BERNARD STIEGLER

What I call automatic society is produced by the technology of automatism that is digital technology. Digital technology, that is, algorithmic technology, produces logic automatisms... But now we have to deal with new kinds of automatisms, which are the automatisms of the economy of data. That is, the economy of social networking, of smartphones, of automatic guidance by GPS, etc. And here the problem is that with digital technology, automated technology, it is possible to control the automatisms of everybody and to make them converge into the interest of the controller.

I now believe that in the next ten years we will see the collapse of employment and the destruction of the salaried condition. We are turning to a new and completely different society, in which the Fordist compromise based on the redistribution of incomes collapses. With the process of automatization, it’s not possible to organize a redistribution of the power for purchasing because you don’t have incomes, you don’t have employment. So how shall we organize society, to make it work, to make it work for selling the goods produced by automats? I believe that it’s necessary to reinvent a new process of redistribution in which what is redistributed is time. And time is given to you for developing your capacities, your knowledge, your possibilities for producing bifurcations, disautomatization, negentropy.