What is to be done in the era of the digital? Bernard Steigler, the late French philosopher of technology, is perhaps most known for his analysis of technology's primary role in shaping humanity. What he is less well-known for is his totalizing and radical analysis of contemporary digital capitalism and climate change, which we will delve into during this lecture. First, we will explain the general concepts of his philosophy, inheriting as it does diverse concepts such as individuation from Simondon, retention from Husserl, and the pharmakon from Derrida. Then we will see how Stiegler, in response to the increasing general proletarianization, or loss of knowledge, of humanity - due to the automatization of the cognitive by digital technologies - put forward a theory of resistance based on negentropy. This led to a concrete strategy of reforming local communities while building a new internation, drawing on Mauss. This strategy will be compared and contrasted to the more well-known traditional revolutionary strategies of Marx when faced with the advent of industrial capitalism. Given the rise of artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT, we will try to determine the desiderata to update political philosophy in the era of the digital.

The Speaker
Harry Halpin is CEO of Nym Technologies and a Research Associate at CLEA at VUB. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL and Inria de Paris. He finished his Ph.D. under Andy Clark at University of Edinburgh and his postdoctoral studies at IRI du Centre Pompidou under Bernard Stiegler. He has published over 100 papers ranging on topics from artificial intelligence to extended cognition to privacy-enhancing technologies. He is the author of "Social Semantics" and co-editor of "Philosophical Engineering."

The CLEA seminars are taking place simultaneously at the VUB campus in Etterbeek, Brussels, and online (via Zoom) and are open to everyone interested. Read more at clea.research.vub.be/en

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