Hyperreality: How Our Tools Came To Control Us
Ebook
Overview
What is the similarity between battery chicken, iris scans, Facebook friends, and porn videos? They are all features of a technical system built to satisfy our desires and to suppress our fears. It is a so-called hyperreality, an improved version of natural reality, promising wealth, security, and belonging. However, behind the shiny appearance we can detect a few dangerous mechanisms. Increasingly our tools are controlling us, instead of the other way around, and we are steadily rebuilding the world into a machine with laws we are unable to change. What are the risks of this machine? How can we discern the illusions of hyperreality? With insights derived from Rene Girard and Jacques Ellul, among others, this book calls for a joyful spiritual life, in the midst of stubborn reality.
“Hyperreality is about a lot more than ‘how our tools
control us,’ as its subtitle promises. ‘How our modern culture has
gone badly wrong—and a possible way back for people’ is the bigger
message I read. Mulder’s superb journalistic skills describe how
our mad desires for wealth and consumer goods, for security and
safety, and for social affirmation and acceptance are doomed to
fail in our lived reality. . . . The ‘hyper’ reality on our screens
seduces and distracts us away from the actual reality of people and
nature all around us. . . . I will be recommending
Hyperreality to all of my thoughtful, reflective
friends.”
—David W. Gill, President, International Jacques Ellul
Society
“In the spirit of Ellul and Girard, Frank Mulder
interrogates the extraordinarily virtual realities we now inhabit.
Whether or not we share Mulder’s faith in our inevitable
deliverance, we can benefit from his keen insights on the way we
have used technology to surround ourselves with illusions of
choice, control, and immortality.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Team
Human
- Title: Hyperreality: How Our Tools Came To Control Us
- Author: Frank Mulder
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2021
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781725277922, 9781725277908, 9781725277915, 1725277921, 1725277905, 1725277913
- Resource ID: LLS:9781725277922
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-01-18T21:56:07Z
Frank Mulder is a freelance journalist in the Netherlands
writing for different magazines and newspapers. With his wife and
four children he lives in a community with refugees in a poor
neighborhood. He likes technological products like his bicycle, but
he has no smartphone.