Back in April 2020, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jürgen Habermas pointed out that “existential uncertainty is now spreading globally and simultaneously, in the heads of medially-wired individuals themselves.” He continued, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.”

Habermas is right to claim that this not-knowing does not concern only the pandemic itself — we at least have experts there — but even more its economic, social, and psychic consequences. Note his precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.

We now know that in, say, medieval times or early modernity they knew much less — but they didn’t know this because they relied on some stable ideological foundation which guaranteed that our universe is a meaningful totality. The same holds for some visions of Communism, even for Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history — they all assumed to know where history is moving. Plus, Habermas is right to locate the uncertainty into “the heads of medially-wired individuals”: our link to the wired universe tremendously expands our knowledge, but at the same time it throws us into radical uncertainty (Are we hacked? Who controls our access? Is what we’re reading there fake news?). Viruses strike in both meanings of the term, biological and digital.