The rating Brain of Bureaucrats and Luhrmann’s Zettelkasten: two versions of the “Machine Man” in the age of digitalization

Abstract

The modern “digitalized” person is predominantly an object of information, to a lesser extent a subject and an agent of information. The digitalization of the individual manifests itself in the expansion of all sorts of rating systems through which the employer controls the employee and social media monitors people’s daily lives. The phenomenon of “digitalized man” brings us back to the idea of dualism: the man of the modern information society is objectively bifurcated into a biopsychic organism, on the one hand, and his “digital replica”, on the other. Niklas Luhmann proved by his way of life the possibility of a paradoxical synthesis between the idea of mechanistic (bureaucratic) functionality and the idea of spontaneous, intuitive insight inherent only in a living person.