Hardly a day goes by without someone fretting about when automation is going to take away our jobs, how the only realities now are increasingly virtual and why digital devices have made us unable to concentrate. Psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s suggestion as to how we should think about these cultural transformations is nothing if not bold and original. “What if,” he asks, “rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilisation, we see today’s changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands?”
That “first and foremost” means the suggestion cannot be taken both literally and seriously. Asking if hands are the right place to start to explain the rise of social media, for example, is a non-starter. The question is better read as genuinely hypothetical, an invitation to embark on a kind of thought experiment that may or may not generate new insights on our contemporary condition.
Related: Darian Leader: 'Madness is the rule rather than the exception' – interview
Leader’s references to knitting exemplify both his talent for acute observation and his fondness for hidden explanations
Related: Darian Leader: how technology is changing our hands
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