Le totalitarisme informatique

In spite of ourselves, computers are creating a new presence in the world, automated and 'Under his Eyes' - to quote a famous line from the series based on Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale". So how do we overcome the fascination of screens that makes critical analysis inaudible?

Christopher Pollmann confronts his experience of decades spent in front of the computer with the crossroads of the human sciences and philosophy. He draws on Hannah Arendt's argument that totalitarianism makes human beings 'superfluous'. Yet this is precisely what GPS, automatic translation, managing a network of friends on Facebook, making the series House of Cards by statistical calculation and countless other feats do: they strip us of our human subjectivity. By mechanising language, computers are turning society into an anthill controlled by digital pheromones. And ambitions to automate social life are leading to algorithmic complexity and bureaucratic paralysis, in the etymological sense of the power of the office and the written word.

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Christopher Pollmann, Professor of public law at the University of Lorraine, director of the "Accumulations and accelerations" seminar at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.

Angélique del Rey, Associate Professor of philosophy, she recently published Éloge du conflit, La Découverte 2014.