The evolution of the digital human: the transformation of Homo Sapiens into Homo Digitalis in the socio-cultural and event context of the past

Abstract

The phenomenon of the digital human in contemporary philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities discourse is relevant and appealing to numerous researchers, scholars, and social practitioners. Much has been written about the inhabitant of digital space, the digital neo-anthropos: after all, what could be more interesting to a digital human than the digital human itself? Since the characteristics and properties of modern humans have formed into the holistic phenomenon of Homo Digitalis, more than 20 years of active digital development have passed, the world has changed, and with it, not only the basic Homo Sapiens has changed, but also the digital human being, who has undergone significant changes over the past quarter of a century – social, philosophical, psychological, and even psychophysiological and anatomical. The evolutionary and transformative phenomenon of the Internet has led to the emergence of an existentially fundamental and anthropologically revolutionary dichotomy – the ambivalent but inseparable coexistence of humans in the physical and digital worlds. Homo Digitalis immerses himself in virtual space in order to satisfy all his modern needs, becoming digitally existent and no longer able to exist completely outside the internet. Researchers have called this process ‘the new positional advantage of artificiality over nature [4, 5]. But the phenomenology of the digital human is that it does not stop, but confidently strides along the trajectory of temporal and exponential development, surprising itself and barely managing to record its own transformation in all its diversity and incomprehensibility. Even the recent past, which is already a real stage in the emergence and formation of Homo Digitalis In contemporary philosophy and general humanities, it remains a vast body of information in which individual areas and highly specialised issues are examined and conceptualised, but without the necessary systematic dialectical, phenomenological, futurological, and legal approaches. The author's goal is to conduct a retrospective study of the sociocultural chronotope of previous decades, recording events and reflecting on the preconditions for the formation of the digital human. The object of the study is the socio-cultural and historical space and the extended (physical and digital) environment (offline and online), where the formation, existence, ontology and vision of the digital human unfold. The subject of the study is the digital human in the chronotope of events of their formation. The material focuses on the historical phenomenon of hyperstition as a driving force of human vision, which is the ‘new socio-political attractors’ of civilisation.