The information society and the nihilism of the 21st century

Abstract

Byung-Chul Han writes about a new form of nihilism that has emerged mainly since the 21st century in the information society. From this, I analyze how this nihilism stems from the elimination of truth as an individual and collective guiding criterion. For Han, this would result from the emergence of information as the new criterion of knowledge, which imposes itself as a device of the current society through its great rapid and quantitative productivity, aimed at acceleration, production, and exploitation. In this way, information takes the place of truth as narrativity, and eliminates the difference between truth and lies, which has as its main consequence the abandonment of orientative models. In this article, I propose to present the characteristics of the nihilism of the information society and classify it, based on Deleuze's theoretical references on the subject, as an active nihilism, since while it denies the known and existing models of truth, it has a posture and propositional action in the production of a new individual and social model based on the power to affirm.