We criticize tech giants while using their services daily. This contradiction reveals our ambiguous relationship with technologies and calls for rethinking our political engagement.
Industrialists: opportunists rather than ideologues
It has become conventional to rail against major industrialists, systematically portrayed as allies of the Trumpist far right. Yet these same actors were just yesterday supporting the Biden administration and actively participating in widespread censorship, contributing to the suppression of freedom of thought on social networks during the Covid period.
In reality, they are merely opportunistic merchants, aligning themselves with those in power to guarantee their shareholders the expected dividends. We criticize these industrialists with disconcerting intellectual ease, while daily resorting to ChatGPT to optimize our productivity. This contradiction is inevitable: refusing these tools would mean condemning ourselves to a loss of efficiency compared to those who adopt them.
The trap of cognitive dissonance
This cognitive dissonance questions me: we denounce and rebel, while remaining the primary consumers of these services that simplify our existence. I believe we need more nuance in our reflection.
Blind adherence to technologies is very naive, as they emerge in political contexts that they transform in return. But systematic opposition proves equally naive, even more pernicious. It claims to embody enlightened virtue and lucid consciousness, but is rooted in hypocrisy: militant discourses radically contradict daily practices. Individuals caught in this contradiction elaborate justifications that allow them to live with this incoherence. We thus witness a simulacrum of engagement that mistakes itself for authentic political action.
Towards authentic political engagement
True political engagement would not consist in despising those who transform our existences, but rather in deepening our understanding of these technologies and their real implications, rather than believing that our postures could produce changes. It would involve working, in our personal and collective spheres, to develop alternatives in our digital practices, to reduce our dependence on industrial giants. This emancipation remains perfectly accessible, but it requires sustained intellectual effort and sincere commitment to public service and the common good.
This demands effort, continuous learning, but that is precisely where authentic political engagement lies, not in grandiloquent and hypocritical speeches. True engagement does not consist in vilifying today those we may praise tomorrow, nor in glorifying those we will later condemn, based on superficial and contradictory information. It is rather about learning, understanding, acting concretely, transforming our habits and informing ourselves rigorously.
Deconstructing our representations to build our freedom
It is indeed about deconstructing our representations, through our actions, to build our freedom. This may seem obvious, but in my view it is of great importance. Let us strive to deconstruct our prejudices and representations concerning technologies, as we do for systems of domination, whether hierarchical, financial, sexist or patriarchal. Everything is interconnected. Let us guard against believing that we hold the truth or that we embody the side of good, just because we criticize without knowing.
We belong simultaneously to both camps. Let us nevertheless progress in our awareness and understanding. This is, it seems to me, the price of our future freedom and that of our loved ones. This is what I mean by authentic engagement for the common good, at a time when Artificial Intelligence technologies are inducing anthropological mutations of unprecedented speed and depth.
