“The flavor of data”: for a phenomenology of digital autonomy

In the contemporary digital ecosystem, our apparent freedom of use conceals a structural and total dependence on platforms. This illusion of autonomy masks the disappearance of our individual and collective sovereignty.

The invisible infrastructure of our voluntary servitude

Digital sovereignty constitutes a fundamental political issue for the future of our so-called democratic societies. Our growing dependence on major technological platforms, whether it affects our personal, psychological, administrative, economic, energy or patrimonial lives, marks the gradual end at very rapid speed of our sovereignty, that is, our capacity for political self-determination. How does this unfold, what are the risks and what can we do about it?

Étienne de La Boétie, in his book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1576), already explained very well how we actively participate in our own subjugation; today it is in a digital dimension, where the chains are completely invisible and the oppression apparently very gentle.

We are hyperconnected, thanks to digital services, of which we are the objects, the “products,” as they say in economics. In reality, we are no longer free to define our own modes of interaction. It is now multinationals that orchestrate and mediate all of our relational capacities. Their structural power exceeds that of nation-states, because they control the very infrastructures of global social functioning. This architecture of control, which Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), redefines the contours of our freedom.

This loss of sovereignty leads us inexorably toward living spaces impoverished in real freedom and possibilities for emancipation as we knew them in the past. Paradoxically, these spaces can be full of illusions of choice, but they can also encourage generalized self-censorship. Digital alienation is thus distinguished by its ability to make itself desired, to make itself indispensable while depriving us of our fundamental autonomy.

I take the liberty of extensively quoting three excerpts from the important book “Geopolitics of Digital, Imperialism with Giant Steps” by Ophélie Coelho (2023), to clearly specify the economic-political processes of industrial and strategic rationalization that lead to this situation:

As orders and funding multiply, the American State becomes a privileged client of these companies, but also one of the most dependent on their technologies. Moreover, in general, States that undergo their “digital transformation,” whether the United States or the rest of the world, become important clients of digital giants. But most of the time, the technical instances used are the same as those dedicated to the general public, with commercial offers specifically dedicated to public actors. Let us also emphasize here the ambition of the American State: it is about increasing the market share of national companies and positioning their digital power as a strategic weapon.

[...]

Public investments allow companies such as Amazon Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet, Apple and Meta to become the giants we know today, and that we call Big Tech. And these actors have positioned themselves in all areas that initially fall under the mission of States, marking both a confirmation and a displacement of the traditional pattern of opposition between corporate power and State power, corroborating the thesis on the political project of GAFA and the dismissal of the social State defended by Evgeny Morozov since 2015. In terms of digital geopolitics, this positioning represents a formidable technological expansion strategy driven by two strong levers: economic intelligence through data collection, and making entities dependent through the monopolization of their operational technical foundations.

[...]

It is first to reduce development times and costs that companies use digital tools to industrialize at low cost a set of tasks that were previously internalized. Operations on the company’s information systems that are gradually “outsourced” within infrastructure platforms and web development progressively rely on a set of technologies produced by third parties, and even knowing how to code is gradually presented as accessory. It is then no longer necessary to have in the company certain technical skills that were previously essential, because these are gradually replaced by remote management interfaces. These subjugation practices therefore have important consequences on the evolution of professions and technical knowledge, which further accentuates the mechanisms of dependence on monopoly actors.

The mirage of fluidity, or when accessibility masks dependence

We struggle to become aware of this erosion of our sovereignty, precisely because everything seems so accessible, so simple, so fluid. I create a Google document, I access Netflix with one click, I listen to my playlists on Spotify or Deezer, I check my Dropbox, my emails sync instantly, I interact on social networks with disconcerting ease. This frictionless user experience creates what I call “informational fluidity,” generating a deceptive feeling of great autonomy.

But let’s imagine for a moment that tomorrow, due to some of your activities, perhaps perfectly legitimate in your eyes, whether religious, political, or simply non-conforming to the shifting standards of platforms, you suddenly find yourself deprived of access to all or part of these services. Your morals, your readings, your listening habits, your relationships, everything that constitutes your digital identity could become suspect. Or again, imagine that these networks stop functioning for geopolitical reasons, following commercial conflicts or international sanctions.

It is then that we would feel with painful acuity our total absence of sovereignty, our absolute dependence, because we would be from one moment to the next dispossessed of both our entire heritage or almost, our links and our capacities for action. An entire ministry, a municipality, an administration can be paralyzed in an instant. The moral or political judgments of a supranational private body do not only apply to isolated individuals, but can strike entire communities. This redefines the contours of public sovereignty itself, at all levels of administration.

Dystopian scenarios and contingent realities

Allow me to sketch a fictional but technically feasible scenario: if tomorrow Microsoft’s terms of use evolved under the influence of new geopolitical alliances, integrating cultural or ideological criteria foreign to our values in France, we could witness the automated censorship of entire sections of internal documents of the French Ministry of Culture. Agents could be automatically reported to “competent authorities” to sanction their non-compliance with these new rules, and this retroactively, applying today’s standards to yesterday’s content.

This dystopian fiction concretely illustrates what I mean by loss of digital sovereignty. It echoes Michel Foucault’s warnings about surveillance and normalization devices in Discipline and Punish (1975), transposed to the digital era with multiplied control power. The fundamental difference lies in the preventive and predictive nature of these new devices, capable of anticipating and shaping our behaviors before we are even aware of them.

On the other hand, if we control the location of our data, in a NAS on our premises for example, and if we manage them, duplicate them, take care of them as we maintain our library or our building (strategies that I document in detail in this section on digital heritage) then the scenario I just mentioned becomes simply impossible. No one, except public agents with a judgment and physically present to seize the equipment, holds this power of life and death at a distance over our digital data, that is, our personal and social existence.

The patient reconquest of our digital autonomy

The reconquest of our digital sovereignty, because it is indeed lost at the collective scale, promises to be a slow and demanding process. In barely two decades, we have ceded, with enthusiasm and in complete unconsciousness, entire sections of our autonomy. This reconquest requires work, sustained attention, cooperation, the implementation of new procedures, the adoption and development of free and collaborative tools. This is not about making anyone feel guilty: we all do our best in the complex reality that surrounds us.

This reconquest begins with awareness, and that is the reason for this article. Consciousness is already a huge step. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t instantly migrate all your Google accounts to free alternatives. As Antonio Gramsci wrote, we must combine “the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will”. Understanding the gravity of the situation without being paralyzed by it.

This consciousness, progressively nourished by information, knowledge and curiosity about these sovereignty issues, can arouse unexpected and revealing emotions in us. It transforms our phenomenological relationship to technologies, making us sensitive to previously invisible dimensions of our digital experience.

The epiphany of dependence, a phenomenological experience

Let me share a recent personal experience that crystallized my emotional understanding of these issues. I was traveling, trying from my phone to connect to the personal server that runs permanently in my office, simply to listen to music. This server hosts my documents, my music, an entire digital heritage that I manage, duplicate and maintain in total independence from any multinational. The connection failed. Was it the local network? A problem with my internet box? I don’t know.

Faced with this technical failure, I thought: “It doesn’t matter, I want to listen to music, I’ll open Spotify.” I have a subscription, after all. But something in me resisted. Why? Rationally, it’s the same music, the same notes, the same harmonies. Yet, no: the music wouldn’t have the same flavor. I physically felt this unpleasant feeling of dependence that I don’t want to have with Spotify. I didn’t want to be dependent to listen to music at that precise moment. I aspired to listen to this music in complete independence, in complete freedom, basically.

So I preferred silence to listening to the same music via Spotify rather than via my own server. This emotion, fruit of my progressive awareness, appeared to me as an excellent sign. It testifies to an inner transformation, a new sensitivity to the political dimension of our daily technological choices.

The sovereign flavor, the flavor of data

One could object to me: “Why bother storing MP3 files on your own hard drive when everything is accessible on Spotify? It’s simpler, accessible from anywhere, and even economically more rational with a simple subscription giving access to millions of titles.” This objection contains a grain of truth, but it obscures essential dimensions of our relationship to culture and memory.

First, the “everything” of Spotify is an illusion. It doesn’t include the records of my artist friends from the 80s and 90s, bootleg recordings of memorable concerts, rare alternative versions and remixes, and my way of organizing. My personal music library reflects my singularity: it is organized according to my own logic, as I arrange my physical books according to an order that resembles me and tells my story. Spotify playlists don’t replace CD covers patiently digitized with their complete booklets, testimonies of a particular era and aesthetic.

The analogy with vinyl records, which have made a strong comeback, is enlightening. Why burden yourself with vinyl records when the same song is available for streaming? It’s not so much the sound difference, contrary to audiophile myths, that matters. It’s what I call the “flavor of data”, this singular relationship to the cultural object. Music, like all data, has a dual nature: an immaterial aspect that flows fluidly through digital networks, and a material aspect that defines our political and emotional relationship to these contents. This materiality, even when it is digital, changes everything. It is what gives its particular flavor to the experience.

I therefore propose this concept of “flavor of data” to qualify the phenomenological and emotional dimension of digital sovereignty. This flavor is not a luxury or a whim: it is the very taste of our freedom in the digital space. As Walter Benjamin explained very well in a foundational way in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), even in the era of infinite reproduction, there remains an “aura” linked to the context and the relationship we maintain with cultural objects. In our case, this aura is that of autonomy, mastery, sovereignty over our own digital existence.

Cultivating this sovereign flavor is resisting the standardization of experiences, it is keeping alive the possibility of an authentic and free relationship to our data, to our culture, to ourselves. It is, in short, preserving the conditions of possibility for our emancipation in the digital world to come, it is both political and intimate.

Appendix: a surprising interpretation by Google’s AI

While writing this article, to save a little time, instead of copying it by hand or putting it on my good old scanner, I took a photo of page 58 of the book “Geopolitics of Digital” and asked Gemini 2.5, Google’s state-of-the-art AI at the time of writing this article, to simply do text recognition. Here is the recognition that Gemini produced:

The instances for public actors thus allow better alignment with the needs of state actors. Alphabet, for example, qualifies the services it deploys for the public sector as “tailor-made”. Amazon Inc. and Microsoft Corporation, for their part, explain that their respective domains have been designed to meet the specific regulatory requirements of the US government. These actors have committed to ensuring that their employees working on these instances are American citizens. In addition, the FBI is responsible for checking the backgrounds of these employees. All of these elements constitute a confirmation of the State’s power in defining standards, with regard to digital. The State’s mission here is to orient the market according to its needs. This is the corroboration of the thesis of the entrepreneurial State developed in 2013 by economist Mariana Mazzucato, as well as Evgeny Morozov’s political project. This is one of the challenges of digital socialism, which advocates state control over GAFAM. It is also a question here of an issue of political positioning of digital, and of the State.

While the original text is this:

Public investments allow companies such as Amazon Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet, Apple and Meta to become the giants we know today, and that we call Big Tech. And these actors have positioned themselves in all areas that initially fall under the mission of States, marking both a confirmation and a displacement of the traditional pattern of opposition between corporate power and State power, corroborating the thesis on the political project of GAFA and the dismissal of the social State defended by Evgeny Morozov since 2015. In terms of digital geopolitics, this positioning represents a formidable technological expansion strategy driven by two strong levers: economic intelligence through data collection, and making entities dependent through the monopolization of their operational technical foundations.

It’s incredible: the original text is extremely critical of GAFAM in their siphoning of sovereign functions, while the text produced by Gemini advocates the virtuous complementarity of GAFAM in the service of nations. It’s exactly the opposite idea!

And yet the photo was well taken, it wasn’t blurry at all. I asked it several times to recognize the exact text, it apologized saying it would correct it, but it always displayed its interpretation instead of the original text. We can see to what extent, in this tiny example, AIs are totally politicized to defend certain interests. The neutrality of technology is a myth, it absolutely does not exist, and if another example was needed to prove it, it came by itself in the writing of this article.