IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 6

BOOK REVIEW

JOHN HOLGATE

From Classical Ontology
to WHO Magazine
Digital Whoness: Identity, Privacy and Freedom in the Cyberworld.
By Rafael Capurro, Michael Eldred, and Daniel Nagel. New Jersey, U.S.A.: Transaction Books, 2013.

igital Whoness is a significant exploration
of the notions of privacy and publicness
in our increasingly digitized world. It is
an original contribution to the philosophy
of information and communication as well as a way
mark for all who believe privacy is an essential component of a democratic society.
Michael Eldred is an Australian philosopher and
mathematician who has lived most of his professional
life in Germany as a translator. Endowed with a firstclass knowledge of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Marx
he explores the nature of privacy within the contemporary digital landscape. Supported by two insightful
chapters from rafael Capurro (on privacy and intercultural ethics) and Daniel Nagel (legal aspects of privacy), Eldred situates privacy within the concepts of
"whoness," "interplay" (between self and other), and
the Aristotelian "privation" - a lack of form accruing
to a changing property, i.e., privacy seen as a deprivation rather than an asset of self.
The book poses a range of important questions. Who -
as distinct from what - are we? Can the self be digitized? Will or can the algorithm replace the soul and
the psyche? What are the intercultural determinants of
private/public ethics? How is the interplay between private and public spheres of experience to be enacted?
Where is the fine line between trust and control? How
is trust to be engendered in a cyber world that enables
"self-determined world-sharing with selected others"

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2291167
Date of publication: 9 December 2013

when in the background "service-providing masters
of digital cybernetics" loom large? According to the
authors, privacy and publicness are not "properties of
things, data or persons, but rather ascriptions dependent
upon the specific social and cultural context."
The current dramatic events involving Wikileaks and
Assange, Snowden, and NASA as well as the worldwide
political protests facilitated by FaceBook and Twitter all
represent a global protest against the dangers of uberveillance on a cultural and ontological level. The panopticons of Bentham and Foucault have found a digital
counterpart in the monitoring omnipresence of the electronic dream police (Adam Curtis's "machines of loving grace") who both promote and guard our social and
commercial intercourse - what Eldred calls the "gainful
game" (the game of capitalism itself):
... the gainful game can be played in and
through the cyberworld which, as a global medium, can lubricate and speed it up. The gainful game and the cyberworld are affine, and
because the latter is becoming more and more
ubiquitous and all-pervading, the players can be
drawn more tightly into the gainful game's play
(Eldred, p.155).
Anyone who has downloaded files music and movies to their laptop, mobile, and tablet, gambled online
or dabbled in Bitcoin mining has experienced this
affinity.
A legion of greedy apps is forever waiting in the
wings to keep the game going.

John Holgate is a Sydney information scientist and has published articles on electronic publishing, reference librarianship and information management. He has been an information consultant on projects involving health portal design and
content creation. Since 1998 he has been an active member of the online Foundations of Information Science forum (FIS)
and is a coeditor with Rafael Capurro of the book Messages and Messengers (Boten und Botschaften), Fink Verlag, 2011.
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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTEr 2013

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