Les Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel 2015 (14-15 December)

Les Entretiens du nouveau monde industriel 2015

LA TOILE QUE NOUS VOULONS – du web sémantique au web herméneutique

Paris. Centre Pompidou. Grande Salle. 14 et 15 décembre 2015

 

Cette page est aussi disponible en français.

From semantic web to hermeneutic web

With the world wide web, has emerged 22 years ago what now appears to be the reticular society that disrupts the economy of data, to the benefit of industrial groups that have become planetary in less than ten years and to the detriment of European economies which failed to develop industrial policies to meet the challenges neither at national level nor in the context of the European Union.
Although the web was invented at CERN, it is in North America that its consequences were drawn, and this is under the influence of feedback loops, favorable to its business model, that the web has evolved – in a sense that deeply denatured it, to the point of transforming it into an instrument of hyper-control and of enforcement of a purely computational governance on everything.
In spring 2014, and in the wake of the effects caused by the revelations of Edward Snowden, Tim Berners Lee and the W3C launched the “Web We Want” initiative. Following this momentum, IRI proposed to its partners (Cap digital, France Televisions, Strate Design School, Institute Mines – Telecom, W3C) to dedicate its ninth edition of the New Industrial world Forum to the hypothesis of an overhaul and a reinvention of the World Wide Web under the French translation “la toile que nous voulons” – toile (the web) that can be perceived henceforth both as the spider trap and as the projection screen of a better future.
*
Since its origin, and under the pressure of an economic sector becoming dangerously hegemonic, the Web has evolved into an increasingly computational vision, focusing excessively on automation implemented for the benefits of business models which may be weakening social service structures, and may prevent the development of a reflective and deliberative practice, therefore aware of the networked digital instrumentality – not to mention the aspects revealed by Edward Snowden.
This issue poses a triple challenge: economic, political (ie also military) and epistemological. When Chris Anderson in 2008 launched the debate on the challenges of big data, which was then called the data deluge, he proclaimed the “end of theory”. This view undoubtedly true in fact in some fields, is undoubtedly wrong in law – the difference between the fact and the law stands the question we asked in the New Industrial World Forum 2014 under the title “the digital truth”. The end of theory is the automatic and entropic closing of knowledge – that is, its statistical annihilation.
We do not only oppose Chris Anderson’s standpoint with an abstract right argument. We add that the automation of the web will only be beneficial if it is augmented by a hermeneutic – that is a neguentropic – function, capable to trace disputes, polemics and controversies and to organize the deliberative collective individuation process by designing a new type of social networks inspired by Simondon’s concept of individuation and relying on a new graphic annotation language.
This 2015 edition of our Forum, which will take place immediately after the UN conference on the limitation of climate change, will affirm the necessity and the possibility to re-develop the web so that it is explicitly designed to increase the neguentropic potential of humanity, instead of submitting all singularities and possibilities able to sustain deliberate bifurcations to a systematically entropic computational model.
The challenge is that of a struggle against the massive entropy which is the advent of Anthropocene, as well as that of the re-opening of a European future based on the revival of a European industrial policy – beyond Airbus and the TGV as well as beyond the storytelling of big data.

Latest from Blog

Chinese translation of ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines (Voices of Photography, issue 35)

ChatGPT自2022年11月推出以來,便引發了狂熱與恐懼。它對不同語言的語義及語法的嫻熟掌握(但尚未精通內容),令只是期待普通聊天機器人的使用者感到驚訝。有些大學院校立即禁止學生使用ChatGPT來寫論文,因為它的表現優於多數人類學生。報紙上的專欄文章則宣布了教育的終結──不僅因為學生可以用它來做作業,還因為ChatGPT比很多老師能提供更多的資訊。人工智慧似乎已征服了另一個根據古典哲學來定義人性的領域:邏各斯(logos)。恐慌隨著存在領域(existential territory)1的進一步喪失而加劇。當氣候的崩壞和機器人的反叛召喚出了末世,人類歷史的世界末日想像變得更加強烈。 末日對於現代人來說從來都不陌生。事實上,哲學家卡爾.洛維特(Karl Löwith)在1949年出版的《歷史的意義》(Meaning in History)一書即指出,現代歷史哲學──從黑格爾(Hegel)到布克哈特(Burckhardt)──就是末世論的世俗化2。歷史的終極目標便是使超越的變成內在(makes the transcendent immanent),不論是耶穌基督的第二次降臨或只是成為神人(Homo deus)。更廣泛地說,這種對歷史時期的聖經式或亞伯拉罕式想像,為人類的存在提供了許多深刻反思,卻也阻礙了對於我們的未來之理解。 more