WORK
Non-Things
Han's 2021 book diagnosing the digital replacement of the order of things — tangible, durable, embodied objects — with a world of information flows in which human thinking will adapt to it and itself become mechanical.
Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Undinge, 2021) is Han's most sustained engagement with digital and artificial intelligence as ontological transformations rather than merely technological novelties. The book's central claim is that the digital order is replacing the order of things. Things — tangible, durable, embodied objects — grounded human existence by providing resistance, persistence, and the specific weight of the material. Non-things — information flows, data, digital experiences — are smooth, available, and finally incapable of supporting the forms of dwelling, care, and contemplation that things had historically sustained. The book's most cited line states the diagnosis in its sharpest form: Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason it cannot get goosebumps.
