Automatic Society, Volume 1 (eBook)

Bernard Stiegler is the Director of Cultural Development at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Introduction: Functional Stupidity, Entropy and Negentropy in the Anthropocene 1

1 The Industry of Traces and Automatized Artificial Crowds 19

2 States of Shock, States of Fact, States of Law 41

3 The Destruction of the Faculty of Dreaming 65

4 Overtaken: The Automatic Generation of Protentions 93

5 Within the Electronic Leviathan in Fact and in Law 127

6 On Available Time for the Coming Generation 157

7 Energies and Potentials in the Twenty-First Century 182

8 Above and Beyond the Market 208

Conclusion: Noetic Pollination and the Neganthropocene 226

Notes 248

Index 322

"As Stiegler shows in this important work, there is a glaring and dangerous absence of critical thinking about automation and its effects on political and economic life. His argument is profoundly important: we must interrogate the production and maintenance of automatisms in contemporary life in order to prepare the way for what he calls a dis-automatization of society. Stiegler?s vision for the future calls for the foundation of a new human order in the midst of the Anthropocene, against the entropic violence of capitalism in its current algorithmic guise."

David Bates, UC Berkeley

"At once a bracing critique of algorithmic governmentality, with its accompanying specter of mass unemployment as automated labor displaces humans, and a hopeful call for reversing the ecological devastation of the Anthropocene, Stiegler lays out a blueprint for catalyzing our entry into what he calls the Neganthropocene, an era where knowledge trumps information and human well-being comes before capitalist profits. This provocative book will be of interest to anyone worried about where we are headed and eager to embrace a more positive future."

N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University