This book is a timely addition to the Innovation and Responsibility set¹, as it is published shortly after the implementation of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)². It can be said that this regulation, which places Europe at the highest level of data protection, illustrates and contributes to the broader notion of “innovation and responsibility”, which almost all the books in the two sets mentioned explain in different ways. The book that follows deals very carefully with the problem of identities in the light of certain digital developments, particularly those of massive data processing (Big Data). It therefore goes far beyond the protection of personal data, which until now has been collected and, in particular, exploited without clearly informing the users. Similarly, it shifts our focus from discourses about technologies, as in Armin Grunwald’s case³, to the technologies themselves, even though they are discreet and difficult to grasp for users.

The approach here is also original, since the central chapter, Chapter 2, is by a researcher with a double competence in engineering sciences and human and social sciences (Armen Khatchatourov). This central part is supplemented by three contributions – by two socio-philosophers (Pierre-Antoine Chardel and Andrew Feenberg) and by a political scientist (Gabriel Périès) – which constitute theoretical reactions to the theses advanced therein. Three of the authors are professor-researchers at the Institut Mines-Télécom Business School and members of the Chair of Values and Policies of Personal Information⁴. They are therefore familiar with the technologies and debates relevant to these issues. Andrew Feenberg is famous in the United States, France and Canada for his analyses of the evolution of technological societies and his ambition to develop a critical theory of technology.

In the context of the growing importance that companies and governments grant to our digital identities, their monitoring or their management, it is important to consider the effects that these changes have on processes of subjectivation, on the becoming subject, and on the free will that we can exercise in digital environments.

In the central part of the book, Chapter 2, Armen Khatchatourov deals with the ambivalence that digital technology brings in this respect: if in some respects it constitutes an opening and an “encapacitation”, in others, by redistributing differently the play between constraints and resistances, it leads to greater malleability of subjects. This chapter therefore examines the concrete ways in which new regimes of subjectivity are constituted, examining the question of identity both in its historical record and in the most recent forms of digital technologies (Electronic Identity Management Systems, Big Data and the Internet of Things, “the Quantified Self”). Armen Khatchatourov returns to the notion of the person, at the heart of the protection of data that is precisely qualified as “personal”, as well as to the identity as a repetition of the same (idem) and authentic transformation of the self (ipse), according to Paul Ricœur’s⁵ formulation. The author does not just show how these perspectives may allow us to understand from afar what is at stake in digital technology. Knowing the technologies in question, he shows almost in situ, and in any case in context, the processes according to which this “identification”, with all the ambiguity that accompanies it, is constructed.

In addition, Khatchatourov strongly resituates the debate on privacy in theoretical relationship with Altman and Mead’s interactionist approaches. The individual and his or her private life are negotiated in social interactions. This private life does not simply involve a personal choice to escape surveillance. He therefore vigorously revisits the terms of the debate on privacy and the injunction to defend it as individual or simply economic values, these values being the theoretical underpinning of the consent-based approach.

Borrowing from Foucault and even more from Deleuze, Armen Khatchatourov shows the ambiguities of the consent paradigm at a time when our society seems to correspond to what the two philosophers saw as control societies. They would undoubtedly be amazed to see how far the means of control have extended today, especially with the complicity, implicit or explicit, of those who claim to be liberal. Beyond a hidden technological power, another novelty is undoubtedly the coexistence of the injunction of data protection and the social imperative of visibility.

Armen Khatchatourov also questions current legislative approaches, such as the GDPR regulation, which are ambiguous, for example because of their desire to guarantee data portability throughout Europe. Certainly, it is practical; it is even said that it will give more control to the user by means of interoperable formats. However, at the same time, the door is opened to the exchange of this same data by many other actors, thereby reducing the real autonomy of individuals.

He then convincingly invites us to move from the concept of autonomy – the counterpart of traditional modes of governance that now seem to be giving way to “algorithmic” governance – to what he calls “modulated autonomy”. Indeed, the “overdetermination of the private domain” (to use the author’s expression) – and therefore the scope of the subject’s autonomy – depends on legislative or commercial variations and fluctuations, and therefore can lead to the strengthening of surveillance and control over the individual. Once again, there is the risk of the expropriation of individuations, in the strong sense given to the term of individuation by the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon.

Pierre-Antoine Chardel’s chapter, Chapter 1, places the issue of identity in the context of broader ethical questions. He questions the digital as an experience that makes its effects indistinguishable from a phenomenological point of view, since complex technological environments are beyond the immediate understanding of users. Moreover, digital technology creates contradictory injunctions⁶, because what emancipates the users is at the same time what can constrain them. In these new conditions, ethical questions relating to autonomy and free will are posed with strength and necessity.

Pierre-Antoine Chardel connects these questions to discourses on transhumanism, connected objects, what is often carelessly referred to as “artificial intelligence”, biometric control or facial recognition. He warns against reducing identity to a sum of objective and partial digital traces, and calls for its permanent reconstruction. If a body can be recognized by its biological characteristics, this is not the case for a subject in constant evolution. Identity includes “gaps”, does not retain everything in memory and is constantly being rebuilt; hence the importance of a certain right to opacity. This is all the more necessary as a trend towards that which Armen Khatchatourov calls “memorial exhaustiveness” is made possible by the ease of data collection; even more so if the data were reused for both economic and political purposes. In this chapter, authors who have not been covered much so far in this set are examined: Henri Bergson’s principle of change, Gilles Deleuze’s definition of ethics and Zygmunt Bauman’s description of contemporary society, known as “liquid”.

Drawing on other resources, such as that of Wiener, Gabriel Périès’ chapter (Chapter 3) continues the reflection in a more political and sociological way, opening up a broader spectrum, in order to grasp systemic aspects of the construction of individual identities in the new management of cities called “intelligent” or “interactive” (smart cities). It provides a political perspective on the management of digital identities by public and private authorities, exploring the new forms of normativity that are at stake. It discusses new concepts such as “electronic” citizens or citizenship, which are emerging in the territorial and urban management of digital identities.

In Chapter 4, Andrew Feenberg offers a complementary and different point of view. This chapter re-examines the question of “control societies” as analyzed by Foucault and Deleuze and contrasts them with an examination of the social processes of recent decades and the emancipation that may be at work there. Andrew Feenberg considers, contrary to the predominant view, that the control society is merely a continuation, by new means, of the unidimensionality that the Frankfurt School denounced through Marcuse, whose work he knows particularly well. The problematic questions that Armen Khatchatourov and Pierre-Antoine Chardel ask him during this interview put to the test the resources of critical theory in the context of our new digital environments.

This book completes the Innovation and Responsibility set by going into the depths of the digital infrastructures of information exchange which, because they are difficult to grasp, require knowledge that has not previously been mobilized to ask ethical and epistemological questions. We must be able to decipher our information machines and especially the normative systems that organize them, without falling into blind technophobia.

Between autonomy and control, the title of the book takes up the important themes of responsibility, which appears in several different ways in debates in moral philosophy. Autonomy and freedom can be the conditions for responsibility, as Robert Gianni has defended⁷.

Mastery of one’s actions may be a condition of responsibility for many moral philosophers. However, the problem arises all the more acutely when we are dealing with processes over which we have only very partial mastery. It is then that we must re-discuss, in the new digital conditions, the various conceptions of responsibility, both individual (as capacity to act or virtue) and organizational (as transparency, auditability and accountability). We have a strong feeling that crucial issues for ethics of the future lie in the renewal of these questions.

Bernard REBER

Center of political researches of Sciences Po (CEVIPOF)