Against Disruption, Contributory Technologies

What we have learned to refuse

If you have followed this series, here you are, equipped. Episode 1 gave you the three questions of the pharmakon — what does this technology heal, what does it poison, who accuses it to spare themselves what examination. The second gave you the score test — knowing whether you reread as an author or as a spectator. The third, the inventory of delegations — spotting the forms of knowledge that dissolve to no one's benefit. The fourth, the notebook audit — knowing to whom your external memories belong.

Four tools, with one thing in common: they are tools of defense. They protect — from the poison, from dispossession, from capture. This is necessary, and it is no small thing. But a question stays hollow, and it ends up making itself heard: to defend oneself, yes — but toward what? The most rigorous critique of technologies still does not say what a technology we might have reasons to want would look like.

The previous episode promised the most optimistic word in Stiegler's vocabulary. Here it is — but first we must pass through the diagnosis that makes it necessary.

Disruption, or the circuits that short-circuit one another

In one of his last books — whose French subtitle is unusually blunt: Dans la disruption : comment ne pas devenir fou ? (2016), literally “In Disruption: How Not to Go Mad?”, published in English as The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism — Stiegler gives its final form to the diagnosis the whole series has prepared. Disruption, in his vocabulary, is not a chic synonym for innovation. It is a precise phenomenon: the asymmetry of speeds. Technical innovation runs structurally faster than socialization — faster than the time individuals need to internalize (episode 2), than trades need to reorganize without dissolving (episode 3), than institutions need to institute. When writing spread, the school had centuries to build itself around it. Today's systems deploy in eighteen months, at the scale of entire societies.

The result is not merely discomfort: it is a short circuit. The long circuits — learning, transmitting, debating, instituting — are outrun by the short circuits — deploying, capturing, monetizing. And one then understands why the reflex response, to slow things down, misses its target: the problem is not speed as such, it is the gap between two speeds. You do not fix a short circuit by cutting the current; you fix it by rebuilding the circuit. The question therefore becomes: what would need to be re-instituted — and with what?

The I, the We, and the third strand

What Simondon saw

Stiegler's answer rests on the philosopher to whom he owes the most, Gilbert Simondon. Simondon's idea comes down to an inversion: we believe that ready-made individuals come together to form groups; in reality, the “I” and the “we” do not pre-exist one another — they make each other. You have lived it without naming it: a team goes through a real disagreement, works it through instead of smothering it, and something twofold comes out of it — a more solid collective and more assertive individuals, each knowing better what they think for having defended it. The “I” and the “we” have crystallized together, like two forms setting in the same solution. Simondon called this the transindividual.

What Stiegler adds

Stiegler's addition, faithful to the gesture of his whole œuvre, is the third strand: this co-fabrication of the “I” and the “we” always passes through techniques. The language we speak, the books we read together, the places and tools of debate — the milieu in which a collective takes shape is a technical milieu. Transindividuation is this three-stranded process: psychic, collective, technical. And the “long circuits of individuation” that the first episode invoked without defining are exactly that: the slow paths by which persons and groups grow together in knowledge and in singularity, through their shared supports.

Hence the criterion our compass was missing — the series' only positive criterion, the one that judges not what a technology destroys but what it makes possible: a device is contributory when those who use it come out more capable of thinking together. It disindividuates when it makes them interchangeable — that was proletarianisation — or when it isolates each of them in a personalized stream, an “I” without a “we,” a thousand optimized solitudes side by side.

What a contributory AI would look like

Let us apply the criterion, trait by trait. A contributory AI would make its sources and its limits contestable — not perfect: contestable, that is, offered up to informed disagreement. It would equip collective elaboration — helping a team formulate its options and its disagreements — rather than handing each person an instant, private answer. And it would leave behind users who grow in knowledge: the criterion of episode 3, turned into a design principle. The AI of capture, which we know better, is its exact mirror image: opaque sources, an immediate individual answer, interchangeable users.

We must then confront the objection that arises of its own accord, for it is the most serious in the whole series: all this is a philosopher's utopia. The dominant economic models reward capture, not contribution; what gets financed is the stream that holds attention, not the commons that lifts; Wikipedia would be the exception that proves the rule. The objection describes something real — a balance of forces. But a balance of forces is not a law of nature, and it so happens that the counter-evidence exists at every scale: the digital commons and free software have held for decades at the very heart of the economy that was supposed to make them impossible; and the “institutions of care” encountered in this series — the school after writing, collective rereading after the copilot, transmission after automation — are contributory technologies that dare not speak their name. Above all, the criterion remains usable on hostile ground. You do not always choose your economy; you choose your tools, your demands as a client, your design principles more often than you think. A criterion does not guarantee victory; it keeps you from fighting for the wrong thing.

I owe a word of transparency here: this site is an attempt of that kind. Concept entries linked to one another, a network you can wander through, sources on display, a quality standard made explicit — the idea is not that you should subscribe to what you have just read, but that you should leave better equipped to argue about it, including against me. I do not claim the attempt succeeds: that is precisely the sort of thing the reader is the judge of, and the fact that you can judge it is part of the experiment.

Who writes the prescription?

The first episode of this series ended on a question left open: the pharmakon demands a dosage, a follow-up, a prescription — but there will be no pharmacist-in-chief, so who writes the prescription? At the end of the road, Stiegler's answer can be put simply: the prescription is written by many — and writing it together is already the remedy. For to deliberate over our techniques, at the scale of a team, a school, or a family, is exactly to do what disruption short-circuits: a “we” taking shape, “I”s asserting themselves, through a shared technical object. The collective prescription is not the means of the therapeutics; it is its first act.

Here, then, is the complete compass, by way of farewell to this series: three questions to situate the pharmakon, a test to remain an author, an inventory to keep your knowledge, an audit to own your memories — and a criterion to orient it all: what do we come out of more capable, together? Stiegler, who died in 2020, did not see the systems that occupy us today. His tools, though, have never been in better health — and the bifurcation he called for is not a prophecy: it is a work, already begun, that is short of hands. The entries on this site remain open, to continue without me.