In partnership with France Culture, in this episode of Brave New World dedicated to the digitization of state services, Numerama’s chronicle explores the stateless worlds of cyberpunk. An alert firmly rooted in the present…
Coming home from the radio, I passed a handful of bus stops with a video advertising screen. To advertise my column, I used Twitter, a massive platform owned by Elon Musk, one of the richest men on the planet, who also develops electric cars, rockets and a supersonic train. To decide whether to reinstate a politician — Donald Trump — to the network and to make other decisions, he conducted an opinion poll, which he presented as a kind of referendum. This network, moreover, like Facebook too, can influence elections.
When I bought a vinyl player, I found myself with advertisements everywhere for vinyl players. We also have voice assistants, connected watches – which tell us it’s time to get up and walk –, and finally, the news right now is only talking about artificial intelligence… after a summer punctuated by record heat waves.
Good: I think we live in a cyberpunk world. You know, that specific genre of SF that presents ultra-capitalist and technological futures in a polluted world. As blade runner.
And the state in all this?
In cyberpunk, the state is…nowhere. It is a characteristic of the genre. Here, let’s take Dog51 by Laurent Gaudé, recently published by Actes Sud, cyberpunk in the form of a futuristic and political thriller. GoldTrex, a megacorporation, has literally taken over Greece there and is trying to do the same with other countries. In this type of science fiction, state forms have melted in the face of technological capitalism: politics comes from corporations, which run the world.
In space opera, there are also no more states, replaced by empires or federations. In the post-apo, similarly, but because everything collapsed.
After the welfare state, welfare technology?
After the notion of the welfare state, perhaps we are making a kind of transition towards “welfare technology”. Because they respond to needs and, sometimes more insidiously, create needs to meet them. When SF extrapolates the future, it pushes this cursor further and presents imaginaries where the State no longer seems to suffice: either it’s the end of the world, or it’s technological capitalism.
But it is also a warning. SF shows how technologies can change our relationship to politics. Democracy feeds on citizen choice, so what about citizen choice in a progress presented as inevitable? It is probably also this tension that the democratic state faces today: tech as a political competitor.
(Re)listen to Brave New World
In this Brave New World episode, François Saltiel receives three guests to answer this vast subject: how are our public services transformed by the digital logic, now omnipresent in our lives? What should be understood by the expression “digital privatization”?
With :
- Anne Bellon political scientist, lecturer at the University of Technology of Compiègne, specialist in digital policies and Internet regulation.
- Lucie Castets Co-spokesperson for the collective Nos services publics
- Gilles Jeannot Sociologist, research director at the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and co-author of Digital privatization (Ed. Reasons to act, 2022)
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