Enframed Lives: Heidegger and the Datification of Human Experience

The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics is thrilled to welcome Dr. Fernando Mora to Arizona State University as our 2026 Visiting Scholar.

Lunch will be provided, please RSVP.

This talk invites students from all academic disciplines and faculty members to reflect on how contemporary digital technologies shape everyday life through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘enframing’ (Ge-stell). Rather than treating algorithms as neutral tools, the session examines how data-driven systems increasingly organize, predict and mediate human experience. Through accessible examples drawn from everyday digital practices, such as music consumption and other forms of subjective experience. The talk explores how personal tastes, habits, and choices are translated into data and subsequently shaped by algorithmic systems. In doing so, it considers how these processes can influence decision-making, ethical and political perspectives, and the ways subjectivity itself is lived and understood. The goal is to open an interdisciplinary conversation about what it means to inhabit a world where human lives are increasingly shaped—and limited—by algorithmic forms of understanding.

Fernando Mora is a philosopher and academic leader specializing in ethics, technology, and human experience. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Panamericana and a PhD in Humanistic Studies (Ethics) from Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he received the Torre de Excelencia for academic merit.

He completed studies in Public Affairs at City University of New York and later served as a visiting researcher at the Instituto Iberoamericano in Berlin, focusing on public security and youth at risk in Latin America.

Currently, he is Regional Director of Humanities Studies at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he teaches Ethics and Artificial Intelligence and actively contributes to the institutional implementation of Digital Humanities initiatives. His work bridges philosophy, ethics, public policy, and data-driven technologies, with a particular focus on how algorithms and processes of datification reshape subjectivity, agency, and ethical reflection in contemporary life.