On the Collective Algorithmic Unconscious

• In Event: Bio-Informational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies

Abstract

In the final years of his life, Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) took stock of the pharmacological possibility (poison and cure, breakdown and breakthrough) of humanity’s collective intelligence by turning to Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), and biologist Alfred J. Lotka (1880-1949), among others, to account for the biosphere or history of organic life on earth and to consider their respective senses of the noosphere or ‘terrestrial sphere of thinking substance’ (Teilhard 1969: 151). For Vernadsky (1945), the noosphere – the ‘terrestrial zone containing life’ - was construed as negentropic living matter acting upon the earth – a process which resists or slows entropy, and in Teilhard’s theosophy or terrestrial Gnosis, especially in his Le phénomène humain [The Phenomenon of Man] (1955), it was deemed ‘the skin of the earth,’ destined to reach a final spiritual Omega point. What Stiegler took from this was to envisage the noosphere as symbolising negentropic possibility or bioinformational resistance to the entropic tendency of information as it is now disseminated on the World Wide Web.
Thinking the passage and connection from the biosphere, noosphere, to the technosphere and beyond, to the exosphere (exospherical control technologies or Gestell – the ring of satellites encircling the globe), Stiegler began to talk of the noetic necromass as emerging from the exosomatic humus, that is, dead living matter or humus housed in vast archives, ancient libraries, schools and universities, in other words, concrete forms of human knowledge or tertiary memory retentions stored and passed down the generations. Stiegler was increasingly critical and pessimistic about the entropic tendency of Big Data corporations, so-called platform capitalism, and the trend towards algorithmic governmentality, which he claimed destroyed creativity and the possibility of difference as such. For Stiegler, the World Wide Web in its current iteration was destroying human knowledge through processes of homogenisation and standardisation through the reliance on algorithmic decision making.
To problematise any unthinking affirmation of planetary computerisation, the chapter questions the (im)possibility of educational emancipation and subjection in light of the pharmakon of new knowledge ecologies and hegemonies (artificial intelligence, automatism, autonomy, augmented intelligence, cooperative learning, the collapse of symbolic and biological life etc). At stake is the question of whether ‘the astral figure of humanity,’ as Stiegler puts it, is becoming further imperilled and whether the promise of collective intelligence (Pierre Lévy) is being derailed by a toxic, stupefied ‘collective algorithmic unconscious’ (Bradley).


References
Teilhard, C. P. (1969). The future of man: New York: Harper and Row.
Vernadsky, V. I. (January 01, 1945). The Biosphere and the noösphere. American Scientist,
33, 1, 1-12.
Teilhard, C. P. (1955). The Phenomenon of man. Place of publication not identified:
Collins.

Author

• Joff P.N. Bradley, Teikyo University