Can you cook your way to stardom from a small kitchen in a tiny apartment? The answer, today, is a resounding ‘yes’. Look for a recipe, make a TikTok reel of yourself cooking, and unleash unlimited possibilities for public recognition. TikTok, as one New York Times article puts it, is the “fastest way on earth to become a food star”.
Specialist consultants and even degree courses are now dedicated to helping people become influencers on social media. Clearly such jobs have only been made possible by technological progress. But what kind of work is this? How might we understand this overwhelming desire for self-presentation? Is it of value?
Such questions point to even more fundamental ones, such as what it means to be human, what it means to be free, and whether work is a form of bondage or an essential condition of freedom.
Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher and political theorist, explored precisely such issues in her book, The Human Condition (1958). Considered her magnum opus, it remains one of the key texts of the 20th century investigating the relationship humans have with each other and the world.
Welcome to our new series on key titles that have helped shape business and the economy – as suggested by Conversation writers. We have avoided the Marxes and Smiths, since you’ll know plenty about them already. The series covers everything from demographics to cutting-edge tech, so stand by for some ideal holiday reading.
Arendt’s core argument is that the modern human condition is characterised by two kinds of estrangement that are closely linked to advances in technology. She describes it as a “twofold flight from the Earth into the universe, and from the world into the self”.
Arendt points to the launch, in 1957, of the first satellite, Sputnik, to describe a quintessential feature of all modern technologies: they put more and more distance between humans and our natural environment.
Technology is supposed to protect the good life by freeing us from discomforts. Paradoxically, however, freedom and comfort are being surrendered to synthetic versions of natural activities – from cooking to communication to thinking itself. Ever more dependent on this artificiality, we are merely spectators in technology’s rush into unforeseen territories.
For Arendt, this marked one side of “world alienation”. The other is the way in which scientific discoveries, starting from Renaissance polymath Copernicus’s realisation that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, have made the world appear more and more uncertain. We have fallen back on what seemed to be the only reliable point of reference, the only source of possible certainty: our own selves. We have increasingly put ourselves at the centre of our own individual universes, becoming estranged from a common, shared world.
One way to enter Arendt’s thought is to read the final chapter of The Human Condition after the prologue. There she argues that modernity’s biggest conquest has been for technology to emancipate humanity from the “drudgery of life”. But this has turned into our biggest trap, since we have filled it with mindless consumption.
“The more time [is] left to [us],” she writes, “the greedier and more craving [our] appetites”.
In the intervening decades, human life has been reduced to the pursuit of self-assertion online. Few of us even question this condition.
The tyranny of consumption
Chapters three, four and five of The Human Condition offer a framework for understanding how this estrangement relates to human activities. Arendt presents labour, work and action as the three activities which make up active human life – the vita activa – as opposed to the contemplative life that has preoccupied philosophers.
Labour refers to what we do to satisfy biological requirements like food and shelter, usually in the form of earning money. Arendt distinguishes this from work, which is about producing things of “durable value” that are ends in themselves, such as works of art or handmade furniture. Meanwhile, action is the interaction of people free to speak and act together, when they cease attending to mere consumption.
She shows how labouring has come to dominate our way of being. Endlessly preoccupied with consuming unnecessary things of no intrinsic or lasting value, we have turned away from making or appreciating things of durable value.
Constantly busy with ourselves, we have become incapable of considered conversations and actions concerning the things we depend upon – namely, preserving the Earth and a thoughtful collective humanity. Lost in the mirrors of our smartphones, our incapacity to think only gets worse.
She refers to the Earth as “the very quintessence of the human condition”, given that “earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice”.
If Arendt were around today (she died in 1975), she would perhaps argue that TikTok stardom is pointing to what she describes in her book as the “most sterile passivity history has ever known”, lived by “thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible”.
For this problem, she offers no easy solution. She calls on us to do the most fundamental thing that makes us human: “What I propose… is very simple”, she writes. “It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”
It is in thinking about everything that pertains to concrete human experience that we secure our own individual agency and sense of existence. It’s the case for pausing when we are just about to post yet again on social media, to not seek external validation to simply cook an omelette. Maybe if we reflected more on how technology has robbed us, we would begin to find a better way forward.
