Stratoanalysis of the Digital

Abstract

As we shape them, our tools have the power to shape us too. By using digital instruments that enhance thought, however, we are ending up thinking through them and becoming increasingly dependent on their configuration.
Today ubiquitous on the web, recommendation algorithms and homeomorphic interfaces mediate the relation between the psychosphere and the infosphere, automatically regulating themselves on our behaviours to suggest to us always new connections between ideas or products. Addressing the disruptive psychological and socio-political effects of such instruments, this research revolves around two main questions: How is digital technology grafted onto human life? How do machines perceive and change the world?
To answer these interrogatives, this research mobilizes the philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon, in conjunction with concepts borrowed from the natural sciences and complexity theory, to articulate a connection between biological and technological thought and provide the theoretical background for an investigation of the current exploitation of our co-evolutionary relation with technology, elaborating on Leroi-Gourhan’s definition of anthropogenesis as technogenesis and Stiegler’s analysis of hyperindustrial exosomatisation. Against this background, the dissertation provides a holistic and multi-level description of the transformations that involve and relate life and the digital by developing and employing the descriptive method I call stratoanalysis. This method outlines three intermeshing levels of reality (the physicochemical, the organic and the socio-political ones) by outlining their processes of emergence, and describes their relationship with the digital stratum, that is, with the algorithmically mediated process of emergence of a new hybrid subject of power I call the artisanal cyborg.
Describing this figure and the form of power it is subject to, this work proposes to update our understanding of contemporary modalities of domination in view of the relation between the digital and the virtual, as the ontological dimension of possibility targeted by pre-emptive computational power.