Philosophies of Technologies

12From the Infinite Universe to the Reflexive System: Uses of Technology, States of Emergency and Decidability

12.1. Introduction

Much has been written about the use of technologies during recent states of emergency¹. Indeed, September 11 marked a break with a long-term trend where respect for the private sphere had become the norm, at least in theory, within the republican (Kant’s Towards Perpetual Peace) and democratic paradigms (Declaration of Human Rights): unlike the panopticon described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, surveillance technologies were only supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances. Since 2001, the situation created by the terrorist attacks has been used to legitimize the mass use of new surveillance technologies, which has been made possible by the digital revolution. The transmission of information and communications in packets of bits makes it possible to process and index data with an unprecedented scale and discretion.

The states of emergency linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in 2018 and continued through 2019 and 2020, are even more overwhelming in terms of restrictions on freedoms and, in this regard, appear as a precedent. Whether or not this is just a phase, however, is still open to debate. The related technical facts are also powerful, but in a more bivalent way. The use of surveillance applications as indiscriminate tracing tools has been widely criticized² and has generally failed to gain acceptance; on the other hand, ...