Microtemporality, media archaeology, and the hidden worlds of digital media

<p>Peter Sloterdijk argues that ‘humans create their own climate; not according to free choice, however, but under preexisting, given and handed-down conditions’. Being-in-the-world is, in effect, the production of a world: of a milieu within which the possibility of experience is grounded. Examining the attention that media archaeology has given to the role of microtemporal information processing, this paper argues that the (post-)humanities are now faced with the task of understanding the ways in which our world is produced for us in relation to an interlacing of subjectivity with media forms that operate at a scale and pace imperceptible to human faculties. The indifference of the world revealed in digital form exposes its incommensurability with the realm of human knowledge. We are forced to pay greater attention to the externalization of information production, storage, processing, and distribution that occurs through technical media, and the interfaces that are placed between them and the human sensorium; thinking this not in terms of alienation, but of an unveiling of the inhumanity that has always lay at the heart of human worldmaking.</p>