Critical Futures Collective: Subjectivity in the Digital Age

We live at a pace that no longer belongs to us.

Screens measure our attention, algorithms pre-empt our desires, and time itself seems to have lost its depth. In this restless landscape, the question of who we are has become inseparable from how fast we move.

The Critical Futures Collective is a gathering for those who wish to slow down the velocity of the present. We meet to read and think together about what it means to remain human amid the automation of experience. Through close readings and shared inquiry, we trace the shape of subjectivity under the pressure of connectivity — not to reject technology, but to see through it.

Drawing from thinkers like Han, Heidegger, Berardi, Sloterdijk, and Kierkegaard, as well as literary voices that wrestle with the same anxieties, we explore how digital acceleration reshapes solitude, intimacy, and meaning.

This is not an academic seminar, nor a social club. It is an experiment in collective attention — an attempt to recover slowness as a form of resistance, and thought as an act of care.

Prospective Reading List for 2026:

1. Martin Heidegger - “The Question Concerning Technology”
2. Søren Kierkegaard - selections from The Present Age and/or Concluding Unscientific Postscript
3. Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society
4. Franco “Bifo” Berardi - After the Future
5. Peter Sloterdijk - Rules for the Human Zoo
6. Walter Benjamin - “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
7. Samuel Beckett - “Company” or “Enough”
8. Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism