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Sociohistory of digital criticism since the late 1970s, between continuity and renewal of motifs

Published on 02 March 2022
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

The celebration of the democratic virtues, emancipatory effects and socio-economic gains associated with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s has now given way to disenchantment: the " Techlash ". "The Covid-19 pandemic, by accentuating the domination of the big digital companies, completes the movement of moral tipping, separating the Internet utopia of the 1990s from the digital dystopia of the 2010s.

"A form of historical impressionism tends to obscure the long history of social criticism and critical theories of new technologies," observe Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart and Sébastien Broca, the three coordinators of this issue of the journal Réseaux devoted to digital criticism.

The authors trace, in the introduction, a sociohistory of digital criticism that has accompanied the development of this field, particularly over the last three decades.

"During the 1980s, when the uses of personal computing and the first online networks were developing, a coherent discourse associated computing with an instrument of social and political transformation. The first visions of the digital are bearers of social criticism much more than objects of criticism".

In the second half of the 1990s, the democratization of broadband and the diffusion of participatory devices (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.) nourished the imagination and the rhetoric of a contributory and participatory "Web 2.0": If " the techno-optimistic discourses around a Web 2.If "the techno-optimistic discourses around a Web 2.0 spread until they occupy the front of the stage", "they attract in return a first wave of critics, who point out at the same time the unrealistic character of utopias and the dangers of the paths towards the futures that they draw".

Several lasting critical motifs crystallize during this period:

  • "The first is that of the absorption of individuals by machines and networks, of forgetting the "real" world to escape into the "virtual" world (...).
  • "A second reason points to the chaotic dimension of the online public space, where anyone can intervene freely without moderation from gatekeepers at the risk of destabilizing the social order.
  • A third is the inequality and digital divide between the connected and the disconnected.
  • " This criticism of the inequalities created by the market intersects with another that focuses on the growing privatization of the Internet, which is found among the defenders of the digital commons and a free Internet.
  • " The formal egalitarianism displayed by Web 2.0 tools is fuelling the resurgence of this new wave of criticism in terms of the degradation of public space and the misuse of culture.
  • "The critique in terms of commodification challenges the organization of user participation by private firms, claims control and portability of content for their creators, and strives to build alternative and non-proprietary legal and technical tools (such as Creative Commons licenses). The decade also saw the crystallization of a new critique of the digital world centered on the threats to privacy.
The last period is that of a "critical turn " in the discourse on the digital:
  • "While critical statements appeared in previous decades as footnotes in a grand narrative of modernization and social change, they are gradually taking center stage in most Western countries, seriously weighing the supposed benefits of digitization."
  • "Two critical motives crystallize more particularly during the period; they concern surveillance (control) and exploitation. The notion of surveillance is progressively imposed, in the academic sphere and then in the public debate, to designate the "systematic and oriented" approach to the accumulation of data on users by digital companies.
  • "The notion of "artificial intelligence", although entering its fourth age, is thus found at the heart of the public debate, the classic theme of the replacement of humans by machines covering a material concern: that of the "destruction" and degradation of jobs."
  • "The last few years have also been marked by the revival of an environmental contestation of the digital, emphasizing the ecological footprint of digital infrastructures and the socio-environmental damage of computerization, in a context of uninterrupted growth of uses and rapid renewal of equipment."
In a second articulation of this sociohistory, Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, and Sébastien Broca, drawing on the history of political thought, group digital criticism around three main poles : liberal criticism, social criticism and ecological criticism:
  • The liberal critique of digital technology is based on the great values that are at the heart of political liberalism: freedom of expression and opinion, separation of powers, circulation of knowledge, right to privacy, free competition between economic actors.
  • Social criticism follows on from the different variations of socialist thought and Marxism. Its main spring is the contestation of inequalities.
  • The ecological criticism opposes the productivist imperative, carries a requirement of self-limitation of the societies and opposes the uncontrolled development of sciences and techniques, in the filiation of these technocritical discourses.
These three criticisms, liberal, social and ecological, tend more and more, the authors observe, "to intertwine in the way public problems related to the digital environment are framed and constructed.

Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart and Sébastien Broca propose (third articulation of this sociohistory) to distinguish two regimes of digital criticism: internal (carried by computer scientists) and external, carried by social scientists. This internal/external distinction "largely overlaps with the difference between situated criticism, carried by the social actors concerned, and scholarly criticism, originating in the academic world and often developed without the injustices denounced being the subject of personal experience.

"If digital criticism has historically been carried out mainly by actors from the world of computers and networks, this situation has gradually changed. The multiplication of works on the exploitation of the work of Internet users (digital labor), the reinforcement of inequalities attributable to the digital (of class, gender and race) or the growing ecological cost of computing have brought to the forefront discourses that are more and more circumspect towards the utopia of the Internet.

Fourth and last articulation of the analysis: the three coordinators of the file, observe that " the digital criticisms are often incarnated in realizations and technical devices". This " digitalization of the criticism" is linked to " the historical preponderance of certain actors, in particular the computer scientists resulting from the hacker worlds. The latter have thus operationalized the critical discourse, by incorporating it in various technical realizations: free software, cryptography and anonymization tools, advertising blockers, decentralized networks, etc.".

  • " The digitization of criticism has thus spread from the hacker worlds where these practices were born. This has often gone hand in hand with a distancing from more traditional forms of argumentation, activism and political activity.
  • "The digitization of criticism has sometimes been posed as an alternative strategy to democratic action and attempts to achieve legal or regulatory advances, under the idea that it is more effective to 'argue with technology' than to 'argue with words'."
  • However, this strategy has shown some limitations. " It has sometimes suffered from an aristocratic bias, reserving certain types of action or protection to a technically competent minority (...). By using the digital to criticize the digital, it has been able to provide itself with the means to respond effectively to the technological instrumentation of forms of domination, in terms of surveillance for example. However, it has condemned itself to produce a corrective critique, unable - or unwilling - to question the growing digitalization of the different aspects of social life and to propose ways out.
 

The various contributions in this dossier take into account this plurality of critical motives and thehistoricity of their forms .

Christophe Lécuyer recalls the antiquity of the ecological critique of the digital industries within Silicon Valley. He shows how the environmental critique of the digital industry was born at the end of the 1970s through attempts at unionization within the semiconductor industry. " The evolution of the objects of criticism (the storage of toxic products, the pollution of groundwater, the prevention of industrial accidents, etc.) highlights the evolution of the game of actors and their strategies, a dialectic that led companies to relocate production in order to limit local contestations, thus making the computer industry seemingly an industry of the immaterial and pacified.

Based on the empirical analysis of a corpus of 275 collective actions carried out since 2015, Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann and Quentin Chapus revisit the varied forms of protest, virtual or physical, within large North American digital companies. " Although they concern a minority of employees, these collective actions (petitions or strikes) have an effectiveness that allows them to attract the attention of the media and company management."

Clément Mabi and Irénée Régnauld report on the opposite case: that of a collective of developers, designers, project managers and "agilists" mobilized against the pension reform in 2019. " These "workers in the middle", belonging neither to the working classes nor to the category of elites and top managers in the sector, are thus trying to assert values and a transversal political vision, which also implies distancing themselves from the "startup nation" narrative.Samuel Lamoureux recalls the centrality of the theme of sabotage in the discourses and critical approaches to technologies, from the classical texts of critical thinkers to the denunciation of click work. "Three types of sabotage are thus envisaged to account for critiques of digital capitalism: classical sabotage, subtle sabotage and resistance to technosciences. If the first type of sabotage tends to disappear from the workplace, the second type consists in the reappropriation of digital tools for alternative purposes; while the resistance to technosciences goes through algorithmic circumvention and avoidance."

From a meta-critical perspective, Sébastien Broca, for his part, repositions digital capitalism " in an extended economic history and geography, emphasizing the interdependence between the West Coast of the United States and the rest of the world. From this perspective, these major centers of innovation appear to be dependent on the peripheries providing the material resources necessary for the development of digital capitalism.

Summary of the file

  • Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Sébastien Broca: A sociohistory of digital criticism.
  • Christophe Lécuyer: Union movement and ecological critique of digital industries in Silicon Valley. From ethical to social struggles
  • Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffman, Quentin Chapus: Critical protest movements by GAFAM employees in the United States (2015-2021). The critique of the digital by "workers in the middle"
  • Clément Mabi, Irénée Régnauld: Collective identity and project-based mobilization in the "Onestla.tech" community
  • Samuel Lamoureux: Thinking sabotage in the age of digital capitalism
  • Sébastien Broca: Digital capitalism as a world-system. Elements for a metacritic

Référence :

Sources

Sociohistory of digital criticism since the late 1970s, between continuity and renewal of motifs

The celebration of the democratic virtues, emancipatory effects and socio-economic gains associated with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s has now given way to disenchantment: the " Techlash ". "The Covid-19 pandemic, by accentuating the domination of the big digital companies, completes the movement of moral tipping, separating the Internet utopia of the 1990s from the digital dystopia of the 2010s.

"A form of historical impressionism tends to obscure the long history of social criticism and critical theories of new technologies," observe Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart and Sébastien Broca, the three coordinators of this issue of the journal Réseaux devoted to digital criticism.

The authors trace, in the introduction, a sociohistory of digital criticism that has accompanied the development of this field, particularly over the last three decades.

"During the 1980s, when the uses of personal computing and the first online networks were developing, a coherent discourse associated computing with an instrument of social and political transformation. The first visions of the digital are bearers of social criticism much more than objects of criticism".

In the second half of the 1990s, the democratization of broadband and the diffusion of participatory devices (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.) nourished the imagination and the rhetoric of a contributory and participatory "Web 2.0": If " the techno-optimistic discourses around a Web 2.If "the techno-optimistic discourses around a Web 2.0 spread until they occupy the front of the stage", "they attract in return a first wave of critics, who point out at the same time the unrealistic character of utopias and the dangers of the paths towards the futures that they draw".

Several lasting critical motifs crystallize during this period:

  • "The first is that of the absorption of individuals by machines and networks, of forgetting the "real" world to escape into the "virtual" world (...).
  • "A second reason points to the chaotic dimension of the online public space, where anyone can intervene freely without moderation from gatekeepers at the risk of destabilizing the social order.
  • A third is the inequality and digital divide between the connected and the disconnected.
  • " This criticism of the inequalities created by the market intersects with another that focuses on the growing privatization of the Internet, which is found among the defenders of the digital commons and a free Internet.
  • " The formal egalitarianism displayed by Web 2.0 tools is fuelling the resurgence of this new wave of criticism in terms of the degradation of public space and the misuse of culture.
  • "The critique in terms of commodification challenges the organization of user participation by private firms, claims control and portability of content for their creators, and strives to build alternative and non-proprietary legal and technical tools (such as Creative Commons licenses). The decade also saw the crystallization of a new critique of the digital world centered on the threats to privacy.
The last period is that of a "critical turn " in the discourse on the digital:
  • "While critical statements appeared in previous decades as footnotes in a grand narrative of modernization and social change, they are gradually taking center stage in most Western countries, seriously weighing the supposed benefits of digitization."
  • "Two critical motives crystallize more particularly during the period; they concern surveillance (control) and exploitation. The notion of surveillance is progressively imposed, in the academic sphere and then in the public debate, to designate the "systematic and oriented" approach to the accumulation of data on users by digital companies.
  • "The notion of "artificial intelligence", although entering its fourth age, is thus found at the heart of the public debate, the classic theme of the replacement of humans by machines covering a material concern: that of the "destruction" and degradation of jobs."
  • "The last few years have also been marked by the revival of an environmental contestation of the digital, emphasizing the ecological footprint of digital infrastructures and the socio-environmental damage of computerization, in a context of uninterrupted growth of uses and rapid renewal of equipment."
In a second articulation of this sociohistory, Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, and Sébastien Broca, drawing on the history of political thought, group digital criticism around three main poles : liberal criticism, social criticism and ecological criticism:
  • The liberal critique of digital technology is based on the great values that are at the heart of political liberalism: freedom of expression and opinion, separation of powers, circulation of knowledge, right to privacy, free competition between economic actors.
  • Social criticism follows on from the different variations of socialist thought and Marxism. Its main spring is the contestation of inequalities.
  • The ecological criticism opposes the productivist imperative, carries a requirement of self-limitation of the societies and opposes the uncontrolled development of sciences and techniques, in the filiation of these technocritical discourses.
These three criticisms, liberal, social and ecological, tend more and more, the authors observe, "to intertwine in the way public problems related to the digital environment are framed and constructed.

Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart and Sébastien Broca propose (third articulation of this sociohistory) to distinguish two regimes of digital criticism: internal (carried by computer scientists) and external, carried by social scientists. This internal/external distinction "largely overlaps with the difference between situated criticism, carried by the social actors concerned, and scholarly criticism, originating in the academic world and often developed without the injustices denounced being the subject of personal experience.

"If digital criticism has historically been carried out mainly by actors from the world of computers and networks, this situation has gradually changed. The multiplication of works on the exploitation of the work of Internet users (digital labor), the reinforcement of inequalities attributable to the digital (of class, gender and race) or the growing ecological cost of computing have brought to the forefront discourses that are more and more circumspect towards the utopia of the Internet.

Fourth and last articulation of the analysis: the three coordinators of the file, observe that " the digital criticisms are often incarnated in realizations and technical devices". This " digitalization of the criticism" is linked to " the historical preponderance of certain actors, in particular the computer scientists resulting from the hacker worlds. The latter have thus operationalized the critical discourse, by incorporating it in various technical realizations: free software, cryptography and anonymization tools, advertising blockers, decentralized networks, etc.".

  • " The digitization of criticism has thus spread from the hacker worlds where these practices were born. This has often gone hand in hand with a distancing from more traditional forms of argumentation, activism and political activity.
  • "The digitization of criticism has sometimes been posed as an alternative strategy to democratic action and attempts to achieve legal or regulatory advances, under the idea that it is more effective to 'argue with technology' than to 'argue with words'."
  • However, this strategy has shown some limitations. " It has sometimes suffered from an aristocratic bias, reserving certain types of action or protection to a technically competent minority (...). By using the digital to criticize the digital, it has been able to provide itself with the means to respond effectively to the technological instrumentation of forms of domination, in terms of surveillance for example. However, it has condemned itself to produce a corrective critique, unable - or unwilling - to question the growing digitalization of the different aspects of social life and to propose ways out.
 

The various contributions in this dossier take into account this plurality of critical motives and thehistoricity of their forms .

Christophe Lécuyer recalls the antiquity of the ecological critique of the digital industries within Silicon Valley. He shows how the environmental critique of the digital industry was born at the end of the 1970s through attempts at unionization within the semiconductor industry. " The evolution of the objects of criticism (the storage of toxic products, the pollution of groundwater, the prevention of industrial accidents, etc.) highlights the evolution of the game of actors and their strategies, a dialectic that led companies to relocate production in order to limit local contestations, thus making the computer industry seemingly an industry of the immaterial and pacified.

Based on the empirical analysis of a corpus of 275 collective actions carried out since 2015, Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann and Quentin Chapus revisit the varied forms of protest, virtual or physical, within large North American digital companies. " Although they concern a minority of employees, these collective actions (petitions or strikes) have an effectiveness that allows them to attract the attention of the media and company management."

Clément Mabi and Irénée Régnauld report on the opposite case: that of a collective of developers, designers, project managers and "agilists" mobilized against the pension reform in 2019. " These "workers in the middle", belonging neither to the working classes nor to the category of elites and top managers in the sector, are thus trying to assert values and a transversal political vision, which also implies distancing themselves from the "startup nation" narrative.Samuel Lamoureux recalls the centrality of the theme of sabotage in the discourses and critical approaches to technologies, from the classical texts of critical thinkers to the denunciation of click work. "Three types of sabotage are thus envisaged to account for critiques of digital capitalism: classical sabotage, subtle sabotage and resistance to technosciences. If the first type of sabotage tends to disappear from the workplace, the second type consists in the reappropriation of digital tools for alternative purposes; while the resistance to technosciences goes through algorithmic circumvention and avoidance."

From a meta-critical perspective, Sébastien Broca, for his part, repositions digital capitalism " in an extended economic history and geography, emphasizing the interdependence between the West Coast of the United States and the rest of the world. From this perspective, these major centers of innovation appear to be dependent on the peripheries providing the material resources necessary for the development of digital capitalism.

Summary of the file

  • Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Sébastien Broca: A sociohistory of digital criticism.
  • Christophe Lécuyer: Union movement and ecological critique of digital industries in Silicon Valley. From ethical to social struggles
  • Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffman, Quentin Chapus: Critical protest movements by GAFAM employees in the United States (2015-2021). The critique of the digital by "workers in the middle"
  • Clément Mabi, Irénée Régnauld: Collective identity and project-based mobilization in the "Onestla.tech" community
  • Samuel Lamoureux: Thinking sabotage in the age of digital capitalism
  • Sébastien Broca: Digital capitalism as a world-system. Elements for a metacritic

Référence :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
Sociohistory of digital criticism since the late 1970s, between continuity and renewal of motifs