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Redeker: "Social networks, this new Leviathan without borders"

2020-02-17T14:51:01.431Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - Robert Redeker deplores the growing power and empowerment of social networks. According to him, these tend to become the new political subject, in defiance of the sovereignty of states and peoples.


Robert Redeker, associate professor of philosophy, is a writer. He recently published The Sentinels of Humanity. Philosophy of heroism and holiness (Desclée de Brouwer, 2020).

Never has the Spinozist adage "neither laugh, nor cry, nor hate, but understand" been so appropriate as in the case of which Benjamin Griveaux is the victim. Deploring, lamenting, giving moral lessons, are facilities and reflexes that make, in such occurrences, blind. We are far from having started to think about the consequences of social networks on political life. No doubt even we are only at the beginning of a revolution in public life whose contours we are struggling to define, and whose mishap in the form of a sprinkler sprinkled arriving at Benjamin Griveaux is only an episode to lift curtain. Behind two parent phenomena, the apogee of Greta Thunberg and the fall of Benjamin Griveaux, we meet the signs of a large-scale reconfiguration of the codes and structures of political life.

Due to new technologies, men will no longer be able to maintain secret gardens.

The digitalization of the world, accelerated by social networks, is causing mutations in human behavior which definitively blow up a number of barriers, including that which separates public life from private life. In his book L'Espace public, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas recalled that private life appeared as distinct from public life, and thereby as inviolable space, with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the time of the Enlightenment. The sacralization of private life is linked to the civilizational work of the bourgeois epoch of history, from which it is the most beautiful fruit, and from which we are emerging. The current technological revolution - the digital revolution - throws the bourgeois organization of collective life back into the past. Because of these technologies, men will no longer be able to maintain secret gardens with little poisonous flowers. The digital utopia demands it: in its new world, there will be no more double or triple life, and the human soul will have forgotten these many obscure folds, rebellious to transparency, these refuges made for invisibility, which characterized it. The digital universe that imposes itself on us requires that the human soul be simple and translucent, that it be only an entity without double or triple bottom. These technologies prepare the triumph of one-dimensional man.

Social networks have become more autonomous. In a growing number of fields, they are the ones who decide.

Frankenstein's paradox, whose creature, endowed with intelligence and language, turns against the creator, becomes, with Twitter, Facebook, and their clones, reality. In fact, although it does not seem like it, seeming an instrument in the service of human interests and passions, social networks are a machine which, like the monster made by Frankenstein, has been empowered by phagocytizing its users , Internet users. Swallowed, these are part of this machine, which metabolizes them, of which they are only functions. It is now more and more, and in a growing number of fields, social networks, that is to say technical devices, which decide. They don't just decide if such and such an actor has the right to be honored at the Cannes festival. They go much further. They choose who can appear before the voters. The decision belongs less and less to men, more and more to these social networks. These become technical devices which seek to speak morals and make the law in place of the places traditionally assigned to these offices: political, philosophical, or religious institutions. Let us identify in this substitution the real and violent revolution of our time.

The State fell to the rank of executor of the judgments pronounced by social networks, thereby admitting the surrender of its sovereignty.

The figure of the Leviathan State, of which Thomas Hobbes was the theorist, imposed itself on Europe in the 17th century to emerge from the violent anarchy in which it had been plunged since the Renaissance. According to Hobbes, this "great Leviathan which is called Republic or State" is "an artificial man" made up of the multitude of men in a country. In short, a machine made up of men. In him, says the philosopher, "sovereignty is an artificial soul" . Another machine, also made up of men - all social networks - now competes with these states, undermining their legitimacy to govern and decide. Armed with their good conscience, a parody reincarnation of the beautiful soul of yesteryear, these social networks are placed above the States. They want to be real sovereignty, replacing that formerly stated by Hobbes - the digital soul of the world. Soul: reality which says good and evil, the just and the unjust, which judges and condemns, which makes execute these judgments, in other words the spiritual power. In this perspective, the State falls to the rank of executor of the judgments pronounced by social networks, admitting the surrender of its sovereignty, its soul.

Social networks aspire to become the new political subject. They behave as if they were peoples or nations.

This shift in decision to new bodies upsets the distribution of powers, ignores and downgrades - despite the resistance, ultimately doomed to failure, of certain states, such as China, Russia or Iran - the geopolitical borders, alters the sovereignty of States, questions the constitution of peoples and nations. Everyone sees it: social networks are technological devices that behave as if they were peoples or nations, taking their place. In other words, they are machines seeking to become the new political subject, aspiring to refer the political subjects that we knew hitherto, peoples and nations, to the prehistory of humanity. In this role, they form a new Leviathan, but, unlike the old one, without contours, without borders, organizing itself in a kind of sky, the famous "cloud", this cloud which despite its virtual nature generates terrible reality effects. You have to identify and think evil before you fight it. In these three verbs - to identify, to think, and to fight the new Leviathan, to save the complicated humanity, not one-dimensional, of the human - the political task of the new generations is gathered.

Source: lefigaro

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