"A Fantastical Union With a Cloud”: On the Digitalization of Daily Life, Kierkegaardian Anxiety, and the Question of Ontological Security

Description

From messaging and navigation to banking and streaming, contemporary practices are increasingly mediated by cloud computing infrastructures. These infrastructures quietly organize social interactions, routines, and forms of self-understanding, thereby sustaining the continuity and stability upon which daily life depends. Yet this condition raises an important existential-philosophical problem. While cloud infrastructures promise security through reliability, efficiency, and control, they simultaneously generate new forms of dependence, vulnerability, and disruption. Algorithmic failures, disinformation, cyberat-tacks, and infrastructural breakdowns can abruptly destabilize the computational systems on which individuals and societies rely. Such tensions reveal a paradox at the heart of technologically mediated existence: computational systems are relied upon to secure eve-ryday life, yet they cannot resolve the existential uncertainty that defines human existence itself. This paper brings Søren Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy into dialogue with phi-losophy of technology through the concepts of anxiety and ontological security. It explores the possibility of a philosophical framework for understanding how cloud infrastructures simultaneously sustain and unsettle the continuity and intelligibility of selfhood and of the self’s relations to others and the world. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s analyses of anxiety, freedom, and becoming, the paper argues that vulnerability and uncertainty are constitu-tive dimensions of human existence rather than deficiencies awaiting technological resolution. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that technological stabilization and existential security coincide, and proposes instead a conception of ontological security as a security of becoming: a fragile orientation toward continuity that remains open to con-tingency, vulnerability, and possibility.

Period	8 Jun 2026
Event title	European Philosophies of Technology: Conversations Across Disciplines
Event type	Conference
Location	Paris, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International