Metamorphization of society: The factor of ‘side effects’ and globalization of nothing

Today physical, biological and social worlds develop increasingly quicker and in a more complex way that includes the phenomena of metamorphoses. Traditionally, they were considered as determined mainly by external factors, i.e. the forces of nature. Contemporary metamorphoses seem to become of a complex man-made nature. Compared to traditional metamorphoses with ‘rigid’ and predictable results, contemporary metamorphoses of societies can produce both negative and positive consequences, which proves the non-linear dynamic picture of the world. There is also a traumatic tendency - when something is metamorphosed into ‘nothing’. Due to digitalization, ‘nothing’ becomes more complex and ‘pure’ from cultural and humane characteristics, thus, revealing new expressions of the ‘death’ of the social: humans are metamorphosed into ‘digital beings’. Metamorphization of society can produce common goods as a side effect of the bad. The author argues that the formal-rational, pragmatic transformations of society and nature, like the scientific and technological innovations of mercantile type, deform and dehumanize life-worlds. The global traumatization in the form of ‘liquid’ catastrophes permanently changes the living and non-living nature, structure of soil, water and air, desocializes human relations, facilitates transformations of something into nothing, people into ‘non-people’, places into ‘non-places’, things into ‘non-things’. However, people as reflexive actors can turn metamorphoses into ‘things-for-man’. To start this process, it is necessary to change the pragmatic monodisciplinary principles of science by the interdisciplinarity ones to ensure a humanistic turn in science and technologies.