Juste wow.
Très bonne réflexion sur l'impact des algorithmes et leur abus.

Ce livre est juste génial.

Mini BD sur les élections.

Médias qui cherchent le sensationnel

Comme tout le monde ou presque, nous constatons que nos sociétés sont confrontées depuis plusieurs décennies à un ensemble de situations de plus en plus graves : pollution des airs, des continents, des rivières et des océans; chômage de masse, précarité, pauvreté; généralisation de toutes sortes de violence...

Comme quelques autres, nous ne nous résignons pas à ces situations, nous en souffrons, nous nous en indignons, nous nous efforçons de les analyser, nous souhaitons en débattre  et nous recherchons comment il serait possible d'y remédier.

Comme quelques autres, nous pensons que les choses ne s'améliorent pas car nos gouvernements s'effacent devant la finance et que, volontairement ou non (selon qu'ils se réclament "de droite" ou "de gauche") leurs choix sont ordonnés par le libéralisme.

Comme quelques autres, nous assimilons le libéralisme à une idéologie perverse : d'un côté on met en avant les principes de liberté et de responsabilité individuelles, partant du principe que la majorité des humains sont naturellement raisonnables et bien intentionnés; de l'autre, on feint d'ignorer qu'en réalité, ils se préoccupent bien plus de leurs propres intérêts que du reste de la planète.

Comme quelques autres, donc, nous savons que, d'un point de vue moral, le libéralisme est fondé sur l'hypocrisie : il n'est qu'un immense poulailler libre dans lequel on laisse librement évoluer les renards. Les discours libéraux affichent de nobles idéaux, en réalité s'applique la loi du plus fort, la loi de la jungle.

Comme quelques autres, nous savons que, d'un point de vue logique, le libéralisme est incohérent, aucune régulation par les prix n'est possible dès lors que la finance gouverne le marché car les principes du marché (plus un produit est rare, plus son prix est élevé) sont de facto écrasés par ceux de la finance (plus un produit est rare, plus sa cote baisse).

MAIS...

A la différence d'autres, nous considérons que le libéralisme n'est pas uniquement le fait d'une minorité de "décideurs" (patrons de méga-entreprises, financiers, traders, boursicoteurs petits et grands...) ni des politiciens.

A la différence d'autres, nous n'oublions pas en effet que les politiciens sont élus démocratiquement et qu'ils répondent aux attentes d'une majorité d'individus, animés eux-mêmes par les "valeurs" libérales (mythe du self made man) et qui - plus que toute autre chose - aspirent au confort matériel maximal ainsi qu'à la sécurité leur permettant de jouir de ce confort sans être inquiétés.

A la différence d'autres, nous observons que ce confort matériel, ce sont avant toute chose des moyens techniques qui les leur procurent : la voiture, la télévision, l'ordinateur, le téléphone portable... Toujours plus nombreux, ils s'appliquent à en jouir au maximum.

A la différence d'autres, nous expliquons que notre civilisation est devenue matérialiste parce que la recherche de confort matériel est sans cesse alimentée par la technique : un moyen technique apparaît pour répondre a un désir de confort. Mais, aussitôt comblé, ce désir en génère d'autres, ce qui va donner lieu à la conception, la fabrication et la commercialisation de nouveaux moyens techniques; lesquels, d'une part, rendent obsolètes les anciens moyens, d'autre part donnent naissance à de nouveaux désirs.

A la différence d'autres, nous affirmons que la technique se développe de façon autonome. Cette autonomie correspond d'une part au caractère insatiable du désir de confort matériel, d'autre part au fait que ce désir tend à devenir toujours plus addictif en raison du "perfectionnement" incessant de la technique.

A la différence d'autres, nous ne pensons pas que le matérialisme correspond à "la fin des valeurs" mais au fait qu'une seule valeur se substitue désormais à toutes les autres : "la recherche de l'efficacité maximale en toute chose". Même le goût du lucre est subordonné à cette valeur : la quête de profits passe par celle de nouveaux moyens de faire du profit.

A la différence d'autres, nous observons qu'en civilisation matérialiste, la vie des humains est quasi entièrement consacrée à la production et à la consommation des moyens techniques. D'une part, afin de les fabriquer en grandes quantités, on confère une grande valeur à son travail, y consacrant une partie importante de leur temps; d'autre part, on les utilise de plus en plus, au point d'éprouver de plus en plus de mal à s'en passer et d'inventer toujours plus de dérivatifs pour masquer sa dépendance à leur égard.

A la différence d'autres, nous n'oublions pas qu'avant même l'invention de la télévision, le cycle "métro-boulot-radio-dodo" était devenu un style de vie et que, dès qu'au fur et à mesure que les cadences et les volumes de production se sont accentués, l'industrie du loisir s'est développée, afin de constituer un dérivatif au travail (le "divertissement", c'est "ce qui fait diversion").

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que pour oublier les vicissitudes du travail, les humains s'abandonnent aux biens de consommation, au point d'ériger la consommation en "culture": la publicité n'est pas un simple moyen de propagande, c'est l'instrument d'un culte.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que la religion ne constitue plus "l'opium du peuple", comme autrefois car elle est remplacée depuis plusieurs décennies par la culture de masse.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que la culture de masse ne se réduit pas à la somme des informations que les individus reçoivent des médias institutionnels. Elle inclue également la somme des informations qu'eux-mêmes émettent grâce aux moyens dont la technique les dote (radios locales, blogs, sites web...).

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que la culture de masse "émise" est plus pernicieuse que la culture de masse "reçue" dans la mesure où elle procure une impression de liberté tandis que les grands médias peuvent toujours être suspectés d'intox. Tout média (qu'il soit géré par un groupe industriel ou par un blogueur habile et talentueux) constitue le moyen utilisé par quelques uns (voire un seul) de s'adresser à un nombre important d'individus. En tant que tel, il constitue donc un instrument de puissance.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que la capacité technique d'un État d'entrer dans l'intimité de milliers d'individus  (caméras de surveillance, écoutes téléphoniques, captation des courriels...) constitue un problème insoluble - notamment par le droit - ceci en raison même du caractère autonome de la technique (cf # 11).

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons qu'un individu aussi habile que Snowden (qui dénonce  les atteintes aux libertés par l'État) non seulement ne constitue pas le moindre "contre-pouvoir" à l'État mais contribue à renforcer ses systèmes de surveillance du seul fait que la majorité des humains privilégient le confort et la sécurité à la liberté.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que si, depuis le XIXème siècle, nos sociétés sont marchandisées, c'est  parce qu'il existe un "fétichisme de la marchandise". Et que si elles le sont aujourd'hui plus qu'il y a deux siècles, cela ne vient pas du fait que les marchands et les publicitaires soient plus cupides ou cyniques qu'autrefois mais du fait que la marchandise est de plus en plus technicisée. La technicisation du monde constitue la principale cause et le principal vecteur de sa marchandisation.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que ce sont les fabricants d'ordinateurs, les fournisseurs d'accès à internet et les experts en algorithmes qui structurent aujourd'hui le capitalisme et certainement plus - comme autrefois - les commerçants et industriels traditionnels, ni même les banquiers. Les premiers imposent leurs lois aux seconds.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que "l'homme moderne" fétichise son téléphone portable et sa voiture (et non des produits commestibles, des meubles ou des billets de banque...) parce qu'il estime qu'ils lui permettent de défier la nature. C'est pourquoi il ne recherche pas tant de nouvelles sortes de nourriture, de nouveaux mobiliers ou de nouvelles monnaies que des téléphones, des ordinateurs ou des voitures toujours plus performants.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que si cet homme recherche toujours plus de confort, et de sécurité c'est parce que, consciemment, ou inconsciemment, il entend repousser toujours plus loin les limites que lui impose la nature : son milieu géographique, les conditions climatiques mais aussi la douleur, le vieillissement et la mort.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que la technique est porteuse d'une eschatologie, elle vise un "but ultime" : créer sur terre l'équivalent de ce qu'on appellait autrefois  "le paradis" et que l'on situait dans l'au-delà : ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui "bonheur" et que l'on exige d'obtenir ici-bas, maintenant, tout de suite... et pour soi seul s'il le faut.

A la différence d'autres, nous pensons que de même qu'autrefois les humains se livraient à différents types de sacrifices dans l'espoir que leur âme accéde au paradis, de même, pour accéder au "bonheur", ils se sacrifient aujourd'hui au travail (terme qui vient du mot latin "trepalium", signifiant "instrument de torture").

A la différence d'autres, nous savons que de même que, dans les grandes entreprises, les cadres utilisent toutes sortes de "techniques de communication" pour rendre le travail plus supportable (donc acceptable), de même  aujourd'hui "les autoroutes de l'information" constituent un appareil de propagande destiné à faire oublier (donc accepter) le poids du travail.

A la différence d'autres, nous observons que tout en pâtissant du travail (la fatigue, le stress au travail et dans les transports...), les humains l'acceptent sans broncher, si ce n'est via un "mouvement social" de temps en temps. Ils obtempèrent "contre mauvaise fortune bon coeur" car ils se font à l'idée que le travail est une valeur, il constitue pour eux le "prix du bonheur". Ils l'endurent comme un peuple accepterait la condition d'esclavage et, de temps à autre, se risquerait à négocier le poids des chaînes avec ses maîtres.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous consdérons que si les humains accordaient une réelle importance au temps que leur fait "gagner" la technique, ils ne vivraient pas le chômage comme un drame ou une tragédie mais comme une bénédiction.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous portons un regard sans concession sur la façon dont nos contemporains sont exigeants en matière de confort et de sécurité. D'une part, ils consentent à travailler dur pour s'acheter une maison, une voiture, des appareils électro-ménagers, une télévision, un ordinateur, une tablette, un téléphone portable multi-fonctions, des DVD, des jeux vidéos... Et comme la recherche de leur bonheur personnel les coupe un peu du monde, ils surfent à longueur de temps sur les réseaux sociaux afin de "se faire des centaines d'amis"...  Dans un deuxième temps, afin qu'on ne leur vole pas leurs bagnoles, leurs télés, leurs ordis, leurs DVD... ils équipent leurs logements, leurs rues et leurs quartiers de toutes sortes de digicodes et d'alarmes.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous ne croyons pas que les États puissent constituer une quelconque protection contre les appétits privés ni que leurs pouvoirs s'émoussent devant "les marchés". Nous pensons au contraire que, quels que soient leurs gouvernants, ils exercent sur le monde une autorité croissante.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous analysons la façon dont les États, avec les meilleurs prétextes (la lutte contre le terrorisme et la délinquance) et avec l'accord tacite d'une majorité de concitoyens, usent de moyens techniques stoujours plus sophistiqués, pour violer les fondements de la liberté (écoutes téléphoniques, caméras de surveillance, consultation à distance des échanges internet, établissement de fichiers biométriques, légalisation des puces RFID, etc...), finissant par menacer la sécurité de chacun Cela va de la construction de centrales atomiques au pouvoir accordé à certains (aux États-Unis) d'utiliser des drones afin d'assassiner (dans n'importe quel pays) tout individu qu'ils jugent suspect, ceci en toute impunité.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous considérons que si les chefs d'États et de gouvernements permettent que des techniques soient utilisées à l'encontre de la liberté, de la morale et de la sécurité, ce n'est nullement parce qu'ils sont immoraux mais parce qu'un État, quel qu'il soit, ne peut se développer que sur la base de la valeur technicienne : "la recherche de l'efficacité maximale en toute chose".

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que les humains sont inconscients de ce qu'ils font quand, toujours plus nombreux, ils aspirent à toujours plus de confort. Ils n'évaluent ni son coût social (exploitation de mains d'oeuvre sous-payées dans les pays pauvres, chômage dans leurs propres pays), ni son coût écologique (utilisation de produits toxiques non dégradables). Ils sont inconscients de risquer ainsi leur santé et leur vie.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que ces individus sont hypocrites lorsqu'ils rendent responsables les hommes politiques des crises sociales et écologiques alors que ce sont eux qui ne cessent de leur demander de prendre les mesures leur garantissant toujours plus de confort et de sécurité. Ils sont irresponsables quand ils attendent des scientifiques et des ingénieurs qu'ils leur fournissent toujours plus de gadgets électroniques afin de satisfaire leurs désirs (qu'ils appellent "besoins" pour se donner bonne conscience). Ils sont enfin  inconséquents quand ils s'avisent à critiquer le capitalisme, faisant mine d'ignorer qu'aucun progrès technique n'est concevable sans concentration de capitaux.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que la technique n'est pas seulement ce par quoi s'opère la domination de quelques uns sur beaucoup d'autres (techniques d'armements, techniques financières, techniques médiatiques...) mais qu'elle est aussi ce par quoi s'opère l'aliénation de tous, les dominateurs autant que les dominés.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons donc que dénoncer les mécanismes de la domination en passant sous silence ceux de l'aliénation, c'est être moins consistant que la moitié d'un militant.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous considérons que si la finance gouverne l'économie et si la circulation du capital joue un rôle plus important que son accumulation, c'est parce que des moyens techniques sans cesse plus perfectionnés permettent aux capitaux de circuler à des vitesses toujours plus rapides, sans même parfois nécessiter le moindre contrôle humain, comme c'est le cas avec l'algotrading.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, et bien que nous nous exprimons ici sur un site internet, nous pensons que la technique ne constitue pas un meilleur moyen de s'exprimer et de s'organiser que par le passé. D'une part parce qu'un message est aujourd’hui noyé dans une masse considérable d’autres messages et qu'il a toutes les chances de passer inaperçu. D'autre part parce qu'un site internet, un forum électronique... constituent des moyens de communication désincarnés. Ne recourir qu'à eux revient à légitimer la quête obsessionnelle du progrès technique que nous nous efforçons au contraire de placer sous les feux de la critique.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous ne pensons pas que la technique "n'est ni bonne ni mauvaise" et que "tout dépend de l'usage que l'on en fait". Nous affirmons que LES techniques étant aujourd'hui tellement connectées entre elles, interdépendantes, LA Technique constitue désormais un environnement à part entière tout comme l'était autrefois la Nature. Et tout comme cette dernière jadis, elle conditionne les comportements, qu'on le veuille ou non, que l'on dispose ou non de moyens techniques (dans la mesure où ceux-ci sont porteurs de fantasmes).

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que quand les "décideurs" ne cessent de répéter aux gens qu'ils  ne doivent pas s'inquiéter du fait que les machines suppriment les emplois et qu'ils doivent "s'adapter au changement", ils ne font que leur demander de se conformer au milieu technicien et de se soumettre à ses lois. 

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous entendons faire valoir la notion de  "technicisme passif". De même qu'une personne qui ne fume pas mais se retrouve au milieu d’une salle remplie de fumeurs est victime de tabagisme passif, de même quiconque, dans son travail, se retrouve obligé d'utiliser un ordinateur pour exécuter des tâches futiles subit lde plein fouet 'idéologie technicienne, qu'il le veuille ou non. De même, quiconque, chez lui, se retrouve dans l'obligation de répondre aux quantités de mails professionnels qu'il reçoit quotidiennement. De même que celui qui, ne disposant pas d'internet, s'expose à la suspicion d'être ringard.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous n'assimilons pas  la technique aux seules technologies car elle n'est pas exclusivement de nature matérielle, elle constitue également une façon de penser. On peut définir celle-ci comme "la recherche de l'efficacité maximale en toute chose". Dès lors qu'il s'agit de gouverner une nation (État centralisé), d'administrer une cité (bureaucratie), de diriger une entreprise (management), de gérer un budget, de prévoir la météo ou même d'organiser ses vacances, la technique est omniprésente : elle constitue un fait civilisationnel.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous considérons que lorsqu'une poignée de "penseurs" transhumanistes proclament que le cyborg est l'avenir de l'homme, ils disent tout haut ce qu'une majorité d'individus disent tout bas, ou pour le moins espèrent secrètement.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous considérons que la technique constitue non seulement un nouvel environnement (# 40), un fait civilisationnel  (# 43) et la fin de l'humanisme (# 44) mais un changement de période géologique : l'anthropocène.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres,  nous pensons que la technique ne constitue plus comme autrefois un simple "ensemble de moyens au service de différentes finalités", elle est érigée en "finalité suprême". Ne pas le percevoir n'est pas seulement faire preuve de naïveté et de paresse intellectuelle, c'est la démonstration que le développement technique est désormais considéré comme allant de soi.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres,  nous pensons qu'"on n'arrête pas le progrès" parce que l'on se persuade qu'il ne faut pas l'arrêter (la technique n'est pas seulement incritiquable, elle est indiscutable, tabou). Plus radicalement, nous pensons que l'on se persuade qu'il ne faut pas arrêter le progrès parce qu'en réalité, l'on ne peut plus le faire et l'on n'ose pas s'avouer à soi-même son incapacité à la contrôler.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que le progrès technique étant indiscutable, tout le monde ou presque s'y conforme à l'échelle planétaire si bien qu'il se développe de façon autonome quand bien même on s'évertue à croire et proclammer qu'on le contrôle.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que tout le monde ou presque se conforme à a technique. Aussi bien celui qui monte le volume de sa chaîne HI-FI ou met la pression sur la pédale d'accélérateur de sa voiture que celui qui lance un missile ou une bombe atomique. Les effets sont différents, les causes exactement les mêmes.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous pensons que le conformisme à la Technique constitue une nouvelle forme de totalitarisme : une dictature d'une ampleur inégalée s'exprimant non plus de façon autoritaire, comme autrefois, mais par l'intériorisation des contraintes.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres,  nous ne nous contentons pas de critiquer la technique depuis ses conséquences, une fois qu'il est déjà trop tard (par exemple après l'explosion d'une centrale atomique) mais depuis ses causes. Nous nous demandons quelles sont les "raisons" qui poussent, par millions, des individus se disant "raisonnables" à s'exposer aux risques sanitaires, en premier lieu l'irradiation. Pourquoi ne craignent-ils jamais que leur environnement soit contaminé pendant des siècles par l'atome ? Pourquoi, après Tchernobyl et Fukushima, ne se mobilisent-ils pas en masse, ne serait-ce que pour sauver leur peau ? 

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, "nous ne faisons pas de politique", non pas parce que cela ne nous intéresse pas - bien au contraire ! - mais parce que nous considérons que tous les problèmes que nous rencontrons aujourd'hui découlent d'une idéologie qui s'est ancrée il y a plus de trois siècles et qui, depuis, a tellement pénétré les consciences qu'elle n'est pas reconnue, y compris par la majorité des militants : l'idéologie technicienne. Nous pensons qu'il ne sert à rien de "s'indigner" ni de déblatérer contre le capitalisme tant que l'on n'a pas intégré que la realpolitik n'est qu'une pâle illusion, tant que l'on s'évertue à croire qu'elle peut influer d'une quelconque manière sur le cours des choses.

A la différence de beaucoup d'autres, nous considérons que, de même qu’au XXe siècle le taylorisme a parcellisé le monde du travail, le militantisme est aujourd'hui sectorisé : ici les anti-OGM et les anti-nucléaire, là les opposants à la vidéo-surveillance et au fichage biométrique ; d’un côté les adversaires des drones et de l’algotrading, de l’autre ceux qui voient dans les effets du tout-écran la cause de l’individualisme.

A la différence d'autres militants qui, comme nous, considèrent la Technique comme un phénomène totalitaire mais qui, ce faisant, cèdent aux sirènes de la technophobie ou simplement du passéisme, nous estimons que ce n’est pas la technique qui nous asservit mais le sacré transféré à la technique. Le totalitarisme technicien s'apparente à ce que La Boétie appelait "servitude volontaire" dans la mesure où c'est volontairement (bien qu'inconsciemment) que nos contemporains privilégient le confort matériel à la liberté.

De façon très marginale (une marginalité dont nous pâtissons mais que nous assumons), nous considérons que nos contemporains ne sont nullement aussi "modernes" qu'ils le prétendent mais au contraire aussi religieux et fétichistes que leurs plus anciens ancêtres. Autrefois, on imaginait qu'un arbre avait un esprit et l'on faisait des sacrifices aux divinités... Aujourd'hui, on panique quand on a égaré son téléphone portable et l'on se délecte de films en 3D et d'images virtuelles quand on est incapable de percevoir la réalité dans ses deux dimensions : physique et fantasmée.

De façon très marginale, nous considérons que, quelle que soit la valeur utilitaire qu'on accorde aux technologies (en particulier les médias), celles-ci exercent une capacité de divertissement sans commune mesure avec ce que l'histoire a jusqu'ici produit. La capacité de divertissement est "la capacité de faire diversion", multiplier les informations de façon qu'il devient toujours plus difficile de distinguer ce qui est essentiel de ce qui est accessoire.

De façon très marginale, nous considérons que la technique divise les individus... pourtant censés être indivisibles. D'une part, elle les coupe de leur intériorité. D'autre part, elle les oppose les uns aux autres. Car plus ils croient communiquer les uns avec les autres, plus ils  s'instrumentalisent les uns les autres du fait même qu'ils échangent entre eux par la médiation d'instruments divers.

De façon très marginale, nous considérons que, de même que "l'homme moderne" a autrefois colonisé des peuples qu'il considérait comme inférieurs à lui, de même ses écrans d'ordinateurs, par retour de bâton, colonisent désormais son imaginaire. Nullement parce que ces écrans (ou les images en général) sont maléfiques en soi mais parce que lui-même est idolâtre. Tel le "primitif" qu'il a autrefois soumis à sa domination, il croit qu'un écran est une fenêtre ouverte sur le monde, alors qu'il n'en est qu'une représentation fantasmée, un "écran" de fumée lui dissimulant la partie le plus profonde (donc la plus obscure) de lui-même.

De façon très marginale, nous considérons que "l'homme moderne" réduit la psyché à la conscience. Il identifie la réalité du monde à l'image qu'il s'en fait (et aux multiples images qu'il en fait). Or cette image émane en grande partie des couches de son inconscient, elle en est une projection. L'inconscient est comparable à un continent que "l'homme moderne" a dévalorisé aussitôt qu'il l'a identifié (au début du XXe siècle) car il lui  renvoyait une image contrastée, associant les ombres aux lumières; bien moins glorieuse par conséquent que celle qu'il se forgeait (et continue de se forger) par la conscience : celle d'un homme libre, "éclairé", émancipé  de toutes sortes de croyances.

De façon très marginale, nous pensons que plus "l'homme moderne" sacralise la Technique, plus celle-ci, en retour, lui renvoie un spectacle kaléidoscopique qui le détourne toujours plus de son intériorité, laissant du coup le champ libre à sa volonté de puissance,  à ses pulsions prométhéennes, à ses instincts grégaires et prédateurs. Intrinsèquement mortifère, la sacralisation de la technique (et non la technique elle-même) ne peut provoquer à terme que des effets mortels. La doctrine transhumaniste en constitue le prologue.

De façon extrêmement isolée, certains d'entre nous considèrent que les humains sont aujourd'hui tellement fascinés et façonnés par  leurs prothèses qu'ils sont, en l'état, incapables de réaliser qu'ils les ont fabriquées par orgueil. Secrètement mais exclusivement motivés par le désir de remplacer les dieux, dont ils ont préalablement décrété le décès, ils  sont en réalité devenus sourds à toute forme de transcendance.

De façon extrêmement isolée, certains d'entre nous considèrent que seul un sursaut d'humilité, une réactivation des facultés contemplatives et un sens prononcé de l'éthique pourraient briser ce terrifiant cercle vicieux et éviter qu'il ne devienne fatal.

De façon extrêmement isolée, toutefois, certains d'entre nous considèrent qu'en aucune manière une quelconque forme de spiritualisme ne saurait valoir d'antidote au matérialisme qui ronge la planète au travers de mille techniques. Seul l'exercice personnel (mené par chaque personne) d'une  dialectique de l'immanence et de la transcendance pourrait constituer une planche de salut.

EN RÉSUMÉ...

De façon très isolée, nous considérons que la technique constitue un phénomène radicalement différent de ce que "l'homme moderne" affirme habituellement et de ce qu'il s'acharne non seulement à faire croire aux autres mais à croire lui-même.

De façon très isolée, nous considérons que la technique ne peut se définir exclusivement en termes rationnels et que, pour en comprendre pleinement le processus, il importe de prendre également en considération les motivations inconscientes des humains.

De façon très isolée, nous pensons que quand les humains entonnent la rengaine "la-technique-n'est-ni-bonne-ni-mauvaise/seul-importe-l'usage-qu'on-en-fait", c'est exclusivement afin de s'auto-justifier, fermer les yeux sur leurs instincts prométhéens, se donner bonne conscience afin de poursuivre dans la voie de la toute-puissance.

De façon très isolée, nous pensons qu'affirmer que "la technique est neutre", c'est passer avec soi-même toute une série de petits arrangements, de manière à rester soi-même neutre à son égard. C'est vouloir rester non critique envers sa propre volonté de puissance. C'est en premier lieu se mentir continuellement à soi-même et - secondairement, par voie de conséquence - mentir à autrui.

De façon aussi résolue que marginale, et étant donné son pouvoir extrêmement destructeur, nous entendons démystifier la technique : tenir à son endroit un autre discours. Raison pour laquelle notre association porte le nom de Technologos.

Toutes les fois qu’à notre époque éclate une guerre, alors éclate aussi et surtout parmi les plus nobles fils du peuple un désir secret : ils s’exposent eux-mêmes au nouveau danger de mort parce que dans leur sacrifice pour leur patrie, ils croient qu’ils ont enfin trouvé la permission qu’ils n’ont cessé de chercher, la permission d’échapper à leur destinée humaine. La guerre est pour eux une forme plus aisée du suicide, elle leur permet de se suicider la conscience en paix.

Nietzsche

Cette citation a la puissance de remettre en question la bêtise que j’associais à la guerre et au patriotisme. Je me suis longtemps demandé comment autant de personnes pouvaient accepter d’aller tuer leur prochain pour le pouvoir de quelques uns sans forcément y associer le mal-être de toute une frange de la population. Cela est peut-être dû à la façon dont l’Histoire est enseignée, il n’y a dans mon souvenir que l’origine de la seconde guerre mondiale que l’on transmet sur ces bases de frustrations de tout un peuple.

Si j’ai fui l’Asie, puis l’Europe, c’est en partie par peur de la guerre. Mais aussi car je ne veux pas me retrouver dans ce mal-être et l’auto-alimenter. Avant la guerre il y a la perte d’enthousiasme et de bienveillance, des tensions qui se cristallisent autour des cultures et des possessions. J’ai besoin d’un environnement propice à l’expression de ces qualités, j’ai besoin d’être entouré de cultures différentes pour m’enrichir, j’ai besoin de me sentir libre de mes possessions pour ma propre (r)évolution (cache).

C’est parce que je suis incapable de réaliser le bien dans ma vie que je projette sur l’État qui doit le réaliser par procuration à ma place. C’est parce que je suis incapable de discerner la vérité, que je réclame que l’administration la discerne pour moi, me dispense de cette quête pénible, et me la remette toute produite. […] Ce sont les mêmes motifs, c’est le même processus, c’est la même mystification qui conduisaient l’homme dans la religion et à attendre de Dieu l’accomplissement de ce qu’il ne savait pas faire, et qui le conduisent aujourd’hui dans la politique à attendre de l’État ces mêmes choses.

Rejeter sur l’organisation de la société la solution de tous les problèmes personnels, la réalisation des valeurs, c’est réaliser une opération très commode d’absentéisme humain.

L’illusion politique, Jacques Ellul.

Mes voisins ont cédé à cette pulsion suicidaire et questionnent les valeurs des autres humains :

Êtes-vous aussi désespérés que nous au point de vouloir avoir recours à un suicide collectif ?
Avez-vous si peu appris des faiblesses humaines au cours de l’Histoire ?
Est-ce que votre vie a encore une quelconque saveur lorsqu’elle est privée de savoirs ?

Cet aveu de manque d’éducation est terrible et se concrétise logiquement par la mise au pouvoir d’un CEO :

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley run because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences – setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio – then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

Extract of a speech at Frontiers Conference 2016, Barack Obama

Barack Obama s’adressait probablement davantage aux CEO de la Silicon Valley et peut-être plus directement à Mark Zuckerberg (cache) à ce moment là, il n’empêche que le président actuel apporte avec lui tout le champ lexical guerrier du commerce. Ainsi qu’une incompréhension de la diversité nécessaire à la démocratie et du temps long associé pour rendre assimilables des valeurs par une culture.

I believe my Holocaust memorial in Berlin could no longer be built today,” the architect Peter Eisenman has told Die Zeit. Eisenman says that Europe is now “afraid of strangers”, and he fears that the rise of xenophobia and antisemitism in Europe would make it impossible to build monuments like the vast field of grey sepulchres that he designed as Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in 2005 close to the site of Adolf Hitler’s bunker.

He may well be right – yet surely this is the wrong end of the book to start at. The real question is why Holocaust memorials have done so little to prevent the return of Europe’s far-right demons.

Holocaust survivors' 3D project preserves testimony for the future
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In Vienna, as in Berlin, the victims of the Holocaust are remembered by public art. Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust memorial is a sealed library of closed books, each book suggesting a whole life we cannot recover.

Since its unveiling in 2000, it has become, like Eisenman’s Berlin memorial, a sombre tourist attraction and civic symbol. Yet Austria has just come perilously close to electing a president whose extreme-right Freedom party has Nazi roots and espouses xenophobia. Norbert Hofer was defeated – good – but how can anyone at all be drawn to far-right politics in a Europe that remembers its history? If memorials like those created by Whiteread and Eisenman have any value, it should surely be to make race hate an utterly marginal force, and far-right extremism the smallest of minorities. Instead, in its new guise of “populism”, the anti-liberal right is running rampant.

A young man stands on a stone of the holocaust memorial in Berlin, Germany, November 26, 2016.
A young man stands on a stone of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Photograph: Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters
The reason is historical ignorance, and it’s a tragedy that Holocaust memorials have done so little to combat that forgetting. Could it be that artists like Eisenman are too modern or abstract to communicate with the public? Perhaps, but you can hardly say the same of films such as Schindler’s List or The Pianist. Since the 90s, a sustained and diverse effort on every front from sculpture to children’s books has put the memory of the Holocaust at the forefront of modern culture. The result? A world in which moderation is becoming a dirty word, the left is dying, and the far right is the loudest, strongest voice with its claim to speak for the volk. Sorry, the people.

What went wrong? Unfortunately, the problem is memory itself. It plays us false even in our personal lives. The idea of collective memory is fundamentally dangerous. Either it creates empty, bland expressions of vague goodwill, or, when it gets emotional, outright lies. Britain’s move towards Brexit has been marked culturally by a strange reinvention of the first world war as a great patriotic struggle and orgies of poppy art.

Putting the Holocaust at the forefront of modern culture... Schindler’s List.
Putting the Holocaust at the forefront of modern culture ... Schindler’s List. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Universal
Holocaust memorials are truthful and they are necessary, but mass memory does not mean much. Only historical knowledge can help human beings engage with the past in a meaningful way. And astonishingly, in spite of all the television documentaries, books, films and artworks, our public knowledge of 20th-century history is appalling.

The fact that commenters will reach for the vacuous cliche of Godwin’s law before finishing this sentence only demonstrates how inadequate are our images of 20th-century history. The Nazi era started to be stereotyped while the second world war was still being fought. Hollywood Nazis helped create a mythic version of Hitler’s Germany while it was still being defeated. Ever since, a mythic image of the Nazi age has served the interests of the post-1945 era. Because democracy won the second world war – at least in the west – nazism has been mythified ever since as democracy’s “other”, a totalitarian system that rigidly controlled a helpless population. In fact, it was in many ways a consensual movement in which people consciously “worked towards the führer”. This is true of the Holocaust itself.

Far from a cold bureaucratic machine carrying out a single order handed down from above, the murder of Europe’s Jews was a complicated process in which many people made conscious decisions to participate. The exact relationship between state and individual responsibility, determination and free will, in the massacres in forests, burnings of villages and, finally, the death camps that sought to exterminate a people, is a problem worthy of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but the fact is that Hitler really did find willing executioners.

Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna.
Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna. Photograph: Herwig Prammer/Reuters
We see the Holocaust and nazism in a dangerously complacent way. Because there is no sign of one-party states in contemporary western Europe, it is said to be historically crass to compare right-wing populism with 1930s nazism and fascism. Yet these movements too had democratic support, a love from the volk to match that of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins, and an impulsive, emotional, unpredictable quality that completely belies the totalitarian stereotype.

The monolithic bleakness of Eisenman’s Berlin memorial implies an innacurate vision of nazism. He makes the Holocaust look like a state bureaucrat’s calculus of death. It was worse. It was a chaos of hatred, bigotry and unreason. When unleashed in a modern technological society, these demonic passions can quickly create a hell on earth. We would be utter fools to think it can’t happen again, or that the world will never have any more reason to build memorials.

L’argent est-il le seul et unique observable universel ? Peut-être. Dans tous les cas, c’est aujourd’hui le plus courant et le plus utilisé. Il faut donc en tenir compte sans le rejeter en bloc. Construire une société sans argent me semble une utopie irréalisable et probablement pas souhaitable.

Par contre, au niveau individuel, nous sommes bien peu à considérer l’argent comme le seul moteur de notre vie. Pourtant, par facilité, nous nous y abandonnons. Nous travaillons plus pour gagner plus. Nous repoussons les prises de risque qui pourraient nous faire perdre de l’argent.

Confronté à cette réalité, nous avons tendance à camoufler. À brandir des objectifs secondaires, des déclarations d’intention. À nous tromper nous-mêmes.

Mais alors, quel est l’observable de nos vrais objectifs personnels, ceux que nous n’avons jamais pris la peine d’explorer, de conscientiser ?

Car si nous voulons changer le monde et nous changer nous-même, il faut se fixer un réel objectif principal avec une observable digne de lui.

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?

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But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?

We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.

But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?

Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.

I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.

Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.

But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.

Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.

Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster

So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.

That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.

And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.

Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.

Why?

Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.

Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.

When work disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When socially necessary labour declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.

Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labour, convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism. There never was a free market in labour in these united states. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.

And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.

How would human nature change as the aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of all?

Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.

Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.

Who Will Command The Robot Armies?

When John Allsopp invited me here, I told him how excited I was discuss a topic that's been heavy on my mind: accountability in automated systems.

But then John explained that in order for the economics to work, and for it to make sense to fly me to Australia, there needed to actually be an audience.

So today I present to you my exciting new talk:

Who Will Command the Robot Armies?

The Military

Let's start with the most obvious answer—the military.

This is the Predator, the forerunner of today's aerial drones. Those things under its wing are Hellfire missiles.

These two weapons are the chocolate and peanut butter of robot warfare. In 2001, CIA agents got tired of looking at Osama Bin Laden through the camera of a surveillance drone, and figured out they could strap some missiles to the thing. And now we can't build these things fast enough.

We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance.

There are also portable UAVs with explosives in their nose, so you can fire them out of a tube and then direct them against a target—a group of soldiers, an orphanage, or a bunker–and make them perform a kamikaze attack.

The Army has been developing unmanned vehicles that work on land, little tanks that roll around with a gun on top, with a wire attached for control, like the cheap remote-controlled toys you used to get at Christmas.

Here you see a demo of a valiant robot dragging a wounded soldier to safety.

The Russians have their own versions of these things, of course. Here's a cute little mini-tank that patrols the perimeter of a defense installation.

I imagine it asking you who you are in a heavy Slavic accent before firing its many weapons into your fleeing body.

Not all these robots are intended as weapons. The Army is trying to automate transportation, sometimes in weird-looking ways like this robotic dog monster.

DARPA funded research into this little bit of nightmare fuel, a kind of headless horse, that can cover rough terrain and carry gear on its back.

So progress with autonomous and automated systems in the military is rapid.

The obvious question as these systems improve is whether there will ever be a moment when machines are allowed to decide to kill people without human intervention.

I think there's a helpful analogy here with the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttle was an almost entirely automated spacecraft. The only thing on it that was not automated was button that dropped the landing gear. The system was engineered that way on purpose, so that the Shuttle had to have a crew.

The spacecraft could perform almost an entire mission solo, but it would not be able to put its wheels down.

When the Russians built their shuttle clone, they removed this human point of control. The only flight the Buran ever made was done on autopilot, with no people aboard.

I think we'll see a similar evolution in autonomous weapons. They will evolve to a point to where they are fully capable of finding and killing their targets, but the designers will keep a single point of control.

And then someone will remove that point of control.

Last week I had a whole elaborate argument about how that could happen under a Clinton Administration. But today I don't need it.

It's important to talk about the political dynamic driving the development of military robots.

In the United States, we've just entered the sixteenth year of a state of emergency. It has been renewed annually since 2001.

It has become common political rhetoric in America to say that 'we're at war', even though being 'at war' means something vastly different for Americans than, say, Syrians.

(Instead of showing you pictures of war, I'm going to show pictures of kids I met in Yemen in 2014. These are the people our policies affect most.)

The goal of military automation is to make American soldiers less vulnerable. This laudable goal also serves a cynical purpose.

Wounded veterans are a valuable commodity in American politics, but we can't produce them in large numbers without facing a backlash.

Letting robots do more of the fighting makes it possible to engage in low-level wars for decades at a time, without creating political pressure for peace.

As it becomes harder to inflict casualties on Western armies, their opponents turn to local civilian targets. These are the real victims of terrorism; people who rarely make the news but suffer immensely from the state of permanent warfare.

Once in a long while, a terror group is able to successfully mount an attack in the West. When this happens, we panic.

The inevitable hardening of our policy fuels a dynamic of grievance and revenge that keeps the cycle going.

While I don't think anyone in the Army is cynical enough to say it, there are institutional incentives to permanent warfare.

An army that can practice is much better than one that can only train. Its leaders, tactics, and technologies are tested under real field conditions. And in 'wartime', cutting military budgets becomes politically impossible.

These remote, imbalanced wars also allow us to experiment with surveillance and automation technologies that would never pass ethical muster back home.

And as we'll see, a lot of them make it back home anyway.

It's worth remarking how odd it is to have a North American superpower policing remote areas of Pakistan or Yemen with flying robots.

Imagine if Indonesia were flying drones over northern Australia, to monitor whether anyone there was saying bad things about Muslims there.

Half of Queensland would be in flames, and everyone in this room would be on a warship about to land in Jakarta.

The Police

My second contender for who will command the robot armies is the police.

Technologies that we develop to fight our distant wars get brought back, or leak back, into civilian life back home.

The most visible domestic effect of America's foreign wars has been the quantity of military surplus equipment that ends up being given to police.

Local police departments around the country (and here in Australia) have armored vehicles, military rifles, night vision googles and other advanced equipment.

After the Dallas police massacre, the shooter was finally killed by a remotely-controled bomb disposal robot initially designed for use by the military in Iraq.

I remember how surprising it was after the Boston marathon bombings to see the Boston police emerge dressed like the bad guys from a low-budget sci-fi thriller. They went full Rambo, showing up wth armored personnel carriers and tanks.

Still, cops will be cops. Though they shut down all of downtown Boston, the police did make sure the donut shops stayed open.

The militarization of our police extends to their behavior, and the way they interact with their fellow citizens.

Many of our police officers are veterans. Their experience in foreign wars colors the attitudes and tactics they adopt back home.

Less visible, but just as important, are the surveillance technologies that make it back into civilian life.

These include drones with gigapixel cameras that can conduct surveillance over entire cities, and whose software can follow dozens of vehicles and pedestrians automatically.

The United States Border Patrol has become an enthusiastic (albeit not very effective) adopter of unmanned aerial vehicles.

These are also being used here in Australia, along with unmanned marine vehicles, to intercept refugees arriving by sea.

Another gift of the Iraq war is the Stingray, a fake base station that hijacks cell phone traffic, and is now being used rather furtively by police departments across the United States.

When we talk about government surveillance, there's tendency to fixate on national agencies like the NSA or CIA. These are big, capable bureaucracies, and they certainly do a lot of spying.

But these agencies have an internal culture of following rules (even when the rules are secret) and an institutional committment to a certain kind of legality. They're staffed by career professionals.

None of these protections apply when you're dealing with local law enforcement. I trust the NSA and CIA to not overstep their authority much more than I trust some deputy sherrif in East Dillweed, Arizona.

Unfortunately, local police are getting access to some very advanced technology.

So for example San Diego cops are swabbing people for DNA without their consent, and taking photos for use in a massive face recognition database. Half the American population now has their face in such a database.

And the FBI is working on a powerful 'next-generation' identification system that will be broadly available to other government agencies, with minimal controls.

The Internet of Things

But here the talk is getting grim! Let's remember that not all robots are out to kill us, or monitor us.

There are all kinds of robots that simply want to help us and live with us in our homes, and make us happy.

Let's talk about those friendly robots for a while.

Consider the Juicebro! The Juicebro is a $700 Internet-connected juice smasher that sits on your countertop.

Juicebro makes juice from $7 packets of pre-chopped vegetables with a QR code on the back. If the Internet connection is down, or the QR code does not validate, Juicebro will refuse to make you juice. Juicebro won't take that risk!

Flatev makes sad little tortillas from a Keurig-like capsule of dough, and puts them in a drawer. Each dough packet costs $1.

The Vessyl is a revolutionary smart cup that tells you what you're drinking.

Here, for example, the Vessyl has sensed that you are drinking a beer.

(This feature can probably be hard-coded in Australia.)

Because of engineering difficulties, the Vessyl is not quite ready for sale. Instead, its makers are selling the Pryme, a $99 smart cup that can only detect water.

You'll know right to the milliliter how much water you're drinking.

The Kuvée is the $200 smart wine bottle with a touchscreen that tells you right on the bottle what the wine tastes like.

My favorite thing about the Kuvée is that if you don't charge it, it can't pour the wine.

The Wilson X connected football detects "velocity, distance, spiral efficiency, spin rate and whether a pass was caught or dropped." It remembers these statistics forever.

No more guesswork with the Wilson connected football!

The Molekule is one of my favorite devices, a human-portable air freshener that "breaks down pollutants on a molecular level".

At only eight kilos, you can lug it around comfortably as you pad barefoot from room to room.

Molekule makes sure you never breathe a single molecule of un-purified air.

Here is the Internet connected kettle! There was a fun bit of drama with this just a couple of weeks ago, when the data scientist Mark Rittman spent eleven hours trying to connect it to his automated home.

The kettle initially grabbed an IP address and tried to hide:

3 hrs later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base station reset, now port-scanning network to find where kettle is now.
Then there was a postmodern moment when the attention Rittman's ordeal was getting on Twitter started causing his home system to go haywire:

Now the Hadoop cluster in the garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT integration with Amazon Echo
Finally, after 11 hours, Rittman was able to get everything working and posted this triumphal tweet:

Well the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we're eating dinner in the dark while the lights download a firmware update.
Internet connected kettle, everybody!

Peggy is the web-connected clothespin with a humidity sensor that messages you when your clothes are dry.

I'm not sure if you're supposed to buy a couple dozen of these, or if you're meant to use only one, and dry items one after the other.

This smart mirror couples with a smart scale to help you start your morning right.

Step on the scale, look in the mirror, and find out how much more you weigh, and if you have any new wrinkles.

Flosstime is the world's first and possibly last smart floss dispenser. It blinks at you accusingly when it is time to floss, and provocatively spits out a thread of floss for you to grab.

I especially like the user design for when there are two people using htis device. You're supposed to to take it off its mounting, flip a switch on its back to user #2, and then back away slowly so the motion detector doesn't register your presence.

Spire is a little stone that you clip to your belt that reminds you to breathe.

Are you sick and tired of waiting twelve minutes for cookies?

The CHiP smart oven will make you a batch of cookies in under ten minutes!

The my.Flow is a smart tampon. The sensor connects with a cord to a monitor that you wear clipped to the outside of your belt, and messages you when it's time to change your tampon.

Nothing gives you peace of mind like connecting something inside your body to the outside of your clothing.

Here is Huggies TweetPee, which is exactly what you're most afraid it will be.

This moisture sensor clips to your baby's diaper and sends you a tweet when it is wet.

Huggies tried to make a similar sensor to detect when the diaper is full of shit, but it proved impossible to distinguish from normal activity on Twitter.

Finally, meet Kisha, the umbrella that tells you when it's raining.

All of these devices taken together make for quite a smart home. Every one of them comes with an app, and none of them seem to consider the cumulative effect of so many notifications and apps on people's sanity.

They are like little birds clamoring to be fed, oblivious to everything else.

The people who design these devices don't think about how they are supposed to peacefully coexist in a world full of other smart objects.

This raises the question of who will step up and figure out how to make the Internet of Things work together as a cohesive whole.

Evil Hackers

Of course, the answer is hackers!

Before we talk about them, let's enjoy this stock photo.

I've been programming for a number of years, but I've still never been in a situation where green binary code is being projected onto my hoodie. Yet this seems to happen all the time when you're breaking into computer systems.

Notice also how poor this guy's ergonomics are. That hood is nowhere near parallel to the laptop screen.

This poor hacker has it even worse!

He doesn't even have a standing desk, so he's forced to hold the laptop up with one hand, like a waiter.

But despite these obstacles, hackers are able to reliably break into all kinds of IoT devices.

And since these devices all need access to the Internet, so they can harass your phone, they are impossible to secure.

This map could stand for so many things right now.

But before the election it was just a map of denial-of-service attacks against a major DNS provider, that knocked a lot of big-name sites offline in the United States.

This particular botnet used webcams with hard-coded passwords. But there is no shortage of vulnerable devices to choose from.

In August, researchers published a remote attack against a smart lightbulb protocol. For some reason, smart lightbulbs need to talk to each other.

“Hey, are you on?”

“Yeah, I'm on.”

“Wanna blink?”

“Sure!”

In their proof of concept, the authors were able to infect smart light bulbs in a chain reaction, using a drive-by car or a drone for the initial hack.

The bulbs can be permanently disabled, or made to put out a loud radio signal that will disrupt wifi anywhere nearby.

Since these devices can't be trusted to talk to the Internet by themselves, one solution is to have a master device that polices net access for all the others, a kind of robot butler to keep an eye on the staff.

Google recently introduced Google Home, which looks like an Orwellian air freshener. It sits in your house, listens through always-on microphones, and plays reassuring music through speakers in its base.

Google

So maybe it's Google who will command the robot armies! They have the security expertise to build such a device and the programming ability to make it useful.

Yet Google already controls our online life to a troubling degree. Here is a company that runs your search engine, web browser, manages your email, DNS, phone operating system, and now your phone itself.

Moreover, Doubleclick and Google Analytics tell Google about your activity across every inch of the web.

Now this company wants to put an always-on connected microphone in every room of your home.

What could go wrong?

For examples of failure, always turn to Yahoo.

On the same day that Google announced Google Home, Reuters revealed that Yahoo had secretly installed software in 2014 to search though all incoming email at the request of the US government.

What was especially alarming was the news that Yahoo had done this behind the backs of its own security team.

This tells us that whatever safeguards Google puts in its always-on home microphone will not protect us from abuses by government, even if everyone at Google security were prepared to resign in protest.

And that's a real problem.

Over the last two decades, the government's ability to spy on its citizens has grown immeasurably.

Mostly this is due to technology transfer from the commercial Internet, whose economic model is mass surveillance. Techniques and software that work in the marketplace are quickly adopted by intelligence agencies worldwide.

President Obama has been fairly sparing in his use of this power. I say this not to praise him, but actually to condemn him. His relative restraint, and his administration's obsession with secrecy, have masked the full extent of power that is available to the executive branch.

Now that power is being passed on to a new President, and we are going to learn all about what it can do.

Amazon

So Google is out! The company knows too much, and it's too easy for the information it collects to fall into tiny, orange hands.

Maybe Amazon can command the robot armies? They sell a similar device to Google Home, a pretty cylinder called Echo that listens to voice commands. Unlike Home, it's already widely available.

And our relationship with Amazon is straightforward compared to Google. Amazon just wants to sell us shit. There's none of Google's obliqueness, creepy advertising, and mysterious secret projects designed to save the world.

Amazon Echo is a popular device, especially with parents who like being able to do things with voice commands.

And recently they've added little hockey pucks that you're supposed to put around your house, so that there's microphone coverage everywhere.

Amazon knows all about robot armies. For starters, they run the cloud, one of the biggest automated systems in the world.

And they have ambitious ideas about how robots could serve us in the future.

Amazon's vision of how we'll automate our lives is delightfully loopy. Consider the buttons they sell that let you re-order any product.

I lifted this image right from their website. When would this scenario ever be useful? Is this a long weekend after some bad curry? How much time are we talking about here?

And what do you do when the doorbell rings?

It's too bad, then, that, Amazon has got Trump problems of its own.

Here's a tweet from Jeff Bezos—the man who controls "the Cloud" and the Washington Post—two days after the election.

Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump. I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.
People are opening their minds so far their brains are falling out.

I'd like to talk about a different kind of robot army that Amazon commands.

Most of you know that the word "robot" comes from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

I finally read this play and was surprised to learn that the robots in it were not mechanical beings. They were made of flesh and bone, just like people, except that were assembled instead of being born.

Čapek's robots resemble human beings but don't feel pain or fear, and focus only on their jobs.

In other words, they're the ideal employee.

Amazon has been trying to achieve this perfect robotic workforce for years. Many of the people who work in its warehouses are seasonal hires, who don't get even the limited benefits and job security of the regular warehouse staff.

Amazon hires such workers through a subsidiary called Integrity. If you know anything about American business culture, you'll know that a company called "Integrity" can only be pure evil.

Working indirectly for Amazon like this is an exercise in precariousness. Integrity employees don't know from day to day whether they still have a job. Sometimes their key card is simply turned off.

A lot of what we consider high-tech startups work by repackaging low-wage labor.

Take Blue Apron, one of a thousand "box of raw food" startups that have popped in recent years. Blue Apron lets you cook a meal without having to decide on a recipe or shop for ingredients. It's kind of like a sous-chef simulator.

Blue Apron relies on a poorly-trained, low wage workforce to assemble and deliver these boxes. They've had repeated problems with workplace violence and safety at their Richmond facility.

It's odd that this human labor is so invisible.

Wealthy consumers in the West have become enamored with "artisanal" products. We love to hear how our organic pork is raised, or what hopes and dreams live inside the heart of the baker who shapes our rustic loaves.

But we're not as interested in finding out who assembled our laptop.

In fact, a big selling point of online services is not having to deal with other human beings. We never engage with the pickers in an Amazon warehouse that assemble our magical delivery. And I will never learn who is chopping vegetables for my JuiceBro packet.

So is labor something laudable or not?

Our software systems treat labor as a completely fungible commodity, and workers as interchangeable cogs. We try to put a nice spin on this frightening view of labor by calling it the "gig economy".

The gig economy disguises precariousness as empowerment. You can pick your own hours, work only as much as you want, and set your own schedule.

For professionals, that kind of freedom is attractive. For people in low-wage jobs, it's a disaster. A job has predictable hours, predictable pay, and confers stability and social standing.

The gig economy takes all that away. You work whatever hours are available, with no guarantee that there will be more work tomorrow.

I do give Amazon credit for one thing: their white-collar employees are just as miserable as their factory staff. They don't discriminate.

As we automate more of middle management, we are moving towards a world of scriptable people—human beings whose labor is controlled by an algorithm or API.

Amazon has gone further than anyone else in this direction with Mechanical Turk.

Mechanical Turk is named after an 18th-century device that purported to be a chess-playing automaton. In reality, it had a secret compartment where a human player could squeeze himself in unseen.

So the service is literally named after a box that people squeezed themselves into to pretend to be a machine. And it has that troubling, Orientalist angle to boot.

A fascinating thing about Mechanical Turk is how heavily it's used for social science research, including research into low-wage labor.

Social scientists love having access to a broad set of survey-takers, but don't think about the implications (or ethics) of using these scriptable people, who spend their entire workday filling out similar surveys.

A lot of our social science is being conducted by having these people we treat like robots fill out surveys.

My favorite Internet of Things device is a fan called the Ethical Turk that subverts this whole idea of scriptable people.

This clever fan (by the brilliant Simone Rebaudengo) recognizes moral dilemmas and submits them to a human being for adjudication. Conscious of the limits of robotkind, it asks people for ethical help.

For example, if the fan detects that there are two people in front of it, it won't know which one to cool. So it uploads a photograph of the situation to Mechanical Turk, which assigns the task to a human being. The human makes the ethical decision and returns an answer along with a justification. The robot obeys the answer, and displays the justification on a little LCD screen.

The fan has dials on the side that let you select the religion and educational level of the person making the ethical choice.

My favorite thing about this project is how well it subverts Amazon's mechanization of labor by using human beings for the one thing that makes them truly human. People become a kind of ethics co-processor.

The Robot Within

Let me talk briefly about the robots inside us.

We all aspire to live in the moment like Zen masters. I know that right now I'm completely immersed in this talk, and you feel equally alive and alert, fully engaged in what I'm saying. We're fellow passengers on a high-speed train of thought headed to God knows where.

But it's also true that we spend much of our lives on autopilot. We have our daily routine, our habits, and there are many tasks that we perform with less than our full attention.

In those situations, we can find ourselves behaving a bit like robots.

All of modern advertising is devoted to catching us in those moments of weakness. And automation and tracking has opened up new frontiers in how advertisers can try to manipulate our behavior.

Cathy Carleton is a marketing executive who flies a lot on US Airways. At some point, she noticed that she was consistently being put in the last boarding group. Boarding last means not having enough room for your bag, so it's one of those petty annoyances that compounds when you travel a lot.

After some months of being last to board every plane, she realized that the airline was pushing her to get the US Airways credit card, one of whose perks is that you get to board in an early group.

This kind of triple bank shot of tracking, advertising and behavior modification was never possible in the past, but now it's a routine part of our lives.

I have a particular fascination with chatbots, the weird next stage in corporate personhood. The defining feature of the chatbot is its insincerity. Both you and the chatbot (or the low-wage worker pretending to be the chatbot) know that you're talking to a fictitious persona, but you have the conversation anyway.

By pretending to be people, chatbots seek access to a level of emotional engagement that we normally only offer to human beings.

And if we're not paying attention, we give it to them.

So it's fun to watch them fail in inhuman ways.

A few weeks ago I was riffing with people on Twitter about what kinds of devices we'd find in Computer Hell. At some point I suggested that Computer Hell would be served by America's most hated cable company:

Computer Hell is proudly served by Comcast
Seconds later, the Comcast bot posted a reply:

@pinboard Good afternoon. I'd be happy to look into any connection problems you're having...
The same thing happened after I tweeted about Google:

Sobering to think that the ad-funded company running your phone, DNS, browser, search engine and email might not cherish your privacy.
Google Home looks pretty great though.

The chatbot only noticed my second tweet, and thanked me fulsomely for my interest. (Unfortunately that reply has been taken down. Either the Google bot got smarter, or an intern was made to vet all conversations for irony).

While these examples are fun, the chatbot experience really isn't. It's companies trying to hijack our sociability with computer software, in order to manipulate us more effectively. And as the software gets better, these interactions will start to take a social and cognitive toll.

Social Media

Sometimes you don't even notice when you're acting like a robot.

This is a picture of my cat, Holly.

My roommate once called me over all excited to show me that he'd taught Holly to fetch.

I watched her walk up to him with a toy in her mouth and drop it at his feet. He picked it up and threw it, and she ran and brought it back several times until she had had enough.

He beamed at me. "She does this a couple of times a day."

He was about to go back to whatever complicated coding task the cat had interrupted, but something about the situation felt strange. We thought for a moment, our combined human brains trying to work out the implications.

My roommate hadn't trained the cat to do anything.

She had trained him to be her cat toy.

I think of this whenever I read about Facebook. Facebook tells us that by liking and sharing stuff on social media, we can train their algorithm to better understand what we find relevant, and improve it for ourselves and everyone else.

Here, for example, is a screenshot from a live feed of the war in Syria. People are reacting to it on Facebook as they watch, and their reaction emoji scroll from right to left. It's unsettling.

What Facebook is really doing is training us to click more. Every click means money, so the site shows us whatever it has to to to maximize those clicks.

The result can be tragic. With no ethical brake to the game, and no penalty for disinformation, outright lies and hatred can spread unchecked. Whatever Facebook needs to put on your screen for you to click is what you will see.

In the recent US election, Facebook was the primary news source for 44% of people, over half of whom used it as their only news source.

Voters in our last election who had a 'red state' profile saw absolutely outrageous stories on their newsfeed. There was a cottage industry in Macedonia writing fake stories that would get boosted by Facebook's algorithm. There were no consequences to this, other than electing an orange monster.

But Facebook insists it's a tech company, not a media company.

Chad and Brad

My final nominees for commanders of the robot armies are Chad and Brad.

Chad and Brad are not specific people. They're my mental shorthand for developers who are just trying to crush out some code out on deadline, and don't think about the wider consequences of their actions.

The principle of charity says that we should assume Chad and Brad are not trying to fuck up intentionally, or in such awful ways.

Consider Pokémon Go, which when it was initially released required full access to your Gmail account. To play America's most popular game, you practically had to give it power of attorney.

And first action Pokémon Go had you take was to photograph the inside of your house.

You might think this was a brilliant conspiracy to seize control of millions of Gmail accounts, or harvest a trove of private photographs.

But it was only Chad and Brad, not thinking things through.

ProPublica recently discovered that you could target housing and employment ads on Facebook based on 'ethnic affinity', a proxy for race.

It's hard to express how illegal this is in the United States. The entire civil rights movement happened to outlaw this kind of discrimination.

My theory is that every Facebook lawyer who saw this interface had a fatal heart attack. And when no one registered any objection, Chad and Brad shipped it.

Here's an example from Andy Freeland of Uber's flat-fare zone in Los Angeles.

You can see that the boundary of this zone follows racial divisions. If you live in a black part of LA, you're out of luck with Uber. Whoever designed this feature probably just sorted by ZIP code and picked a contiguous area above an income threshold. But the results are discriminatory.

What makes Chad and Brad a potent force is that you rarely see their thoughtlessness so clearly. People are alert to racial discrimination, so sometimes we catch it. But there's a lot more we don't catch, and modern machine learning techniques make it hard to audit systems for carelessness or compliance.

Here is a similar map of Uber's flat-fare zone in Chicago. If you know the city, you'll notice it's got an odd shape, and excludes the predominantly black south side of the city, south of the diagonal line. I've shown the actual Chicago city limits on the right, so you can compare.

Or consider this screenshot from Facebook, taken last night. Facebook added a nice little feature that says 'you have new elected representatives, click here to find out who they are!

When you do, it asks you for your street address. So to find out that Trump got elected, I have to give a service that knows everything about me except my address (and who has a future member of Trump's cabinet on its board) the one piece of information that it lacks.

This is just the kind of sloppy coding we see every day, but it plays out at really high stakes.

The Chads and Brads of this world control algorithms that decide if you get a loan, if you're more likely to be on a watch list, and what kind of news you see.

For more on this topic, I highly recommend Cathy O'Neill's new book, Weapons of Math Destruction.

Conclusion

        So who will command the robot armies?

Is it the army? The police?

Nefarious hackers? Google, or Amazon?

Some tired coder who just can't be bothered?

Facebook, or Twitter?

Brands?

I wanted to end this talk on a note of hope. I wanted to say that ultimately who commands the robot armies will be up to us.

That it will be some version of "we the people" that takes these tools and uses them with the care they require.

But it just isn't true.

The real answer to who will command the robot armies is: Whoever wants it the most.

And right now we don't want it. Because taking command would mean taking responsibility.

Facebook says it's not their fault what people share on the site, even if it's completely fabricated, and helps decide an election.

Twitter says there's nothing they can do about vicious racists using the site as a political weapon. Their hands are tied!

Uber says they can't fight market forces or regulate people's right to drive for below minimum wage.

Amazon says they can't pay their employees a living wage because they aren't even technically employees.

And everyone agrees that the answer to these problems is not regulation, but new and better technologies, and more automation.

Nobody wants the responsibility; everybody wants the control.

Instead of accountability, all we can think of is the next wave of technology that will make everything better. Rockets, robots, and self-driving cars.

We innovated ourselves into this mess, and we'll innovate our way out of it.

Eventually, our technology will get so advanced that we can build sentient machines, and they will help us create (somehow) a model society.

Getting there is just a question of being sufficiently clever.

On my way to this conference from Europe, I stopped in Dubai and Singapore to break the journey up a little bit.

I didn't think about the symbolism of these places, or how they related to this talk.

But as I walked around, the symbolism of both places was hard to ignore.

Dubai, of course, is a brand new city that has grown up in an empty desert. It's like a Las Vegas without any fun, but with much better Indian food.

In Dubai, the gig economy has been taken to its logical conclusion. Labor is fungible, anonymous, and politically inert. Workers serve at the whim of the employer, and are sent back to their home countries when they're not wanted.

There are different castes of foreign workers—western expats lead a fairy cozy life, while South Indian laborers and Filipino nannies have it rough.

But no matter what you do, you can never hope to be a citizen.

Across all the Gulf states there is a permanent underclass of indentured laborers with no effective legal rights. It's the closest thing the developed world has to slavery.

Singapore, where I made my second stop, is a different kind of animal.

Unlike Dubai, Singapore is an integrated multi-ethnic society where prosperity is widely shared, and corruption is practically nonexistent.

It may be the tastiest police state in the world.

On arrival there, you get a little card telling you you'll be killed for drug smuggling. Curiously, they only give it to you once you're already over the border.

But the point is made. Don't mess with Singapore.

Singaporeans have traded a great deal of their political and social freedom for safety and prosperity. The country is one of the most invasive surveillance states in the world, and it's also a clean, prosperous city with a strong social safety net.

The trade-off is one many people seem happy with. While Dubai is morally odious, I feel ambivalent about Singapore. It's a place that makes me question my assumptions about surveillance and social control.

What both these places have in common is that they had some kind of plan. As Walter Sobchak put it, say what you will about social control, at least it's an ethos.

The founders of these cities pursued clear goals and made conscious trade-offs. They used modern technology to work towards those goals, not just out of a love of novelty.

We, on the other hand, didn't plan a thing.

We just built ourselves a powerful apparatus for social control with no sense of purpose or consensus about shared values.

Do we want to be safe? Do we want to be free? Do we want to hear valuable news and offers?

The tech industry slaps this stuff together in the expectation that the social implications will take care of themselves. We move fast and break things.

Today, having built the greatest apparatus for surveillance in history, we're slow to acknowledge that it might present some kind of threat.

We would much rather work on the next wave of technology: a smart home assistant in every home, self-driving cars, and rockets to Mars.

We have goals in the long term: to cure illness, end death, fix climate change, colonize the solar system, create universal prosperity, reinvent cities, and become beings of pure energy.

But we have no plan about how to get there in the medium term, other than “let’s build things and see what happens.”

What we need to do is grow up, and quickly.

Like every kid knows, you have to clean up your old mess before you can play with the new toys. We have made a colossal mess, and don't have much time in which to fix it.

And we owe it to these poor robots! They depend on us, they're trying to serve us, and they're capable of a lot of good. All they require from us is the leadership and a willingness to take responsibility. We can't go back to the world we had before we built them.

It's been a horrible week.

I'm sure I speak for the other Americans here when I thank you guys for your hospitality and understanding as we try to come to terms with what just happened.

For the next few years, we're in this together. We'll need all your help to get through it. And I am very grateful for this chance to speak to you.

I hope you will join me for my talk next year: "Who Will Command The Robot Navies".

COMPASSIONATE, AUSTRALIAN APPLAUSE.

As some of my friends have noticed, over the last few years, I have not been very well. I’ve been drifting. My body and my mind were detached, like floating in the ocean and going wherever the current would take me. It was such a very weird feeling. And I knew exactly what the reason was. The uncomfortable truth is that I fell out of love with the technology world and that I am not excited by the future anymore. At least the future that is being built today.
With the terrible Paris attacks last year, I kept asking this question to myself: If the world we are building is so amazing, why would someone take a gun and kill my friends? I couldn’t find any answer. So I escaped Paris and traveled to the first destination I could find: Bali. I was drifting again.
Bali had that incredible impact on me. Being far away from the craziness of this world, slowing down gave me the opportunity to better understand the source of my recurrent discomfort. In the world of technology, we are taught to build things fast. Sometimes too fast. But Life and people are not like lines of code. We can’t break things just to see how it will work out. Everything we create online can have a huge impact on the real world. And we spend so little time studying the consequences of what we build. Competition for attention has slowly replaced the values of the founding fathers of the lnternet.
I have personally witnessed this change in technology. Because my daily life is now affected by the consequences of this change. I have identified at least three things that make me fear this future.
The first one is (the lack of) ownership.
For many people, entering this new digital world means the end of ownership. At first it was more like a conceptualisation. But now I can see the impact this has on my daily life.
I used to own CDs, books, magazines, art, and so many things that helped me shape my own personality. Now it’s all about subscriptions. I didn’t mind subscribing to some services until I started to see, in Paris or everywhere I would go, that it also meant closing bookstores, record shops and even public libraries. That struggling magazines have to loose some of their identity to the advertisers. And Culture is becoming increasingly commoditized. Every once in a while, some famous artist dies and my entire news feed lights up with old nostalgia videos edited overnight. Now that I have 30 years of online experience, I truly believe that the offline world treated with much more respect subcultures than the digital world. Mega platforms have become the mac donald’s of the minds.
It scares me so much. I feel that when people don’t own anything they don’t have anything to lose.
The second one is algorithmic choice.
My relationship with content and ideas has always been obsessive and intense. Today, it’s really hard to accept the fact that the machine should decide what’s important for me. Because as good as the algorithms are, they are black boxes with very little control over them.
Of course I hear all the arguments on machine filtering. Because we live in a super busy world and because our friends are producing so much information (or noise), an entity should mediate and organise it wisely. But honestly, are we busy because of our lives or because of our tools? I reject the underlying philosophy of this new technical design.
I don’t believe we should optimize and apply machine learning to everything. Content, like life, is about finding pleasure in messy and unpredictable situations. It’s about content serendipity and friends mentorship. It’s about all these little things technology wants to make impossible in the future.
The last one is the impossibility to slow down.
There’s an incredible paradox to see the rise of meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley while most products that are built are designed to accelerate time and stress. While the Dunbar number of meaningful interactions with other humans is around 120, our social graphs are breaking records every days about how many people we can talk to.
Most of the tools I have in my phone can’t help me enjoy the present time. Because none of them live in the present. For one simple reason. On the Internet of today, the past or the present are not interesting . The new gold rush is about dominating the near future. A world where our next actions, our next intent, our chats and our searches can be turned into monetisable actions.
It has an incredible impact on who we are. We can’t be in a place without the urge of telling our friends what we do. The idea of impressing others comes before our own satisfaction of the present moment.
At any given time we are stuck in an infinite number of conversations. With humans or robots. And our mobiles are trying constantly to stimulate our senses with notifications.
Like many, I have been caught into the craziness of the last technological decade. I’ve have seen billion-user platforms emerge from the ground up without any deep thinking about how it would impact the world we live in.
I have started to engage that conversation, but in our tech world it’s taboo. We have designed an unsustainable world for the planet and for your brains. Seriously, do we need to sell to the same people every year a slightly updated new phone with marginally better software?
I wish something different could come up. A sort of Slow web that is to technology what slow food is to processed things.
We need to give people access to other choices, other life narratives, other tools, and other ideologies. A sort of “organic sustainable slow technology” that fights this commoditization of everything online and offline.
I feel it’s time to build this and for that I want to stop drifting and get back to building products that make me love the future again.
There’s never been one truth and one path, especially in technology. We just need more people to raise their voice and be part of this.
Thanks for listening.