Non-Things (Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld)
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 think because it cannot get goosebumps and the argument that AI is de-caring human existence by optimizing the future into an assured present.
The Material Substrate of Information — Contrarian ^ Opus
There is a parallel reading that begins from the server farms humming in Oregon, the rare earth mines in Congo, the assembly lines in Shenzhen. Han's distinction between things and non-things dissolves when we follow the actual path of what he calls "pure information." Every AI response requires kilowatts of electricity, every smartphone interaction depends on lithium batteries that workers extract from salt flats, every "non-thing" exists only because massive material infrastructures make it possible. The hand that swipes the screen may not feel the weight of these systems, but the workers maintaining the data centers feel it in their bodies, the communities near mining operations feel it in their poisoned water.
The real transformation is not from things to non-things but from visible to hidden materiality. The AI assistant appears weightless precisely because its weight has been displaced — to the global supply chains that produce the chips, to the energy grids that power the computation, to the content moderators in Manila who clean the training data. Han mourns the loss of the pitcher that gathers world and earth, but the smartphone gathers its own world: cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, assembly in China, software from California, data from everywhere. It is not that things have been replaced by non-things; it is that the ruling classes of the Global North have successfully externalized the thingness of their things. The goosebumps Han misses are still there — on the arms of the gig worker waiting for the next algorithmic assignment, on the skin of the child laborer in the cobalt mine. The order of non-things is the achievement of a political economy that has learned to make its violence immaterial to those who benefit from it.
In the AI Story
The argument draws on Heidegger's late meditations on the thing — the pitcher, the bridge, the farmhouse — as gathering points where world, earth, sky, and mortality meet. Heidegger's claim, which Han extends, is that things are not merely objects. They are organizing presences. They focus human life around practices — cooking, dwelling, crossing — that give time its texture and space its meaning. The replacement of things by non-things is not a neutral substitution. It is the loss of the organizing presences around which human life takes shape.
Han's extension to AI is specific. The AI assistant is a non-thing par excellence. It has no body. It has no history. It does not age. Its outputs — generated text, predicted code, synthesized images — are themselves non-things: information artifacts that exist without material resistance, without the wound of production, without the capacity to be touched or to mark the maker who made them. The worker who builds with AI is building with non-things, and the building itself is increasingly a non-thing.
The argument connects to Han's earlier analysis of smoothness: non-things are smooth by structural necessity. They have no seams because they have no material construction. The smoothness of the AI-generated artifact is not a design achievement; it is the signature of the absence of the friction that would have been present if the artifact had been made from matter by a being with stakes.
The book is also the source of Han's most developed account of de-caring. When the future has been converted into an optimized present, care becomes unnecessary. Why worry about what will happen when the system has already determined what will happen? The de-caring sounds like relief. Locally, it is. Collectively, it is the elimination of the conditions that make human life meaningful: the uncertainty that makes choices matter, the finite time that makes presence precious, the unknown future that gives the present its weight.
Origin
Undinge: Umbrüche der Lebenswelt was published in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic — a period in which the digitization of ordinary life accelerated dramatically and the consequences for embodied experience became impossible to ignore. The English translation by Daniel Steuer appeared in 2022.
The book is shorter than much of Han's earlier work and more lyrical in tone, structured as a series of short meditations on specific phenomena: hands, the smartphone, selfies, AI, silence. Each meditation returns to the central thesis: the order of things is being replaced by the order of non-things, and the replacement is not neutral.
Key Ideas
Things resist; non-things do not. The physical object has weight and history; the information artifact has neither.
AI as non-thing. The AI assistant is the paradigmatic non-thing — present without being, responsive without being affected.
De-caring human existence. Optimization eliminates the uncertainty that makes care necessary and therefore eliminates the weight of human presence.
Goosebumps as signature of things. The capacity to be affected is the capacity to encounter things as things; it cannot be generated by information.
The smartphone is not a thing. It is a portal to non-things, and the hand that holds it is increasingly shaped by the non-things it serves.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Scales of Material Encounter — Arbitrator ^ Opus
The tension between Han's phenomenology and the materialist critique resolves differently at different scales of analysis. At the scale of immediate experience — the question of what it feels like to interact with digital interfaces versus physical objects — Han's framework captures something essential (90% weight). The smartphone really does lack the resistance of the hammer, the AI-generated image really does arrive without the struggle of painting. The phenomenological poverty he diagnoses is real and consequential for human development.
At the scale of infrastructure and political economy, the materialist reading dominates (80% weight). Every non-thing requires massive material substrates, and Han's framework risks obscuring these dependencies. Yet even here, Han offers something the pure materialist account misses: the specific quality of alienation when materiality is systematically hidden. It's not just that the smartphone depends on lithium mining; it's that this dependency is structurally invisible to the user, creating a particular form of false consciousness that previous technologies did not produce.
The synthetic frame might be: we are experiencing a redistribution rather than an elimination of thingness. The material resistance that once organized individual life has been displaced to systemic levels — felt collectively in climate change, supply chain disruptions, energy limits — while disappearing from personal experience. This creates a dangerous gap: those who most need to feel the weight of things (consumers in the Global North) experience weightlessness, while those who bear the actual weight (workers in the Global South) have no power to change the system. Han is right that this is a crisis of the lifeworld; the materialists are right that it's also a crisis of political economy. The task is to make the hidden weight visible again.
Further reading
- Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Polity Press, 2022).
- Martin Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper Perennial, 2001).
- Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
- Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2016).