Fourth talk of the 2026-2027 season Sam Aston, LMHC
When the world is digitized, how do our ways of accessing ourselves and the world change, and how do these changes affect our being? Sam Aston takes up this question with particular attention to how the systemic nature of the digital world and artificial intelligence, and who they are designed for, warps not only the kinds of connections we have, but what connection means to us. Utilizing Cushman and Lacan, Aston asks how the digital world not only alters what the self engages in, but how it can engage and with whom it is able to engage. Stemming from this fundamental shift, Aston calls upon Levinasian ethics of care to help clarify how we can care and what we can care about in a world designed to obfuscate others and ourselves with automatons. Pulling the thread of how the digital world is designed, Aston draws upon Baudrillard’s concept of Hyperreality to explore who the digital world is designed for and what desires its systems produce. Ultimately, Aston wonders whether the increasing subsumption of the physical world into their version of the digital world threatens our sense of Being in every world.
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