Towards a Digital Society Manifesto - Part 1
The end of 2023 is approaching. I have already written a subjective review of the year. It is now time to turn to the future and write about what I can think about it. At least since the fall of communism it has become clear that institutions in general were failing all across the board. I have the feeling that we are at a turning point of this process. As I have recently discussed in this substack, the powers that be are no longer the ones that we are used to. To borrow from Churchill just after second El Alamein battle in WWII:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Why have I this feeling? Well just looking at headlines, sorry trends, of the last weeks is enough to convince you that there is not a lot of ambiguity about that:
The Harvard’s president is suspected of repetitive plagiarism in her academic work.
The son of the president is facing numerous charges in federal tax cases.
The USA initiative to build a coalition in Red Sea has been withdrawn by european allies .
Xi was blunt about Taiwan reunification prospect during last summit with the USA.
The USA have urged Israel to stop the ground war for weeks, they don’t give a shit.
I am not going to analyze in detail all of these points, but the list is not exhaustive and is just about things that happened in December 2023. Early December, the year is not over yet and who knows what can happen next. If it doesn’t look like “fin de règne” to you I don’t know what can. My diagnostic in few words: we are living through the end of the industrial revolution, and this is only the surface. More fundamentally I think that we are moving from written culture to digital culture. It is even more earth shattering that the invention of Gutenberg printing press. It much more impacts how culture itself is built.
This substack is dedicated to the observation of this transformation. My aim is to be able to think new intellectual frames to grasp with this evolution. It is very early. It would be foolish to think we can have any idea on what to do. Maybe it is possible to have glimpses about what not to do or what to avoid. It is rather in this spirit that I am thinking. I am going to unfold this here during next months. But first things first: how do I see the world ? This worldview is fundamental: without it there is simply no way to have a constructive action on the world. Where are we ? I am going to explain my metaphysical perception of the world and from there see what it implies on human action. Because I think that every aspect of our society is going to be impacted by the digital revolution: our ways to understand politics -how to implement ideas and principles in public life- or even the very notion of “nation state” are going to change.
The Realms of Reality
I am a reluctant dualist. I can see that there should be something as unity but I can’t make it work when I am trying to understand this unity. Surely it is something like the mystery at the heart of monotheistic religions. Something you have to believe in, but for which you don’t have any proof. It is this idea that you can’t see God directly. So for pragmatic purposes I am dualist: ideas and objects are fundamentally different. I can’t fathom a cohérent framework in which they are the reflect of a more fundamental reality. So I accept that they are different as an axiom.Yet they are not living separately either: observation is how objects interact with ideas, and will is how ideas have an impact on objective world. I see reality as the product of all this: ideas, objective world and their interactions back and forth. I know that there are boundaries between ideas and objective world yet it is not clear exactly where they are. This is this eternal discussion on what’s possible and what’s impossible. I know I can’t fly like a bird but I am able to invent airplanes and rockets… So what is said to be impossible is sometimes just laziness or lack of imagination. Other times what I want is irrelevant. If I wanted to be a woman I couldn’t. Left and Right political pathology come from forgetting that this border between ideas and reality exists. Leftist think they can bend objective reality to their will -call me zee- and rightists think that there is no such thing as society and that there is no social construct -try to bootstrap yourself up from a slum.
New information technologies mess with this duality. Ideas can now behave like objects -typically bitcoin, but also think 3D printing that essentially transmutes a number into an object- and objects like ideas -for instance the train ticket that is a QR-Code and that can’t be destroyed, doesn’t have a notion of original etc. Smartphones allow back and forth between reality and virtuality. Every instant of our lives can be broadcasted live and become a virtual thing instantly. New information technologies act as a portal between ideas and objects. Theology shows how deep and complex those problems are: take for instance the mystery of incarnation, the doctrine of the Trinity etc. We haven’t really understood how the interactions between ideas and objective entities work but it doesn’t mean that we are unable to use them. Just like we don’t know how to build and Artificial General Intelligence, yet there is nothing more natural than having kids and raising them…
Human Action
From a foundational point of view I apprehend society as the result of the interactions of humans classified along several tiers. I will describe those tiers in an allegoric way. I identify 4 fundamental tiers. Each tier represents the interactions that occur in the realm of virtual world/real world. I show how this taxonomy relates to common concepts and words.
1. The Warriors
The Warriors have a direct impact on the world: they are the ones that turn ideas into reality. I have chosen this name because ultimately war is a clash of will. There is no war without will. Wars do not flow from the physical world. They are initiated in the virtual world and have an incarnation in the physical world. From a standard political point of view this is the executive branch of the government: how do you turn laws and regulations into a tangible reality. Police is used to enforce social peace and implement judiciary decisions. The sentence pronounced by a judge is just a text. It has to be fleshed out (the incarnation mystery). It is done using warriors. Elon Musk also belong to this category: his purpose in life is to transform ideas and aspirations into concrete technologies. In the Ancient Régime it was : “Le Rouge” -the Red- as the symbolic color of the army, the aristocracy. Think Alexandre the Great, Napoleon.
2. The Priests
The man who acts presumptuously by not obeying the priest who stands to minister there before the Lord your God, or the judge, that man shall die.
Deuteronomy 17:12
The Priests are the one who build ideas from what happens in the objective world. They are the ones that interpret reality and turn physical manifestations into ideas. They assign significance to material phenomenons (death, birth, wedding). The judiciary branch of the government is the political manifestation of this tier. The job of the judge is to build “judicial truth” from events. Priests, Rabbis or Muftis are religious expressions: they are interpreting life within a moral/religious framework. In the Ancien Régime it was: “Le Noir” -the Black- as the dress of catholic priests. Many podcasters belong to this tier. Think Joe Rogan, the Weinsteins brothers, Jordan Peterson: something like the intellectual dark web. They are very much included into the society and are talking about what is happening and what it means.
3. The Merchants
The Merchants make the world go round. From peasants to plumbers, mechanics, delivery guys passing by cable technicians, they are the ones literally bringing food on the table, and the table itself. This is the tier that never stopped to work during the COVID crisis. They are the ones acting in the physical world. In the Ancien Régime it was: “le Tiers état” -literally what’s left- Meaning what’s left after having removed the two previous tiers (called orders). They were not identified as tier traditionally because they had no way to express themselves, they were busy working. Maybe the Marxist lumpenproletariat. New information technologies change this tier a lot: it has access to communication and coordination without having to go by middle men. Just like buyers/sellers through Amazon. Think “Gilets Jaunes” riots in France.
4. The Clerks
The Clerks are working in the world of ideas. They are the philosophers, theoretical scientists, teachers, journalists, writers in general. They are the legislative branch of the government: they invent/vote new laws. This used to be the most important (in political terms) tier because it corresponds to the editorial function. In a written society one has to vet what is going to be printed (because it is expensive). The digital revolution has made this tier more important numerically but paradoxically less powerful than before precisely because so much of our lives is now on line/virtual. It means that what was their main input to society can be done by non specialists. The editorial function has lost its primacy on speech: any teenager can publish a tiktok video.
Ubairbnbfication
The switch to a digital society has introduced instabilities. The harmony that was aimed at for written culture is no longer harmonious in a digital society. At first it may appear that the Clerks are the ones that gain the much from the transition. This is what conveyed the “Learn to code” meme. I think it is an illusion. Digital technologies are killing middle men more than anything else. This is the Uber/Airbnb effect. Drivers, cars, unoccupied flats were there before the apps. It was impossible to let customer know, have confidence and deal with payment (Airbnb clients may come from the other half of the world). All those activities were done by clerks. They are now done via a distributed system to manage information. Another great example comes from “The Science” apparatchiks and their reaction to the COVID-19 crisis.
On the other hand Merchants and Warriors that relied on the work of Clerks to be more efficient don't need them as much as they used to. The switch is particularly marked for Merchants that are the farthest from the virtual world. The “Gilets jaunes” demonstrations that shook France for months starting from November 2018 were close to topple the power. It was not Jan 6 Kabuki kind of event. Footage are different than what happened on Capitol Hill. This what it looked like inside a pre-insurrection:
This specific instance ended in a typical digital way: centrifugal forces are stronger than centripetal ones. It is easier to gather against something than to follow a constructive path. This is another major change in the political arena. Events are more and more driven by swarms:
A swarm is the purest form of absence of middle men. Elements of the swarms are individuals reacting following their own agenda. The unity of the swar .is very relative and unstable. They are the flags on social media profiles or the one line “je suis Charlie” slogans. In the case of Gilets Jaunes the swarm was essentially composed of Merchants that coordinated using social media. No political parties nor unions (typical instantion of Clerks) were directly involved. More important: the Gilets Jaunes swarm dissolved without having been incorporated into the political area. Political parties tried, and failed, to capture the momentum of the riots. This episode is illuminating : Clerks are loosing relevance and Merchants rising to new powers but the story doesn’t stop here. Merchants don’t know what to do, because … they are Merchants. So what we see is a broken society. Things are no longer in harmony.
This lack of harmony can also be witnessed for Warriors and Priests. But this will be the starting point of the second part of “Towards a Digital Society Manifesto”.