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As an adjective, ‘digital’ refers to that which is associated with computations built on discrete binary operations (Floridi 2017). It is not counterposed to the physical, nor is it framed by an opposition between the virtual and the real. What makes an image digital is that it is the manifestation of chains of discrete yes-or-no indications rather than continuous chemical processes of photographic production; those computations are as much of the world as the negative bathed in developing fluid, even if the digital image is, say, an abstract animation rather than a representation of something ‘real’. Digital practices encompass not only participating in digital cultures by clocking, reacting, ignoring and creating, but less obviously social acts such as setting an alarm, noticing a push notification, asking Alexa to play a podcast, emptying email trash, calling an Uber and buying clothes from ASOS. The movements of fingers and the voice commands that accomplish these acts are indissociable from them, not earthbound analogues to things that happen in the digital world, since the world of bits and the world of atoms are the same world. A digital process might be about encoding and rendering an image visible to a user with the relevant kit, but one of the defining features of the digital age is the pervasiveness of processes that are unseen by human subjects, or at least by most of them; for example, high-frequency trading, algorithmic consumer profiling, and autonomous facial recognition. These all involve more human intentionality and labour than is sometimes assumed, and it bears emphasizing that what makes them digital is not that they have a tendency to be absent from the consciousness and agency of the majority of us – rather, again, it comes down to 1s and 0s. Digital mechanisms include apps and the devices used to access them, but also the corporate governance and legal frameworks of big tech. Digital environments include online extremist forums and Netflix, but also urban spaces covered by Wi-Fi, 5G and CCTV, mapped by Google and used as backgrounds for Instagram posts. Digital infrastructures include unnoticed data centres, electricity grids and undersea cables, but also everything that makes digitally afforded experiences possible and meaningful in everyday life, from economic and political systems to educational establishments, Foxconn factories and yttrium mines.

Digital life is the condition of existing amongst and through these manifestations, processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures. That gerund is important: there is no pre-digital existence that the digital has happened to. At the personal level, many of us remember what it was like to live in the pre-internet era, but these memories are not of the past; they are phenomena that we make and remake in the present, through practices that are of a world that is permeated, constrained and enabled by the digital. At the level of the social and political, history of course matters, but is made meaningful by all the things we find ourselves doing in the relentless present that is our constant origin. This means that we should not think of selves who go out into the world and use digital technologies; they are always already part of the world in which we are forever emerging, in the countless acts of subjectivation through which we make that world and ourselves familiar and navigable. The focus of this book then is not on how people feel about digital technologies, or even how they affect them, strictly speaking – there is no ‘them’ prior to the affecting, after all, only ways of being afforded by the contingencies of now, and it was ever thus. There is nothing necessarily amnesiac or myopic about digital life: how we got here, what our possible futures are, and what we can do about them are of vital importance. The point is that we come at understanding and answering these questions by way of the at-hand resources – at once enabling and debased, revealing and complicit – of everyday experience.

Chapter 2 addresses the care deficit said to be endemic to the digital age, specifically the argument that our digital lives are so full of affective distractions that our capacities for compassion and solidarity are diminished. Through an exploration of Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and the concept of mere-feltness, it is suggested that the distracted, ambivalent experience of digital multitudes may over time amount to a more substantive, reliable form of subjective recognition than focused attention on individuals. It thus lays the groundwork for thinking differently, but nonetheless ethically and politically, about social relations in a digital age in which connections have simultaneously proliferated and become ephemeral. Chapter 3 develops this into a positive agenda, drawing on Tim Ingold’s notion of life lived alongly, as well as Heidegger’s concepts of thrownness and findingness, to suggest a model of ethics in motion. It fleshes out how those proliferated and ephemeral encounters are experienced in everyday digital life: on the move, amid the rhythms and routines of ordinary existence. This is not a degraded mode of being in the world but precisely how that world is disclosed, along with its immanent stakes; as such, what constitutes an ethical relationality is nimble, dextrous navigation rather than pausing and thinking hard about the other.

Chapter 4 moves on to the territory of subjectification, and what it means to be an ethical self in everyday digital life. It has been observed already that the digital is not something that happens to the self, but is integral to how we continually become selves. This then raises the question of moral obligation in relation to modes of selfing that change over time, something that appears to have been proceeding at pace in recent history. How does one strike an ethical bearing towards one’s self if it is constituted on the move in a world in flux? The chapter answers this by tackling the thorny issue of data privacy and surveillance culture, and especially the apathy with which many citizens regard these issues. It builds on an exegesis of the Lord and Bondsman section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to reframe autonomy as a collective, situated and practical value more appropriate to our digital world.

Chapter 5 expands on the theme of the stakes implicit in the routines and rhythms of everyday life by delving further into Heidegger’s work. In particular, this chapter addresses those sections of Being and Time in which he discusses the existential and ontological stakes of things not usually associated with the political: moods, idle talk and curiosity. In so doing it advances the claim that we should take seriously, and treat as grounding facticity, the way we generally experience digital life, i.e. inauthentically. This move leaves open the possibility of excavating and critiquing the contingencies of contemporary everyday life in ways that exceed the assertion that we do not see things as they really are, especially amid all the distractions of our digitally saturated existence. Heidegger shows that it is a condition of thrownness that there never was the possibility of actually grasping the things, people and phenomena we encounter in themselves; inauthenticity is our ever-present origin. The salient point is that ordinary movement from one encounter to the next, rather than abstraction, is how we come at understanding; the affects and discourses that propel us in everyday digital life seem intuitively to be just so much noise, but they are every bit as ontologically constitutive as focused attention and clear-headed cognition.

Chapter 6 takes up these insights and demonstrates how they can be put to work to reframe public deliberation in the digital age. Specifically, it seeks to shed new light on an aspect of digital life that is said to be undermining the public sphere: identity politics. Beginning with a consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the relationship between perception and values in everyday life, it moves on to marshal Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to work towards a reconceptualization of values as dispositional practices. Rethinking values as things done in everyday digital life rather than internal qualities to be defended from exogenous forces points towards a different future for deliberative democracy far from the polarized filter bubbles often seen as an inevitable consequence of digitization.

Chapter 7 then asks a critical question that pushes beyond the realm of social relations: what does it mean to live ethically in a world suffused with digital processes, mechanisms, environments and infrastructures? While all of these things structure and generate our conditions of sociality, the lived experience of them exceeds their intent and design. The withdrawal of infrastructure from conscious experience is not necessarily sinister, and it remains possible to live creatively and critically amongst forces like the protocols of social media platforms.

Finally, Chapter 8 rounds out the discussion by reflecting on Michel de Certeau’s theorization of the possibility of creativity and resistance in the face of an imposed social order. The world-disclosing, agentic potential of making do with the digital resources we find ready at hand in everyday life cannot be underestimated, offering as they do endless opportunities to experiment, reveal stakes, strike stances accordingly, and then to persevere or try something else. It is assuredly the case that those resources, practices and postures are not of us but of the world; nonetheless the temporally indeterminate scope to enact them effects real change in that world. Repertoires of improvisation are key to living ethically in the digital age, as selves that are provisional not programmed, enacting politics that are likewise provisional not programmatic.