Anthropology of the Digital Age: The Problem of Human Being and Technological Sovereignty

The review offers a philosophical-anthropological and cultural-philosophical reading of American journalist Eva Dou's book House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company. Grounded in an extensive body of interviews, internal corporate documents, and state reports, the book substantially exceeds the bounds of a conventional corporate biography, functioning instead as empirical material for reflecting on fundamental contradictions of the contemporary technological age. The reviewer draws out several interconnected philosophical-anthropological threads embedded in the narrative. The first concerns technological sovereignty as a precondition of national agency. Dou traces how China's dependence on foreign telecommunications switches during the 1980s was experienced not merely as an economic inconvenience but as an existential threat to statehood, and how the 1991 breakthrough of a homegrown digital switch came to symbolize a form of anthropological emancipation from structural subordination. The reviewer situates this narrative within the broader discourse of technological nationalism and digital sovereignty, arguing that the capacity to produce critical technologies has become a marker of a nation's subjecthood in the global order. The second thread addresses the transformation of the human being under conditions of radical technologization of labor. Huawei's notorious “wolf culture” and “mattress culture” along with its demand for absolute loyalty, and the tragic wave of employee suicides between 2006 and 2008 are read as symptoms of a deeper anthropological crisis intrinsic to contemporary technological capitalism, in which the human person is reduced to a productive function while existential needs are systematically disregarded. The review also highlights a paradox: the same corporate culture that instrumentalized employees demanded of them a humanistic, almost “Renaissance”, breadth of learning. A third dimension concerns the possibility of cultural synthesis under globalization. The reviewer examines Huawei's eclectic architectural campus in Dongguan — complete with miniature replicas of Heidelberg Castle, Versailles, and other European landmarks — as a material embodiment of “hybrid modernization”: the selective absorption of Western technological and managerial practices without abandoning Chinese cultural identity, interpreted through Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum and Yuk Hui's concept of cosmotechnics. The fourth thread engages the ethical dilemmas of the digital age, particularly state surveillance, corporate-party entanglement, and the structural ambiguity of telecommunications infrastructure as simultaneously a means of communication and a potential instrument of control — illustrated through international debates over “back doors” in network equipment. Finally, the review situates Huawei's rise within a broader philosophy of history, framing it as a twenty-first-century “Sputnik moment” that unsettles Western assumptions about the necessary correlation between political freedom and technological innovation, challenging Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis. The monograph is recommended to researchers in philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture, philosophy of technology, social philosophy, and philosophy of globalization, as well as to general readers seeking to understand the deeper logic of contemporary technological transformation.

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