D' or Et D'Airain: Penser, Cliquer, Agir

Education, work, objects, places, people: everything is going digital, everything is interconnected and becoming information. The picture painted in glowing colours by the Internet is the promise of a new golden age. Planets have certainly never been so well-aligned. Digital capital is plentiful and inexpensive. Digital production’s marginal cost is virtually null: a simple copy-and-paste. Never before have so much data been created and devoured by computers. The Internet confers a gift of unprecedented omnipresence on every activity. Yet this planetary golden age may ultimate amount to a mere bronze age. The Internet feeds on powerful network effects that inevitably lead to a world in which, inescapably, the winner takes all, a world in which modern-day blacksmiths armed with digital anvils acquire unmatched power. They owe this power to increasing returns to scale (the more they win, the more they win), but also, and most importantly, to a Faustian pact which, under the guise of the all-too-familiar “creative destruction” that we have naively accepted, is trading the gold of our data for a cheap free access that conceals a redoubtable threat. This allegiance to digital blacksmiths is, in reality, a submission to the algorithmic dictat that everything is quantifiable: “To each according to his number!” The more we progress numbed by the instant gratification of gratuitousness, the more we exchange our gold for the digital blacksmiths’ bronze: our (free) data are nourishing these robots and algorithms which merely exacerbate the inequalities between the winners and losers. We have reached the breaking point between gold and bronze: a critical and ambiguous breakaway in which anything remains possible. By (re)visiting familiar places (libraries, schools, lighthouses, etc.) and everyday objects (pocket knife, book, keyboard, banana, etc.), by observing people going about their daily lives (employees, members of the middle class, entrepreneurs, blacksmiths, pirates, etc.), and by relying upon history, philosophy, economics, sociology, science and poetry, this book illustrates how poor an advisor our impatience is, and how deceiving those truths presented to us as established can really be. It is not in “creative destruction” (gold supposedly gleaned from bronze), but in “creolisation” (as defined by poet Edouard Glissant) that we must steep ourselves to escape from the formidable triptych which imprisons us: embarrassment of riches (abundance can be burdensome), a Faustian pact which tarnishes our data and concentrates them in unreliable hands, corruption, and the predatory capture of value (monopolised beyond all reason, talent, or marginal productivity). We have the data – our data – we need to regain control of our lives, to belong to ourselves and not/no longer belong to whomsoever it may be under any algorithmic form whatsoever. We can – as in this industrious revolution preceding the 18th century’s industrial revolution – build our own platforms, our digital neighbourhoods, connect them to each other like rhizomes, and exploit their benefits without having to completely (and politically) submit to the digital blacksmiths, by unmasking the deception of this bronze which shines too much to be gold.Eric Briys is an Internet entrepreneur who, in 2001, co-founded www.cyberlibris.com, a pioneer digital library business. He is a graduate of the University of Geneva (PhD), the Stockholm School of Economics (ITP), and HEC. Before launching into his Cyberlibris venture, he was an investment banker and a finance and economics professor.