Bernard Stiegler’s life reads like something out of a parable. A young man with no future robs banks in 1970s France, spends years behind bars, and in that captivity rebuilds himself with philosophy. He walks out of prison not as a criminal, but as a thinker possessed, convinced that the real theft in our time is not money, but attention.

In this episode of The Observing I, we explore Stiegler’s haunting philosophy of technology. For him, every tool humanity creates is a pharmakon, a drug that is both poison and cure. Writing, television, the internet, the smartphone. Each expands memory and possibility, while at the same time eroding our ability to care, to think slowly, to live with depth.

Stiegler saw consumer capitalism as an attention factory, engineering desire, fragmenting focus, and hollowing out culture. He warned that the collapse of care, the long, patient work of knowledge, intimacy, and love, was not a side effect but the central mechanism of the system we live inside. Burnout, anxiety, distraction: these are not private pathologies, but collective symptoms of a civilization addicted to speed.

We trace Stiegler’s journey from outlaw to philosopher, his obsession with memory and time, his warnings about the industrialisation of attention, and the tragic end of his life that makes his work feel even more urgent. At the heart of it all lies the question he left for us: if attention is the last scarce resource, can care itself survive?

This is not just an episode about a philosopher. It’s about the world we live in now. A world where our memories are outsourced, our futures feel stolen, and our very capacity to care is on the line.

Much love, David