Colloquium organized with the support of The Hugot Foundation of Collège de France.
Symposium
According to André Leroi-Gourhan's profound anthropological observation, " humanity changes species a little every time it changes both tools and institutions ". Every major technical mutation in the means of production or communication has been accompanied by an overhaul of institutions. This was the case with the invention of writing, the syllabic alphabet, Indo-Arabic numeration, the printing press and electronic means of capturing and broadcasting words and images. As the impact of the latter on the history of the century shows XXthcentury, the relationship between technical and institutional change is by no means a foregone conclusion. Cinema, radio and television have not created democracies any more than dictatorships, but they have given them new faces and new ways of exercising power. Techniques and institutions are part of the same imaginary at any given time, and influence each other mutually. The law, which was one of the first immaterial techniques in history, may well have been both the precursor of technical revolutions and the response to their most deadly effects. As shown by the invention of the social state, it acts as a technique for humanizing technology, as a means of placing new machines at the service of humans rather than enslaving humans to machines.
The digital revolution raises anew the question of this dialectical relationship between technoscience and institutions. In its early days, many thought that it would necessarily be a factor in the democratization of both political and economic power. Deterritorialized and equally open to all, digital space was finally supposed to fulfill the promise of a transparent public space, transcending borders, thwarting censorship and equally open to all. Without ignoring the prodigious resources of our digital tools, we have to admit that this promise has not been kept. Rather than a global agora, the digital space has often become a jungle, a place of predation or an instrument for monitoring and standardizing behavior. Its horizontality does not erase power, but rather makes it invisible and irresponsible. Awareness of these harmful effects has led to different responses in different countries and continents. The People's Republic of China has made it a powerful instrument of its " democratic dictatorship ", notably through a social credit system explicitly aimed at monitoring and controlling individual and collective behavior. As the inventor of what Shoshana Zuboff has called " surveillance capitalism ", the United States, on the other hand, invokes freedom of expression to combat the regulation of the digital space that the European Union has adopted.
The aim of this conference is to assess the impact of the digital revolution on institutions. To this end, it will focus on history, looking back at the impact of previous technical revolutions on political and economic institutions. It will also make ample room for comparison of the regulation of the use of digital tools, notably in Europe, the United States and China.