Social Contracts in the Digital AgeStanislas Bigirimana
part of:
Twenty-second Annual NYU Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy
November 12, 2027, 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Department of Philosophy, New York University
New York 10003-6611
United States
Organisers:
New York University
New York University
(unaffiliated)
New York University
Topic areas
Details
- Social contracts emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as responses to the decline of naturalistic theories of social organization which derived from the belief in a divine order which enforced the will of God through absolute monarchs. However, (1) naturalistic theories of the universe (especially Newton’s mechanics), (2) the emergence of religious diversity which made difficult the possibility of a consensus on what constitutes the “will of God” and hence the social and political order derived from that will and (3) the rise of natural science as an epistemological framework for both the description of reality and the articulation of knowledge. In this context, social contracts theories start by a hypothetical “state of nature” on what would happen if humans were left on their own without authority. They reject the biblical narrative of special human beings created in the image of God.
- This essay will argue for a social order based on the notion of information. Going back to Wiener (1948)’s definition of information as “negative entropy” i.e. “negative disorder” or “degree of organization”, information is defined as patterns of (self)-organising matter and energy at the micromolecular, neural, cultural, bureaucratic levels and in artifacts such farms, social and economic systems, corporations and software. Information creates an ecological continuity between the inorganic, the organic, and the artificial through a parallelism between levels of control (Beniger, 1986) and levels of consciousness (Fuchs-Kittowiski, 1991). Henceforth, with information processing occurring in macromolecules such as the DNA, across synaptic connections, in various social organisations but also in a formalized way in bureaucracies and in artifacts such as software, corporations, farms and human made organisations, there is a possibility of transcending the idea that the public is made of real individual human beings because there is a growing “online constituency” made of facebook and watsapp groups, twitter and youtube videos where where people express their grievances and exchange views without necessary sharing the same physical space.
- The notion of The Public goes much beyond people who share physical boundaries. One may also argue that the Public goes beyond individual human beings and includes artificial intelligent agents such as robots, automated production systems, corporations, or human-made environments such as buildings, farms or genetically modified organisms.
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