In the movie Blade Runner 2049, we see the bloodstained protagonist, Officer K, gazing at a giant hologram of his AI companion, JOI, who points at him and says, “You look lonely. I can fix that.” This scene encapsulates the profound paradox that is occupying our contemporary digital age – the technology advertised as the cure to loneliness has become an alienating force. As human beings, it is our primal fear to be alone. It seems to be the case that belonging to a community is both a physical and spiritual need of a person whether argued from an evolutionary perspective where human beings lived within a community to survive against predators, or at a deeper level where human beings “take delight in living together (delectabiliter vivere in communi)”.[i] This essay attempts to sketch out how digitalisation simultaneously exploits and undermines the conditions required to experience belonging and togetherness in order to explain alienation of the contemporary subject, and how it develops into a new digital form of solipsism that obstructs community formation.

In The Need for Roots, Simone Weil contends rootedness to be a “central human spiritual need” that is often overlooked, describing it as a societal possibility for individuals to participate in different communities by immersing themselves within its traditions and taking part in the growth of these communities.[ii] As such, she views uprootedness (déracinement) as a dangerous malaise that threatens the spiritual wellbeing of humanity. Her analogy of being uprooted as being plagued by a disease goes further: she observes that uprootedness possesses a viral quality where those who have become severed from the profound continuity of their community and tradition often go about uprooting other. Some poignant examples she uses include the Roman Empire and the colonialist expansion of Western powers from the sixteenth century onwards.

How can Weil’s analysis of uprootedness help us understand our feelings of loneliness in the contemporary context, more specifically, our paradoxical alienation in this hyper-connected world? In the digital age when most human activities, including crime and warfare, are conducted in virtual spaces, uprootedness also festers there. Interactions within the virtual world often mimic human practices of play, performance, and creativity found in the physical lifeworld. Despite so, such online ‘interactions’ are only flattened forms, or simulacra, of the human experience of entering into communion with others. This is evident in the way that complex verbal interactions, such as sarcasm, depends not only on intonation and context, but also employs nuanced facial expression and body gestures to convey affective states or hidden intentions of the subject, aspects that are either lacking or obscured in digital communication. Real life examples of this problem can be found in both very common, everyday misunderstandings that occur in texting or phone conversations and also the increasing issues of scamming that are generally executed through the same media.

While some transhumanists may argue that embodiment is an obstacle humanity needs to overcome and technological development in augmented or virtual reality serves as an interim solution, it seems to me that the physical presence of an ‘other’, with its own vitality and force, setting itself against the ‘I’ creates what Byung-Chul Han calls a “counter-body” that demands for recognition and attention and lays the foundation for any kind of alterity relation.[iii] This argument I am putting forward here does not limit itself to interpersonal interactions but extends to all things in the lifeworld: the blooming of the cherry blossoms causes me to take pause and appreciate its beauty or the hostile bark of dog that makes me wary. What differentiates these interactions, from inanimate beings to animate non-personal beings, and then to personal beings, is the degree of intensity and perfection. For example, while my aesthetic appreciation of the blossoms employs both my sensual and rational faculties and consequently draws me closer to nature, the same experience shared with a friend offers a mutual sense of togetherness that is distinctive to interpersonal interactions. Similar intimations can be found in Weil’s analysis of la force, which can be translated into English as ‘might’. In her essay ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’, Weil observes one of the manifestations of might in our day to day lives, and writes, “[a]nybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power over us by his very presence, and a power that belongs to him alone, … alone in our rooms, we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently from the way we do when we have a visitor.”[iv] Without going too far into discussions on embodied cognition or theories of empathy, we can highlight, at least in a relational manner, that the external lifeworld and its inhabitants play a constitutive role in us being rooted.[v]

In the digital order, heavily driven and determined by the capitalist spirit, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air.”[vi] What Marx did not recognise though is that rather than the air clearing away illusions of traditional structures and forcing humanity to reconcile with its material conditions and relations, instead it forms into a thick, heavy mist. This mist of digital communication, consisting of shallow images and weightless spectacles, paralyses and suffocates us by obfuscating our ability to perceive anything beyond our own individual egos, and as such, depriving us from the genuine social relations necessary for human flourishing. Without a view of what lies beyond the immediate, transcendence, in every sense of the word, becomes impossible. In this manner, digitalisation reframes our existence into a new form of solipsism that is even harder to escape than before. Let’s consider the use of algorithms in digital platforms. Our perceptive horizons online are often dictated by highly personalised algorithms: in a subtle, suggestive way, we are told what things we should see, where we should travel to, what books to read, and even who to love.[vii] While we have previously had the power to resist the coercion of others, it has become far more challenging now when they are presented to us as our own desires and thoughts. Another problem that arises as a consequence is an atomised horizon which reduces the common ground of experiences, limits our exposure to diverse perspectives, and in turn, forms the solipsistic bubble of the digital ego. This is the crisis of community.

When a community ceases to be the scene of shared existence, it regresses into a mass clustered by interests. What we have in the digital space today are not communities but disembodied masses that are tenuously mediated and connected solely through personal interests. Without the bond of communion, members of a community are degraded into objects available for manipulation and domination. Digital networks that were originally meant for the formation of community become the ground where sycophantic echo chambers are constructed with its only function being the endless affirmation and to aggrandisement of the solipsistic ego; as Han puts it, “[l]ikes, friends and followers do not provide us with resonance; they only strengthen the echoes of the self.”[viii] In the vast expanse (perhaps continually expanding) of the digital network, the individual is reduced into an insignificant data that is neglected and overlooked. As a consequence, silent participation in communal life is no longer sufficient. To be recognised by others, one now feels the compulsion to stand out from the mass. Similar to the conditions of production and consumption, this means constantly performing and exposing ourselves through posting, giving likes, and commenting, and in return, feel validated by receiving them. In this manner, digital communication resembles a series of cacophonous disruptions that seek to outdo one another resulting in the decomposition of a communal melody – a shared narrative of hermeneutic significance.

To very briefly conclude, it seems to me that the digital space, as Han points out, by its very nature, cannot accommodate the establishment and flourishing of community among individuals as it does not have capacity for them “to dwell in it.”[ix] Or to put it in words that follows more closely to Weil’s analogy, the digital landscape does not allow the person to grow roots and to flourish. As a consequence, we become solipsists and narcissists who are so obsessed with our own reflections that we are desensitised to the beauty of the world and oblivious of the danger that this anaesthetisation poses. Therefore, in our fragmented world today, both online and offline, there is an urgent need to question this digital enframing and to recover our sense of belonging by letting ourselves live in the presence of the other and them in us.[x]

Notes:

[i] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae q. 114 a. 2 ad 2.

[ii] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being, trans. Ros Schwartz (Penguin, 2023), 33.

[iii] Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today (Polity Press, 2018).

[iv] Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, edited and trans. Sian Miles (Penguin Classics, 2005), 187.

[v] For discussion on embodiment theory, see Emma Cohen-Edmonds, “Bridging the explanatory gap with theories of Embodiment,” in Qualia, posted on 25th February 2025, at https://qualiamagazine.edublogs.org/2025/02/25/bridging-the-explanatory-gap-with-theories-of-embodiment/.

[vi] Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 2nd revised edition, trans. Samuel Moore (Progress Publishers, 1977), 39.

[vii] See Shannon Vallor, AI Miror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024), 10.

[viii] Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, trans. D. Steuer (Polity Press, 2020), 11.

[ix] Byung-Chul Han, opt cit., 29.

[x] I am paraphrasing Romano Guardini, “The Meaning of Community,” in The Human Experience: Essays on Providence, Melancholy, Community & Freedom (Cluny Media, 2018), 85.