Escaping the anthropocene

Bernard Stiegler

pp. 149-163

in: Mauro Magatti (ed), The crisis conundrum, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Algorithmic automation has led to both a decline of wage labour and employment and a cultural proletarianisation, that is a loss of theoretical and practical knowledge. On one side, algorithmic automation influences the imminent disappearance of the Keynesian model of redistributing productivity gains, a model that has until now been the basis of the macroeconomic system's ability to remain solvent. On the other, it has deprived us of people abilities, causing a vertiginous increase in entropy. To invert this trend, the alternative path requires negentropic abilities—originating human power of agency—to be widely developed on a massive scale via a reorganisation of economics.