Daniel Cohen - The Inglorious Years: The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society

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IN THIS BOOK, I describe the transformation of economic structures and political thinking that has swept the world over the last fifty years, from the sixties to the present. The collapse of the old industrial society in favor of a digital society still in the making forms the heart of this account. By tragic coincidence, as the English language edition of this book was being prepared, the world was battered by a crisis unique in recent history, a pandemic, COVID-19. In a totally unpredictable manner, it served as a catalyst for a burgeoning of digital society, whose underlying logic, unexpectedly, it allows us to understand.

Because of the virus, society has suddenly become fearful of face-to-face contact. All of us are trying to protect ourselves from the risk of infection others may be carrying. Restaurants, cafs, and concert hallsessential sites where urban civilization can flourishwere closed. Life withdrew to the family cell, and the burden of stress and frustration followed. During the lockdown, every possible step was taken to allow people to work online easily, to purchase goods without having to physically enter a store, to entertain themselves without venturing out to a theater or concert hall. As it happens, the key feature of what can be called digital capitalism is precisely to reduce physical interactions, to dispense with the need for people to meet face-to-face. Under the assault of the health crisis, fine-tuning digital capitalism has come into the spotlight: increasing its efficiency by dispensing with the need to meet in person. Many activities have been rendered virtual. In medicine, for example, many consultations are now conducted remotely. The big winners in the crisis were Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, whose control of the market exploded during the lockdown. The virus arrived at just the right time for the dominant players in digital industries, who were able to conduct a full-scale experiment on the virtual worlds assimilation of the physical world.

Back in 1948, the French economist Jean Fourasti published an analysis of long-term economic transformations which provides us with an essential key for understanding the change under way. Growth is necessarily kept in check when one has to meet in person, whether to examine the bodies of patients or attend a play. And the essence of capitalism, always and everywhere, is to seek the systematic reduction of costs. It took a long time to find the solution to Baumol and Fourastis problem, but it is now clear: One has only to convert the humans we are, beings of flesh and spirit, into data sets, bits of information about our temperatures or our desires, so that we may become part of the Web, where we can be managed by algorithms. Freed from the imperative of encounters in the flesh, growth once again becomes possibleonline.

During the spring of 2020, Paris, New York, London, and Milan stopped working. Health concerns became imperative, and was compared ironically by some to May 68, when the economy also suddenly came to a halt in opposition to the assembly-line work and mindlessness of industrial society. The comparison between the COVID-19 pandemic and the sixties is obviously comical. Back then, people threw themselves into the feverish pleasure of political demonstrations. Presently, COVID has us at home in lockdown, in a kind of internal exile. With the digitization of the world, the great hope that society would have finally been humanized is receding into the distance. In a strange inversion of May 68 values, it has been those on the rightsupporters of Trumpwho have waged the war against the lockdown in the name of freedom. The fact that a large number of societys loudest forces now bend towards the radical right is telling of the U-turn that our societies are engaged in. Yet the criticisms voiced by the young hippies in California and the leftists in Paris have also found echoes in present-day society, be it with radical groups such as Extinction Rebellion in the name of ecology or Black Lives Matter in favor of civil rights. The polarization of politics, the criticism of the contemporary world, are becoming as sharp as they were in the sixties, when they were directed against industrial society. History is coming full circle.