Internet connectivity reduces everything and everyone to a resource for use

Evidence

Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the Internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world storeable and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal ‘they’ whom we never meet and cannot locate. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1022

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects Heidegger’s ‘das Man’ (the ‘they’) to modern algorithmic platforms and surveillance capitalism — echoes Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism thesis and the reader’s ‘sacrifice’ framing of resource-extraction. — connects to: Mass communications reduce all cultural realms to the commodity form. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 283; The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 18; Perpetual online connectivity produces numbness without genuine connection — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1246
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Heidegger predicted the feed’ — how the concept of Being-as-resource maps onto the attention economy and why the internet removed depth from experience.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that being made a resource hands us over to an impersonal ‘they’ we cannot locate is a genuinely paradigm-shifting frame for understanding digital life — dense, nuanced, and resists one-sentence summary.

Broader Connections

• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #expands (0.90) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18
• Mass communications reduce all cultural realms to the commodity form. #corroborates (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 283