“When we change scale, phenomena change not only in size, but in nature. » This is what the French geographer Olivier Dollfus wrote in his book Geographical space (PUF, 1970). He then spoke about the practice of his discipline, geopolitics, at different scales, local or global. In the technological field, nothing seems more true: a change of scale such that it would signify a change in the nature of the problem. This is exactly what is at work at the intersection of technology and politics.
Contemporary technology is not simply disparate technologies, digital tools here, artificial intelligence or social networks there. These technologies are above all system technologies, omni-use, hyperspeed and symbiosis technologies, which can be described as “symbiotic technologies”. Hyperspeed in relation to human cognition, symbiosis of political representations which seemed clear until then, between true and false, real and virtual, man and machine, public and private, end and means , between internal and external threats, civil and military, war and peace, the infinitely small (the intimate) and the infinitely large (the world).
The idea of symbiosis is to be understood here as an organic fusion between entities or notions which adapt and co-evolve. The symbiosis is not a simple crossing, it is more radical, and more dangerous too. These new political borders, still untamed, make visible, not without concern, new new hybrid actors, the technological giants (Big Tech), designers and owners in part of these symbiotic technologies.
Subtle phenomenon
These new paradigms signify the end of democracy in the sense in which we understood it until now, that is to say as mass democracy, in the same way as production, consumption, education or mass media . Democracy as we thought of it from the industrial era and throughout the 20th centurye century seems to be over. Or rather it hybridizes, in a permanent oscillation between massification and hyperpersonalization. And that is the subtlety of the phenomenon.
How, then, can we rethink our benchmarks, reinvent a commonality, an adherence to the project of liberal democracy when, from the individual to information, everything is nothing more than a polarized atom?
By will or by force, we will have to think differently to navigate the new century, as the sociologist Alain Touraine (1925-2023) suggested to us in The New Political Century (Threshold, 2016). There is no point in getting agitated, as the times and the spirit of the times tell us to do, generally only incantations and poor ideas come out. Counter-intuitively, faced with the hyperacceleration of time, we must detect in order to think.
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