The Comfort Trap: Pseudo-Innovation, Digital Comfort, and the Erosion of the Human Condition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17162/riva.v12i1.2113Keywords:
Pseudo-technological innovation, Culture of comfort, Human agency, Algorithmic design and ethics, Human meaning and purposeAbstract
This theoretical essay offers an interdisciplinary reflection on the anthropological, ethical, and cultural implications of contemporary technological innovation oriented toward comfort, immediacy, and efficiency. Drawing on contributions from psychopolitics, sociology of character, technology critique, design studies, and theological anthropology, it examines how forms of so-called pseudo-innovation may generate tensions with fundamental human capacities such as self-discipline, personal management of life with intention, criteria, and responsibility, narrative identity, and meaningful conversation. Without asserting direct causal relationships between technology and human decline, the essay suggests that the systematic delegation of cognitive, relational, and moral effort constitutes a relevant phenomenon for understanding certain vulnerabilities of contemporary subjects. It argues that the core issue lies not in technology itself, but in the erosion of ethical, social, and anthropological criteria necessary to distinguish between innovations that support human development and those that undermine it. The essay presents a foundational conceptual framework to enrich scholarly discussions of innovation, character, and human meaning in digital societies.
Downloads
References
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming life. Polity Press.
Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. Penguin.
Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. HarperBusiness.
Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2020). AI ethics. MIT Press.
Crawford, M. (2015). The world beyond your head: On becoming an individual in an age of distraction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner.
Eco, U. (2015). Pape Satàn Aleppe. La nave di Teseo.
Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
Frankl, V. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be? Harper & Row.
Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical technologies: The design of everyday life. Verso.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.)
Han, B.-C. (2021). The disappearance of rituals. Herder.
Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. Spiegel & Grau.
Huang, C. (2022). A meta-analysis of the problematic social media use and mental health. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 68(1), 12-33.
Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3(3), 285–306.
Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations. W. W. Norton.
Lipovetsky, G. (2007). Les temps hypermodernes. Grasset.
Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press.
Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. PublicAffairs.
Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things (Revised ed.). MIT Press.
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown.
OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (GPT-5.1) [Large language model]. Retrieved December 12, 2025, from https://chat.openai.com/
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Viking.
Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2017). A large-scale test of the Goldilocks hypothesis: Quantifying the relations between digital-screen use and the mental well-being of adolescents. Psychological Science, 28(2), 204-215. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616678438
Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688.
Seligman, M. (2018). The hope circuit: A psychologist's journey from helplessness to hope. Hachette.
Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. W. W. Norton.
Sindermann, C., Montag, C., & Elhai, J. D. (2022). The design of social media platforms: initial evidence on relations between personality, fear of missing out, design element-driven increased social media use, and problematic social media use. https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000096
Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin Press.
Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen: Why Today's Super‐Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. New York, NY: Atria. ISBN: 978‐1‐5011‐5201‐6 paperback. 342 pp.
White, E. G. (1903). Education. Pacific Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Juan Carlos Niño de Guzmán Miranda
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Política propuesta para revistas de acceso abierto
Los autores/as que publiquen en esta revista aceptan las siguientes condiciones:
- Los autores/as conservan los derechos de autor y ceden a la revista el derecho de la primera publicación, con el trabajo registrado con la licencia de atribución de Creative Commons, que permite a terceros utilizar lo publicado siempre que mencionen la autoría del trabajo y a la primera publicación en esta revista.
- Los autores/as pueden realizar otros acuerdos contractuales independientes y adicionales para la distribución no exclusiva de la versión del artículo publicado en esta revista (p. ej., incluirlo en un repositorio institucional o publicarlo en un libro) siempre que indiquen claramente que el trabajo se publicó por primera vez en esta revista.
- Se permite y recomienda a los autores/as a publicar su trabajo en Internet (por ejemplo en páginas institucionales o personales) antes y durante el proceso de revisión y publicación, ya que puede conducir a intercambios productivos y a una mayor y más rápida difusión del trabajo publicado (vea The Effect of Open Access)
