Warning

Journal Identification = NRP Article Identification = 0652 Date: June 12, 2021 Time: 4:36 pm

doi:10.1684/nrp.2021.0652

REVUE DE NEUROPSYCHOLOGIE

NEUROSCIENCES COGNITIVES ET CLINIQUES

123

Point of view

Rev Neuropsychol

2020 ; 12 (S1) : 123-4

Warning ^*

L’avertissement

Bernard Stiegler

Institut de recherche et d’innovation, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

<Bernard.Stiegler@centrepompidou.fr>

To cite this article: Stiegler B. Warn- ing.Rev Neuropsychol 2020;12(S1):123-4 doi:10.1684/nrp.2021.0652

T

he pandemic that has paralysed the world in just a few weeks is now makingevidentthe extraordinary and appalling vulnerability of the current ‘devel- opment model’, and the potential multiplication of the combined systemic risks that are accumulating within it.

Itprovesthat, wherever in the world we happen to be, this model has a death sentence hanging over it, if we do not change it.

That there are, to this day (April 9, 2020), still people who wonder why the world economy is being blocked for a health crisis “that causes fewer deaths than do car acci- dents” – which shows that they do not understand that if the number of deaths in France and Italy is limited, it is precisely becausedrastic measures havefinallybeen taken – testifies to the fact that a large part of the problem that threatens us all is thestupidity on which this developmental model is fundamentally based¹.

This is the case because it imposes mechanistic mod- els on living realities (nature and human beings), poisoning them. Failure to understand that the problem is not whether the pandemic causes greater or fewer deaths than road acci- dents is a failure to understand that, in life, exponential dynamics are the rule, as Darwin wrote in 1859:

“There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair”[1].

The so-called ‘Spanish flu’ that emerged in North Amer- ica and claimed some 50 million victims, or even double that figure according to some estimates, was globalized by what was then the FirstWorldWar. It would probably not

∗This article is an English language translation of the following article:

Stiegler B. L’avertissement.Rev Neuropsychol2020 ; 12 (2) : 247-8.

doi:10.1684/nrp.2020.0583.

Translated by Daniel Ross.

Correspondence:

B. Stiegler

1And this is why Greece and Croatia, for example, which took imme- diate containment measures, are, for the moment at least, in a far less critical situation.

have been such a disaster without the mechanical acceler- ation (by ship and other forms of troop movements) of the spread of the virus. Covid-19, for its part, was transported and saw its spread accelerated by theworld economic war that our “developmental model’ has become, particularly since the ‘conservative revolution”.

This is why this developmental model is in reality a model of destruction– and this destruction, long regarded as “creative”, has been accomplished over the past two decades through theglobal civil and economic war now being waged with the computational weapons of mass destruction that arise with reticular innovation (based on networks, their “network effects” and what, to describe the specific of computational information, Clarisse Her- renschmidt calls “reticular writing” [2]) and disruptive innovation (destabilizing social organizations by outstrip- ping them[3]). When President Macron declared, ‘We are at war’, he should have added, “and have been for decades”, and, more precisely, ever since this ‘conservative revolu- tion’ that hassystematically and systemicallydestroyed the social constructions that had, in the past two centuries, and especially with Roosevelt (1933), the Declaration of Philadelphia (1944) and the ‘Fordist compromise’ of the post-war period (and in the Cold War context), limited, rela- tively speaking, the anti-social effects of economic struggle (especially in terms of health)².

InBifurcate:‘There is No Alternative’, a book co-written with the Internation Collective (and published by Les Liens qui Libèrent at the same time as this article), we claim, as the basis of the transdisciplinary work that produced it, that this destructive model of development is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen said contra Joseph Schum- peter as early as 1971, is based in all its sectors on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the

2 The fundamental logic of this disruption.

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REVUE DE NEUROPSYCHOLOGIE

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Point of view

constraints of localityin biology and theentropic tendency in reticulated computational information[4].

A fundamental aspect of this structural scientific archaismis that it a priori eliminates theirreducibly local dimension of biological and human phenomena – in order to justify a globalization that has been weakening and ulti- mately ruining entire regions of the world for decades, and that is bound to lead to the multiplication of catas- trophes such as the one we are currently experiencing, which will increasingly combine with climate problems, resource depletion, the exacerbation of tensions over access to resources, mental and social regression, financial disaster and so on.

It is to establish a precise diagnosis and advocate a general method in order to get out of this state of fact with- out law that this book has been written – just before the pandemic – and presented in broad outline in Geneva on 10 January 2020. The proposals set out in this work respond in advance to the question of a post-pandemic world – and with a view to rebuilding, not a war economy, but an econ- omy of transition towards a global economic peace based on a new economic pact and giving concrete form to a peace treaty.

After 2008, and after the restoration over the following decade of a process of financialization that was not only just as absurd (where the banks were recapitalized without in any way requiring them to adopt new investment policies) but in factintensified to an extreme degree by digital disrup- tion (through the combined development of smartphones and social networks), it is doubtful whether, in order tobuild a post-health-crisis world, it is still possible to trust corpora- tions and banks with regard to their willingness and ability to modify their investment policies – because, behind these economic powers, there are shareholders who hold them in check by keeping a gun pointed constantly at their heads.

This is why, if it is obvious that the primary issue is the reconstruction of functional economic and political local- ities, which alone (and for scientific reasons) are capable

of struggling against entropy, and the reconstruction of variously reticulatedopen localities, then the transitional operatorin this regard must be the gradual implementation of new binding accounting standards, that is, a form of accounting that functionally penalizes entropy at the micro-, meso- and macro-economic levels.

This resolute transformation of accounting standards can and must occur by setting up networked territorial economic innovation workshops around the world, created in order to constitute polarities and reticularities of contributory eco- nomics, all guided by the absolute priority of struggling against entropy – these pathways being by nature diverse.

This is whyBifurquerproposes that territorial laboratories be set up without delay, linked together through an authority to be called the internation.

In addition, the fundamental question entailed by accountancy instructionin the age of algorithms is thetech- nology of calculability, which must become atechnology of incalculability: a new foundation of theoretical computer science is essential – and, on this basis, acontributory retic- ulation must be put in place, based on networks whose

‘network effects’ do not short-circuit the deliberative fac- ulties. The current model of the data economy is based on a form of theoretical computer science that is utterly subservient to the neoliberal model as defined by Friedrich Hayek and Herbert Simon at the Mont Pelerin Society, giving to information the function of reducing everything to mar- ket calculations – thus eliminating the possibility of taking the incalculable into account, even though it is the incalcu- lable that always lies at the origin of bifurcations, whether positive or negative.

As long as this reduction of all decision-making to calculation continues to prevail, we are doomed to disas- ter, of which the current global health situation is the first warning.

Conflict of interest None.

References

1.Darwin C. On the Origin of Species. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 52.

2.Herrenschmidt C. Les trois écritures : langue, nombre, code. Paris : Gallimard, 2007.

3.Stiegler B. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Com- putational Capitalism. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge : Polity Press, 2019.

4.Pfaltz JL. Entropy in Social Networks (2012), available at:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.2917.pdf, no page numbers: ‘under contin- uous change/transformation, all networks tend to “break down” and become less complex. It is a kind of entropy.’.