Philosophies of Technologies

4The Code Paradigm: Trace Amnesia and Arbitrary Interpretation

4.1. Introduction

While it is commonplace to note that our lives, whether material, social, intellectual or cultural, are conditioned by the use of digital technology and instruments, it is often more difficult to determine the scope and depth of the changes or evolutions we observe. In this chapter of the book, we focus on the nature of knowledge and the relationship we more or less implicitly establish when we assert this knowledge about that: what relationship do we then understand between this, which is the knowledge, and that, which is what is known? More specifically, how do they differ from one another, and how does the evolution of what is known translate into a joint transformation of the knowledge that takes it as its object?

What we want to explore here is how digital technology introduces a new paradigm of knowledge, in other words, a new type of relationship between knowledge and the object of this knowledge (what is known). This relationship is code. Of course, we did not wait until the digital era to mobilize codes, establishing them both to encode and to decode content, but it had rarely crossed the minds of their designers that the purpose of code was to establish an epistemic link with what is coded. On the contrary, most of the time, code is what is used to make the link between knowledge and its object obscure and inaccessible: code has to be broken, or, at the very least, analyzed, in order ...