Social networks, dating application, telecommuting, streaming platform, artificial intelligence… All areas of our daily life have been taken over by digital technology. The Covid crisis, and periods of confinement, have accelerated this digital revolution, for better and for worse. In “Homo numericus. The Coming Civilization » (Albin Michel editions), the economist Daniel Cohen analyzes this digital revolution and tells how it has profoundly changed our societies.
Ten years after his portrait of the“homoeconomicus”the president of the Paris School of Economics and director of the economics department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) paints a portrait of the “ homo numericus “, a being overwhelmed by contradictions and frustrations, both “liberal” and “anti-system”. It warns above all about the disintegration of social relations and the dehumanization induced by the digitization of the world.
The advent of the Internet promised an opening to the world. However, in your essay, you explain to what extent digital today favors “between oneself” and leads to dehumanization…
When digital arrived, we were promised a new Gutenberg. We were talking about a new galaxy, a revolution, something that was going to transform society, the relationship to knowledge. As the invention of the printing press had finally done. With Wikipedia as a model, and this ability to be able to communicate with everyone, to basically create a planetary agora. But it didn’t turn out like that at all. When we go on the Net today, it is not to have a philosophical conversation. It is exactly the opposite. We have a surge of hatred, violence, detestation of others. We were waiting for collective intelligence, today we really have a world of post-truth, conspiracy, fake news…
How did we get here ? What are the “pathologies” of this digital revolution?
When you surf the Net, you enter a jungle. To be heard, – and to be retweeted -, you have to speak louder than the others. In reality, we engage in what economists call “the attention economy”, an arena where you have to speak louder than others to have an echo. And that leads to the staging of hatred, violence, horror… There is a culture that pushes people to go ever further into the unspeakable. Social networks are not a new agora, but a machine for feeding cleavages and fractures.
When you also go on the Internet, you are not looking for information, but confirmation of what you already think. I have an idea, I want to prove it and I’m going to look for all the clues that confirm it. This is what psychologists call “confirmation bias”. It’s a way to amplify what you’re already thinking. You join a sub-group, “a digital ghetto”, which is actually welded together by its hatred of all contrary thoughts.
You explain that we have gone in a few years from homo economicus at thehomo numericus. How would you draw up the composite portrait of this new being that we have become?
The digital revolution has invaded all areas of our daily lives [l’amour avec Tinder, le travail avec la visio, la politique avec Twitter…], it is in this that we can truly speak of an anthropological revolution, and no longer just a technological one. In that world, homo numericus to the particularity of being anti-system: those who express themselves on social networks have a hatred of the elites, of all those who hold power. Paradoxically, homo numericus is also liberal, in the Thatcherian sense of the term. He is also a being overwhelmed with contradictions. He wants to control everything, but he himself is irrational and impulsive, driven to addictive behaviors by those same algorithms that monitor the smallest details of his existence.
The phenomenon of “yellow vests” sums it all up very well. It is a movement that is both anti-system, anti-establishment, against power, against the elites… And it is at the same time a social movement, echoing May-68, but also very individualistic and liberal. They are finally quite representative of this world of social networks, capable of gathering around roundabouts to protest against the injustices of the world, without any other place of existence.
You also explain that the digitization of our lives has accelerated the disintegration of our institutions…
The digital revolution undermines traditional models of representation and dialogue. Internet has been the instrument of the bursting of the social space and the organization of society. Digitization has led to the deinstitutionalization of the world, that is to say the weakening of all the institutions that form the social body: companies, unions, societies of scholars, the media, political parties… We are today in a disestablished world, and this is also what explains this proliferation of fake news.
With the Covid crisis, digital has been of great use, especially to continue working and having social interactions. The digitization of the world therefore does not only have bad sides…
Digital capitalism exploded during lockdown. No need to travel to work, we had Zoom; to go to the cinema, there was Netflix; or shopping, there was Amazon… There was a real digital acceleration during that period. We discovered that many things could be done remotely. The deepest trace, and I think it is lasting, is telework and telemedicine. This may be pleasant at first sight… But digital capitalism is mainly used in reality to dispense with meeting. It makes human interactions non-existent, it is a real impoverishment of interpersonal relationships. The risk is that we go a step further, and that we dry up life in society.
How has digital been positive for our societies?
The homo numericus is the heir of two deeply contradictory revolutions: the neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s, but also that of May-68. The counter-culture of the sixties, inhabited by the refusal of the verticality of the old world, directly fed the imagination of the pioneers of the digital revolution in the 1970s. With this desire for a horizontal society, where everyone can express… The digital revolution has thus enabled freedom of speech, and revolutionary movements to exist, from the Arab Spring to #MeToo, via Black Lives Matter. We can therefore see to what extent the Internet can also be a powerful instrument for echoing the suffering of the world, for denouncing injustices, climate inaction…
Artificial intelligence will be one of the next major societal challenges. Is this progress or a danger for “the coming civilization”?
We are today only at the beginning of something which will profoundly revolutionize the world. This huge surge of artificial intelligence has only just begun. The world that is taking shape with AI is the ability to have very precise surveillance instruments on each of the eight billion individuals who inhabit the planet. We have entrusted the destiny of humanity, our collective intelligence, to high-performance machines, which we do not really control. It is something potentially revolutionary, both fascinating and frightening. We will have to quickly ask ourselves the question of regulation…