What a nightmare! When our computer or cell phone suddenly goes out of service or displays an error code on the screen, impatience and anger arise at the drop of a hat. Faced with this unexpected bug, the user panics at the mere thought of being unreachable.
But what if this failure were instead a blessing? This moment of dysfunction can be an opportunity to understand what is hidden behind the smooth apparatus of applications and platforms. At least, this is the proposition put forward by the philosopher Marcello Vitali-Rosati in his captivating book In praise of the bug, which sheds light on our technological alienation.
The bug or bug evokes, in English, an insect, but the word of Welsh origin can also mean “ghost”. By short-circuiting the machine it inhabits (or haunts), the bug pushes us to open the black box, indicates the professor at the University of Montreal and professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Writing.
His stimulating essay, which panache interweaves the disparate knowledge of computer systems with that of ancient thinkers such as Socrates, is a mine of information. The place of digital in our lives has become so important that we have now come to delegate our choices to GAFAM. These Silicon Valley giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) have established the terms “simple, practical, intuitive” as essential values, swearing to free us from all material constraints thanks to a contemporary world governed by algorithms. But behind the promises of thinking for us, this “rhetoric of immateriality”, a whole vision is proposed to us: that of a loss of autonomy in favor of productivity and performance, the philosopher advances.
Freeing ourselves from this dependence on digital giants is not easy, however, Vitali-Rosati concedes, emphasizing in passing that we have permanently internalized what he calls the functional imperative, this idea that “it has to work.” The author ofMisguidedness. Love, Death and Digital Identities (published by Hermann) — a work on the loss of identity through the various digital existences of the individual (avatars, profiles, pseudonyms, etc.) — suggests here putting the functional imperative on hold in order to better prioritize our values.
The philosopher, who does not own a cell phone, hopes, with this militant essay, to bring out an attitude whose objective is not to increase productivity or the ability to manipulate digital environments, but the emergence of critical and sovereign thinking. “This implies, firstly, minimising our needs by questioning what is really necessary and desirable for us and, secondly, developing our abilities to understand and arrange our own digital environments,” he suggests. A piece of advice to think about… without the help of technology, it goes without saying.