关键词:
cosmotechnics
Yuk Hui
Andre Leroi-Gourhan
computer science
information theory
摘要:
Today's question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We can no longer avoid integrating this question with that of entropy, but also with the specific question of anthropic entropy, and the way this has accompanied the rise of computation: it thus demands a new approach to theoretical computer science. While digital and network technologies initially seemed to offer new hopes for the reorganization of work (exemplified by the free software movement), the subsequent rise of smartphones and social networks seems to have turned these hopes into lost illusions: network effects and algorithmic platforms are hegemonic, and the changes brought by neoliberalism are being progressively intensified. Unless something utterly improbable happens, this dystopian tendency seems destined to continue. Could the pandemic bring the necessary break? Before asking this question, we should reflect on the meaning of the probable, the improbable and the unforeseen. Capitalism can be described as anepisteme, whose operator is information, but also as an anti-episteme, because it installs generalized proletarianization. In other words, knowledge is destroyed and diversity systemically eliminated, and a new theoretical computer science must learn how to take the need for diversity functionally into account. Yuk Hui raises these questions through the notion of technodiversity, as a way of challenging the hegemony of a universal calculability prescribing arrangements between the technical system and the social and biological systems. Today, the computer is a cellular element in a global megamachine, and, from Hui's perspective, it imposes this cosmotechnical question firstly because China cannot be reduced to the West. Already in the twentieth century, the culture industries tended to reduce reason to rationalization, raising the question of whether moderni