This essay discusses Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnical framework as it relates to recent contributions that deal with the inherent opacities of digital technology and processes of blackboxing. I argue that Sloterdijk’s philosophy is a precious case of affirmative, non-nihilistic technophilic thinking that espouses the technogenic provenance of mankind, and leaves space for technologically engendered incomprehensibility while tracing a horizon for human beings’ resoluteness. In the first section of my essay I tackle Sloterdijk’s reflections on the philosophical transition from wonder to horror in (...) the twentieth century, and I put it in dialogue with his concept of the monstrous as defined by boundlessness, complexity, and excess. Here, I discuss how the human being shows both monster-slayer and monstrous tendencies. Secondly, after having revisited the question “what happened in the twentieth century” from this perspective, I discuss how Sloterdijk’s analysis of the monstrous provides a coherent genealogy for an assessment of the individual’s relation to current “monstrous” technologies, as they are tied to algorithmic processing. I conclude by arguing that Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics and onto-anthropology allow for an acrobatic confrontation with the possibility of untethering technological advancement from illusory promises of absolute clarity, and promote the immunological value of darkness. (shrink)

The ever-increasing prevalence of chronic conditions over the last half century has gradually altered the demographic of patients admitted to acute care settings; environments traditionally associated with episodic care rather than chronic and complex healthcare. In consequence, the lifeworld of the hospital medical doctor often entails healthcare for a complex, multi-morbid, patient cohort. This paper examines the experience of providing complex healthcare in the pressurised and fast-paced acute care setting. Four medical doctors from two metropolitan health services were interviewed and (...) their data were analysed using a combinatorial framework of phenomenology and complexity theory. The horizon of complex care revealed itself as dynamic, expansive, immersive, and relational, entailing a specialised kind of practice that is now common in acute care settings. Yet this practice has made inroads largely without heralding the unique nature and potential of its ground. Herein lies opportunity for complex care clinicians to expand notions of health and illness, and to shape research, practice, and system design, for a future in which care for health complexity is optimised, irrespective of care settings. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century investigations of the deep sea provide a case study for black box science. Naturalists were forced to theorize about a space for which they had no direct sensory observations. This study traces the emergence of bathymetry and deep-sea biology and then analyzes how men of science dealt with the uncertainty associated with their black box practices. I argue that these investigators created multiple types of black boxes based on their uncertainties and that these black boxes did not operate equivalently. (...) Consequently, scholars should be aware of the different categories of black boxes when they describe scientific practices. (shrink)