not minor. Heidegger’s account still bears traces of Western metaphysics, even amid his critique of the tradition. Han’s alternative shows him far more at home in Zen Buddhism.
What unites them, however, is Gestell. Enframing explains why, in our technological age, we increasingly experience one another not as neighbours but as objects which are available, usable, and commodifiable. Gestell orders the world in advance so that beings appear as standing-reserve. Under this ordering, persons show up as resources to be managed rather than others to be encountered. Late-stage capitalism is not merely an economic phenomenon. It is metaphysical.
Here, we can make two important observations. First, technology’s Gestell names the dominant mode of revealing; second, stimmung names how we are attuned within that revelation. Enframing informs our moods before it shapes our arguments. We do not first choose to objectify; we find ourselves already disposed to do so. This technological ordering of reality produces characteristic moods such as anxiety, restlessness, boredom. Yet Han advocates for another mode of attunement. He proposes a cultivated friendliness meant to soften the system’s violence. This appears to be a way of salvation from our technological age. Han advances what Heidegger gestured at in his argument for salvation from Gestell.
Han’s response is to call for friendliness toward the other (and toward ourselves) not as a sentiment, but as a mood. This is a genuine insight. Yet it falters unless sin is interposed into the analysis. Han cannot accommodate this rupture. His friendliness assumes a world in which attunement can heal what is broken. I suspect Han rightly diagnoses our age’s pathologies, and he might even have discovered a saving power (the mood of friendliness). But I cannot help but see this attunement as another illusion that masks being’s disclosure.
It may be that older patterns of metaphysics give us the resources we need to more adequately find rescue from the machine. For example, Aristotle’s notion of entelechy provides another frame for consideration. If Gestell names how the world presences itself and Stimmung describes how we are attuned to this disclosure, entelechy reminds us that we are ordered toward a natural end. From this vantage, our basic attunement may share something of moods like Angst, boredom, or friendliness, but we would remain directed toward the fulfillment of our nature. On this admittedly creative reading, natural telos might function analogously to mood, not as an affective state, but as a prior orientation that shapes how the world presences itself to us
Scripture sometimes defines human telos as glory. Paul, for instance, tells us that by patience in well-doing, we should seek glory and honour (Rom 2:7). Glory here names the realized form of human life oriented toward the good. And this orientation might mean that the world shows up for us as a theatre of God’s glory, as John Calvin put it. Our mood, then, could be construed as an attunement toward glory.
Canadian philosopher George Grant recognized that human nature provides limits, limits that we may find impossible to bypass. In this general sense, we might think of glory’s disclosure as another way to conceive of what it means to live within our enframenet, or perhaps as our salvation from it. In short, by modifying concepts found in both Heidegger and Han, we might say that Gestell underlies the essence of modern technology; Stimmung names our attunement; and glory bespeaks an end toward which our lives must be ordered if we are to resist becoming merely standing-reserve.
Digital technology enframes us and our world. Digital media so pervades our lives that it changes how we understand ourselves and others. We begin to see the world as a dataset. Every object becomes a potential background for a digital photo, something we can use to promote a lifestyle brand.
At work, human resources tells us that we are resources ready at hand, to be placed within a tightly ordered economic engine. Everything is tidy, ordered, and ready for use. This is simply how the world now appears to us. It presences itself as a set of objects that can be arranged for productive gain.
By dominating nature through technique, we become the kind of person that technique can dominate. We end up seeing ourselves as a resource ready for economic exploitation. We sell our time at work in units. We see ourselves as human resources for a corporate body. Influencers become entrepreneurs of themselves, selling their own lifestyles for personal gain.
Behind this reality lies a complex set of reasons. Here, I only bring up a perspective that may show us how digital enframing hides the most important things in life from us. Further, the modernist collapse of metaphysics into physics leaves us without the resources to see the problem for what it is. Our way of living in the world as machine-humans who calculate everything makes it hard for us to cross the chasm from flesh to soul. As many have observed, modern technology resembles ancient magic. With the right formula, nature yields. Technique promises mastery through calculation, until we become as much like the machine as the machine itself is.
Heidegger helps us to see that this technological mastery makes the world show up for us in machine-like ways. We forget that we are truly human, and the tragic part is, we do not even see it. Heidegger, in this one narrow sense, helps us to explain why we see ourselves as products in the digital age. And while he is joined by a cohort of philosophers of technology (McLuhan, Ellul, Mumford, etc.), I know of only one author who integrates this perspective intentionally into an analysis of our technological age: Byung-Chul Han.