We have never been voluntary: Techno-genetic reflections on Ricœurian freedom in digital societies

This commentary poses the question: how do subjects recognise and evaluate what they are able to change for themselves under algorithmic conditions that increasingly shape attention, desire, and anticipation? Bringing Bernard Stiegler into dialogue with Ricœur, I consider what becomes of freedom in digital societies if one is also to recognise Stiegler’s argument that human life is technologically constituted at its genesis. We were never voluntary, following Stiegler, since there was never a notion of voluntary human choice that could be bifurcated from involuntary acts of technologies from the start. This techno-genetic line of thought insists instead that freedom, needs, and desires at the level of the human subject concern a task of enacting a liberty to think differently given an originary human-technological entwinement.