Worlds Without Us: Anders, Baudrillard, Philip K. Dick, and the Obsolescence of the Human

Taught by Nicolas de Warren (Acid Horizon Research Commons)

Something has gone wrong with the human—or perhaps the human has simply run out. Not through extinction or catastrophe, but through a quieter and more unsettling process: we are being unmade by the things we have made. The machines, media systems, weapons, and simulations that human civilization has produced have not merely transformed the conditions of human life—they have begun to replace human agency altogether. Neither living nor dead, the human persists as something overtaken, timed-out, rendered obsolete by fabricated agencies of its own invention. Are we witnessing the age of the last humans, without even the promise of another human beyond the human?

This four-week seminar takes this provocation seriously. Its primary guide is Günther Anders, whose recently translated masterwork The Obsolescence of the Human remains one of the most searching—and most neglected—diagnoses of the modern condition. Writing in the shadow of cybernetics, screen media, and the nuclear bomb, Anders argued that human agency is quietly dissolving before forces that outstrip our imagination, our responsibility, and our capacity for shame. We have become inferior to our own creations—and we do not even feel the full weight of that inferiority. This is what Anders calls "Promethean Shame."

From Anders, the course pivots to Jean Baudrillard, asking whether his influential account of simulacra and hyperreality can be recast as its own theory of human obsolescence. In his final texts, Baudrillard himself drew this connection explicitly, tracing the movement from the age of simulation into what he called the age of "cannibalism and carnival"—a world in which the real has not merely been copied but consumed. Tiqqun's The Cybernetic Hypothesis enters as a further interlocutor, pushing the political stakes of this diagnosis toward their anarchist conclusions.

The seminar closes with an inversion. Rather than continuing to elaborate a philosophy of obsolescence as though it were a kind of science fiction—a characterization neither Anders nor Baudrillard would refuse—the course turns to science fiction itself as philosophy. Philip K. Dick's novels do not merely illustrate the obsolescence of the human; they think it from the inside, staging the collapse of authentic agency, memory, and selfhood with a precision that academic philosophy rarely matches. Dr. Strangelove and Tarkovsky's Stalker appear as cinematic companions, and the Netflix series Terminator Zero brings these questions into the present tense.

Throughout, the course holds open a question that none of its thinkers fully resolves: if the human has become obsolete, who—or what—is doing the noticing?

Course Structure

This four-week seminar moves through three thinkers and one inversion:

Session 1, May 26 — "Good morning, and in case I don't see ya..." An introduction to Anders' "Promethean Shame" and his pioneering critique of media technology, read against the history of Promethean imagery from Plato to Marx.

Session 2, June 2 — "Well, boys, I reckon this is it" Anders on nuclear weapons, apocalyptic blindness, and the destructive consequences of technologies that outrun human imagination—extended toward military automation, industrial waste, and the worlds we are already building without us.

Session 3, June 9 — "There is no spoon" Baudrillard's arc from Simulation and Simulacra to The Agony of Power and Carnival and Cannibal, reframed through Anders and supplemented by Tiqqun's The Cybernetic Hypothesis.

Session 4, June 16 — "Before we even know what we are, we fear to lose it" PK Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as philosophical investigations of obsolescence—alongside the Netflix series Terminator Zero.

Instructor Bio

Nicolas de Warren is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Penn State University, where his work spans phenomenology, philosophy of time, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

Course Schedule

All sessions meet from 7:00–9:00 PM EDT via Zoom.

Session 1: May 26 — "Good morning, and in case I don't see ya..."

Session 2: June 2 — "Well, boys, I reckon this is it"

Session 3: June 9 — "There is no spoon"

Session 4: June 16 — "Before we even know what we are, we fear to lose it"

Students will receive access to all recorded sessions and supplementary reading materials. Upon enrollment, a recurring Zoom link will be provided to access your classroom.