Protocol for a Technologically Emancipated Civilization

Progress fascinates. It always has.

True, the printing press had its detractors. And one can hardly imagine the defenders of medieval walls marvelling at the first bombards that pulverised their ramparts. But since the Renaissance, in the West at least, the enthusiasts have always prevailed over the sceptics. Today, this fascination borders on enchantment.

Yet it is worth remembering that the great technological accelerations have also left the deepest scars on the social body.

Consider the birth of capitalism. Among its founding dynamics, one retains a particular symbolic charge: the enclosures. From the fifteenth century onwards, first in England and then progressively across Europe, the common lands — those commons where peasants had exercised collective rights of use for centuries, allowing them to subsist with dignity — were systematically fenced off, privatised, transformed into exclusive property.

It would take until Proudhon, in the nineteenth century, for a voice to rise: “Property is theft.” But by then, entire populations had been expropriated, driven into the cities, reduced to destitution — thus creating the very conditions for a labour market to exist. Karl Polanyi demonstrated it: this dislocation of rural communities was not a side effect of modernisation. It was its engine. Without the destruction of rural society, the self-regulating system founded on three abstract and interchangeable commodities — land, labour, money — could never have emerged.

The industrial cities that resulted were, first and foremost, places of concentrated misery — fuel for the first industrial revolution, just as much as coal. The wealth created was immense. So were the destruction and wars it engendered. As for the distribution of this wealth, it reached such a level of concentration in the nineteenth century that Piketty, speaking of it two centuries later, coined this formula: “The past devours the future.”

---

We are not today on the brink of yet another bank bailout by our chancellor.

We stand at the crossroads of several major phenomena:

— An entropic dynamic that may lead to planetary environmental collapse;

— Global warming, euphemistically rebranded as “climate change”;

— The unravelling of the world architecture born in 1945 — that balance of terror which, for eight decades, froze the fault lines without ever healing them;

— And a second great industrial revolution, bearing in mind that the first two crises mentioned are precisely the consequences of the first.

Logics similar to those of the enclosures will unfold. This is inevitable. New fences are already being erected — around data, algorithms, digital infrastructures, cognitive resources.

---

This is the purpose of this protocol.

To remember the social struggles of the twentieth century. To honour all those who, throughout history, refused to stand in awe before technological progress and the natural concentration of power. But also — and above all — to anticipate the transformations to come. To implement a resolutely clear-sighted collective action. To aim for the most decisive impact.

No longer to settle for a defensive posture, clinging to gains that were themselves wrested belatedly, in reaction to the upheavals of the first industrial revolution.

To act, this time, in time.