On July 19, a computer outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide. A simple update disrupted thousands of flights, emergency services, factories, media, businesses, global stock markets, etc.
The scale of this outage has highlighted our growing dependence on digital giants.
According to the most recent essay by the philosopher Marcello Vitali-Rosati, In Praise of the Bugthis global outage is the ideal opportunity to take a break and question ourselves about the influence of GAFAM1 on our daily lives.
For the author, the bug thus acts as a spark, inviting us not to be fooled by GAFAM and to understand them better in order to better criticize them. “The bug could be the small roughness that allows us to have a hold on this smooth power,” he writes.
Any reader who wants to dissect the current digital age from an original angle will find pleasure in this essay. The author goes off the beaten track and, with his accessible but rich pen, invites us to reflect on our own relationship with technologies.
This is an ambitious project that Marcello Vitali-Rosati is proposing to us. Freeing ourselves from dependence on GAFAM involves not only turning our backs on a handful of American companies, but also radically questioning their vision of a capitalist and uniform world.
This vision of the world, he argues, is based first of all on the functional imperative, the refusal of dysfunction. In the digital age, a technology that works is one that accelerates processes and increases productivity. This injunction of “better and better” makes the idea of wanting to slow down absurd.
An application that would be less accessible, slower, that would not notify, that would separate living spaces, that would be less invasive, would be considered non-functional, precisely because it would propose a vision of the world different from that of capitalist productivity.
Excerpt from the essay
GAFAM have also accustomed us to everything being simple and intuitive. With them, we gain devices and applications that are very easy to use, but we lose access to internal mechanisms, the ability to adapt the codes to our needs, our autonomy. When a model becomes dominant, we lose our ability to imagine other options, and when its mechanisms are opaque, we lose our ability to criticize it.
When it comes to the material aspect, we sometimes forget that GAFAM have a very concrete impact. In fact, it is the companies themselves that communicate very little about the materiality of their products and services. They prefer to highlight, for example, their cloudwhich evokes lightness, the airy, which is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
However, cloud services depend on powerful machines, connected to network infrastructures. This requires energy, rare materials, and it releases heat. The presence of GAFAM in territories has environmental, political and economic consequences.
Without us being aware of it, almost all of our daily actions pass through massive networks of undersea cables owned by a handful of companies and states.
The author devotes his last chapter to possible solutions. For example, he advocates free digital spaces — multiple, free, open, without owners and collective. Faced with current technologies that pollute, run on planned obsolescence and require increasingly scarce resources, Vitali-Rosati suggests pressing the brake rather than the accelerator by favoring low tech.
Of course, its solutions require more advanced technical skills than swipe and of scroll. But it is precisely complexity that the philosopher invites us to desire.
Digital literacy is becoming a central element of our freedom. Not the kind that teaches us how to handle an iPad or use Word. The kind that is acquired by “tinkering,” by questioning ourselves, by taking detours to better understand. The kind that does not free us from “trivial tasks,” but from a dependency on a single, pre-chewed vision of the world.
Marcello Vitali-Rosati does not claim that his essay will advance the world. Rather, he aims to offer the freedom to question the directions to take. He does not want to encourage the reader to reconfigure his computer. Above all, he hopes that his book will succeed in making us waste time and put us in “that active idleness that allows the emergence of thought.”
1. By GAFAM, the author refers to the digital giants whose world view is dominant, namely Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.
Extract
“GAFAM thinks for us. They promise to take care of us completely. We don’t need to know the route, because Google Maps will show us; we don’t need to ask ourselves what we want to eat, Tripadvisor will tell us the best restaurant; we don’t need to ask ourselves questions, Airbnb will find us the right accommodation, Netflix the right film to watch, iPhoto will organize our memories in the right order, Uber will regulate traffic in our cities by allowing us to find a driver or an electric scooter, Tinder will take care of introducing us to the right person… We are freed from all these concerns and we are completely dependent not only on the services of these technologies, but also on their visions of the world.”
Who is Marcello Vitali-Rosati?
Professor in the Department of French-language Literature at the Université de Montréal, Marcello Vitali-Rosati is a philosopher and specialist in digital publishing. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Writing and the Chair of Excellence in Digital Publishing. Marcello Vitali-Rosati refuses to own a smartphone.
In Praise of the Bug — Being Free in the Digital Age
Areas
203 pages