From Computer Science to ‘Hermeneutic Web’: Towards a Contributory Design for Digital Technologies

Introduction

On 8 May 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic had become widespread in all countries, giving rise to different forms of lockdown and considerably increasing the time spent in front of screens, the journalist Naomi Klein published an article in the American magazine The Intercept, which was entitled ‘Screen New Deal’. In this article, Klein showed how giant tech companies were taking advantage of the pandemic in order to expand their power, in the context of an economic war between the United States and China. According to Klein, digital companies from Silicon Valley are currently taking advantage of the pandemic situation to impose their technological devices and their economic models, particularly in the fields of tele-medicine, tele-education, surveillance and smart city projects. According to Klein (2007), giant tech companies are thus applying the ‘shock doctrine’ which characterizes neoliberalism and which consists of taking advantage of the psychological shocks caused by disasters of all types to impose economic reforms on societies, thus subjecting public power to market rules. In the context of the pandemic, this doctrine takes the form of what Morozov (2013) has described as ‘technological solutionism’, which consists in imposing on populations ‘smart’ industrial systems in order to resolve social and political problems, but independently of any collective deliberation concerning the functioning of these systems, most of which constitute what Simondon (2016) described as ‘closed technical objects’, fully automated, and unintelligible for people. Such algorithmic systems serve a data economy which tends to become what Lauren Smiley (2015) calls a ‘shut-in economy’, that is to say, an economy exclusively based on the consumption of on-demand services, mediated by digital platforms, which requires the invisible and precarious work of individuals for extraterritorial companies, to the detriment of the development of local economic activities, in a context where traditional jobs themselves increasingly tend to be automated.

According to Stiegler (2016), such a techno-economic model is not able to remain solvent: the gradual automation of a growing number of jobs inevitably implies a reduction in purchasing power, which endangers the consumerist model, and which therefore ultimately threatens the data economy itself, mainly based on consumption, oriented by marketing and advertising. In addition to its intrinsic insolvency, this technological and economic model also raises ecological problems: the collection of massive amounts of data and their algorithmic processing in real time implies their storage into servers whose energy consumption and polluting effects seem to accelerate the ecological catastrophe. In addition, the attention economy which characterizes digital capitalism also destroys psychic and social individuation: most of the applications imply addictive uses, stimulate drives, disseminate attentions, and threaten cognitive capacities. In short, data economy and algorithmic governmentality seem extremely problematic, from the point of view of environmental ecology, mental ecology and social ecology (Guattari, 2014).

This is the reason why, in one of his last texts, Stiegler (2020a) proposed to rethink the current economic and technological model. According to him, this task requires us to rethink the founding principles of theoretical computer science in order to design new digital technologies, which do not exploit data and destroy attention, but which support contributory processes of transindividuation and knowledge production. In order to understand Stiegler’s claims and to explore his proposition, I will first try to make explicit the founding principles of current theoretical computer science and explain why they seem problematic, as long as they rest on a dualist opposition between software and hardware, which itself leads to fallacious analogies between mind and computer. Then, I will try to show that through their organological thought, Georges Canguilhem’s and Bernard Stiegler’s works offer a new perspective to understand the relation between mind, brain and technical supports, which does not compare mind or brain with computers, but which tries to understand the effects of technical artifact on psychological and noetic functions. This perspective implies we consider what Stiegler (2017) calls a process of exosomatization of knowledge, that is to say, the externalization of memory and of other ‘mental’ or ‘cognitive’ functions into material supports, which are constitutive of the preservation, constitution and evolution of knowledge in human societies, as many theories have shown at the end of the 20th century. I will finally raise the question of the digital exosomatization of knowledge in contemporary societies: according to Stiegler, the current stage of exosomatization implies a new design of digital platforms and digital technologies, which serve automatic calculation and algorithmic performances, but which have to become supports for collective intelligence and noetic activities.

The Founding Principles of Theoretical Computer Science and the Attention Economy: Information, Cognition, Computation

In his last paper published in August 2020 and in his last seminar, Stiegler (2020) argued that the only way to deal with the new ‘shock doctrine’ of giant tech companies was to elaborate a ‘counter-doctrine’ (p. 71) based on a ‘re-foundation of theoretical computer science’ (p. 72) which has been ‘abandoned [. . .] by European philosophy’ and left to ‘the ideologues of neoliberalism’ and ‘computational pseudosciences’, such as cognitivist theories (p. 69). Indeed, according to Stiegler, it is necessary to re-evaluate ‘the role of computer science and cognitivism in the neoliberal apparatus’ (p. 68). He insists on the fact that the domination of neoliberalism and the domination of computational cognitivism are two faces of the same problem: according to him, the conception of the market as a system of information and the conception of democracy as a space for free information, which are at the origin of the neoliberalist doctrines of Friedrich Hayek and Herbert Simon, both rest on a problematic conception of ‘calculable’ information which reduces ‘all reality to calculability’ (p. 73). In order to understand and criticize the current digital epoch of neoliberalism (which tends towards ultra-liberalism and libertarianism), it is necessary to go back to the theoretical principles underlying contemporary technological devices and economic models.

Indeed, the neoliberalist doctrine was a conceptual, logical and theoretical matrix, notably developed in the 1970s through the works of Hayek and Simon, two pioneering authors in the fields of information economy, which was studied by Hayek in 1945, in an article entitled ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (Hayek, 1945), and the attention economy, which was studied by Simon in 1971 in an article entitled ‘Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World’ (Simon, 1971). Although they both received the Nobel Prize in economics, in 1974 and 1978, Hayek and Simon were not only economists: in addition to their economic theories, Hayek and Simon were also the authors of pioneering works in the field of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. They are indeed known for their works in cognitive psychology, a discipline that developed between the 1950s and the 1970s, and whose main objective was to explain the functioning of the human mind in an ‘objective’ way. Indeed, the two authors not only used the notion of information in their economic and social theories, they also tried to explain mental activity, here assimilated to cognition, with the concepts of information and information processing. In The Sensory Order (Hayek, 1952), Hayek proposes a conception of the mind as a classification system, making it possible to connect sensory stimuli (or objects) to mental states (or categories); he thus anticipates the connectionist conception of mind, which will subsequently develop in the field of cognitive sciences. In Models of Thought, a collection of articles dating from the 1950s to the 1970s (Simon, 1979), Simon attempts to explain mental processes, from perception to decision-making, on the basis of a small number of fundamental mechanisms of information processing, the combination of which makes it possible to perform increasingly complex tasks, which can be modeled in computer systems, qualified as ‘artificial intelligence’. The information and attention economy which then emerged, and led to the current cognitive capitalism and data economy, thus seem to be based on ‘informational’ or ‘computational’ theories of mind and behavior, themselves developed on the grounds of the scientific and technical discoveries specific to the epoch.

Indeed, in the 1950s, the notion of information – which was eventually used to think cognition, behavior, market and society – was just appearing in the scientific and technical field, particularly through the development of computer science and information theory, two disciplines then in full expansion. As Longo (2016) puts it in an article entitled ‘Complexité, science et démocratie’, ‘the notion of information can be specified by at least two scientific theories, both rigorous and important: the elaboration of information from Turing’s works, and the transmission of information from Shannon’s’ (p. 1). What characterizes this notion of information, according to Longo, is that it depends neither on the code nor on the medium: ‘This ancient invention, formalized in a revolutionary way by Turing in 1936 and then essential to Shannon, has allowed us to distinguish the software from the hardware and to propose an autonomous theory of programming, or of transmission, independent of the material support, great richness of the computing practice’ (p. 1).

Nevertheless, this distinction between information and support or between software and hardware, which made the great richness of computing practice, had a certain number of ideological consequences. As Mathieu Triclot (2004) suggests in an article entitled ‘La notion d’information dans la cybernétique’, this dualism between information and support or between software and hardware has gradually been transposed from the field of computer science to the field of human sciences, and especially in the field of cognitive psychology, where it was used to think the relationships between minds and brains – mind being an informational process (software) implemented into the material support of the brain (hardware). Even though none of the first theoretical computer scientists, information theorists or cyberneticians have ever maintained such claims, the cognitive paradigm at the origin of cognitive sciences is indeed based on the idea that the same relationship exists between mind and brain as between software and hardware or between program and machine.

Since then, cognitive processes have been described as logical operations in elementary symbols which can be performed through any material device (regardless of its concrete structure, be it mechanical, electronic or organic). Mind is thus assimilated into a kind of computational program which could be carried out in very different machines, the brain being one of the possible supports, the computer being another. From this idea will arise much of the transhumanist mythology: the myth of artificial intelligence, according to which a machine could think and ‘mind’ could be reproduced artificially, or the myth of the downloading of the mind on an electronic medium and preserved after the biological death of the individual (Kurzweil, 2013). Such claims, which are based on an implicit metaphysical dualism (between information and support, software and hardware, mind and brain), rest on a cognitivist conception of the mind, which takes the functioning of computers as a general model of thought, while computers constitute a very specific and singular stage of a process of technical evolution, which started in prehistoric times with the process of humanization itself.

Rethinking the Relationship between Brain, Mind and Technics: From Analogy to Organology, from Cognition to Exosomatization

Indeed, as Canguilhem (1952, 1993 [1980]) has shown in his texts entitled ‘Machine et organisme’ and ‘Le cerveau et la pensée’, this tendency to think the ‘functioning’ of mind on the model of the latest technical inventions raises some very fundamental questions: how could a particular and historical technology serve as a general model for conceiving thought, since its very invention presupposes the thought it is supposed to explain? In other words, what is the value of a model, when the model claims to model its own conditions of possibility? Indeed, this comparative approach which takes a specific tool as a model to understand thought or cognition seems problematic: if we consider that cognition or thought is always an articulation between a body and its tools, a process taking place between brains and tools, then, we cannot assume that the tools themselves constitute a model of brain, thought or cognition, because this would lead to taking a part of the system or of the process (of thought or cognition) as a model for the whole system or process. According to Canguilhem, even if they have played a heuristic role in scientific and technological developments, the notions of ‘conscious brain’, ‘conscious machine’, ‘artificial brain’ or ‘artificial intelligence’ are irrelevant expressions because they tend to make us forget that the computer constitutes a stage in a process of technical externalization through which many writing and counting systems have developed. Those writing and counting systems can assist the human mind in its various activities, but their structures, whether they be mechanical, electronic or digital, have no relation to the organic structures of living organisms and cannot be compared to them.

When Stiegler (2020) asserts the necessity to rethink theoretical computer science outside of the computational paradigm and on the basis of a new consideration of technical evolution, which itself relies on Canguilhem’s reflections (p. 76), he thus suggests not taking a particular technology (like the computer) as an analogical model to explain the functioning of mind, but rather thinking the co-evolution of biological organisms and artificial organs, that is to say, the co-evolution of sensory, cognitive and psychological functions and artefactual supports. Therefore, the challenge is to move from an analogical paradigm (which takes a technology as a general model of thought) to an organological paradigm, which questions the way in which technical devices and supports (exosomatic organs) affect and transform psychosomatic organisms (endosomatic organs), and in particular, their psychological, intellectual, cognitive and noetic functions – in short, the functions which allow them to know and think, but also, and inseparably, to dream and to desire. In other words, the challenge consists in going beyond cognitivism, by considering technical devices not as models of the psychic apparatus, but as transformations of the very psychological and noetic activities.

Just as the biological functions are transformed through the evolution of the natural milieu, the noetic functions are transformed through the evolution of the technical milieu. This transformation of ‘mental’ activity by technical devices, this co-evolution between cognitive or noetic faculties and artefactual supports, is what Stiegler (2020) describes as an exosomatization of noesis, which, according to him, requires a ‘reconsideration of noesis, its faculties and its functions, from the exosomatic standpoint’ (p. 76). He thus maintains that the faculty of knowing or of thinking is not a universal and homogeneous faculty, but evolves and diversifies throughout the evolution of technical devices which are its condition of possibility and through which the noetic functions (such as memory, intuition, understanding and imagination) are exteriorized or exosomatized: ‘the functions of the faculty of knowing are thus transformed by exosomatization’ (Stiegler, 2017: 81).

This notion of exosomatization was first used in 1945 by the mathematician and biologist Lotka (1945), five years before the construction of the first computer, when information and communication technologies were gradually developing. In an article published in the scientific journal Human Biology, Lotka (1945) described the development of ‘methods of recordings’ which enable human beings to accumulate knowledge by storing it outside of their brains, in what he called ‘exosomatic’ organs, that is to say, technical organs located outside of the biological organisms (p. 192). Indeed, according to Lotka, the human species is characterized by the production of artificial organs, which serve as auxiliaries to biological organs, in particular by increasing perceptual and effective functions. According to him, in the human species, these functions are no longer performed only by organisms but through a coupling between biological organs and artificial organs: for example, vision is performed through a coupling between eyes and glasses, hearing is performed through a coupling between ears and phones, action or movements are exerted through a coupling between muscles and tools or vehicles, etc. Even if Lotka himself did not speak about the exosomatization of mental or cognitive functions, it seems that such an idea was developed after him in many different scientific fields, foreshadowing Stiegler’s theory of the exosomatization of noesis.

The Exosomatization of Knowledge: Externalization of Noetic Functions into Technical Artefacts and Social Activities

Indeed, in 1964, nearly two decades after Lotka’s description of the process of exosomatization, Leroi-Gourhan (1993) described the process of technical externalization through his paleoanthropological discoveries. According to Leroi-Gourhan, the human species is neither characterized by an intelligent property nor by the volume of its brain, which would give to humans a place apart from other animal species. Rather, human beings are characterized by their ability to produce tools, in which they externalize the operational chains characteristic of their behavior, and by their ability to place their memory outside of themselves, into the artefacts which form the social organism and carry collective memory (first through different types of tools and then through written inscriptions, which can be pictographic, mythographic or alphabetical). According to Leroi-Gourhan, such writing systems in turn transform the human brain and memory capacities, which are intrinsically linked to artificial supports.

A few years later, in the 1970s, the role of this artificial memory was underlined in the field of epistemology by the philosopher Karl Popper (1972), who insisted on the ‘exosomatic’ or ‘extra-personal’ evolution of memory and knowledge, through paper, pencils, pens, typewriters, dictaphones, printing presses, libraries and computers. Popper thus suggests that the faculty of knowing, which is the object of epistemology, results from a coupling between endosomatic organs (especially brains) and exosomatic organs. Therefore, knowledge is not a cognitive faculty which would unfold in the mind through the manipulation of mental representations, nor a simple cerebral faculty, which would unfold in the brain through neural connections, but a social and technical activity which requires an exosomatic memory (that is, the inscription of symbols into artefactual supports). Eleven years after Popper’s considerations, in 1983, this notion of exosomatic or extra-cerebral memory entered the neuroscientific field through Jean-Pierre Changeux’s famous book entitled Neuronal Man (1997). Even if throughout this book Changeux seems to identify mental activity with cerebral processes and neuronal connections, in the last chapter, he acknowledges that the technology of writing constitutes an ‘extra-cerebral’ memory, which gives images and concepts a life span greater than that of the nervous system which produced them, and which thus allows the constitution of a cultural memory perpetuated from generation to generation without being recorded in the genes. The neuroscientist thus insists on the necessity to confront neuroscientific discoveries with social anthropology and ethnology, in order to understand the transmission and constitution of human knowledge through what is then described as ‘intellectual technologies’.

Indeed, during the same period, the anthropologist Jack Goody (1977), who had been studying the anthropological consequences of the development of writing systems, created the concept of ‘intellectual technologies’ in order to emphasize the role of tools and instruments in the activities of thought and reasoning. According to Goody, recording methods not only serve to preserve ideas, information or knowledge, but also and above all create new possibilities of thought and transform the ways of reflecting and reasoning. Written inscriptions not only make it possible to record speeches, but also enable people to decompose its elements, to analyze the arguments, to classify the words under categories, and thus to develop faculties of abstraction, analysis and logic which are characteristic of rational thought. According to Goody (1977), logical operations or logical rules are not universal properties of cognitive subjects, they are the products of a ‘graphic reason’ intrinsically linked to the alphabetic writing system, which does not constitute a mere mean of transmission but rather a technical milieu in which a very specific kind of thought was constituted. This constitutive role of the writing technique in the thinking process was also described by the linguist and anthropologist Walter Ong (1982), in his book entitled Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, in which he studies the role played by phonetic writing (and other ‘technologies of the word’) in the restructuration of consciousness: technologies, according to Ong, ‘are not mere exterior aids but also transformations of consciousness’ (p. 81). He further argues that ‘the use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life’ (p. 82). Ong particularly shows how the absence of the audience and the separation from the living context of speech that is typical of the activity of writing imply the development of new ‘mental’ capacities, such as ‘fictionalization’, ‘circumspection’ and ‘introspectivity’ (pp. 101–3).

In the 2000s, this constitutive role of ‘intellectual technologies’ in intellectual activities was explored in the field of neurosciences through the work of Wolf (2008), who shows how the brain’s structure is transformed through the learning of writing and reading. Wolf argues that learning to write and read implies a profound reorganization of the brain, which in turn makes possible some ‘mental’ faculties such as reflection, long-term memory, deduction, deep attention. She also shows that, depending on the linguistic and writing systems practiced, different neural connections are required: linguistic and scriptural diversity thus generates neurological diversity, itself made possible thanks to cerebral plasticity, which has been recently studied through many philosophical works, such as those of Malabou (2005) or Bates and Bassiri (2016). According to such discoveries, the interactions between brains and artefacts are at the origin of the activity of thought itself. This is also what has been confirmed by media theory, through the works of Hayles (2007), who showed that our attention capacities are configured by our media environments. Hayles maintains that the shift from literal supports to digital supports has led to a shift in the ‘cognitive styles’, from ‘deep attention’ (the capacity to concentrate on a single object for long periods, ignoring external stimuli) and what she calls ‘hyper attention’ (the tendency to switch focus rapidly among different tasks and multiple information streams).

During this time, from the 1970s to the 2010s, cognitive sciences have themselves evolved considerably: the computational paradigm, which first dominated the field, has been gradually criticized and replaced by the externalist paradigm, which proposes an embodied, situated and extended conception of cognition, according to which the mind is not located in the brain or even in the body, but extends to the whole environment, even to the technical artifacts, which participate in the cognitive processes and function as cognitive extensions (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). According to this perspective, the computer is no longer the model of thought but rather one part of a more global system, which always includes humans and their environment, as Gregory Bateson had emphasized in the 1970s, through the notion of an ‘ecology of the mind’ (Bateson, 1972). This externalist paradigm has made possible new research in cognitive sciences and, in particular, their articulation with anthropology and archaeology, as Malafouris’ (2013) work attempts to do, by questioning the role of material cultures (artifacts, arts, architecture, writing systems) in the evolution of human cognition.

It thus seems that from the 1950s to the present, in multiple scientific fields (from biology to neurosciences, including paleoanthropology and ethnology), the main question is not the question of artificial intelligences or thinking machines, but of exosomatic memory and intellectual technologies. While information, communication and computing technologies continued to improve, a new conception of the mind was also emerging. Contrary to the ideological discourses about artificial intelligence and mind downloading, this conception does not explain the activity of the mind by comparing it to a computer (in an analogical perspective) or by assimilating it to neural or synaptic connections (in a reductionist perspective); this position implies that psychological, cognitive and noetic functions are always conditioned by artificial or exosomatic organs, whose practices transform brains’ organizations and ‘mental’ capacities. To put it in Stiegler’s (2017) words, it seems that such ‘mental’ faculties are in fact ‘constituted by their exosomatization [. . .] and coupled with a disorganization and reorganization of the cerebral organ’ (p. 82). The mind, then, is neither a cerebral process nor an algorithmic operation, but can only be thought from an organological perspective which considers transductive relations between living and psychic organisms, artificial organs, and social organizations. ¹

According to this perspective, knowledge cannot be reduced to cognition; on the contrary, Stiegler (2014) insists on the fact that knowledge is located between the brains which relate to each other thanks to artefacts, in which ‘mental’ contents are externalized and from which symbolic content is internalized, through a double process of externalization and internalization which is always psychic, technical and collective (p. 21). Such processes are not simple calculations of data nor simple transmissions of information because, through the process of psychic internalization, the externalized data are interpreted, and through the process of technical externalization, they are transformed and individuated – they become singular expressions which give new meaning to the received data. As Stiegler (2017) puts it: ‘one does not (or not only) make calculations with this data that, received, we must render to those who have given it to us by having made it fruitful, by having transformed it exosomatically and intensified the improbability’ (p. 89). Through such circuits of transindividuation (irreducible to feedback loops), which are both sensitive, affective, psychological, intellectual, noetic and collective, knowledge circulates between generations through the intermediary of technical supports. Knowledge is thus transformed and diversified through the singular interpretations and expressions, and therefore evolving and bifurcating in unpredictable directions. Because of this evolving and bifurcating dimension which opens improbable inventions, knowledge cannot be reduced to a computational information process.

Towards a ‘Hermeneutic’ Design for Digital Technologies: Deliberative Platforms and Contributory Social Networks

This is the reason why Stiegler maintains that a new design for digital technologies is necessary in order to make them become the supports for collective knowledge processes, and not only devices for processing data, transmitting information or capturing attention. Indeed, as Stiegler (2017) shows in an article entitled ‘The New Conflict of the Faculties and Functions: Quasi-causality and Serendipity in the Anthropocene’, reticulated artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and deep-learning machines, which correspond to the current stage of exosomatization, tend to disintegrate noetic functions and the faculty of knowing. Indeed, technical supports of noetic activity are pharmacological; they ‘can just as easily deepen and lengthen circuits of noetic transindividuation as [they] can short-circuit them, in the latter case by replacing them with automatisms’ (p. 82). According to Stiegler, digital tools ‘based on analytic, statistical, and probabilistic models’ which systematically process digital traces at speeds ‘million times quicker than the noetic body and its nervous system’ are thus automatizing or short-circuiting the different functions that compose the faculty of knowing (p. 82). While the reception of data through intuition is ‘formatted by data-capturing interfaces’, the analytical function of understanding is ‘delegated to algorithms’, the projective function of imagination is ‘reconfigured by the automated protentions’ and the interpretative function of reason is short-cut by the speed of automatic information processing (p. 82).

Moreover, the dominant digital companies, which calculate users’ profiles and automatically suggest to them further content in order to increase their ‘engagement’ on platforms or applications, or to increase the number of views or likes, are homogenizing behaviours and eliminating differences and bifurcations. To fight against these entropic effects, ‘functionalities must be developed that cannot be reduced to simple calculations of probabilities: incalculable deliberative and hermeneutic fields must be constituted in the service of knowledge communities’ (Stiegler, 2020: §94). Indeed, in order to avoid the disintegration of knowledge faculties and the homogenization or automatization of noetic life, it seems necessary to design, develop and experiment with new digital and algorithmic tools, which do not just extract and exploit statistical data, but which enable users to interpret the content they receive and to collectively share and discuss their interpretations through contributory platforms of annotation and deliberation. Even if they are still far from being concretized, digital technologies precisely include such potentialities, because contrary to literary or audio-visual media such as books, cinema or television, they open a new space of publication and allow receptors of symbolic content to become producers of symbolic content by expressing their interpretations, publishing their annotations, confronting their points of view and debating together about political, scientific, artistic or any other issues.

Such practices of collective discussions, debates and controversies require new types of functions related to ‘indexing, categorization, annotation, visualization, recommendation, editorialization and group-formation’ (Stiegler, 2020: §94): all these contributory functions could be articulated with algorithmic data processing and give birth to a new kind of social network, based on the constitution of collective groups or communities of peers sharing knowledge, and not on the personalization of individual data, reduced to programmable profiles (Hui and Halpin, 2013; Stiegler, 2014: 25). In such a framework, ‘algorithms no longer have the function of statistically processing user data in order to predict their behaviour, but rather of qualitatively analysing annotations in order to identify convergences or divergences of interpretation’, and to organize rational debates, which are the basis of political and scientific activities, and of noetic life more generally. According to Stiegler, such functionalities, which are constitutive of what he calls the ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘contributory’ web (Stiegler, 2016: §70; 2020: §94), could transform digital technologies, which are tools of massive calculations, into supports of individual and collective interpretations and individuations, giving place to diverse points of view and to the vitality of controversies, which characterizes every ‘public’ space, whether it be political, scientific, artistic, etc.

Contributory Research: Theory and Practice, Science and Technology, ‘Technodiversity’ and ‘Noodiversity’

According to the perspective developed in Bifurcate, such contributory, hermeneutic and deliberative digital tools could be developed through processes of contributory research, which involves academics with citizens, associations, economic actors, political representatives, designers, engineers, computer scientists, or other professionals in research and experimentation projects (Stiegler, 2020: §58). The aim of contributory research is to articulate academic research with local concrete problems in order to design and to experiment with new digital tools, platforms or social networks for academic, scientific, artistic, professional or citizen communities, but each time adapted to the singular and local needs of the inhabitants. Through such research projects, both social and technological, academic researchers and inhabitants (who themselves become contributory researchers) develop ‘technodiversity’, which is the condition of ‘noodiversity’ (§22 and §69). The goal of such a method is to develop a ‘new relationship with technology’ in which ‘the inhabitants of territories are not merely users of technological systems’ but which would be ‘based on studying [these systems] collectively, both practically and theoretically, so that [the] researcher-inhabitants can understand, prescribe, transform and practise’ digital technologies (§58) and participate in the future developments of their technical milieu, which is also the milieu of their noetic lives.

In order to give a concrete example of such projects of contributory research and design, we can briefly describe a project which was elaborated on the principles of this methodology, from 2018 to 2020, through the research program called ‘Contributory Learning Territory’, launched by Stiegler in 2016 in the north of Paris (Stiegler, 2020: §47). This project dealt with the problems raised by the effects of screens and smartphones on children’s psychic development. The aim of the project was to gather together academic researchers (particularly in biology and philosophy), doctors, child psychiatrists, care workers and parents, in order to study this question at a theoretical level (so as to understand the effects of screens and smartphones on brains, and their dangers for the development of linguistic, cognitive and social aptitudes) but also to conceive and experiment with practical ‘therapies’ in order to convert the toxic uses of smartphones and screens into new educational practices. In the long term, the goal of this project is also to involve doctors, care workers and parents in the conception of ‘therapeutic’ digital tools and contributory social networks, which would enable them to share their experiences and to organize together in their neighborhoods through contributory educational practices. Indeed, the toxic effects of screens on children’s psychological development is also connected to the lack of time their parents have to take care of them: in this respect, digital local platforms could help them a lot to organize common activities for their children and to cooperate together to look after and take care of them in a collective way. This project thus crossed three different and complementary approaches: a theoretical research approach, which was based on the reading and study of theoretical and scientific texts (concerning the mother-child relationship, addiction theories, digital ‘attention economy’ or other related themes); a practical approach, which relied on the sharing of the parents’ and professionals’ personal experiences and on the collective viewing and analysis of short films (documentaries or interviews) concerning the topic; and a technological approach, developed through cooperation with engineers, computer scientists and digital designers, in order to create and experiment with ‘therapeutic’ or ‘curative’ digital tools, corresponding to the local and singular needs of the inhabitants.

In the context of the ‘Screen New Deal’ (Klein, 2020), when screens are becoming increasingly omnipresent, such projects of contributory research and design could be developed in many areas: the issues of the neurological and psychological effects of screens and the need to develop contributory digital tools adapted for local needs have become a major concern for parents, but also for students and teachers, for health organizations, for associations, and even for employees of many different companies. The development of an ‘organological’ perspective (which requires the study of relations between psychosomatic organisms, technical organs and social organizations) and the articulation of interdisciplinary research with socio-technical experimentations seems all the more necessary in a context where the improvement of ‘artificial intelligence’ goes hand in hand with the spread of ‘digital denoetization’ (Stiegler, 2020: §19). Such a radical transformation of the digital hardware, software and interfaces would also require a political and economic project likely to open an alternative beyond current digital capitalism based on cognitive and computational extractivism.