CHANTELLE GRAY | The end of imagination, the beginning of dreams: it’s up to us

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the death of French philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler. As a high-school dropout, Stiegler’s career options were hardly those of a budding philosopher. Instead, he opened a jazz club in Toulouse, though it was soon shut down because he refused to become a police informant and sell out his patrons. Still, it was at this very bar where Stiegler’s interest in philosophy took root, inspired by conversations with a regular, philosopher Gérard Granel.

Now without work, Stiegler began robbing banks to care for his family and pay his debts but was caught and arrested in 1978. During his five-year sentence, he turned to philosophy in earnest, sparking a profound journey of self-examination.

Stiegler would eventually enrol in a philosophy course for prisoners, commencing the formal part of his academic journey. During this time, he also maintained correspondence with Granel, who would later introduce him to Jacques Derrida, his doctoral supervisor.

During this period Stiegler developed a fascination with technology and the digital condition. In fact, he began to argue that human existence was inseparable from technology, or “technics”. This is not difficult to see in contemporary society, where it is virtually impossible to separate our everyday experiences from mobile phones, the internet, machine learning and other technologies. But Stiegler also explored how technology is a constitutive part of human memory ― both individual and collective ― which basically means that it is impossible to understand human experience without it.

For example, our phones can be seen as extensions of our minds because they serve as prosthetic tools that expand human capabilities. These external or technological forms of memory are, for Stiegler, central to what makes humans human. It is also what permits collective memory and knowledge to be stored and intergenerationally transmitted.

Stiegler goes as far as to argue that technical extension is what gives memory its creative capacities, because the long-term archiving and sharing of experience and knowledge enables new forms of thought and experience through what we call culture.

But there is a danger too. Because this kind of externalised memory is prosthetic rather than genetic, it carries the risk of eroding our biological memory and fostering an over-dependence on machines that automate various parts of our lives. This is perhaps one of the most important lessons to keep in mind when thinking about and using machine learning technologies.

When, for example, we glibly say “AI” to refer to anything from LLMs to image generators to predictive medical analytic technologies, we run the risk of forgetting what is happening behind the scenes. For Stiegler, two questions are always important: what is being automated, and what is this automation doing to the “temporal fabric” of our shared memory?

The problem of automation in the current time is not simply that the digital economy is a threat to human autonomy. The more pressing issue is that when our thought patterns become increasingly shaped, prompted and pre-empted by algorithmic feedback loops our critical reflection is reduced. A simple example is music recommendations. On the face of it, this is a useful technology that can allow us to discover new music. Until, however, the “creep” begins to catalyse a mounting abdication of agency. Then, before you know it, you are no longer training algorithms, they are training you!

When there is a loss of epochal thought there ensues a crisis of meaning. Today, the right wing has capitalised on this with force.

More insidious than music recommendations is the right-wing creep we are currently witnessing, which has triggered a mistrust of institutions and fellow citizens alike by fostering a conspiratorial mindset. This is what philosophers call an epistemic breakdown ― a collapse in shared knowledge systems that is in our age fuelled by Big Data, machine learning-powered bots and the information saturation they produce.

Stiegler theorises this in terms of the long-term consequences of algorithmic interference, particularly as it relates to human memory and time-consciousness. Think about how long it takes to establish cultural patterns, rituals and knowledges ― long! When we externalise our memories into digital extensions like our phones, or have our thoughts curated by sophisticated algorithms that can powerfully shape how we think and act, we risk botching our shared memory-making, woven from generations of knowledge. These shared traditions, art forms and skills are themselves founded on the possibility of a shared epoch-making, without which we cannot perceive the passage of our societies, cultures and politics across time.

In Stiegler’s work, an “epoch” is a period defined by how humanity organises its collective memory and knowledge through, for example, literature, art and archiving. When our shared histories become short-circuited ― due to the speed of technological change and the inability to collectively adapt to these changes in ways that are healthy for a society, for instance ― we lose our ability for epoch-making or long-term vision. This is what Stiegler means when he says that the long-form threads of memory-time become disrupted.

When there is a loss of epochal thought there ensues a crisis of meaning. Today, the right wing has capitalised on this with force. Just because the left appears to have not caught up, however, does not mean that all those shouty podcast bros are right. Rather, it is a call for us to collectively wake from our slumberous impotence and imagine a different ending, beyond the limitations we ourselves ― in collusion with algorithms ― have placed on the horizon of possibility. Let’s forget the images we have clung to, the failed political programmes we have invested in, the flags we have committed our lives to. Let us instead reimagine a world in waiting, a world dreaming to unfold itself through our collective dreams.

Gray is a professor in the University of Johannesburg department of philosophy and editor-in-chief of the South African Journal of Philosophy