Zoom? New. When we have him on the phone to make an appointment, tech philosopher Éric Sadin makes another proposal. “Why don’t you come to my holiday address? I’m near Toulouse, on a small estate with a castle, where you can rent a room. You can walk beautifully here.”
Last week the Dutch translation of his book was published L’ere de l’individu-tyran (2020): The era of the I-tyrant. In an elegant, somewhat ironic style, Sadin describes how today’s public space is filled with 21st-century people who keep their eyes fixed on their screens, in airpods, with no regard for others. Taking selfies, making hands-free calls. Everyone in their own bubble. The world as silent disco. According to Sadin, we have ended up in ‘collective isolation’.
Yes, Sadin says, individualism has been around for a while, but that trend is being reinforced by technology that makes us feel like we don’t need anyone else. And then the pandemic took it even further.
In September of last year, Sadin coined the term ‘télésocialité’: ‘living together at a distance’ in an opinion piece, in which, according to him, we lose part of our humanity. He warns against the normalization of that ‘mask of pixels’, the computer screen, as a medium for our social interactions.
It is therefore logical that we avoid that ‘télésocialité’ for this interview. Four days after the phone call, the philosopher receives a message in the library of the castle. “Do you want coffee?” asks Sadin, who, along with Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner, is one of the French media philosophers who unbutton their shirts wider than Elvis Presley. “I have the time, here in the castle, we are not in a hurry.”
Do you ever give an interview via Zoom?
“Yes. But I’m not fond of it. A live interview is less predictable, less controllable. In the 21st century, we strive for efficiency, profit, optimization and rationalization in all areas. The pandemic has accelerated this trend. I was invited by the University of Ottawa for a lecture this week. By that they meant a online reading, I soon discovered. That was not even mentioned anymore, online is apparently already the norm. Unfortunately, the benefits of live, that you understand each other better and make more contact, difficult to quantify.”
Sadin, he tells us later that day during a walk in the woods in the vicinity of the castle, as a philosopher wants to ‘diagnose’ the world in which we live, in the tradition of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. And he often does this with short, concise sentences.
‘Economic crises,’ he writes in The era of the I-tyrant, ‘enhance a sense of dispossession and powerlessness. Technology creates the feeling of being supreme’.
According to Sadin, we don’t feel seen in the real world, but we do feel liked and loved on the other side of the screen. It makes sense that even on the street we keep our gaze ‘continuously and obsessed’ on that smartphone, as if there were no other pedestrians.
In this book you will analyze the digital revolution in conjunction with social developments. After your books on algorithms and artificial intelligence, why did you put on the hat of sociologist this time?
“I want to describe how all of us, including you and I, fell into the trap. And you can’t just explain that with technology criticism. We are the product of a political and social history that, since we took the neoliberal path in the 1980s, has been largely made up of disappointments. Trust in each other and in politics has crumbled, the sense of inequality has grown.”
From the turn of the millennium, you write, the Internet and the cell phone gradually restored the individual’s sense of power.
“In the eighties and nineties you saw the emergence of techniques that fostered individualism: the video recorder for personalized entertainment, the microwave to heat up your own meal. Tools that helped us shape reality to our will. This was followed by the internet and the mobile phone and, around 2010, the social networks. Facebook stroked our egos with likes, on YouTube we can share our videos with the whole world. In 2006 called time “You” as Person of the Year. Apple uses the prefix ‘i’ in all its product names: iPhone, iPad, iMac. On Twitter, everyone can get the feeling that they are talking to the greats of the earth. In this way, the individual who feels crushed in the real world can lead a second life behind his screen. The internet has given the individual the illusion of status and power.”
It’s not about tech criticism for him, Sadin explains. He wants to describe the human condition and make connections between seemingly unrelated things. He sees the same trend in selfies, hoodies and electric scooters: confinement in one’s own cocoon, and denial of the other.
In an opinion piece in Liberation, last September, he warned against the total digitization of our lives. Working from home is especially good for the employer, he wrote, not for the employee. A healthy separation of work and private life is thus lost.
In his latest book, Fair secession. Pour une politique de nous memes (to separate. For a politics of our own) coming out this month in France, the thinker goes one step further. He predicts how the trend of working from home could further exacerbate existing social inequalities. With a sense of exaggeration, he extends the now visible lines to a near future, in passages that are sometimes reminiscent of Michel Houellebecq’s novels.
The current trends of working from home and ‘télésocialité’, according to Sadin, will lead to a division of society into three classes. For the upper class, the managers and liberal professions who can move to the countryside thanks to technology, digitization means freedom. These “premium” professionals, as Sadin calls them, live in big houses and can play tennis in the morning before going to work. While they meet for an hour via Zoom, the fresh vegetables grow in the garden.
Sadin calls the second group the ‘economy class’: they are home workers with middle incomes, who are monitored by their managers via screens. Their productivity is controlled by technology. They live in smaller houses and have to deal with an unhealthy mix of work and private life. The chance of a burnout is high.
Finally, there is the third class, which Sadin refers to as the ‘masked legion’. It is the people who have to be physically present at work. Cleaners, drivers, delivery guys, nurses, Amazon employees. They do the hardest work and earn the lowest wages. Their activities are determined by algorithms. According to the philosopher, this development takes place completely outside the eye of politics. That’s why he calls fair secession to political awareness, citizenship and mobilization.
You disagree with tech critics like Shoshana Zuboff who argue that we have entered an age of surveillance capitalism. Why not?
“The new trend is not surveillance, but guidance. I wrote about collecting personal data for marketing purposes more than ten years ago. The future is well-being management, often with our consent. We authorize the technology to increase our well-being. For example, your self-driving car may soon notice that you look tired and say: Éric, you drank too much wine yesterday, I’m taking you to a pharmacy. Do you want your seat in siesta position? Or shall I take you to a motel? That’s not surveillance, that’s welfare management. It’s important to see that difference, because it’s a new paradigm: the tech industry organizes our lives in a seemingly pleasant, effortless, comfortable way.”
Is there actually something wrong with that?
“Not necessarily, but I do think that the tech industry has been able to increase its power over our lives far too unfettered over the past twenty years. That’s why I write books about data collection, artificial intelligence and the ‘anticipation society,’ where technology starts to predict our behavior. About technology that promotes collective isolation and alienation. That has major consequences for our lives and it is therefore time for a broad social debate.”
Then Sadin suggests going for a walk: “It is almost getting dark.”
After the walk there is dinner and red wine, which culminates in a YouTube session of French pop music. Towards the end of the evening Sadin, who somewhat resembles chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg, is dancing in an energetic and somewhat eccentric way. And yes, then it is time to prove him right: it is more fun to meet each other in person.
The next morning, at breakfast, it is time for one last question.
In Libération you state that the pandemic has made us leap in time, ‘as if humanity has suddenly entered a new stage’. Can we still go back to the old world?
“Yes. I think one of the big themes of the coming years will be the return to the sensory. Now that we’re all alone behind our screens, we could end up in a collective depression. And then there can come a turning point. A moment when we say: we are suffocating, we can’t stand it anymore. And then new behavior will arise. Then people will work together to develop alternatives. Small-scale cooperatives, craft projects. I’m not a clairvoyant and it’s not written anywhere that it’s going to happen, but I think it can. Because it is human.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of October 11, 2021