The essay contends that modern technicity has advanced beyond Heidegger’s Gestell (Enframing), which reduces entities to standing-reserve, into a new phase the author calls Pervasive Transhuman Agency or Transhuman Agentic Saturation, paradigmatically embodied by AI and the “vaccinated human body.”

Drawing on claims by Karen Kingston and others, it asserts that mRNA COVID-19 injectables contain nanoscale components capable of transmitting and receiving digitized information, enabling networking within bodies and with external systems, and links these to reported excess deaths and magnetic or other anomalous effects.

The author concludes that this saturation of biological and digital spaces represents a qualitative escalation of technicity that, in Heideggerian terms, further strips entities of intrinsic meaning and leaves only a “god” capable of rescue.

In my reconstruction and discussion of Heidegger’s remark – in the course of the interview that he granted the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, in 1966 – that ‘Only a god can save us,’ it was shown that this issued from his conviction, that the ‘essence’ of modern technology (what he calls ‘technicity’) functions as a ‘framework’ within which every question and decision are formulated and made. He calls this ‘essence’ Gestell (‘posure,’ Enframing’), the fundamental organising power of which reduces everything in the world to a ‘standing-reserve,’ which means that its sole purpose is restricted to its usefulness or calculative utility. 

So, for example, even human beings are approached as ‘resources,’ which is made visible in renaming what used to be called ‘Personnel Departments’ in companies (and other organisations) as ‘Human Resources.’ Hence, the essence of technology, or Enframing,’ brings about the stripping of entities of their intrinsic meaning, transforming them into mere resources for use, instead of allowing them to be what they are – and arguably should be – according to their own being. 

Norman Melchert (The Great Conversation. A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 576) provides an apt characterisation of the world under the dominance of the essence of modern technology where he writes:

In the age of enframing, where everything is understood as standing-reserve, there is no ‘room’ for God. (Or perhaps even God is thought of as ‘standing-reserve’, a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one’s desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists.

In the age of enframing, where everything is understood as standing-reserve, there is no ‘room’ for God. (Or perhaps even God is thought of as ‘standing-reserve’, a kind of public utility that can be used to gain the satisfaction of one’s desires; one often gets this impression from the television evangelists.

The most obvious question that would probably arise for most readers is why Heidegger talks about the essence of technicity or technology, which he names Gestell, instead of simply referring to concrete instances of technology in the guise of technical devices, such as electric drills, saws, and vacuum cleaners, all of which are embodiments of Enframing. The answer has to do with the fact that Heidegger thinks ontologically about technicity, and not ontically.

Ontology being the discipline that addresses questions concerning the distinctive (or essential) being of beings – what makes them into what they are, in contradistinction with other beings or entities – the essence of technicity is what makes technology into what it is distinctively, and technical devices embody this essence paradigmatically. Insofar as an electric drill manifests Enframing as its technological essence, it allows the handyman or -woman, by using it, to draw on the standing reserve of stored electricity in a manner which optimalises its usefulness. 

To think about electric drills in relation to other similar or dissimilar tools comparatively as part of a collection of ‘technologies’ is to focus on them ontically, and no longer ontologically. The following excerpt from Heidegger’s ‘The question concerning technology’ (In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt, Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1977, p. 14-15) clarifies what is at stake by contrasting an older way of benefiting technically from wind and water with its modern technological counterpart:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.     In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.

    In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it.

Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.

In the extract quoted above one finds an insightful summary on Heidegger’s part, of how the essence of modern technology ‘works itself through’ every aspect of the world within which human beings live, focusing particularly on the earth or land (soil) to demonstrate how the earlier relationship people had with these has been upended and transformed by modern technology. His emphasis is on how, in comparison with an earlier, premodern dispensation – when humans worked ‘with’ nature to survive, instead of harnessing or ‘challenging’ it – under the dominance of Gestell, everything is commandeered, forcing it to yield to human demands.

It is striking, from Heidegger’s evocative description, how the integrity of the earth (and air) is shattered in the process: coal, nitrogen, and uranium, for example, are extracted from the lived totality with which it comprises a unity – something that comes into view, in a compelling manner, in Heidegger’s essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking,’ where he elaborates on what he calls the unified ‘Fourfold’ of Earth, Sky, Mortals, and Divinities, as essential values for a truly human life. 

Not everyone (to put it mildly) likes Heidegger’s ‘essentialist’ approach to technology, however. As the Italian thinker, Agostino Cera (2020, ‘Beyond the Empirical Turn: Elements for an Ontology of Engineering,’ Információs Társadalom XX, no. 4: 74–89) has shown, since Heidegger’s time, philosophers have executed what he terms a significant ‘ontophobic turn,’ with most individuals writing about technology shifting their focus away from (that is, ‘replacing’) what was central for Heidegger, namely the essence of technology as such. Referring to the so-called ‘empirical turn’ in the philosophy of technology (which resonates with the ‘ontophobic turn,’ or ‘fear of ontology’), which amounts to philosophers of technology no longer contemplating ‘technology,’ but ‘technologies’ instead, Cera writes about this ‘replacement’ that (2020: 82):

I agree with the idea that such a replacement means much more than a lexical change, but in my view........

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