Digital Identities in Tension

Between Autonomy and Control

Armen Khatchatourov, Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Gabriel Peries, Andrew Feenberg

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119629627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Identities in Tension deals with the ambivalence of universal digitalization. While this transformation opens up new possibilities, it also redistributes the interplay of constraints and incentives, and tends insidiously to create a greater malleability of individuals. Today, companies and states are increasingly engaged in the surveillance and management of our digital identities. In response, we must study the effects that the new industrial, economic and political logics have on ethical issues and our ability to act. This book examines the effects of digitalization on new modes of existence and subjectivation in many spheres: digital identity management systems, Big Data and machine learning, the Internet of Things, smart cities, etc. The study of these transformations is one of the major conditions for more responsible modes of data governance to emerge.

1
Identity as an Issue of Constraint and Recognition: a Question of Fundamental Ethics

1.1. Introduction

We have a strong feeling that technological innovations that are spreading throughout our individual and collective lives, in our most basic everyday lives, raise ethical questions about who we are and what we want to become. This is the case, for example, with the expansion of connected objects that create significant risks of the dissemination and exploitation of personal data. On another level, if we think about the progress made in the field of biotechnology, we know that humanity can be the subject of increasingly bold interventions. Such possibilities of intervening in biological reality are likely to transform our ideas of the human, amplifying their capacities exponentially, thus renewing the modern dream of self-mastery. In this respect, we recall that, for René Descartes, the desired mastery of nature (of which it was a question of “making oneself master and possessor”) had to follow the movement of an ego becoming ever more self-confident. The destiny of modernity was deeply marked by the idea that the mathematization of nature and the coronation of the subject would be mutually reinforcing (Waldenfels 2005, p. 329).

Resonating with such an ideal, the advent of transhumanism would allow humanity, according to some ideologues, to free itself from its limits by increasing its potentialities, almost to infinity. A major challenge for the representatives of this current – which has attracted considerable scientific, industrial and financial investment – would be, no more and no less, to free humans from changes in their bodies, their organs, aging and even death itself (Besnier 2009; Benasayag 2016). If we seem to be referring in this way to the great modern utopias that have advocated the principles of controlling and controlling the hazards of the human condition and nature, these are now overwhelmed by fantasies – even extrapolations – that call into question the ideal borne by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Because this ideal had as its horizon the harnessing of technology to the service of a project of emancipation and societal realization. Technoscientific advances were indeed supposed to serve political and social progress. In the alliance between scientists and industrialists, freedom of research was supposed to “satisfy a principle of social utility” (Taguieff 2001, p. 92).

However, there is a current tendency to favor technological progress that is devoid of any extrinsic purpose. It tends to act outside any regulatory norm that would be able to intervene to promote the common good or living together¹. Transhumanism generates an outdated conception of humanity, its identity being itself susceptible to being reduced to a set of digital traces and information. While the clearly ideological dimensions of these extrapolations are beginning to be well identified and analyzed, the fact remains that the development of digital technologies as a whole sometimes gives rise to this kind of fetishism of progress.

1.2. Digital ethics in context

In view of the multitude of questions raised by our hypermodern environments, a whole set of social representations, visions of man and discursive logics must be interpreted. This is in relation to the moral values that are supposed to guide our actions, on the assumption that not everything that is technologically possible is always humanly or socially desirable.

Such an exercise requires, on the one hand, questioning the societal, political and industrial contexts in which these representations emerge. On the other hand, it requires identifying criteria for evaluating new technologies – along with the ideals that support them – without making any unambiguous reference to what the “authentic” human being or “human nature” should be. This is because the impasse of essentialism or any kind of moral panic must be avoided. It is therefore up to us to ask ourselves what values we intend to preserve at a time when the term “intelligence” is flourishing in many spheres of industrial innovation. Our homes, cars or cities are referred to as “intelligent”. A city that is designated as such, for example, ideally makes it possible to have better control over information at the same time as a more fluid and predictive flow of urban traffic. As Fabio La Rocca has pointed out, the image of the hypermodern metropolis is therefore analogous to the world of the Web. Metropolitan territoriality is no longer experienced by creating a separation between physical space and Web space:

“On the contrary, this vision becomes a single feature, a co-fusion, a constellation of lines of flight that intertwine and erase the barriers, the borders erected between the Real and the so-called Virtual”. (La Rocca 2013, p. 271)

The benefits of digital deployment across cities are important from an informational and ecological point of view.

However, it is necessary to make it possible to question these trends in terms of ways of life, as well as their existential meanings, which come into play through these dynamics of innovation which are never without a backlash. New constraints are always likely to emerge. As Mark Hunyadi has said in this regard, we are, for example, accustomed in our daily lives to having to respond to machines in most areas of life, follow their instructions and acquire the multiple cognitive and practical skills that enable us to interact with them:

“There is in this development an inextricable combination of systemic factors – economic, technical, industrial, commercial – all of which result from individual initiatives without any agreed plan in advance”. (Hunyadi 2014, p. 42)

In this way, we are collectively engaged in ways of life that we do not choose, nor do we comprehend the technical constraints that these entail. These constraints are all the more insidious because they do not say their names and are often even perfectly undetectable.

In addition, we are dealing with modes of technological development that are most often accompanied by discourses of valorization (“techno-discourses”) that most often act to extinguish our critical vigilance. We are told about intelligent environments, “open data”, the “Cloud”, search engines in “natural language”, etc., all terms that suggest that we would now have access to absolutely fluid, flexible and open universes, capable of offering us ever more comfort, well-being and security. We are thus confronted with systems of representation and discursive logics that do not encourage the development of critical thinking, that is, thinking that would have the task of questioning the symbolic, social and existential challenges of our technological environments.

Several analyses of the social consequences of modern technology have highlighted how individual freedoms, in the context of hyperindustrial societies, can be reduced to symbolically controlled lifestyles, helping to create a form of habituation, such that we do not experience our progressive loss of freedom as the work of a “hostile” or “foreign” force (Marcuse 2008). By following such an angle of analysis, we can admit that if, for example, the so-called “intelligent” city poses (among other things) important problems in terms of transparency, traceability and respect for privacy, an instrumental rationality tends to prevail in the acceptance of such a model of urban development. The dominant order, once instituted, blurs our perception of technological innovations and their consequences, by making any criticism inappropriate: “Nothing nowadays discredits someone more quickly than to be suspected of criticizing machines” (Anders 2002, p. 17). Above all, there is a current tendency to equate criticism with reaction. However, by presenting from the outset any such criticism as “reactionary” or “reactive”, we limit the scope of analysis of the ways of life entailed by our hypermodern environments.

Another factor restricting the development of a “techno-critique” is the fact that in our daily lives we increasingly deal with devices that would probably seem unacceptable to us in their material forms. Critical analysis of a dematerialized device, such as a biometric technology, is by no means obvious and immediate. The digital age accentuates an experience of undetectability while at the same time producing completely paradoxical dynamics:

“Digital technology creates contradictory injunctions on all sides, which consequently have specific ethical implications for information and communication technologies”. (Béranger 2016, p. 25)

What emancipates us is at the same time what constrains us, especially in complex technological environments that are beyond our immediate understanding. We thus often see ourselves returned to the Promethean shame once described by Günther Anders to emphasize the powerlessness that we often feel in the face of the “omnipotence” of machines, which causes us to be subjugated by them, without giving us the means to question them:

“No expression more clearly expresses what shame is than ‘I can do nothing about it’. For what ‘I can do nothing about’ is what I cannot do, that is, what escapes my freedom, the dimension of fatum, that of things that are ‘fatal’ in every respect, that of ‘powerlessness’ in the broadest sense of the word. Shame arises from the contradiction between the claims of freedom and what is ‘fatal’, from the contradiction between power and lack of power. It is the shame of not being able”. (Anders 2002, p. 88)

Even though, to return to this example, the functions of anthropometry and those of biometrics are not the same, the impression of reification of the human being is much more likely to be induced by the sight of an anthropometric identification measure, by consulting archival photos of judicial anthropometry for example. On the contrary, a critical approach to a less visible device (such as a biometric identification technology of which only the interface is perceptible) is not self-evident. We are dealing with a device that is difficult to understand from a phenomenological point of view. In addition, biometrics is also helping to make everyday life more comfortable. At the very least, this is what the doxa (common opinion) most often reveals when we talk to users about it. For example, biometrics provides more instantaneous – and supposedly more secure – access to certain features or sectors (e.g. on a company’s premises). However, the more comfort becomes a pre-eminent criterion in guiding our technological choices, the more vigilance must be increased as to the effects of such an imperative on the exercise of our reflexive judgment. Indeed, the reflexive judgment tends to diminish as the criterion of comfort is emphasized.

1.3. Identification, corporality and recognition issues

In the current context of the development of identification technologies, it is the body that often expresses itself for the subject. The latter is no longer considered only as a speaking being, but is identified in the disclosure of their social and political behavior (Chardel and Périès 2009, p. 37). Remote facial recognition systems make permanent identification possible, which puts us at risk of freezing identity in its very essence. All the devices that allow an ever-tighter profiling of our activities have the characteristic of integrating the act of signifying in a very specific way: they “signify” for us, at a distance, without us having to manifest ourselves through speech, as beings endowed with language.

Between RFID chips and the data collected by connected objects, many industrial developments are currently moving in this direction on a massive scale. We can also easily mention the fascination generated by technological progress, which leaves us overall without any control. It goes without saying that deciphering our information machines and the normative systems that organize them is particularly difficult to grasp. This is particularly what justifies, among other things, a detour through the history of the devices themselves to contribute to developing a sufficiently adequate and creative critical apparatus, by committing ourselves to questioning the worldviews and conceptions of identity at stake through digital technologies. In this respect, the desire to introduce a single identifier to simplify certain administrative procedures is far from being insignificant from an existential point of view. Armen Khatchatourov will return to this point in Chapter 2.

Ethical questioning of our digital age is generally made difficult by the very fact that these technologies bring us ease in our activities, bring us speed, and bring us immediacy. As we have been able to point out, a new formal landscape, in the hypermodern era, seems to be promised to us, that of the disappearance of technological materiality, where everything would become a vector of the digital environment and where our smallest actions would be digitized (Avenati et al. 2016, p. 13). Thus, in the futuristic film Her (2014), Spike Jonze imagines that each person is able to develop an intimate and privileged relationship with the digital environment:

“In the film, everyone enters into a verbal dialogue with a global computer entity that manifests itself in the form of a voice (in this case, in the film, Scarlett Johansson’s voice), an int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Identity as an Issue of Constraint and Recognition: a Question of Fundamental Ethics
• 2 Digital Regimes of Identity Management: from the Exercise of Privacy to Modulation of the Self
• 3 Individuals, Normativity and Urban Spaces: Critical Perspectives on Digital Governance
• 4 Wait a minute, dystopia has not arrived yet? – Digital Identities and the Ability to Act Collectively, an Interview with Andrew Feenberg
• References
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement