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Non-Things (Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld)
Han's 2021 book diagnosing the digital replacement of the order of things — durable, embodied objects that resist — with an order of pure information that has no depth, no history, no capacity to be touched.
Non-Things (
Undinge, 2021) is Han's most direct engagement with the digital transformation of the lifeworld. The German title plays on the double meaning of
Unding: both
non-thing (that which is not a thing) and
absurdity (that which is nonsensical). Han argues that the contemporary environment is replacing the order of things — physical objects with
weight, resistance, and history that ground human experience in a durable world — with an order of information that has none of these properties. Information does not resist. It does not age. It cannot be touched. It produces no
goosebumps. And the human being who lives in an environment saturated with non-things gradually loses the capacities that the encounter with things had cultivated: patience, embodied attention, the sense of being situated in a world that exceeds the self. The book is the source of Han's most quoted sentences about artificial intelligence, including the claim that AI cannot