The eroded trust of the flow society

The expansion of digital technology in our lives calls for forms of responsibility that concern the meaning we wish to preserve in the development of our societies. In this respect, ethical questioning is crucial insofar as it concerns the way in which we intend to participate (in a consumerist or responsible manner) in our complex technological environments.

With the advent of digitization, there is so much scope for exploiting the traces we leave behind in the course of our activities that we need to take extra care to preserve the values we hold dear in order to promote living together. Among these, trust is ethically of the highest order. It is an essential component of our individual and collective existence. It guarantees freedom of being and of action; it is also an essential condition for any exchange.

But trust is being eroded in an age when disempowerment seems to have become a rule of conduct, amply facilitated by technological architectures that produce certain effects of impunity. We also know that too much acceleration in communication, that is, too much information in constant flow, is likely to create an intense blurring of meaning. One of the most disorientating factors today is of course the spread of fake news, facilitated by the fact that “the negativity bias generally overrides the confirmation bias”¹.

As a result, we are becoming increasingly accustomed to living in regimes of mistrust and suspicion that insidiously undermine the equilibrium of our societies. And yet we know that trust is absolutely crucial to our common future and to the definition of desirable futures: “Without trust, the network of human commitments collapses, making the world an even more dangerous and frightening place”². But are the digital metamorphosis and the capitalist logic really compatible with such ambitions?

From this perspective, a new kind of knowledge production is needed, one that is more cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, enabling a better understanding of the technological objects themselves, at a time when AI systems are tending to impoverish the very exercise of our free will. In the face of these trends, we need to learn to “visualize networks without panicking”⁴, using digital tools that enable us to sharpen our gaze on invisible phenomena that escape our perception, such as the networks through which our personal data can be exploited.

Data visualization and graphic design can help us to gain a better understanding of our digital environments. Without such efforts to represent, design and interpret our online activities, we will undoubtedly be less inclined to evolve with foresight in our network societies. In any case, restoring confidence in our digital interactions will surely require an effort to design architectures that are not only more secure, but also more readable by their users. A fundamental question arises in our screen-based societies: What is happening to the culture of the written word, a traditional attribute of the elite and a vector of power in the “old world”?

Is it doomed to decline in an internationalized world where the flow of images, pushed forward by platform algorithms, reigns supreme? Are we witnessing, as Virginie Martin and I wondered in our recent book Vertigineux réseaux. Enjeux éthiques, cliniques et politiques⁵, the advent of a cold technicism, with machines and their codes constraining our thinking and formatting it by imposing drastic editorial standards, at the risk of simplifying and distorting the original message? And to what extent can we allow algorithms to manage the hierarchy of information, at the risk of impacting the political balance itself?

As the French philosopher Anne Alombert has described, whereas the Web was based on hypertext links, enabling intentional browsing, recommendation algorithmizes direct users. It's as if the ‘web’, a sort of rhizome, had been transformed into a silo. Such structural realities should certainly encourage us today to create alternative algorithmic policies that are more open and contributory: “This transition from automatic and private recommendations (based on the choices of companies and the quantification of views) to contributory and citizen-based recommendations (based on the interpretations of citizens and the quality of content) is not only more than desirable, it is entirely possible”⁶.

The societal challenge is all the more crucial in that the real power seems to have shifted away from those who control the distribution infrastructures (the companies that own the social networks decide what can and cannot be seen, thereby privatizing the moderation process in line with their own standards and values), and towards those who can develop the tools to decipher and interpret them.

At a time when the logic of data predation is being exacerbated, a minimum of trust and transparency in the design of algorithms must be reinstituted: This can be achieved, for example, through initiatives aimed at tackling the biases they may convey. From this perspective, a new, more collaborative and transdisciplinary production of knowledge is needed on a European scale, reviving a certain experience of the common good.

From an ethical point of view, there is also the challenge of enabling more virtuous conceptions of technology at a time when AI systems are tending to undermine the very exercise of free will. Faced with these trends, we need to learn to develop a certain digital intelligence, while avoiding letting the networks produce irreversible effects of proletarianization⁷, as used by the French philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler. He labeled such effects as the loss of knowledge and specific skills, among other things.

Confronted with the opacity of algorithms and the risk of a fragmentation of the commons, one possible alternative is to learn to understand these systems better: to decipher their logic (via initiatives like AlgorithmWatch), to regulate (with frameworks like the DSA) and to explore alternatives (e.g. Mastodon or Wikipedia).

This work of transparency and collective design would enable us not to passively suffer the effects of these digital architectures, but to think of them as spaces to be reinvested. Without this effort, we would remain at the mercy of a dizzying technological whirlwind. Beyond a certain moral panic that tends to overwhelm us, these are ways of developing a more serene relationship with our digital technologies, aiming to achieve a better understanding of the new environments they are shaping.