L'optimisation du quotidien. Sur l'affinité entre la culture de la souveraineté individuelle et l'industrie culturelle numérique.
(2026)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Hunyadi, Mark
- Abstract
- How can we make sense of our embrace of the digitization of everyday life? Is it really self-evident that each new step in the automation of our decisions is adopted without any friction? The argument put forward is that our widespread submission to platforms stems from a culture of individual sovereignty, or that the “individual sovereign” (Ehrenberg) is the perfect user (Bratton). From this perspective, digitization does not impose itself ex nihilo by prescribing both a technology and a corresponding way of life; rather, it grafts itself onto a historically formed subjectivity predisposed to welcome it. In a society haunted by the fear of downward mobility, where each choice can tip an individual from success into failure, recommendation algorithms and Quantified Self techniques function as tools that simulate a “self-certainty” (Bourdieu) through data-driven calculation. Seen in this light, the current triumph of artificial intelligence stems less from the intrinsic efficiency of the technical system than from our failure to politically produce a sense of identity. From the standpoint of a critical theory of culture, this argument accounts for the proliferation of connected devices in our daily lives, the overall rise in the influence of Big Tech, and the subordination of our shared rationality to the ideology that automated information processing legitimizes decisions. In conclusion, the analysis suggests that to emancipate ourselves from the “dictatorship of algorithms” (Fourquet & Hoang), we must move beyond the paradigm of sovereignty and reconnect with democratic practice, initiating a shift from the culture industry to cultural democracy.
- Affiliations
Citations
Ghins, J.-B. (2026). L’optimisation du quotidien. Sur l’affinité entre la culture de la souveraineté individuelle et l’industrie culturelle numérique. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274018