The PC Revolution and Its Philosophical Consequences
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
From Machine to Tool
The 1980s brought a revolution that was not technical but social: the personal computer. The computer went from being a mainframe in a data center to being a device on a desk.
This changed the relation between human and machine. The mainframe was an alien power — experts operated it, laypeople had no access. The PC became a tool — anyone could use it, program it, shape it.
The metaphorical shift is significant. The first computer generation spoke of “electronic brains” — the machine as artificial human. The PC generation spoke of “tools” — the machine as an extension of the human being.
McLuhan had predicted it: media are “extensions of man.” The PC extends memory (storage), computational capacity, and communicative ability (networks). It does not replace the human being, it amplifies them.
The Digitization of Culture
With the PC, the digitization of culture began. Text, image, sound — all were converted into bits and bytes, storable, copyable, alterable.
This has philosophical implications. In 1936, Walter Benjamin had written about “the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility”: reproduction destroys the “aura” of the original. Digitization radicalizes this: there is no longer any “original,” only equivalent copies.
This is Baudrillard’s simulation technically realized. In the digital realm there is no difference between original and copy. Binary representation is perfectly reproducible. The “reality” behind the sign disappears — there are only signs left.
The Internet as Global Nervous System
By the end of the period under discussion, 1989, the internet already existed — but only for specialists. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 (by Tim Berners-Lee), but only became popular in the 1990s.
Yet the philosophical foundations were laid in the 1970s and 1980s. Marshall McLuhan had predicted the “global village” — a world in which electronic media connect all people. The internet is the technical realization of this vision.
The consequences were not yet foreseeable in 1989: social media, surveillance capitalism, fake news, digital publics. All of this belongs in Volume III. Here it suffices to note: the technicization of thought was still only beginning in 1989. But the philosophical questions had already been posed.
Outlook on Volume III
The technicization of thought was only at its beginning in 1989. What has happened since then — the internet, social media, big data, deep learning, large language models — exceeds all predictions.
The philosophical questions posed in the 1970s and 1980s are more pressing today than ever. Can machines be conscious? What does it mean when AI creates art, makes diagnoses, makes decisions? How does digital networking change the human relation to self?
These questions are the subject of Volume III. Here, at the end of this volume, it suffices to note: the foundations were laid. The questions were formulated. The answers are still pending.
Transition to the conclusion: The four transformations after 1968 — the critique of the subject, self-organization, media theory, technicization — together form an epochal shift. The classical subject has been deconstructed, but not annihilated. It now appears as embedded, mediated, technically extendable — and yet: as the locus of freedom and responsibility.
This shift is the starting point for Volume III, which covers the period from 1989 to the present. The philosophical problems formulated here become practical in Volume III: as the climate crisis, as identity politics, as the AI revolution, as the crisis of democracy. Theory becomes practice — and practice demands new theory.