The Environment and Frictionless Technology For a New Conceptualization of the Pharmakon and the Twenty-First-Century User

This article aims to contribute to the burgeoning exchange between media theory and the environmental humanities by considering the ecological implications of contemporary digital technology in relation to user experience. It does so by arguing for a reconceptualization of the classic philosophical concept of the pharmakon. This concept, which underlines how technology is always simultaneously poison and cure, has been mobilized to assess how human perceptual and sensory capacities are both augmented and curtailed by technology. However, as this article demonstrates through a reorientation of the work of pharmacology’s prime philosopher Bernard Stiegler, familiar interpretations of the pharmakon exhibit an important shortcoming: such interpretations fail to consider how the ostensibly curative perceptual effects of technology may be supported by the propagation of poison elsewhere. This quandary is argued to be especially pressing in light of the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness: in order to facilitate increasingly convenient user experiences, contemporary technology exploits but also increasingly hides its material conditions of production from view. Underlining the pharmacological ramifications of frictionlessness, the article concludes by suggesting that an environmentally sustainable pharmacology would mean appending the common definition of the digital user with a second definition: the user as a usurping subject whose supposedly frictionless experience is pharmacologically facilitated by and perceptually divested of vast networks of exploitation and environmental destruction.