Bernard Stiegler's Foreword to "Sauver le Monde" - (English Translation)

= This is the complete English translation of Bernard Stiegler's foreword to Michel Bauwens' book Sauver le Monde (To Save the World), originally published in French in 2015. Without footnotes.

For the original, see: Préface de Bernard Stiegler.

Full Text

Bernard Stiegler:

Over the next twenty years, automation will cause the decline of a society founded on wage labour: 49% of jobs are expected to disappear in the United States, 43% in Great Britain, 50% in Belgium, 56% in Italy and Poland.¹

This immense transformation — which results from the integration of automatisms by digital technology — constitutes the horizon of the theses advanced here by Michel Bauwens. Bauwens studies and promotes the new model of production made possible, once again, by the digital, and based on peer-to-peer relations — that is, on the overcoming of proletarianization, upon which industrial capitalism had previously rested. Here, proletarianization means first and foremost the loss of knowledge (savoir).

Like Ars Industrialis and the Institute for Research and Innovation, the P2P Foundation states as a principle that digital reticulation no longer rests on a model founded on the functional opposition between production and consumption, but on the constitution of communities of knowledge elaborated through peer relations — that is, on the reconstitution of knowledges (to live, to do, to theorize) that have been systematically destroyed over the last two hundred and fifty years.

This discourse affirms the possibility of salvation: it is a question of Saving the World. Such a title will make skeptics of all kinds sneer — that is, the deniers who, like “climate skeptics,” still try to convince the Marquise that everything is going very well… against so much evidence.

These evidences are those of a profound degradation of the social cohesion of industrial societies on Earth and of the devastating effects on societies still on the margins of industrialization. Nothing is being done in the short term to remedy this in the coming years, and these degradations will only accelerate, like an uncontrollable chain reaction. This state of affairs results from what, since the beginning of the 21st century, has been called the Anthropocene.

Insofar as it disrupts the great meteorological, oceanological, atmospheric, hydrological, and demographic balances while exhausting combustible energies as well as social and psychic energies and their physical or cultural materials, the Anthropocene constitutes an unsustainable acceleration of the entropic becoming that threatens a world that indeed needs to be saved.

Such salvation requires a radical change in the organization of work, social relations, and the economy — one that takes into account the transformations already accomplished by digitization since the appearance of the World Wide Web and that goes beyond the state of affairs they have installed: namely, the domination of the world by increasingly tentacular reticular industries originating from the Californian model of Silicon Valley, so well described by Evgeny Morozov.²

The current model of voluntary or involuntary contribution imposed by the data economy exploited by the “Big Four” and by those who thrive in their ecosystem is not only unjust, but unsustainable and hyper-proletarianizing. Far from deproletarianizing individuals, it increasingly remote-controls them through mimetic technologies driven by algorithms performing intensive calculations in real time on massive data sets. These form new kinds of “crowds” in the sense Freud gave to the term in his reading of Gustave Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds.³

This happens because these bottom-up networks capture value and hyper-standardize behaviors (they hyper-proletarianize them in this sense) by hiding and monopolizing the top-down processing of data produced by crowds, mobs, and other reticulated masses subjected to intensive calculation. I believe, like Geert Lovink, that in this respect the appearance of social networks during the first decade of the 21st century constituted a perilous turning point: the submission of peer-to-peer dynamics to statistical and probabilistic models that reinforce gregarious behaviors through user profiling and all kinds of algorithmic doubles.

The transition to a genuine peer-to-peer economy is nevertheless inevitable in the long term, for four reasons:

• In the current system founded on wage labour and inherited from Fordism, regulated by the Keynesian growth model based on the redistribution of purchasing power through employment (which neoliberalism reduces by weakening wage redistribution, thereby fragilizing the system while maintaining it through speculative artifices), massive automation will generate systemic insolvency and lead to the collapse of consumerist capitalism.

• In addition to these destructive effects on the macroeconomic system, the Anthropocene itself will generate telluric toxic effects that can only be countered by the maintenance and valorization of new negentropic potentialities.

• Thales, the “first geometer,” established the canon of rational thought (logos) as a peer-to-peer model, which Socrates perpetuated in his practice of dialogue, and as a principle of evolution of the Greek city-state — as a process of collective individuation founded on the maximum expression of the possibilities of psychic individuation of each citizen. This placed knowledge and its culture at the very heart of being-together, in complete opposition to the decomposition of knowledges that has today led to what some call functional stupidity⁴ — the common lot of so-called cognitive capitalism.

• Only knowledges produce new negentropic potentialities, and only a social organization founded on their systemic valorization and cultivation — according to the paths made possible by reticulated parity — will allow us to overcome the Anthropocene and “save the world” in order to enter what should therefore be called the Neguanthropocene.

We (Ars Industrialis and the IRI) believe that this requires a new model for redistributing the immense productivity gains made possible by integral and generalized automation. This model should take as its matrix the regime of the intermittents du spectacle as it has existed in France since 1936, just as free software must serve as a matrix for new forms of peer-based work organization.

This is why we advocate a contributive income, granted to all those who cultivate their capabilities (in Amartya Sen’s sense) and on the condition that they commit to regularly valorizing them in contributive projects. These projects would themselves be supported by contributive credits granted by contributive banks, and take the most diverse forms of socialization: associations, public services, enterprises. The concrete modalities of this approach must be experimented with on territories that choose to do so — particularly in order to give their younger generations, who are most exposed to the consequences of automation, the possibility of producing the capabilities needed to overcome automatisms.

Automation is indeed that which, in the absence of an appropriation of the time freed for the increase of knowledges in all their forms (knowing-how-to-live, knowing-how-to-do, and knowing-how-to-theorize), can only lead to a deadly acceleration of entropy. Conversely, deproletarianization as the reconstitution of individual and collective capabilities (knowledges) makes it possible to transform gained time into negentropic possibilities.

However, the contributive society founded on a contributive income that valorizes the cultivation of individual and collective capabilities also requires the reinvention of both the World Wide Web and social networks. As they function today, these favor calculable data formats that allow the extraction of information on the crowds that they massify — instead of reinforcing the singularities of peers, which alone can together constitute dynamic knowledges, constantly reconfigured and improved by contributive controversies.

This is why it seems to us indispensable, in order to confirm and concretize the perspectives opened by Michel Bauwens on the basis of his extraordinary practical and theoretical knowledge of peer-to-peer dynamics, to respond to the initiative launched by Tim Berners-Lee in March 2014, The Web We Want,⁵ with the proposal of a new architectural model founded on the valorization of interpretable and non-calculable singularities — calculation being that which entropically reduces the singular to the particular."