A short glossary for diagnosing the digital age

The article is a review of Byung-Chul Han’s Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy (translated from German by S.O. Mukhamedzhanova, Moscow: AST Publishing House, 2025. 160 p.). According to the annotation, this is a “laconic, conceptually rich essay” in which the author “examines the transformation of democracy in the digital age - when information, not ideology or economics, becomes the main instrument of power” (P. 4). One may disagree with the author’s radical separation of information, on the one hand, and ideology and economics, on the other (after all, information presupposes an ideological component, and its dissemination requires economic investments), but one cannot help but admit that the book offers the reader a brief glossary (a system of concepts for analytical work) for “diagnosing” the current digital age from. The author’s “diagnosis” is disappointing, but the reader can argue with it based on the author’s categorical apparatus in his own “diagnosis”.