The ‘dematerialisation’ of public services

The seminar ‘Accumulations and accelerations: Le totalitarisme informatique II' is pleased to invite you to the first session of the series, with Clara Deville, PhD in sociology, research fellow at the Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (Dijon), and author of L'État social à distance. Dématérialisation et accès aux droits des classes populaires rurales, Éd. du Croquant 2023.

The attendance at the 10 sessions of the first seminar session dedicated to the all-encompassing grip of computing and the increasing number of critical publications on the subject justifies a second session. It will explore several falsehoods: "dematerialization" proves to be ecologically burdensome and humanly oppressive; the emancipatory prophecy of the Internet conceals an unprecedented centralization and bureaucratization; virtual currencies are a chimera, and "artificial intelligence," as foolish as other machines, masks issues of power and profit. It also obscures the main danger, namely that human intelligence may become mechanical and that individuals may lose their inner life.