For a Political Consciousness of Digital Technology

Every click, every application used, every digital service adopted constitutes a political act that participates in building our collective future, far beyond our individual uses.

Digital technology as an artificial environment of existence

I have long been accustomed to saying that digital technology is constitutive of our environments of existence in the same way as nature, the city, the air we breathe, or culture. But unlike nature, digital technology constitutes an artificial environment, a technological and industrial construction. However, their fragilities are comparable. The fragility of the digital environment lies in its absolute dependence on components, electricity, and human engineering. Without energy sources and without large industries, this environment would instantly stop functioning. When sharks occasionally bite the underwater transatlantic cables, as sometimes happens, the Internet experiences glitches that reveal its structural vulnerability.

This fragility is not unique to digital technology. Nature itself requires an ecosystem of infinite complexity to maintain its balance. Our own body, which seems to function with daily obviousness—it seems so evident to wake up, walk, talk, work—is in reality an environment of dizzying complexity. The apparent simplicity of its functioning masks an extraordinary sophistication. Digital technology shares this characteristic: consubstantial with our lives, it appears simple and obvious to us while resting on an infinitely complex and vulnerable infrastructure.

In the digital environment, as in nature, the positive and the negative coexist. Nature has its predators, apparent violence that paradoxically allows life to perpetuate itself and the environment to evolve, not to become frozen. Where we can act is in the direction of emancipation, evolution, inscription in an ever-renewed diversity, a diversity that, alas, is dramatically becoming scarce in nature with the accelerated disappearance of animal species, for example.

The urgency of a digital ecology

Thus, it seems to me that we have an interest in cultivating a true ecology of our digital environment. This ecology implies inscribing more diversity in it, creating spaces of autonomy and sovereignty capable of dialoguing and mutually enriching each other. It requires reducing our dependence on large industrialists whose objectives remain far from any collective virtue, diversifying our energy sources, and ending the scandalous exploitation of the earth for the manufacture of electronic components and electricity.

Digital technology can perfectly well evolve toward more virtuous modes of manufacture and existence. Approaches already exist in this direction, which it seems essential to me to cultivate and develop. But those who carry these alternatives, the defenders of free software, open licenses, Linux and LibreOffice, or those who generate their own electricity, are still perceived as gentle dreamers, disconnected illuminated ones. They appear, in the eyes of most people, as marginals facing the apparent evidence of the widespread use of Microsoft and Google tools, facing the habit of storing our data on American servers while accepting permanent surveillance, without awareness of the underlying political and ecological issues.

This perception strangely reminds me of that of ecologists in the 1970s. Then seen as dangerous utopians for the established order, almost like today’s “conspiracy theorists,” delirious individuals threatening the world order, they have nevertheless ended up seeing their concerns shared by a growing proportion of the population. It’s an elevation of the level of consciousness. If some still perceive them as dangerous beings, an ecological consciousness has fortunately developed among a large part of human beings. In the field of computing and digital technology, the same phenomenon is at work.

The political dimension of our technological choices

I will never tire of repeating it: our uses of digital technology, particularly in the choice of our tools, constitute political choices. These individual choices have, like any personal action, an impact on the global ecosystem. When we organize our personal and professional life around Outlook calendars, effectively excluding those who don’t use these same services and strongly encouraging them to conform, we are performing a political act. We create a collective dependence on Microsoft, a multinational with purely capitalist objectives, while alternatives exist.

These alternatives certainly seem bizarre and complicated at first glance. But consciousness is always more demanding than unconsciousness, the expression “happy idiot” bears witness to this... The question is always: what do we want for ourselves and for our society? The jurist Lawrence Lessig formulated it as early as 1999 with his expression that has become emblematic: “Code is law.” According to him, computer code acts as a form of regulation comparable to laws promulgated by political institutions. Technical architectures determine what is possible or not on networks and platforms, and thus shape our freedoms, our access, our privacy, and our expression. Lessig warns: it is the engineers and developers who manufacture the future politics of the organization of the human world, generally outside of any control, due to our unconsciousness that democracy is at stake there.

The real political decision-makers of tomorrow will probably not come from ENA nor from Sciences Politiques, but are rather polytechnicians or self-taught computer geniuses. I propose to look at things this way: real politics, that of the future, no longer operates in traditional legislative bodies. In France notably, our elected officials believe they decide because they vote on budgets and levy taxes. But progressively, they are shifting away from the reality of power. Microsoft and Google, which allow the French State to function in its digital dimension, without which it can no longer exist, pay only derisory taxes thanks to the tricks of globalization. Traditional political power no longer has any grip on them.

The alliance of digital titans

Elon Musk’s spectacular engagement in Donald Trump’s campaign, to the point of seeming at one time to be his number two, should not surprise us. Nor should Trump’s invitation for the start of 2025 to digital industry captains, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Sam Altman, all come to pledge their allegiance to him. These actors are not simply industrial, they are political. The issue of digital development for the United States goes beyond the simple economy: it’s about reconquering a threatened world hegemony, particularly in the face of China and India.

Despite their disagreements, these titans know how to form alliances to preserve their common interests: the future industrial power of their nation and the defense of a shared capitalist worldview. In 2013, the publication of the book “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business” by Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Google) and Jared Cohen deeply surprised me. The title of the French translation had been sweetened, no doubt to make it acceptable in our latitudes, which was amusing: « À nous d’écrire l’avenir: Comment les nouvelles technologies bouleversent le monde » [Ours to Write the Future: How New Technologies Are Transforming the World]. This book doesn’t simply talk about tools or mobile phones, but exposes how these technologies will completely modify the ways of life, governance, and economy of peoples.

Schmidt and Cohen discuss the risks of generalized surveillance while proposing paths for more freedom and sovereignty in this ultra-connected universe. They predict the emergence of privacy protection groups, affirm that the use of technologies will always depend on a “human hand.” For me, this book was the starting point of an awareness: these technological actors explicitly take positions on political subjects, and this trend is only amplifying.

Politics in intimacy

The political dimension is not limited to macroscopic organizations. It penetrates intimacy itself: our personal relationships, family relationships, even the bedroom. Everything is nourished by representations of the world that shape our vision of ourselves and structure our relationships. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been worried about this for a long time. As early as 2013, ten years before the launch of ChatGPT and at the time of the publication of Schmidt and Cohen’s book, he was raising the question of growing inequalities caused by technologies and advocating for new redistribution mechanisms, notably a universal basic income.

This political reasoning, carried in France by political actors like Benoît Hamon, has never been formulated by our national technological actors. Only the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, during his lifetime, conducted concrete experiments in Seine-Saint-Denis based on his reflection on technology on new ways to redistribute wealth. Altman, for his part, concretely experimented with universal income with thousands of people in the United States starting in 2016, via Y Combinator then Open Research.

This same Sam Altman launched ChatGPT in November 2022, causing this shift in the daily use of generative artificial intelligences, which is disrupting the world. ChatGPT was the origin of a new way of living, as the iPhone in 2007 had created the very concept of the smartphone. The iPhone was not the best, but the first, and it completely transformed this tool that we all have in our pockets. ChatGPT played the same role for generative AI, opening the door to a new reality. Paradoxically, Altman is the first to worry about ChatGPT’s too intimate involvement in people’s lives, aware of the issues of data security and privacy, among other risks, as I detail in the article Artificial Intelligence and Major Risks.

The revealing example of the Covid crisis

The Covid crisis revealed in a striking way this displacement of political power. Western decisions, remarkably similar from one country to another, were not made by States but by the consulting firm McKinsey, operating on behalf of its shareholders according to the capitalist logic of the moment. This strategy was indeed “reasonable” from their point of view: at the cost of France’s massive indebtedness (to speak of the country I know), the unprecedented increase in inequalities, the deterioration of the mental health of a large part of the population (particularly young people), and the long-term effects of experimental products inoculated into billions of people, McKinsey’s shareholders and large pharmaceutical multinationals doubled their fortune in two years. Never seen before in the history of capitalism.

Were these choices democratic? Absolutely not. Decided under the seal of defense secrecy permitted by the declared state of emergency, they constitute political decisions made by the capitalist system and not by States. The latter didn’t really have a choice anyway: any opposition would have led to their ostracization, as in Ireland where they don’t dare increase multinationals’ taxes for fear of seeing them leave, even though justice has authorized it. Only developing countries, over which the big capitalists don’t yet have complete control, were able to conduct sovereign and sensible health policies. Their citizens experienced better health, fewer restrictions on freedom, and much less catastrophic long-term consequences.

This example demonstrates that nations that believe themselves powerful are in reality subservient to the political power of the major technology industrialists, themselves linked to financial power where the strongest developments are concentrated. Current and future politics is in the hands of technology, even if we resist wanting to become aware of it.

Toward a micropolitics of digital technology

Reappropriating and becoming aware of the possibility of technological uses different from those piloted by multinational industries constitutes in my opinion a major political issue. At this point, either democracy or autocracy is being built. Each individual act, each choice of tool on a daily basis participates in this construction. I don’t claim that we can all immediately become perfectly conscious knights, because no one can be conscious of everything. Dialogue is therefore I believe an essential path to share our diversified consciousness, which is one of the facets of solidarity, because we don’t all have the same skills.

This approach joins what Deleuze and Guattari call the “micropolitics of groups”: the analysis of power relations and arrangements at the molecular scale, these processes that regulate the links between singularities and collectives. In the digital context, this means becoming aware of the power dynamics that run through our daily uses, developing tools to analyze and regulate these tensions, promoting openness to novelty and the capacity for transformation in the face of imposed routines.

We absolutely need to reweave links around each person’s micro-political skills. It’s about manufacturing together the world we want, rather than being the objects of decisions of which we are already slaves and will be increasingly so. The violence deployed during Covid, the hatred and dissension it was able to generate in such a short time must be a safeguard: this awareness is vital. Articulating the ecology of our collective digital practices with a reflection on subjectivity and care for the collective is in my opinion a necessity to avoid the necrosis of our capacity for political action and to keep alive our relational and democratic creativity.
We absolutely need to reweave links around each person’s micro-political skills. It’s about manufacturing together the world we want, rather than being the objects of decisions of which we are already slaves and will be increasingly so. The violence deployed during Covid, the hatred and dissension it was able to generate in such a short time must be a safeguard: this awareness is vital. Articulating the ecology of our collective digital practices with a reflection on subjectivity and care for the collective is in my opinion a necessity to avoid the necrosis of our capacity for political action and to keep alive our relational and democratic creativity.