The Onlife Manifesto

Front matter

Luciano Floridi Fditor

The

~ Onlife Manifesto

Part II Commentaries Charles Ess

Commentary on the Onlife Manifesto... cece ceeseecsecneecnecneeneeenees 25 Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

Mireille Hildebrandt

Commentary by Yiannis Laouris 200.000... eee e eee ceeeeee cee eneececseeeeeeneens 31 Yiannis Laouris

Ugo Pagallo

Judith Simon

May Thorseth: Commentary of the Manifesto... eee eeeeseeteeeteees 37 May Thorseth vi Contents Part III The Onlife Initiative

Background Document: Rethinking Public Spaces in the Digital

Transition aono eE A E E E E E EEEE EA EREEREER 41 The Onlife Initiative

Part VIII The Onlife Initiative—Conclusion Contributors

Stefana Broadbent University College London, London, UK

Nicole Dewandre European Commission, Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology, Brussels, Belgium

Charles Ess Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Luciano Floridi Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire UK

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia LIP6, University Pierre and Marie Curie, Sorbonne Universités, Paris, France

Mireille Hildebrandt Jurisprudence, Erasmus School of Law, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS), Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Law Science Technology & Society (LSTS), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Yiannis Laouris Future Worlds Center, Cyprus Neuroscience & Technology Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus

Lefkosia, Cyprus Claire Lobet-Maris University of Namur—Belgium, Namur, Belgium

Sarah Oates Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Ugo Pagallo University of Torino, Torino, Italy Judith Simon Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Technologies in Practice Group, IT University Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark x Contributors

The Onlife Initiative Oxford, UK

May Thorseth Department of Philosophy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Peter-Paul Verbeek University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

About the Authors

Stefana Broadbent lectures in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. She is the convener of the MSc in Digital Anthropology. Previously she was in the Strategy Board of Swisscom where she also directed a research unit the User Observatory. She was in the Management Team of IconMedialab now LBi a multinational digital consultancy listed in Stockholm. In 1993 she founded CB&J, a research company that was acquired by IconMedialab in 1999. Stefana holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, and a degree in Psychology from the Univesité de Genève. She has lectured in Anthropology and Ergonomics, at the Politecnico di Milano, the ENSAD in Paris. Her recent book L’'Intimite’ au Travail FYP Editions 2011 received the AFCI prize in 2012.

Nicole Dewandre is advisor for societal issues to the Director General of the Directorate General for Communications, Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) at the European Commission. She studied applied physics engineering and economics at the University of Louvain, operations research at the University of California (Berkeley) and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). She entered the European Commission in 1983. She has been a member of the Central Advisory Group and the Forward Study Unit, dealing with strategic analysis of research and industrial policy for the President of the Commission (1986-1992). In 1993, she supported the Belgian Presidency of the European Union in the areas of industry, energy, and consumer policies. She then worked in “science and society” issues (women and science, research and civil society), before being in charge of the “sustainable development” unit that has been put in place in DG Research between 2007 and 2010. She is now working on the societal interface of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

Charles M. Ess is Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. Ess has received awards for excellence in both teaching and scholarship; he has also held several guest professorships in Europe and Scandinavia - most recently as Professor MSO (med særlige opgaver), Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark (2009-2012). Ess has published extensively in Information and Computing Ethics (e.g., Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition, Polity xi xii About the Authors

Press, 2013) and in Internet Studies (e.g., [with William Dutton, OIJ, Special Issue: The Rise of Internet Studies, new media and society 15 (5), 2013). He emphasizes cross-cultural approaches, including virtue ethics and its applications to questions of being human in an (analogue-)digital age — e.g., a recent Webinar for The (E.C.) Digital Futures Task Force and DG CNECT on norms and values for media in the digital age.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Among his recognitions, he was the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, Gauss Professor of the Academy of Sciences in Gottingen, and is recipient of the APA’s Barwise Prize, the IACAP’s Covey Award, and the INSEIT’s Weizenbaum Award. He is an AISB and BCS Fellow, and Editor in Chief of Philosophy & Technology and of the Synthese Library. He was Chairman of EU Commission’s “Onlife Initiative”. His most recent books are: The Ethics of Information (OUP, 2013), The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011), The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (editor, CUP, 2010), and Information: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010).

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia is Professor of Computer Science at the University Pierre and Marie Curie, member of the LIP6 (Laboratory of Computer Science of the UPMC) where he heads the ACASA team and deputy director of the OB VIL Laboratory of Excellence, in cooperation the Sorbonne University with the UPMC on Digital Humanities. His research activities are focused on Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Computational Philosophy and Digital Humanities. He is member of COMETS (the CNRS Ethical Committee) and of CERNA (the Commission on the Ethics of the Digital Sciences for Allistene) which coordinate the French research institutes in computing. He is also an ECCAI Fellow. His most recent books are J.-G., ‘Voir et pouvoir: qui nous surveille?, Editions le pommier, 2009, Idées reçues sur l’intelligence artificielle, Le cavalier bleu, 2007, and Les sciences cognitives, Editions le pommier, 2006

Mireille Hildebrandt is Professor of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS), Radboud University Nijmegen. She is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam and senior researcher at Law Science Technology & Society studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussels. As a lawyer and a philosopher she publishes widely on the nexus of information law, philosophy of law and philosophy of technology. She co-edited Profiling and the European Citizen (Springer 2008), together with Serge Gutwirth, Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing (Routledge 2011), together with Antoinette Rouvroy, Human Law and Computer Law (Springer 2013), together with Jeanne Gaakeer, and Privacy and Due Process after the Compuational Turn (Routledge 2013), together with Katja de Vries. She is editor in chief of the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy and a founding member of the Digital Enlightenment Forum.

About the Authors xiii

Yiannis Laouris is a social and business entrepreneur, a neuroscientist, a systems engineer, and a peace activist currently serving as Senior Scientist and Chair of the Cyprus Neuroscience and Technology Institute (www.cnti.org.cy) and Future Worlds Center (www.futureworlds.eu). He is founding member of the Cyprus Society for Systemic Studies, Board member of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras and of several high-tech companies. In the 90’s he founded CYBER Kids (www.cyber-kids.com), a chain of franchised computer learning centers, which introduced IT in the lives of thousands of children and adults in several countries. He promotes the application of broadband technologies as tools to bridge the digital-, economic-, educational- and inter-personal divides in our planet. His team pioneers internationally in the theory and application of the science of structured democratic dialogue. Their research aims scaling up of participatory dialogic processes to engage asynchronously thousands in meaningful authentic dialogues, thus accelerating institutional and societal change.

Claire Lobet-Maris is a sociologist with a Ph.D. in Labour Studies. As a Professor at the University of Namur in Belgium, she teaches sociology to students studying computer science and law, and she is also Scientific Director for CRIDS (Research Centre on Information, Law and Society), specialised in the sociological, ethical, legal and political evaluation of issues of identity and social bonds associated with the information society. Her research consists in observing and analysing media practices and what they tell us about “being in the world” and “living together”. She is member of the Belgian Academy of Sciences, Belgian representative for the Social Sciences Committee, Sciences for Europe and Scientifce Expert for the ethical commission of Allistene (Alliance des Sciences et Technologies du Numérique — French Government). She is Vice-Rector of the University of Namur (Belgium).

Sarah Oates is Professor and Senior Scholar at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). She is an author of five books about media and democracy, including Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere (OUP, 2013) and Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy: Political Campaigns in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She has been an investigator on several grants that examined the role of information in society, including six funded by the Research Councils of the United Kingdom. Founder of the Google Forum U.K., she is a principal on a grant from the ESRC Google Analytics Social Science Research Program to study the impact of search on informing voters in four countries.

Ugo Pagallo is Professor of Jurisprudence at the Department of Law, University of Turin, since 2000, faculty at the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS) in London and faculty fellow at the NEXA Center for Internet and Society at the Politecnico of Turin. He is a member of the Group of Experts for the Onlife Initiative set up by the European Commission (2011-2013), and chief editor of the Digitalica series published by Giappichelli in Turin as well as co-editor of the AICOL series by Springer. Author of nine monographs and numerous essays in scholarly journals, his main interests are AI & law, network theory, robotics, and information technology law (specially data protection law and copyright).

xiv About the Authors

Judith Simon is senior researcher at the University of Vienna (Department of Philosophy) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis). She was a postdoc at the Institut Jean Nicod (Ecole normale supérieure) in Paris and has held visiting positions in the US (Stanford), Italy (Trento) and Catalonia (CSIC-IIIA Barcelona). Currently, she is researching the relationship between trust, knowledge and various technologies of computation, information and communication as Principal Investigator of the project “Epistemic Trust in Socio-Technical Epistemic System” funded by the Austrian Science Fund. In 2013 she received the Herbert A. Simon Award of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) for outstanding research at the intersection of philosophy and computing. Judith serves as executive editor of the journal “Philosophy & Techology” as well as co-editor of the journal “Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries”, which will be launched in 2014. Her research interests include: philosophy of information and communication technologies, social epistemology, feminist philosophy of science and technology, science and technology studies, technology assessment & values in design.

May Thorseth is Professor of philosophy, Department of philosophy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Director of NTNU’s Programme for Applied Ethics www.ntnu.edu/appliedethics. Thorseth is also member of the management group of NTNU’s Globalization Programme www.ntnu.edu/ global. Project leader of large research project in applied ethics Applied Ethics: Governance of Health and Natural Resources (funded by the Norwegian Research council 2012-2015) www.ntnu.edu/appliedethics/isp-fide. Selected publications on information ethics: Global information and computer ethics, 2010 (with C. Ess), in L. Floridi (ed): The Cambridge handbook of information and computer ethics. CUP (ISBN 978-0-521-88898-1), pp. 163-181; Deliberation Online: An Impediment Against Fundamentalism Offline, 2011.Ofati Socio-Legal Series (ISSN 2079- 5971) Volum 1 (5) pp. 1-17; Trust and Virtual Worlds. Contemporary Perspectives, 2011 (co-edited with C. Ess) Peter Lang Publishing Group 2011 (ISBN 978-1-4331- 0923-2)

Peter-Paul Verbeek (1970) is Professor of philosophy of technology and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is also president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. Verbeek’s research focuses on the anthropological and ethical aspects of human-technology relations. He recently published Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), in which he analyzes the moral significance of technologies, and its implications for ethical theory and for design practices. He is also the author of What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (Penn State University Press, 2005), which investigates the phenomenon of technological mediation, with applications to industrial design. Currently he is working on a book on human enhancement technologies, in which he aims to expand the theory of mediation into philosophical anthropology, and to integrate it further in the ethics of technology.

Introduction

On the 8th of February 2013, The Onlife Manifesto! was released at an inaugural event held in Brussels by DG Connect, the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology.”

The Manifesto was the outcome of the work of a group of scholars, organised by DG Connect, which I had the privilege to chair: Stefana Broadbent, Nicole Dewandre, Charles Ess, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Mireille Hildebrandt, Yiannis Laouris, Claire Lobet-Maris, Sarah Oates, Ugo Pagallo, Judith Simon, May Thorseth, and Peter-Paul Verbeek.

During the previous year, we had worked quite intensely on a project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. We decided to adopt the neologism “onlife” that I had coined in the past in order to refer to the new experience of a hyperconnected reality within which it is no longer sensible to ask whether one may be online or offline. Also thanks to a series of workshops organised by DG Connect, we had investigated the challenges brought about by the new digital technologies. We had debated the impact that ICTs are having on human life, and hence how one may re-engineer key concepts—such as attention, ownership, privacy, and responsibility—that are essential in order to gain the relevant and adequate framework within which our onlife experience may be understood and improved.

In the course of our investigations, we soon realised that the output of our efforts would have been more fruitful by summarising it in a short document—which soon became known as The Onlife Manifesto—and a series of short commentaries

' For the English electronic version and the translations of the Manifesto in French, German and Italia, please visit http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-manifesto.

? DG Connect manages The Digital Agenda of the EU. For further information see http://ec.europa. eu/digital-agenda/en/inaugural-event.

3 The website of the project is available at http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-initiative.

L. Floridi (2) Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, OX1 3JS, Oxford, UK e-mail: luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk

(volunteered by some of us) and longer essays (contributed by each of us) that would explain and position The Manifesto within the current debates on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

The inaugural event represented the official opening of the public discussion of our work. Many more public meetings and international presentations followed.4 As a result, this book is actually a synthesis of the research done in 2012 and the feedback received in 2013.

The book is organised in such a way as to give priority to The Onlife Manifesto. This is the document around which the rest of the book revolves. It is followed by eight short commentaries by Ess, my self, Ganascia, Hildebrandt, Laouris, Pagallo, Simon, and Thorseth. The next chapter is the background document. This contains the material that was used to start and frame the conversations during the initial phases of the project. There follow 12 chapters. In them, members of the group, myself included, have presented some of the ideas that guided our contribution to the Manifesto. Although each chapter may be read independently of the rest of the book, it is a modular part of the scaffolding that led to the Manifesto. A short conclusion, which is more a “to be continued”, ends the book. In terms of authorship, any material that is not explicitly attributed to some author is to be attributed to the whole group, as a collaborative work, endorsed by each of us.

So much for the outline of the project. I shall not add any further details because these can be found in the background document. In terms of an overview of the book’s contents, in the following pages we argue that the development and widespread use of ICTs are having a radical impact on the human condition. More specifically, we believe (see the Preface that introduces The Manifesto) that ICTs are not mere tools but rather environmental forces that are increasingly affecting:

. our self-conception (who we are);

. our mutual interactions (how we socialise);

. our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and . our interactions with reality (our agency).

BRWN Re

In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently.

We are also convinced that the aforementioned impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations:

the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality;

. the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature;

the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and

. the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

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The impact summarised in (1)-(4) and the transformations behind such an impact, listed in (a)-(d), are testing the foundations of our philosophy, in the following

4 For a description see http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/onlife-news. Other meetings are listed here: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/past-meetings.

sense. Our perception and understanding of the realities surrounding us are necessarily mediated by concepts. These work like interfaces through which we experience, interact with, and semanticise (in the sense of making sense of, and giving meaning to), the world. In short, we grasp reality through concepts, so, when reality changes too quickly and dramatically, as it is happening nowadays because of ICTs, we are conceptually wrong-footed. It is a widespread impression that our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear conceptual grasp of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future: we fear and reject what we fail to semanticise. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the rest of the book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our conceptual framework. It is a constructive goal. We do not intend to encourage a philosophy of mistrust. On the contrary, this book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily. Redesigning or reengineering our hermeneutics, to put it more dramatically, seems essential, in order to have a good chance of understanding and dealing with the transformations in (a)—(d) and hence shape in the best way the novelties in (1)-(4). It is clearly an enormous and ambitious task, to which this book can only aspire to contribute.

Disclaimer All the information and views set out in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Acknowledgements Too many people helped us since the shaping of the project for The Onlife Initiative in 2011 to be able to mention them explicitly here. However, a few individuals have been pivotal in the realization of this book, and to them go all our gratitude. We, as a group, would like to thank, within DG Connect, Robert Madelin, Director-General; Franco Accordino, Head of the Task Force “Digital Futures”; and Roua Abbas, Igor Caldeira, Orestis Kouloulas, Julia Molero- Maldonado, and Nicole Zwaaneveld, of the Secretariat of the Advisors to the Director-General; and, within Springer, Ties Nijssen, Publishing Editor for History and Philosophy of Science & Logic, and Lue Christi, Editorial Assistant for History and Philosophy of Science & Logic. My personal thanks go to all the onlifers, as we came to be known, for their wonderful contributions and for all that I have learnt from them, and to Penny Driscoll, my PA, for her indispensable help in editing the volume.

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Part I The Onlife Manifesto

Preface The deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their uptake by society radically affect the human condition, insofar as it modifies our relationships to ourselves, to others and to the world. The ever-increasing pervasiveness of ICTs shakes established reference frameworks through the following transformations!:

i. the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality;

ii.the blurring of the distinctions between human, machine and nature; iii. the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and iv. the shift from the primacy of entities to the primacy of interactions.

The world is grasped by human minds through concepts: perception is necessarily mediated by concepts, as if they were the interfaces through which reality is experienced and interpreted. Concepts provide an understanding of surrounding realities and a means by which to apprehend them. However, the current conceptual toolbox is not fitted to address new ICT-related challenges and leads to negative projections about the future: we fear and reject what we fail to make sense of and give meaning to.

In order to acknowledge such inadequacy and explore alternative conceptualisations, a group of 15 scholars in anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, law, neuroscience, philosophy, political science, psychology and sociology, instigated the Onlife Initiative, a collective thought exercise to explore the policy-relevant consequences of those changes. This concept reengineering exercise seeks to inspire reflection on what happens to us and to re-envisage the future with greater confidence.

This Manifesto aims to launch an open debate on the impacts of the computational era on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, this Manifesto aims to start

' Those transformations are fully described in the Onlife Initiative Background document available on https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-initiative.

L. Floridi (ed.), The Onlife Manifesto, 7 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04093-6_2, © The Author(s) 2015 a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built. This is only a beginning...

1 Game Over for Modernity?

Ideas that hinder policy makings ability to tackle the challenges of a hyperconnected era

§ 1.1 Philosophy and literature have long challenged and revised some foundational assumptions of modernity. However, the political, social, legal, scientific and economic concepts and the related narratives underlying policymaking are still deeply anchored in questionable assumptions of modernity. Modernity has indeed—for some or many—been an enjoyable journey, and it has borne multiple and great fruits in all walks of life. It has also had its downsides. Independently of these debates, it is our view that the constraints and affordances of the computational era profoundly challenge some of modernity’s assumptions.

§ 1.2 Modernity has been the time of a strained relationship between humans and nature, characterised by the human quest to crack nature’s secrets while at the same time considering nature as a passive endless reservoir. Progress was the central utopia, coupled with the quest for an omniscient and omnipotent posture. Developments in scientific knowledge (thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, physiology...) brought about an endless list of new artefacts in all sectors of life. Despite the deep connection between artefacts and nature, an alleged divide between technological artefacts and nature continues to be assumed. The development and deployment of ICTs have contributed enormously to blurring this distinction, to the extent that continuing to use it as if it were still operational is illusory and becomes counterproductive.

§ 1.3 Rationality and disembodied reason were the specifically modem attributes of humans, making them distinct from animals. As a result, ethics was a matter of rational and disembodied autonomous subjects, rather than a matter of social beings. And responsibility for the effects brought about by technological artefacts was attributed to their designer, producer, retailer or user. ICTs challenge these assumptions by calling for notions of distributed responsibility.

§ 1.4 Finally, modern worldviews and political organisations were pervaded by mechanical metaphors: forces, causation and, above all, control had a primary importance. Hierarchical patterns were key models for social order. Political organisations were represented by Westphalian States, exerting sovereign powers within their territory. Within such States, legislative, executive and judiciary powers were deemed to balance each other and protect against the risk of power abuse. By enabling multi-agent systems and opening new possibilities for direct democracy, ICTs destabilize and call for rethinking the worldviews and metaphors underlying modern political structures.

? By posture, we mean the dual notion of stance and posing, or, in other words, of occupying a position and being seen occupying it.

2 In the Corner of Frankenstein and Big Brother

Fears and risks in a hyperconnected era

§ 2.1 It is noteworthy that Cartesian doubt, and related suspicions about what is perceived through human senses, have led to an ever-increasing reliance on control in all its forms. In modernity, knowledge and power are deeply linked to establishing and maintaining control. Control is both sought and resented. Fears and risks can also be perceived in terms of control: too much of it—at the expense of freedom—or lack of it—at the expense of security and sustainability. Paradoxically, in these times of economic, financial, political, and environmental crisis, it is hard to identify who has control of what, when, and within which scope. Responsibilities and liabilities are hard to allocate clearly and endorse unambiguously. Distributed and entangled responsibilities may wrongly be understood as a license to act irresponsibly; these conditions may further tempt business and governmental leaders to postpone difficult decisions and thereby lead to loss of trust.

§ 2.2 Experiencing freedom, equality and otherness in public spheres becomes problematic in a context of increasingly mediated identities and calculated interactions such as profiling, targeted advertising, or price discrimination. The quality of public spheres is further undermined by increasing social control through mutual or lateral surveillance (souveillance), which is not necessarily better than "big brother" surveillance, as increasingly cyberbullying shows.

§ 2.3 The abundance of information may also result in cognitive overload, distraction, and amnesia (the forgetful present). New forms of systemic vulnerabilities arise from the increasing reliance on informational infrastructures. Power games in online spheres can lead to undesirable consequences, including disempowering people, through data manipulation. The repartition of power and responsibility among public authorities, corporate agents, and citizens should be balanced more fairly.

3 Dualism is Dead! Long Live Dualities!

Grasping the challenges

§ 3.1 Throughout our collective endeavour, a question kept coming back to the front stage: “what does it mean to be human in a hyperconnected era?” This foundational question cannot receive a single definitive answer, but addressing it has proven useful for approaching the challenges of our times. We think that handling these challenges can best be done by privileging dual pairs over oppositional dichotomies.

3.1 Control and Complexity

§ 3.2 In the onlife-world, artefacts have ceased to be mere machines simply operating according to human instructions. They can change states in autonomous ways and can do so by digging into the exponentially growing wealth of data, made increasingly available, accessible and processable by fast-developing and ever more pervasive ICTs. Data are recorded, stored, computed and fed back in all forms of machines, applications, and devices in novel ways, creating endless opportunities for adaptive and personalised environments. Filters of many kinds continue to erode the illusion of an objective, unbiased perception of reality, while at the same time they open new spaces for human interactions and new knowledge practices.

§ 3.3 Yet, it is precisely at the moment when an omniscience/omnipotence posture could be perceived as attainable that it becomes obvious that it is a chimera, or at least an ever-moving target. The fact that the environment is pervaded by information flows and processes does not make it an omniscient/omnipotent environment. Rather, it calls for new forms of thinking and doing at multiple levels, in order to address issues such as ownership, responsibility, privacy, and self-determination.

§ 3.4 To some extent, complexity can be seen as another name for contingency. Far from giving up on responsibility in complex systems, we believe that there is a need to re-evaluate received notions of individual and collective responsibility. The very complexity and entanglement of artefacts and humans invite us to rethink the notion of responsibility in such distributed socio-technical systems.

§ 3.5 Friedrich Hayek’s classical distinction between kosmos and taxis, i.e., evolution vs. construction, draws a line between (supposedly natural) spontaneous orders and human (political and technological) planning. Now that artefacts taken globally have come to escape human control, even though they originated in human hands, biological and evolutionary metaphors can also apply to them. The ensuing loss of control is not necessarily dramatic. Attempts to recover control in a compulsive and unreflexive manner are an illusory challenge and are doomed to fail. Hence, the complexity of interactions and density of information flows are no longer reducible to taxis alone. Therefore, interventions from different agents in these emerging socio-technical systems require learning to distinguish what is to be considered as kosmos-like, i.e., as a given environment following its evolutional pattern, and what is to be considered as taxis-like, i.e., within reach of a construction responding effectively to human intentions and/or purposes.

3.2 Public and Private

§ 3.6 The distinction between public and private has often been grasped in spatial and oppositional terms: the home versus the agora, the private company versus the public institution, the private collection vs. the public library, and so forth. The deployment of ICTs has escalated the blurring of the distinction when expressed in spatial and dualistic terms. The Internet is an important extension of the public space, even when operated and owned by private actors. The notions of fragmented publics, of third spaces, and of commons, and the increased focus on use at the expense of ownership all challenge our current understanding of the public-private distinction.