Samenvatting

Our age is, according to Hubert Dreyfus, characterized by technological nihilism, just as the pre-Enlightenment era was characterized by Christianity - saints and sinners - and, for example, the Greek era by heroes and slaves. Nihilism, because technology encourages a fixation on trying to get the best out of every possibility, whereby we stay at the level from where we can manipulate everything and, consequently, don 't get deeply involved into anything. In the resulting nihilism we become increasingly passive (more consuming than producing), already beautifully expressed by Søren Kierkegaard in The Present Age (1846): ”A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. There is even a new technology that promises to keep the brain completely undamaged at death for thousands of years, so that future generations could upload all thoughts into a computer reality: Mind-uploading (Nectome). As if future generations don 't have enough of their own lives and problems, they can also reactivate ours. A technological heaven ahead, for those of us unhappy under the colonization of the systems world (technological nihilism). Hubert Dreyfus should be read a lot more!