Abstract

This essay examines temporal aspects of Günther Anders’s media criticism by highlighting the importance of temporality in Anders’s criticism of technology as humans’ late arrival to their own products: human obsolescence. Anders’s writings about the atomic bomb and broadcasting are briefly discussed as concrete examples of the significance of temporality in his criticism. We then present an analysis of Anders’s 1956 essay on Becket’s Waiting for Godot, arguing that the paradoxical experience of time in the play not only inaugurates worldlessness highlighted by Anders, but also resembles the non-directional temporality of digital media, with the consequent difficulty of meaningful action. We compare Anders’s argument to those present in current theorizing on digital temporality before identifying strengths and limitations of Anders’s temporal criticism. Throughout, we refer to the simultaneous presence and absence of Heidegger and Husserl in Anders’s writing as key to a reading of Anders in a digital media context.