The digital revolution, human nature, and epistemic distance

The article analyzes the transition from the analog to the digital world not as a change of tools, but as a fundamental transformation of the environment of human agency. The author points to the phenomenon of the elimination of material resistance—unlike the physical world, where interactions were direct and causally transparent, the digital world introduces an intermediary layer (the interface) that hides the processes leading to the result. Using the concept of embodied cognition, the text argues that this epistemic distancing changes how we build intuitions regarding causality and time. The technological success of digitalization lies in making the infrastructure invisible, which paradoxically increases the distance between human intent and the actual mechanism of the system's operation.