Place is Where it all Begins
And the internet, I'm afraid, is not a place
Logontology is my philosophy. Place is it’s foundation. Since the internet appeared in the 1990’s I’ve been fascinated by its potential. But it worries me that people are beginning to see the internet as a place. It’s not, It’s a giant network of machines.
A true place, a landscape for example, calls something out of you. A true place addresses you and leaves you changed in ways you couldn’t have anticipated and can’t entirely explain.
Place is foundational to everything I’m trying to do philosophically. It’s Logontology’s starting point, it’s the conviction that we are not isolated minds surveying a neutral world, but beings who are always already situated, and always in relation to something that exceeds us. We become who we are through encounter with what is genuinely other - and that encounter requires place.
But the internet is increasingly presenting itself as a place. We speak of online spaces, digital communities, and virtual worlds. But how can they possibly be places?
Marc Augé used the term non-place for the transit zones of supermodernity: airports, motorways, hotel corridors… Spaces that are defined by passage and transaction and not by a shared history. A non-place doesn’t know you. A non-place processes you.
The internet, I suggest in the video, is the perfection of the non-place. And this matters because we are spending enormous portions of our lives in a space that cannot and will never, address us. It doesn’t have the depth to disclose. Instead, it returns to us, with increasing algorithmic precision, nothing but our own reflection.
And you cannot become in a mirror - you cannot evolve.
In my new video - I draw on Augé, on Graham Harman’s notion of the withdrawn object, and on Nishida’s concept of Basho, and ask whether the internet can ever meet the threshold of genuine place. Whether the internet can disclose, or whether it can only reflect.
If we’re beings who become through genuine encounter with otherness, then a world increasingly saturated with reflection rather than disclosure isn’t just culturally impoverishing. It is a threat to becoming itself.