A talk by Daniel Ross on the work of Bernard Stiegler who has been engaged in a long-term project to rethink the intersection of technology and humanity as an inextricable an interrelated process.

Bernard Stiegler has been engaged in a long-term philosophical project to explore the interrelation and co-dependency of technology and humanity. Within this he has examined the unfolding history of media technologies that have given rise to the institutions and practices of – for example - aesthetics, politics, rational thought. Each new technological epoch produces shocks and disruptions that require social adjustment and the adoption of new cultural practices for using the new technologies.

This necessary readjustment and the new forms of knowledge it requires are, however, threatened by the rapid forward pace of technology. In a series of recent articles and in his latest book, La Société Automatique, Stiegler suggests that in the Anthropocene epoch there exists an anti-social ideology that promotes the adaptation to technological change as inevitable. It is an ideology that closes off the rational and critical processes of collective debate required to adopt, rather than adapt, to technology. The nihilistic self-destructive trajectory of this automatic acceptance of the latest innovation is becoming increasingly apparent.

For Stiegler, responding to the Anthropocene is a question of the invention of new forms of knowledge. This requires an aesthetic, political and philosophical questioning that necessarily involves making a fork in the path of our current approaches to 'the digital' - and establishing new digital practices alongside reframing our institutions.

Daniel Ross is currently a Prometeo researcher at Yachay Tech in Ecuador. He has frequently written about the work of Bernard Stiegler and is currently translating Stiegler’s most recent book, which will be published by Polity Press in 2016 as Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work.

Patrick Crogan (Chair) is the author of Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation and Technoculture and he works across a range of themes and elements of digital media technoculture, from games to drones.

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