Affective Infrastructure

Following Mark Weiser’s vision from 1991 that the digital of the 21st century weaves itself “into the fabric of everyday life” until it is “indistinguishable from it,” we are today facing an evolution of the digital toward its naturalization. In this context, the miniaturization of technology plays an important role, but even more so the increasingly natural access to the digital, which brings the digital closer to emotions, affects and intuitions. The term “naturalization” ambiguously refers on the one hand to the digital as a technology that becomes (second) nature, and on the other hand to the naturalization (citizenship) of us in the digital sphere. The paper analyzes from a philosophical perspective the increasing naturalness of the digital as an affective infrastructure as well as the phenomenological consequences for us.