Category: Stiegler

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Translation > Greece at the Heart of Europe (An open letter signed by Balibar, Stiegler & others)

On Politis.fr (the weekly online political magazine) there is an open letter of support to ‘the Greek people’ (published this morning) signed by a long list of notable public/intellectual figures, including Etienne Balibar,  Luc Boltanski, Michael Löwy, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others.

The content is not (really) surprising, and it broadly reiterates much of the criticism of an austerity that is seen as imposed ‘technocratically’ by an unelected (or at least – not clearly democratically accountable in a way that is meaningful to this form of action) ruling class in a socialisation of debt to the extreme detriment of those worst off in society, and apparently to the benefit of those who instigated the economic/financial crisis in the first place.

What is perhaps mildly surprising is where this has been ‘published’, not in Le Monde for example. I am not entirely sure what can be read into this… the website is seen as a more accessible/ international venue(?), the papers won’t publish such a letter(?) – it is interesting, in any case (and regardless of whether you agree or not), that such critique of austerity rarely finds its way into wider public debates (at least in the UK anyway, and perhaps not in France either).

I offer below a rough translation of the letter (it is fairly short). The footnotes were in the original, although I’ve linked to the English version of the second footnote.

Greece at the heart of Europe

PETITION: The Greek people have not problem with Europe, they and us have a problem with the “European” power which is destroying Europe!

We do not believe that it is the Greek people who are guilty of doubling their public debt in less than ten years [1]. Nor do we believe that they should pay such a debt, which has been artificially inflated with the sacking of their human rights and the wrecking of their democracy.

For years the national and supranational powers that control the European Union have inflicted austerity coupled with “structural reforms” upon the Greeks which is ruining their economy and sinking them into increasing misery.

Today, in a burst of lucidity and dignity the Greek people have given an electoral majority to the radical left, distanced from the corruption and compromises of yesterday, forming a government with a mandate to push back against the dictates of the “Troika” (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) and to enact a policy of breaking with such criminal austerity.

The objective of the European ruling classes is not to force the Greeks to repay a debt that everyone knows cannot be repaid, the only function of which is to drain public funds into the banks, but rather to force the government of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza into capitulation. They do this in order to continue to strangle the Greek people, condemning them to forever begging loans that become only ever more expensive, and to demonstrate in the eyes of all of Europe that it is impossible to tackle the banks, to contest the absolute power of the ruling classes, or to open out an alternative to austerity…

It is unacceptable that those who claim to speak “on behalf of Europe” contrive to breach their most basic commitments in order to break the government appointed by the Greek people. Going so far as to yesterday “ban” implementing even minimal humanitarian measures (housing allowance, food aid, restoration of electricity)! Today the ruling classes require the Greek government to worsen the decline in pensions, to below the poverty threshold, to increase VAT on necessities, and they confirm that they are willing to bankrupt the country and expel them from the Eurozone, and thus eventually the European Union, at the risk of provoking a crisis with unpredictable consequences.

We support the Greek people in their mobilisation and their determination to roll back this despotic and reactionary operation.

The struggle of the Greek people is that of all European democrats and progressives. If there is eventual defeat, all of Europe will pay the price. Should there be a victory, however limited, all of Europe will reap the reward.

This is why it is necessary that the movements which in France and in Europe hope for a renewal of democracy affirmatively respond to the calls of Syriza to construct a European solidarity around Greece and the Greek people. The prospect of a referendum increases the urgency of such solidarity [2].

We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Greek people, for their fight is ours.
PRIMARY SIGNATORIES

Antoine Artous, Etienne Balibar, Sophie Bessis, Jacques Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Gilles Bounoure, Marie-Pierre Bourcier, Claude Calame, Patrick Chamoiseau, Patrice Cohen Seat, Jean-Numa Ducange, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Michel Husson, Michael Löwy, Marie-José Malis, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Gus Massiah, Jean-Claude Petit, Philippe Pignarre, Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Pierre Salama, Denis Sieffert, Patrick Silberstein, Francis Sitel, Bernard Stiegler, Hervé Télémaque, Jacques Testart, Eleni Varikas, Pierre Zarka…

Notes.
1. See: An Appeal for Support for Greek resistance and their Trust Commission on Public Debt: http://cadtm.org/Appel-pour-soutenir-la-Grece-qui

2. http://www.altersummit.eu/accueil/article/no-to-austerity-yes-to-democracy

ADDENDUM: Of course, having said that the argument contra austerity rarely appears in ‘mainstream’ media outlets there are some exceptions, not least economist Paul Krugman’s repeated denouncing of austerity through op-ed articles in left-leaning newspapers, such as in The Guardian (29/04/2015) and The New York Times (29/06/2015).

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New resource for readers of Stiegler

Philosopher Daniel Ross, translator of many of Bernard Stiegler’s books published in English with Polity, has uploaded quite a few his translations of lectures and articles by Stiegler to his academia.edu page.

If you’re interested in Steigler’s more recent work, concerning automation and the anthropocene this is a valuable resource.

See, in particular:

So – a public big THANK YOU (from me) to Dan for sharing!!

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To Save the World… Preface by Bernard Stiegler for Michel Bauwens’ new book

Michel Bauwens, peer-to-peer activist and founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, has a new book out, in French, entitled Saving the World: Towards a post-capitialist society with peer-to-peer. In the book Michel, with his collaborator Jean Lievens, argues that a new distributed and de-centralised economic model is necessary to shake up the world and  drive us towards a post-capitalist society. In a wide-ranging, impassioned and ambitious, perhaps idealistic, diagramming of a new mode of living and working Bauwens reaches for a different way of performing economics and the political.

The book has a preface by Bernard Stiegler that has been shared on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website and so I have translated it. I have offered this to the foundation and I would be pleased if it is of use to them or to anyone else. The copyright of the text remains under the license attributed to the original book.

Preface by Bernard Stiegler

To Bauwens, M. and Lievens, J. 2015. Sauver le monde. Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer, Editions Les Liens Qui Libèrent. [Saving the World: Towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer]

Over the course of the next twenty years, automation will instigate the decline of a society founded on salaried jobs: 49% of jobs will disappear in the United States, 43% in Great Britain, 50% in Belgium, 56% in Italy and Poland[1]. This huge transformation, resulting from the integration of digital automation, constitutes the horizon for the argument put forward here by Michel Bauwens. He has studied and promoted the new model of production made possible by digital technologies and founded in peer-to-peer relations, which thereby surpasses the proletarianisation that has hitherto been the basis for industrial capitalism – here, proletarianisation principally signifies the loss of knowledge.

Like Ars Industrialis and the Institute for Research and Innovation, the P2P Foundation sets out the principle that digital reticulation is no longer a model based on the functional opposition between production and consumption. Rather it is based on the constitution of communities of knowledge developed through relations between peers – that is to say, on the reconstitution of knowledge (of life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]) which have been systematically dismantled over the last 250 years. This discourse affirms the possibility of salvation: it attempts to save the world. Such claims will no doubt be scoffed at by sceptics of all persuasions – they are deniers, who, like climate sceptics, are still trying to ‘convince the Marquise that everything is fine’ [2]… against all available evidence.

The evidence is the profound collapse of social cohesion in every industrial society on Earth and the devastating effects on those societies on the margins of industrialisation. Nothing is being done in the short period of time we have available in the near-future to address these issues, and this damage will only cascade like an uncontrollable chain reaction. This situation arises through what we have called, since the beginning of the 21st Century, the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene constitutes an unsustainable acceleration of entropic becoming–to the extent to which it perturbs the meteorological, oceanographic, atmospheric, hydrological and demographic equilibriums while depleting fuel as well as social, psychic and physical or cultural energies–which threatens a world which it should, in fact, be saving.

A real salvation implies a radical change in the organization of work, of social and economic relations, which take into account the changes already accomplished by digitisation beginning with the emergence of the World Wide Web and which goes beyond the state of affairs that these relations have installed, to understand the global domination of the increasingly sprawling reticular industries, stemming from the California model of Silicon Valley, so well described by Evgeny Morozov in “the rise of data and the death of politics” [3].

The present model of voluntary or involuntary contribution imposed by the data economy exploited by the “Big Four”, and by those prospering within their ecosystem, is not only unjust but also bankrupt and hyper-proletarianising: Far from deproletarianising individuals it remotely controls them, as they increasingly rely on mimetic technologies driven by an intensive calculation through algorithms, processing massive data sources in real-time, which form a new kind of “crowds”, in the sense that Freud discusses the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon [4].

This is possible because bottom-up networks capture value and hyper-standardise behaviour (they hyper-proleterianise in this sense) storing and monopolising them through top-down processing of data produced by the crowds, mobs and other reticulated masses sublimated by intensive computing. I believe, like Gert Lovinck, that in this respect the emergence of social networks in the first decade of the 21st century constitutes a dangerous turn as the dynamics of peer to peer submit to statistical models that perpetuate herding behaviour through user profiling and our many algorithmic doubles.

The transition to a true peer-to-peer economy, however, is, in time, inevitable for four reasons:

1. In the current system based upon wage labour, stemming from Fordism and regulated by the Keynsian belief in the redistribution of purchasing power through employment (despite neoliberalism first weakening the system by reducing wage redistribution and now through speculative devices) a massive process of automation will engender a systematic insolvency and lead to a collapse of consumer capitalism.

2. On top of the destructive effects of the macroeconomic system, the anthropocene will itself generate telluric toxic effects that may only be countered by the promotion and maintenance of new forms of negentropic potential.

3. Thales, “the first geometrician”, initiated the canon of rational thought (logos) in the peer to peer model, which Socrates furthered through dialogic practices, and as the principle of development for the Greek city, as a process of collective individuation based on the maximum expression of the possibilities of psychic individuation for every citizen – this installing knowledge and the culture of knoweldge at the heart of collective being, exactly the opposite of the decomposition of knowledge that is today pushing towards what some have called the functional stupidity [5] of cognitive capitalism.

4. Only knowledge has the capacity to produce new negentropic potential, and only social organisations based on systemic enhancement and culture made possible through reticular parity will enable a move beyond the anthropocene, to “save the world”, and enter into what would therefore be called the “neganthropocene”.

At Ars Industrialis and IRI, we think that this requires a new model for the redistribution of the extraordinary gains in production made possible by a full and widespread automation, which must be taken as a template for new ways of organising work amongst peers.

This is why we advocate a [citizens’] contributory income, granted to everyone, in order to cultivate their abilities (as suggested by Amartya Sen) and provided that they regularly use those abilities in contributory projects, themselves supported by mutual credit granted by contributory banks, and within the most diverse forms of socialisation: associations, public services and businesses. The modalities of realising such approaches should be experimented within the areas which will make the choice [of which economic system to pursue], in particular in order to maximally expose their younger generations to the consequences of automation, and the possibility of producing capacities to exceed it.

Automation, with the failure to appropriate free time in order to increase knowledge in all its forms (life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]), can only drive through a mortifying acceleration of entropy. By contrast, deproletarianisation is a reconstruction of knowledges, which are individual and collective capacities and which transform any time saved through negentropic possibilities.

This is why, for us, it seems essential to confirm and realise the opportunities created by Michel Bauwens through his extraordinary practical and theoretical knowledge of the dynamics of peer to peer, and respond to the “Web We Want” initiative [6] launched by Tim Berners-Lee in March 2014, by proposing a new model of architecture based on the valorisation of interpretable and incalculable singularities – calculation being the entropic reduction of the singular into the particular.

Notes.
1. These figures have been suggested by Jeremy Bowles (Bruegel Institute), as a part of a study conducted by the Oxford Martin School by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, and featured in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on 19th July 2014: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

2. I am fairly sure this refers to a comical jazz song, “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise“, recorded in 1936 by Ray Ventura’s band The Collegiate Five, in which the Marquise is told over the phone by various servants that everything is fine at home, excepts for a series of disasters. It has been suggested the song is a metaphor for France’s lack of concern for the approach of WWII –Trans.

3. Evgeny Morozov, “The rise of data and the death of politics”, The Observer, 20th July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation

4. This has been demonstrated by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy in “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” [Algorthimic governmentality and perspectives on emancipation: disparity as a condition of individuation by relation?] Reseaux v.31 n.177: pp. 163-196 (2013) [ http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/ ]. I am developing, myself, this analysis in The Automatic Society, to be published by Fayard.

5. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer “A stupidity-based theory of organizations”, Journal of Management Studies v.49 n.7: pp. 1194-1220 (2014) [ http://jourhavandesociolog.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/joms1072.pdf ].

6. For information on the Web We Want initiative see: https://webwewant.org/ –Trans.

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Bernard Stiegler – Digital shadows and (en)light(enment)

The translation below is the second half of the “Net Blues” interview with Bernard Stiegler conducted by the Le Monde blog “Lois des réseaux” [Laws of the networks].

In this second-half of the interview Stiegler discusses how the web should evolve developing the trope of ‘enlightenment’ (which he has significantly discussed in Taking care of youth and the generations), drawing out the play on words between light and shadow and ‘the Enlightenment’. Highlighting the web as the latest stage in publishing technologies (which have historically been central to political movements), Stiegler argues a new industrial politics must be developed, by Europe, as the ‘curative’ counter to the ‘toxic’ trend towards automation and homogeneity brought about by computation. This is the ‘pharmacological’ character of the internet Stiegler discusses in the ‘Net Blues‘. The new industrial politics Stiegler argues for has universities and the production of knowledge at its heart.

As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text.

Digital shadows and (en)light(enment)

What do you think needs to be happen for the web to evolve?

Bernard Stiegler: I think that the web today is an entropic system. It first appeared, for most of us, not least for myself, as a negentropic opportunity, that is, as a new capacity for diversification, especially because it has allowed people to begin to differentiate between different kinds and uses of media [parce qu’il a permis de démassifier les médias]. Today, major newspapers, such as Le Monde and many others, allow all kinds of actors to convene around the newspaper, collecting together a very diverse range of views. This is an opportunity and it has given the sense of a kind of renaissance, following the development of an extreme consumerism within the mass media and the culture industries becoming an undifferentiated mass [qui avait été une sorte de laminoir] – especially in the last twenty years. Media such as television deteriorated terribly. All of which was related to an economic and industrial model that is now in decline.

Nevertheless, the web initially appeared as an opportunity for negentropy, that is to say of diversification. However, what we’ve discovered in recent years, in particular since we began to speak of the ‘Big Four‘, is the extraordinary hegemony of global giants who have gained an unprecedented prescriptive power over behaviour.

Only the United States takes full advantage of this economy of data. The data economy, which is destroying European national taxation and increasingly deprives public authorities of their capabilities to act, is based on a generalized calculability which is at odds with the negentropic promise of the web. This calculability tends towards the reintroduction of the law of the audience ratings. The page ranking performed by Google’s algorithm is a very specific, surgical form of audience rating, which is very efficient and very refined, but like television audience rating leads to the transformation of singularities into peculiarities, i.e. computable items, because it homogenises and de-singularises. Unlike the individual, the singular is incalculable. In this case, we have a new entropy process that we feel threatens languages. This is how I interpret Frederic Kaplan’s analysis of what he calls “linguistic capitalism.”

However, this predicament is not legislated, and it could be entirely different: the web in the service of an intensification of “individuation”, in other words singularities, is the future–and it is the future of Europe. Given the present circumstances, the web would totally horizontalise and level out information, because it requires processes of computation based on the removal of any lack of transparency.

As I said earlier, the web and the internet are publishing techonologies. Publishing technologies are the origin of what Plato calls πολιτεία (Politeia, Ed.) that we translate as res publica in Latin. Why do we translate it as res publica? Because Politeia constitutes a “public good”, as we discussed earlier. And the establishment of public goods requires publication technologies, which for the Greeks was writing. Marcel Detienne has shown that the Athenian city is like a vast typewriter that has wrote into the marbel of the walls of the city. After each decision of the Βουλή (boulè [parliament], Ed.) the publishers of the law wield the hammer and chisel to carve the decision in stone. This process of publication created the public right of citizens to criticise the law. One enters the politeia, citizenship, and [so] paves the way to democracy. Today, with digital computation, a whole new publication system is in place.

However, we always claim that the state of political rights, and the accompanying reason, is what the Greeks called λόγος (logos, Ed.). However, this assumes that such processes of publication enables disagreement, the publication of contradictory arguments, which we call public debate, and which is a fundamental rule of all rational knowledge. The promise of the web was to revive public, political, scientific or aesthetic debate. But this promise has not been kept. From the moment Google, Amazon and such companies had to make a profit from all of this, they became totally interested in equalising and levelling out data in order to exploit it with algorithms, crushing disagreement rather than enabling traceability and widespread intelligibility. I do not think this situation can last. The basis of knowledge, in all its forms – I’m not just talking about theoretical knowledge, its also true of ‘know how’ [savoir-faire] and life skills [savoir-vivre] – is grounded in a fundamental diversification, which when [knowledge] ceases, leaves behind dead knowledge – like dead languages and towns transformed into museums [villes muséifiées]. If the sciences and knowledge are founded on publication processes, the development of the digital is a radical transformation of knowledge, and in particular of academic knowledge. The power of Europe and the West is founded on power over knowledge. The emperor Frederic Barberousse, who, in opposition to the Pope, granted freedom to the University of Bologna in the 13th Century, initiated a process followed by Oxford, the Sorbonne and Cambridge. It is not the Conquistadors and the caravels that are the primary origin of the centuries-long global domination of the West: it is the reliance upon universities. This clearly evolves in new directions with the appearance of new devices for printing – and the cognitive as well as spiritual revolution brought about by Luther is clearly a consequence of such publishing technologies, by which Luther makes reading the scriptures for oneself the heart of his struggle. Along with the Counter Reformation, this leads to the foundation of the Jesuit Schools and the Jesuits evangelising around the world through their missions, which constitutes a fundamental aspect of the Enlightenment project, and this, with Condorcet[1] and the French Revolution, leads to Jules Ferry[2] via Guizot[3].

Obviously, the web, and the digital more generally, totally reconfigures these maps from top to bottom – not only the maps for teaching but the conditions of scientific research and the life of the mind in all its forms. Europe should not fear this, even less so since it is the origin of the concepts of the web and HTML, in which, in France, CNET [The National Centre for Telecommunication Studies] (which has been destroyed by irresponsible policies) played an important role in the design of the ATM and GSM networks. Europe has played an extremely important role in the configuration of all technical systems, but has failed to make this common knowledge [? elle n’a pas su le socialiser] because European political and economic actors are often blind to such issues. Thus, when researchers and scientists are daring and inventive they have found themselves confined to an imitation of the ‘American model’, which is a disaster for a Europe that is totally devoid of an industrial strategy, and condemned to a ‘downgrading’, at the height of the challenges of our times.

What we call the Enlightenment emerged in Europe, and it was produced by the republic of letters resulting from the printing press. We are no longer in the era of pure Enlightenment: we have entered an era of Shadow and Enlightenment [the word “Lumières” here is used as a play on words between light and enlightenment]. It is an era of a pharmacological consciousness of what pushes the speed of technology, the speed of light, also causes the shadows of the ‘toxicity’ of the digital, which necessarily accompany their own ‘cure’ [sa «curativité»]. A new industrial politics should be supported by Europe and must be based on a curative politics and economics of the digital, deliberatively and rationally battling against its toxicity. After Edward Snowden’s revelations [discussed in more detail in ‘the Net Blues‘] every citizen is aware of this huge problem that puts the future gravely at risk [un immense problème qui hypothèque très gravement l’avenir].

Europe should unite around a project for a new Enlightenment that is at once scientific, philosophical, industrial, and economic; which fully seizes the immense challenges brought by computation [la numérique]. Such a politics should be based upon an unprecedented use of universities and research organisations. The very nature of knowledge is destabilised by the digital. For example, to work in the nanosciences today means working with digital artifacts to produce nanoscale phenomena, that is to say, at the quantum level. These are not actually digital phenomena, i.e. objects of intuition, but what Kant called the “noumena”, that is to say the objects of understanding and reason. However, these are objects that are, at the same time, completely constituted in nanophysics, and are the objects of scientific experiments, by being simulated and mathematically modelled using computers. Genetic biology is made possible today by biostations, that is: by informational calculations made on very large amounts of data. The digital alters the practices of mathematicians, but Frederic Kaplan has shown it also modifies the development of languages. [Furthermore] geography has become fundamentally linked to geographical information systems, as the GPS standard has been socialised within our everyday lives. The structures of digitisation are transforming all knowledge, including know-how [les savoir faires] and life skills [les savoir vivre].

Faced with such a universal upheaval it is essential to reconfigure all academic research and to organise new links between universities and school curriculums [les pratiques scolaires] so that the digital enters schools on a rational basis, not through the stories told [storytelling] by economic actors advocating a legitimation of their own models [of the digital]. This model [of working] should be analysed, critiqued and continuously improved, for that is [the practice of] reason. Taking such a critique to the global level, Europe could reconstruct a digital industry which is currently tragically lacking. It is not only children but also parents, and elected officials, that need to be acculturated [to such changes] through schools, so that European society can be deeply reconfigured, and take with it a new model of the web.

Notes

1. In the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet developed a voting tally system to select the candidate who would beat each of the other candidates in a run-off election.

2. Jules Ferry was a 19th century republican who promoted laicism and French colonial expansion.

3. François Guizot was a prominent 19th century statesman who significantly promoted education.

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Out now > Bernard Stiegler – States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century

Those of you vaguely interested in the work of Bernard Stiegler, and perhaps those of you who are not (yet!) will I hope take note of the publication of an important work by Stiegler: States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century [a translation by Daniel Ross of États de choc:  betise et savoir dans XXIe siecle].

Here’s the blurb from the publisher Polity:

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

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Cultural Geographies article published – Memory Programmes

My article in Cultural Geographies has been published as part of the first issue of 2015. You can find it amongst a really interesting set of papers including two theme sections on habit and on technology, memory and collective knowing. Other articles in the issue include those by J-D Dewsbury and David Bissell, Andrew Lapworth, my colleague Jen Lea, Maria Hynes & Scott Sharpe, and Matthew Wilson.

A reminder about my article, Memory Programmes:

The aim of the article is to interrogate some key elements of how software has become a means of ‘industrialising’ memory, following Bernard Stiegler. This industrialisation of memory involves conserving and transmitting extraordinary amounts of data. Data that is both volunteered and captured in everyday life, and operationalised in large-scale systems. Such systems constitute novel sociotechnical collectives which have begun to condition how we perform our lives such that they can be recorded and retained.

To investigate the programmatic nature of our mediatised collective memory the article has three parts. The first substantive section looks at a number of technologies as means of capturing, operating upon and retaining our everyday activities in ‘industrial’ scale systems of memory. Particular attention is paid to the quasi-autonomous agency of these systems, that appear to operate at a scale and speed that exceeds a human capacity of oversight.

In the second section I look at the mnemonic capabilities of networked technologies of digital mediation as ‘mnemotechnologies’. Following Stiegler, these are technologies and technical supports that both support and reterritorialise what we collectively understand about our everyday lives.

The conclusion of the article addresses the ways in which an ‘industrialisation of memory’ both challenges and transforms the ways in which we negotiate collective life.

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Paper accepted – Memory programmes: the retention of collective life

I am pleased to share that I have recently had a paper accepted for Cultural Geographies, which will form part of a theme section/issue co-edited by Sarah Elwood and Katharyne Mitchell concerning “Technology, memory and collective knowing”–stemming from a session at the 2013 AAG in Los Angeles.

The paper is entitled ‘Memory programmes: the retention of collective life’ and builds upon a theoretical conference paper I gave at the Conditions of Mediation conference in 2013.

The aim of the article is to interrogate some key elements of how software has become a means of ‘industrialising’ memory, following Bernard Stiegler. This industrialisation of memory involves conserving and transmitting extraordinary amounts of data. Data that is both volunteered and captured in everyday life, and operationalised in large-scale systems. Such systems constitute novel sociotechnical collectives which have begun to condition how we perform our lives such that they can be recorded and retained.

To investigate the programmatic nature of our mediatised collective memory the article has three parts. The first substantive section looks at a number of technologies as means of capturing, operating upon and retaining our everyday activities in ‘industrial’ scale systems of memory. Particular attention is paid to the quasi-autonomous agency of these systems, that appear to operate at a scale and speed that exceeds a human capacity of oversight.

In the second section I look at the mnemonic capabilities of networked technologies of digital mediation as ‘mnemotechnologies’. Following Stiegler, these are technologies and technical supports that both support and reterritorialise what we collectively understand about our everyday lives.

The conclusion of the article addresses the ways in which an ‘industrialisation of memory’ both challenges and transforms the ways in which we negotiate collective life.

I have copied below the abstract and I’d be happy to share pre-publication copies, please contact me via email.

Abstract:

This article argues that, in software, we have created quasi-autonomous systems of memory that influence how we think about and experience life as such. The role of mediated memory in collective life is addressed as a geographical concern through the lens of ‘programmes’. Programming can mean ordering, and thus making discrete; and scheduling, making actions routine. This article addresses how programming mediates the experience of memory via networked technologies. Materially recording knowledge, even as electronic data, renders thought mentally and spatially discrete and demands systems to order it. Recorded knowledge also enables the ordering of temporal experience both as forms of history, thus the sharing of culture, and as the means of planning for futures. We increasingly retain information about ourselves and others using digital media. We volunteer further information recorded by electronic service providers, search engines and social media. Many aspects of our collective lives are now gathered in cities (via CCTV, cellphone networks and so on) and retained in databases, constituting a growing system of memory of parts of life otherwise forgotten or unthought. Using examples, this article argues that, in software, we have created industrialised systems of memory that influence how we think about living together.

Keywords: memory, technology, mnemotechnics, industrialisation, programming, Stiegler

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Translation> “Bernard Stiegler: ‘Salaried employment will become uncommon'”

Bernard Stiegler has been very active over the last year and there are a number of interviews in the French press and on francophone websites with him on a range of issues, especially the future of work and of the economy and the (continuing) rise of the far-right (particularly the Front National in France).

With a bit of infant-and-weather-induced sleeplessness I busied myself with a quick translation of one of the recent and quite interesting interviews, undertaken at the OuiShare festival (deliberate pun), with a theme of ‘age of communities‘ which aims to provoke discussion about the ‘collaborative economy’ (lots of peer-to-peer and suchlike).

There’s some familiar themes in relation to contribution, but also some more direct criticism of contemporary political policy — not least directed at Arnaud Montebourg, the French ‘Minister for the Economy, Economic Renewal and the Digital‘. The interview can probably  be read in tandem with an earlier interview (I’ve translated) for Rue89 that advances Stiegler’s argument for an ‘economy of contribution‘.

In these brief interviews there is a danger that Stiegler can be read as having an argument that is too ‘meta’, over-arching and so potentially glib, but if we turn to his more considered writings (books and so on) and the activities of IRI I think we can see the substance.

As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text.

Bernard Stiegler: “Salaried employment will become uncommon”

While digital technologies demolish the paradigms of the 20th century, philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls for a push towards an economic model founded on voluntary contribution and co-creation.

Interview conducted at OuiShare Fest, a festival for the collaborative economy, Paris, 5-7 May 2014.

Do politicians understand the impact of the digital on our economies?

Absolutely not. They think in terms of the software of the 1950s. I recently attended a brilliant presentation by an industrial foresight specialist for ARCEP (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes [The Postal and Electronic Communications Regulation Authority]). He demonstrated how the American car is bouncing back because manufacturers understand that the car of tomorrow is a connected car. In the Gallois report[1] on French competitiveness, commissioned by the President of the Republic 18 months ago, there is not a word on such issues!

You regularly call the digital an industry. So, do you share the opinion of Arnaud Montebourg?

Montebourg is smart but he is too much of a butterfly. He must temper his ambitions and take an interest in the major project of the publishing industry becoming digital. One must understand that what is happening at Libération [2] will extend across all of the cultural industries. There is an urgent need to reinvent the publishing industry through what Ars Industrialis calls an “industrial politics for technologies of spirit”, in the context of the convergence of the audiovisual broadcasting, telecommunications and information technology – but also and above all the industries of text, notably scientific texts, which is a strategic sector for France and for Europe.

Furthermore, Arnaud Montebourg has begun a strategy of roboticisation that we must situate in the context of widespread automation that will lead to the liquidation of the Keynesian model, i.e. the end of “growth” conceived as the base for the redistribution of spending power via earnings and employment.

It is useless to cling to these old models.

The salary model as we know it today and which has been defended by the trade unions is that of Keynes and Ford. A rational model that says for the economy to work, we must redistribute some of wealth made by gains in productivity through technology through salaries, creating purchasing power. It is through this paradigm that the welfare state and its corollary of an economic policy of growth appeared, with its economic indicators such as the famous GDP. This model began to crumble with the first oil crisis and finally cracked in 2008. But it did not die because it has been drip-fed by states which offset insolvency, resulting in the austerity measures we have today which are totally unproductive. But it is dying – and us with it.

Why?

As Bill Gates said: employment is over. Robots replace people [3]. In such a context, Francois Hollande obviously cannot “reverse the unemployment trend” — other than by expedient measures that do not last. Amazon is trying to replace employees with robots and Foxconn has announced the same intention. The price fo robots will drop, through the effect of economies of scale, and SMEs, for which they were too expensive, will gain access to them and, in addition to which, international competition will push adoption. This is a new industrial era that is beginning, and which shall not be based on employment.

What new model can emerge?

Salaried employment will become uncommon. Following this we must consider a new model for distribution. A contributory model of distribution, based not on work-time but on the model of the “intermittents du spectacle” [casual/part-time workers in the creative industries]. There should be the possiblity of regularly investing into contributive projects, which may be mercantile or may not. Projects of general interest would be funded by public authorities. A business would be a particular case amongst many other models.

Doesn’t the collaborative economy sketch the contours of this new mode of organising work?

Alongside the old world alternatives are emerging. The collaborative economy could be one, provided it is not recuperated by consumerism thus becoming an improved margin. The collaborative economy may also be a way to displace some of the work to the consumer. All of which merits further analysis on a case by case basis.

With what criteria?

In fact, the collaborative economy as such interests me only insofar as it allows us to think about the economy of contribution discussed earlier. Yet there is also a toxic form of the collaborative economy, which is that of Facebook. An economy in which the value of a company resides in the content users provide. Algorithms allow this to be exploited through surgical marketing which specifically trace and track products and people. This falls back into consumerism. A stupefaction [l’abrutissement].

How can we conceptualise a positive contributive economy?

There is an alternative contributive economy arrayed through free or open source software. This has developed a form of industrial activity that relies upon communities for the free development of knowledge. This is what, in the 1980s, we called concurrent engineering, but the web allows us to think at a greater scale. This is a “deproletarianisation” in the sense in which Marx intended “proletarianisation” to mean a loss of knowledge, induced by the arrival of machines.

Stupefaction [Abrutissement] on one hand and learning [apprentissage] on the other…

Exactly. All technology has, equally, curative and toxic potentials. There is both a generative web and a mimetic one, which destroys the know-how [savoir-faire] of those who use it. This crisis is related to the automation which arose with algorithmically-controlled high-frequency trading. Following the 2008 crash, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the United States’ Federal Reserve, admitted to having been wrong to have left the economy of his country to be organised by machines. Actors like Google, for their part, impoverish language by operating a website that over-represents the words of interest to them. What results is a semantic standardisation constituted by the auctioning of [particular] words to become ‘Adwords’. We now have, following the hypertextual web of 1993 and the ‘web 2.0’ of the 2000s, a third age of the web.

What will this new era of the web look like?

The basis of Western society has been to undertake what Heraclitus called Polemos [struggle/war]: confrontation and debate. I call for a new “hermeneutic web” which will facilitate exactly such forms of engagement between people who do not share the same views on political and environmental issues to enable them to work together. This was the first purpose of the web: to enable exchange and discussion between universities. At IRI, we are currently working on “Twitter Polemique” [Polemic Tweet], through which it is possible to associate a tenor/sense with a tweet: agree, disagree, querying, neutral. More genenerally, we need to develop a graphical language for annotation and an sharing of such annotation to stimulate collective debate.

Who should do this?

At the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Glen Greenwald, the journalist who published the Snowden revelations, told the participants: “the future of combatting the NSA is in your hands”. He was both right and wrong. For a start, the problem is not solely the NSA: it is also the hyper-consumerist exploitation of data. I do not believe that the future of the web will solely be in the hands of activists, of states, or even of intellectuals like me. We must get everyone around the table. We will need hackers for their technical knowledge, political activists who believe in the public good — which still exists, manufacturers who are amongst the most lucid on these issues, universities, and Europe.

Interview by Côme Bastin.

Notes
1. The former boss of aerospace group EADS, Louis Gallois, was asked by President Holllande to investigate what was holding back French productivity, which resulted in a report, by Gallois, calling for a slashing of employment costs, see this 2012 BBC News article: ‘IMF and Gallois report urge France to cut labour costs’.

2. Due to plummeting circulation figures the management of the newspaper have recast the newspaper’s website as a kind of social network and former Libération journalists are responsible for the creation of the Rue89 news website, which has incidentally carried a few interviews with Stiegler.

3. For example, see the Business Insider article ‘Bill Gates: People Don’t Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced By Software Bots‘, quoting from the 2014 conversation with Bill Gates at the American Enterprise Institute: From poverty to prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates [approx 46-minutes in]. Quote: ‘Capitalism, in general, will over time create more inequality and technology, over time, will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of the skill set. “¦ Twenty years from now labour demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower and i don’t think people have that in their mental model’.

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The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies

Last year I wrote about two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available published in issue 3 of volume 38. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However,  I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.

“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies“ revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.