Place is Where it all Begins
And the internet, I'm afraid, is not a place
I’ve been thinking about place.
Not in the obvious sense, not geography or landscape, though those do really matter to me. I mean place in a deeper sense. The kind of place that calls something out of you. That addresses you. That leaves you changed in ways you didn’t anticipate and can’t entirely explain.
Place, in this sense, is foundational to everything I’m trying to do philosophically. If Logontology has a starting point, it’s here - in the conviction that we are not isolated minds surveying a neutral world, but beings who are always already situated, always already in relation to something that exceeds us. We become who we are through encounter with what is genuinely other. And encounter requires place.
Which got me thinking about where we spend most of our time now.
The internet presents itself as a place. We speak of online spaces, digital communities, virtual worlds. The language of place is so natural, so unreflective, that the question barely surfaces.
But I think it is a question worth challenging.
Marc Augé coined the term non-place for the transit zones of supermodernity: airports, motorways, hotel corridors. Spaces defined not by relation or history or identity, but by passage and transaction. A non-place doesn’t know you. It processes you.
The internet, I suggest in the video, is the perfection of the non-place. And that matters. Because if it is, then we are spending enormous portions of our lives in a space that cannot address us. That has no depth to disclose. That returns to us, with increasing algorithmic precision, nothing but our own reflection.
And you cannot become in a mirror.
This is the argument I explore in the new video - drawing on Augé, on Graham Harman’s notion of the withdrawn object, and on Nishida’s concept of Basho, to ask whether the internet meets the threshold of genuine place. Whether it can disclose, or whether it can only reflect.
I think the answer matters beyond philosophy. If we are beings who become through genuine encounter with otherness, then a world increasingly saturated with reflection rather than disclosure is not just culturally impoverishing. It is, in the deepest sense, a threat to becoming itself.
The video is here. I’d love to know what you think.