Description
From Amazon to Tinder, from Google to Deliveroo, there is no facet of human life which the digital revolution has not streamlined and dematerialised. Its objective was to reduce the cost of physical interactions by forgoing face-to-face interactions, a direct result of the free-market shock of the 1980s, which sought to seamlessly expand the marketplace in every possible dimension. Today, we can be algorithmically entertained, educated, cared for and courted in a way which was impossible in the old industrial society, where institutions structured the social world. Today, these institutions have been replaced by monetised virtual contact.
As with the industrial revolution of the past, the digital revolution is creating a new economy and a new sensibility, bringing about a radical revaluation of society and its representations. While obsessed with the search for an efficient management of human relations, the new digital capitalism gives rise to an irrational and impulsive Homo numericus prone to an array of addictive behaviours. Far from producing a new agora, social media produce a radicalization of public debate in which hate-filled speech directed against adversaries becomes the norm.
The good news is that these outcomes are not inevitable. Technologies have not taken control of our lives. The digital revolution also offers an alternative path: one that leads to a world in which every word deserves to be listened to, without a transcendent truth hanging over it. Are we able to seize the new opportunities opened up by the digital revolution without succumbing to its dark side?
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One
The Digital Illusion
I. The Body and the Mind
Terminator
Reason and Emotions
Descartes’ “Error”
Artificial Intelligence
II. Stultify and Punish
A Wild Thought
The Capitalism of Surveillance
III. Waiting for the Robots
The Death of Kings
The Industrialism of Services
The Thinking Robot
The Stake of the Century
IV. Political Anomie
Impoverishing Growth
Working Class Suicide
A Political Revolution
Vox popoli
Part Two
The Return of the Real
V. The Social Imagination
The Law of 150 Friends
Bonobos and Chimpanzees
Four Possible Societies
The Secular Age
The Triumph of Endogamy
The Post-Modern Mentality
VI. Winter is Coming
The Crises of the Twentieth Century
The Climatic Clock
The Society of Addiction
VII. In a Hundred Years
The Society of Abundance
Back to Science Fiction
VIII. By Way of Conclusion
Notes
Index
