However, how can we prevent them in turn from becoming an aristocracy similar to those that, behind different and often deceptive masks, have ruled peoples of all times, namely the clergy, the nobility, and those with money or expertise?
I do not doubt that the new house [the WAFEL] described above will forbid it. The new neighborhood spaces where we live allow us to have access to any person by cell phone wherever he or she lives or travels and by GPS if we do not know how to reach them; we can have access to any information with search engines, in particular to any text in any language as soon as the world literature will have been digitized.
This universal access can create a real democracy for the rest of us lay people whether we are commoners, ignorant, inexpert, poor, or miserable, since every earlier hierarchy was based on the hoarding of information and monopoly of rare goods: sacraments, legal rules, family genealogy, the mastery of weapons, expertise and knacks, sources of wealth and supplies, seeds, living species, property, the secrets of theory and practice… Hierarchy is theft.
On the contrary, democracy first arrives as soon as mysteries are revealed—at first by the disclosure of secrets and finally by universal disclosure. This reversal of expertise makes it possible to equalize relations between teacher and student, for example, and also between doctor and patient—in short, any relation where non-interactive, asymmetrical and hence unjust information could be transformed into power. Paradoxically today the most beautiful gold mine resides in the data, aptly called since they are really given, shared, and made available to all. Such universal access changes the very nature of power.
I would like to write anti-trust laws that would forbid the secret reconstitution of those little capitals of secrets, treasures whose seizure leads to the enslavement of humans, imprisoning them. Freedom consists in access.
Not only possible access, but also active intervention. Our new living space allows everyone, whether ignorant, inexpert, destitute, poor, or miserable, minors in every way, to learn, to engage, to give his or her opinion, to participate in decision-making, to share expertise—in short, to remain attentive to his or her destiny and active in the community’s. A universal vote in real time is coming, which evokes the dream of an authentic participatory democracy, since equality here also rules through free intervention as well as easy access.
I would like to write stories, songs, poems, and a thousand enthusiastic texts to encourage every woman and man to intervene, in a timely or untimely manner, in every public affair, whether it is their business or not.
Interventions and access here concern information called soft by specialists and not the hard brute force of the policeman’s truncheon or the nuclear bomb, the hammer or sickle.
Let me explain.
How disastrous for thought was the old morality of political commitment! Philosophers were kept busy repeating the parties’ ready-made slogans, sometimes leading to crime or blindness or the search for vainglory formatted by the media. It wasted their time and made it impossible for them to recognize contemporary reality and to meditate on the problems provoked by its ruptures. Nothing hides the new better than the news and current affairs. Faced with minimal changes compared to ours, nineteenth-century thinkers promoted dozens of new political programs, including utopias and pseudo-sciences. Our gigantic upheavals of the twentieth century have produced nothing. This is the betrayal of intellectuals.
Committed intellectuals could start on the following urgent job—that is, to work on the Reform of Understanding. This leads me back to my distinction between the hard and the soft.
Biogea is hard in the following ways: it contains toxic fruit, poisons, poisonous mushrooms, venomous spiders or serpents, devouring wolves, vultures and other carnivores, predators, parasites, bacteria, microbes, viruses… Animal or vegetal, each species has at least one offensive or defensive weapon.
Homo sapiens has intelligence. He never stopped using its power, but mostly to dominate, to go first, become the strongest, to crush everything and everybody on his way and to win. With intelligence as a weapon, he conquered nature and his miserable peers in the course of a warring evolution that is ending with a victory, however so paradoxical it might in turn lead to the species’ eradication. How can this defeat be avoided? By changing this defective weapon: yes, I mean intelligence. Still on the side of venom and fang, it must change, as soon as possible given the serious risks, from will to power to sharing, from war to peace, from hatred to love. This is the objective of my philosophy, of all philo-sophy, since the word associates both terms of this project.
For the adherents of political realism, the word Love will seem quite utopian and soppy. Even feminine perhaps! Nevertheless, the sweetness it implies not only signifies tenderness, leniency, and peace, but also defines a set of knowledges, technologies, and practices, precisely those relating to intervention and access. They quickly become more important than the hard techniques we use, whose praise we sing but that destroy our habitat since the industrial revolution at least and at most since the Stone Age. The three soft revolutions of writing, printing, and the computer have transformed history, behaviors, institutions, and power in our society more fundamentally than hard changes such as labor techniques.
Let me repeat, we call work at an entropic level hard: hammer blows on a chisel, steel melting, engines, or nuclear bombs. We call acts at the information level soft: traces, marks, signs, codes and their meaning. I have repeatedly mentioned the four informational operations.
From stones they became engravings.
Here too, a kind of Palaeolithic age is ending. Today an unpredictable bifurcation is taking place: it is the end of the hard and the beginning of the soft. It concerns not only the soft of morality but also of codes, the theoretical, scholarly and work-related soft; for example, as blue collar work is lessening, there is an immense increase in white collar work in production, the law, and collective activities. This soft makes access and intervention possible. We have arrived at the deep tectonic plate where encounters, short-circuits and ruptures between hard and soft provoke earthquakes.
This is the secret of my book and the crisis: the yawning gaps opening up between the stock market casino and the real economy, the numbers of our fiduciary conventions and Biogea of the living and the Earth. Those distances amount to the bifurcation between the hard and the soft and are the same distances separating the political media circus from the evolutionary state of people and societies. I promise a long book on the Soft for tomorrow.