essay by BYUNG-CHUL HAN artwork by PAUL MCCARTHY & KYLE RAND Born in South Korea in 1959, philosopher-theorist Byung-Chul Han writes on the effects of technology on multitasking, exhaustion, depression, personality disorders. He recently published Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East. On a deep level, thinking is a decidedly analogue process. Before capturing the world in concepts, thinking is emotionally gripped, even affected by the world. The affective is essential to human thinking. The first thought image is goosebumps. Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps. It lacks the affective-analogue dimension, the capacity to be emotionally affected, which lies beyond the reach of data and information. Thinking sets out from a totality that precedes concepts, ideas and information. It moves in a “field of experience” before it turns towards the individual objects and facts in that…