“Hybrid entities, at once private, military and geopolitical companies”, the technological giants, particularly in the United States, are now establishing themselves as the “technological armed arms of their country” details Asma Mhalla in her fascinating essay Technopolitics – Comment technology makes us soldiers (ed. Le Seuil). The researcher at the Political Anthropology Laboratory of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (Ehess) develops a stimulating reflection on the growing economic, military, political and geopolitical influence of these “BigTech” and their increasingly close links. close with the States.

This is evidenced by the “leading role” played by Starlink, Microsoft or Amazon in the war in Ukraine [these companies respectively provided information on a Russian cyberattack, portable servers and low-orbit satellites to the Ukrainian government]. Enough to “give a glimpse of the possible birth of an American techno-military complex” and, more generally, bear witness to a “deep redefinition of the morphology of this collective construction called the State”. Under the pen of Asma Mhalla, the State becomes the “BigState”, an omnipotent actor which can “be authoritarian and liberal at the same time”.

In order to navigate this subject with infinite ramifications, the professor at Columbia University in New York and Sciences Po invites readers to discover the field of “technopolitics”, a “multidiscipline at the crossroads of economics and law, philosophy and political theory, international relations and history, cyber and tech.” The idea: to continue and update in the light of developments specific to the 21st century the technocritical work – not to be confused with technophobia, she specifies – of thinkers such as Jacques Ellul, George Orwell or Georges Bernanos, authors which she cites several times throughout the pages.
Tools “far from being ideologically neutral”

TikTok accused of spying on its users, “industrialization” of informational struggles, social networks used as public spaces of influence by tycoons, sorts of “techno-tycoons” who own them, “new cyber conflicts and neo-wars augmented with intelligence artificial"... For the author, it is urgent to radically address these issues, well beyond the timid attempts at moderation and "legal blocking" of "BigTech" implemented in Europe.

Far from being ideologically neutral tools, social networks, artificial intelligence and algorithms developed by Google, Meta and Palantir (a company specializing in analysis and data science) are reshaping — and privatizing — our intimate lives and our societies to act “as disruptive agents of democracy”. Firstly, by tending to convey, voluntarily or not, a far-right and conspiratorial ideology – the case of Elon Musk, owner of X (ex-Twitter), is paroxysmal in this matter. But also, and the subject is no less worrying, by acting “as amplifiers of a form of techno-security State paranoia”: population technosurveillance devices, biometric software, massive data capture, etc.

Taking the example of France and the multiplication of security laws since the attacks of 2015 (“Global Security” law in 2021, massive surveillance and registration of political and environmental activists), Asma Mhalla notes that in this “new regime of truth », “each individual is by default potentially guilty until proven otherwise, thereby justifying generalized surveillance”. All of this contributes, in turn, to the “internalization of the security norm” by each individual, with citizens finding themselves evolving in what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze “prophesized as “control societies”.
Do not “miss our times”

Once this observation is made, what should we do? According to Asma Mhalla, to escape the “technototalitarianism” that could emerge from this chaos, it is high time that we “produce a new vision of the world”. “It is up to politicians to prepare themselves and society for these changes, to avoid the next major structural crisis due to unpreparedness and lack of anticipation”, without which “we will miss our time”.

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