The Digital as Living Environment: Rethinking Cultural Practices in the Anthropocene Era

On December 11, 2025, at the invitation of Alain Chenevez, Senior Lecturer (HDR) in Sociology at the University of Burgundy, I spoke alongside Olivier Servais, digital anthropologist at the Catholic University of Louvain, as part of the Graduate Schools seminar dedicated to “Imaginaries of the Anthropocene and New Contexts.” This three-hour meeting, held at the Law Amphitheater in Dijon, was structured as a dialogue among three speakers, open to the students and faculty present, exploring the profound transformations that digital technology brings to our ways of inhabiting the world, making culture, and building the commons. Here is a synthesis that blends the contributions of each participant.

The Digital: Neither Tool nor Fate, but Living Environment

A first clarification is immediately necessary: digital technology is not a subject about which one can be “for” or “against.” It now constitutes a living environment, in the same way as the air we breathe or the language in which we think. This perspective, which I have defended for twenty years through my artistic practice and my work supporting cultural policies, invites us to move beyond stances of rejection or naive acceptance to think with digital technology, consciously aware of what it transforms within us.

Michel Serres, in Thumbelina (2012), had already perceived that generations born with the smartphone are not “brain-dead,” but that their cognition functions differently. This intuition is confirmed: neuroscience now shows that while memory capacities tend to atrophy in intensive digital users, their associative capacities develop considerably. We are witnessing an anthropological transformation, not a degradation.

This transformation is not without historical precedent, moreover. As Olivier Servais reminded us, citing Tom Boellstorff, every communication revolution, from the telegraph to the telephone, from radio to the Internet, has provoked similar moral panics. American newspapers in the 19^th century predicted that the telegraph would “destroy jobs” and isolate people in their homes. These recurring fears should not exempt us from vigilance, but they invite nuance.

Continuum and Tipping Points

While digital technology represents a major anthropological transformation, it is part of a longer continuum than is generally believed. The imaginary of thought as calculation dates back to Leibniz, whose 1703 manuscript on binary calculation I showed during the seminar. The first calculating machine, built by Blaise Pascal as a teenager, dates from the 17^th century. Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s, conceptually invented modern computing in her notes on Babbage’s machine. The Turing test, which still defines our conception of artificial intelligence, dates from 1950.

The tipping points for the general public are more recent: microcomputing in the late 1970s, the Internet in the 1990s, mobile Internet in the mid-2000s, social networks with Facebook (which imported gamer culture into social networking), and finally generative artificial intelligence with ChatGPT in November 2022. Each stage was only possible because of the previous ones, technical and imaginary alike.

For our imaginaries precede and guide the transformations of the world. Elon Musk, steeped in science fiction in the 1980s, is today trying to realize those visions. Jeff Bezos personally financed the final seasons of the series The Expanse, so much does this series embody his vision of a future where humanity will extract resources from asteroids. These imaginaries have very concrete consequences for resource allocation and technological directions.

Empathy and the Sensible: What Remains Irreplaceable in Us

Faced with artificial intelligence, a question arises: what qualifies us as human? My answer is clear: it is not cognition, since machines now cogitate. It is empathy, imagination, chance, serendipity, the sensory experience shared between people. All these dimensions that the extractivist production system has precisely neglected, even destroyed.

Olivier Servais enriched this reflection by pointing to the decline in empathy levels measured in social psychology surveys over the past fifteen years. The screen creates emotional distance from others. He testified to his experience as a teacher: while eighteen years ago oral exams were commonplace, he now observes that several students a day break down, unable to meet an examiner’s gaze. Human face-to-face interaction has become an ordeal.

Yet this same technology can create unexpected connections. I experimented with ChatGPT as early as summer 2023 in the social field, during a tour with Culture du Cœur among people in extreme poverty, addicts, transgender people who were victims of violence, young people in foster care. A seventy-year-old man, an alcoholic, who had never typed on a keyboard, spent more than two hours asking ChatGPT philosophical questions about resurrection, fame, how to buy beer without money, and so on. He finally had a benevolent, available, non-judgmental interlocutor. Foster children were able to get precise answers about their video games—questions no adult could answer, usually creating condescension and disconnection.

Cultural Rights: Recognizing the Dignity of Others

These experiences always bring me back to the question of cultural rights, enshrined in French law since 2015-2016. Considering culture in its anthropological sense—what constitutes us—implies respecting the culture of others, including when it is foreign to us or displeases us. A young person passionate about video games whom we judge “worthless” deserves the same respect as a music lover fond of baroque.

This approach distinguishes cultural democratization (inherited from Malraux: providing access to “great works”) from cultural democracy (creating spaces where we mutually enrich one another). Directors of decentralized theaters often resist cultural rights because they consider themselves bearers of “the” right culture to disseminate to the masses. Yet the Ministry of Culture itself, since 2021, has created a delegation and then a directorate for cultural rights, signaling a return of popular education to cultural policy.

I situate myself in the lineage of John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who, in Art as Experience (1934), affirms that art is not the object (painting, sculpture) but the experience lived by the person who encounters it. This reliance on experience aligns with respect for human dignity. Paradoxically, this is also what the big tech companies do when they personalize our experiences through massive data collection. The subsidized cultural sector, for its part, still struggles to genuinely engage with its audiences, even as it claims to offer embodied experiences.

The Long Tail: Diversity Against Uniformity

Digital technology is not only uniformization and mainstream. The concept of the “long tail,” theorized by Chris Anderson in 2006, shows that unlike physical commerce (where 20% of items produce 80% of revenue), digital platforms derive 50% of their income from the immense diversity of niche content. A poetry book selling one copy per year will remain available for ten years on Amazon, whereas it would have been delisted after one year in a bookstore.

This economy of diversity allows communities of enthusiasts—lovers of baroque music on period instruments, players of alternative video games—to find each other, to unite, to create events. The success of music festivals testifies to this return to live performance, nourished by algorithms that connect niches. The music economy, after the shock of piracy, has rebuilt itself around played, performed, shared music.

Digital Sovereignty and Political Responsibility

These opportunities should not obscure the issues of power. I challenged participants about universities’ dependence on Microsoft (for example, 350,000 euros annually for the Office suite at the University of Burgundy), when free alternatives exist. Choosing Windows means subjecting your data to American law. It potentially allows Trump to cut off access to French data.

Microsoft’s history is one of predatory capitalism: software theft, antitrust lawsuits, non-compliance with web standards. Against this, alternatives exist and work: Linux for operating systems, Framasoft for online services, Signal for secure messaging, Mistral for European artificial intelligence that respects GDPR.

Public authorities have a particular responsibility. When Nantes abandons Linux to return to Windows, it is a major political inconsistency. Public money should nourish local ecosystems, free software, FabLabs—not enrich multinationals whose interests diverge from the general interest. On the other hand, the city of Lyon has switched to free software, as has the national gendarmerie, representing an essential political accountability.

The Ecological Challenge: Lucidity Without Renunciation

Digital technology poses considerable ecological challenges. Data centers consume massive amounts of drinking water and electricity. When they are established in a territory, they become so indispensable to infrastructure that in case of a heat wave, power to the machines will be prioritized over that of residents. Two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table go into manufacturing a smartphone, some of which are in critical supply situations.

Yet alternatives are emerging. The Swiss host Infomaniak heats 6,000 Geneva homes with the heat from its servers, uses old computers for rarely accessed data, and offers a free AI (Euria) with a reduced footprint. In France, ST Microelectronics in Grenoble is developing semiconductors according to a logic of sobriety rather than a race for power. Europe, with ASML (the only global manufacturer of lithography machines for the most advanced chips), remains a key player in the digital revolution.

Open-source language models can run locally on a personal computer, without an Internet connection, with minimal energy consumption. Planned obsolescence is not inevitable: a twenty-year-old computer, equipped with an SSD and Linux, works perfectly for everyday uses.

Cultivating Hybridization

My artistic practice embodies these tensions and possibilities. In the documentary I am currently finishing on progressive education, I gave cameras to the children rather than filming them from the outside. How can one claim to document children’s “right to speak” without giving them rights over the film itself? The artist today must assume multiple positions: creator, pedagogue, mediator. This hybridization is not dilution but enrichment. Far from weakening the artistic gesture, it connects it to the world, restores its meaning and legitimacy.

Toward a Distributed Culture

The seminar concluded with a shared realization: we, professionals of subsidized culture, are marginal to actual cultural practices. TikTok is consulted more than Google by young people. Video games are the world’s leading cultural practice, with 3.8 billion users.

Faced with this reality, two paths open to us: retreat into defensive and condescending positions, or openness to genuine cultural democracy. The second path involves recognizing the skills developed by audiences—transmedia navigation, personal curation, community creation—creating spaces of trust where everyone can contribute, and reinventing our methods so they build connections rather than deliver lectures.

Digital technology, an ambivalent living environment like any pharmakon, can be the poison or the remedy. It is up to us to cultivate what makes us human—empathy, chance, encounter—with the tools of our time, without nostalgia or naivety. It is on this condition that the cultural sector will regain its political relevance: not as an instrument of symbolic domination, but as the humble facilitator of a truly shared culture.