so that they can begin to reason systemically. This approach to learning is distributed, laterally scaled and empowered, so that everybody participates and learns from each other.
And finally, students are encouraged to volunteer in the community, to share their skills with their neighbors and work alongside local businesses, non-profit organizations and governments. This approach breaks open the walls of the university and allows for an open relationship between students and their neighbors. There is no division between the school and the community. It becomes one learning community. These are extraordinary accomplishments.
We need more people like Pierre. Pierre’s contribution is already helping to change the approach to higher education in other regions of France, and hopefully in the future around the world.
Jeremy RIFKIN
June 2021
Preface
My first two books, La transition fulgurante (“The Lightning Transition”) and La fulgurante recréation (“The Lightning Recreation”), describe the systemic upheaval we are experiencing on a global scale. The work comes after the combination of a powerful and large-scale technoscientific transition with the massive emergence of the interwoven and “co-elaborative” mode of conceiving cooperation within complex systems (technical and human). According to these two books, it is the source of a true anthropological revolution.
The third book, Au crépuscule des lieux (“At the Twilight of Places”), describes how this metamorphosis led to a generalized deconstruction of locality in the broad sense: the status of “taking place” in space and time, as well as psychological, symbolic and social place. It also shows how these deconstructions were generating, before our eyes, a quest for meaning, providing its own solution: the reconstruction of new places of meaning. These third places in the reinvention of the world were presented in this third work as well as in the fourth, published in 2020, La Crise de la joie (“The Crisis of Joy”), as a source of hope and joy.
However, I remained dissatisfied, because this demonstration remained centered on the analysis of the symptoms and did not focus enough on the epistemological sources of this upheaval. My question was then: “What underlying mutations in the process of building knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, were underpinning this transformation?”
Jérôme Vignon, in the preface to La transition fulgurante, opened his remarks on the need to deal with this question by describing the upheaval in question as an epistemological revolution. Bertrand Vergely, in the preface to Au crépuscule des lieux, referred to Michel Foucault‘s (1966) “épistémè” to identify what he thought underlay my approach. The concept of episteme, according to Foucault, highlights the existence of a “frame of thought of an era”, which permeates the sciences as well as culture (philosophy, arts, lifestyles). This prompted me to approach, modestly and in part, the work of this great thinker. And the required effort led me to reread the concepts of my three works, going deeper into questioning the source of everything: “How is science developed as a cultural object?” Also, conversely, “How do the systemic upheavals of the world modify science and through it, the whole cultural field?” And, finally, “How far does the metamorphosis in such a development suggest a potentially beneficial approach to individual and collective learning?”
Then an image came to mind, that of a river flowing into a sea of joyful and renewed hope. It would be a question of identifying the topological displacement of its bed by coloring the water of its source in order to better describe the new path taken. Thus, my hope would be renewed and I would feel a sense and joy, feeling again able to identify what doing the right thing means “here and now”. Because the river, like life and the living world, is a single flow subject to the rules of time and also a timeless whole. The Jordan of the Bible is no longer quite the Jordan of today; however, it remains the Jordan because people, by naming it, have endowed it with much more than the sum of all its physical and chemical characteristics.
June 2021
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank those who, as debaters or editors, have made this publication possible, for their various contributions:
– Jeremy Rifkin for his Foreword and his support.
– Maël Montévil for our exchanges, his proofreading and all his remarks and conceptual enrichments, as well as his Postface. Maël Montévil is a researcher in organizational theory at the IRI.
– Stanislas Deprez for his proofreading and his contributions in the form of philosophical commentaries on the key ideas of each chapter. Stanislas Deprez is a philosopher and lecturer in philosophy.
– Paul Jorion, Nicolas Vaillant, Christophe Fachon and Benoit Robyns for their direct contributions (chapters). Paul Jorion is a professor and essayist, anthropologist and sociologist. Nicolas Vaillant is a research director and economist. Christophe Fachon is Director of the Institut supérieur d’agriculture de Lille. Benoit Robyns is a research director at JUINA Institute, a recognized specialist in smart grids, and the author of numerous books.
– Arnaud Devos for his expert guidance on quantum physics. Arnaud Devos is a CNRS researcher and a professor of microelectronics.
I would also like to thank:
– Yves Poulet for his critique of the chapter on “endo-contribution law”. Yves Poulet is a professor and researcher in digital law.
– Alain de Vulpian and Irène Dupoux-Coûturier for our numerous debates and our mutual enrichment following their reading of the successive versions. Alain de Vulpian is an anthropologist and Irène Dupoux-Coûturier is a historian and co-founder of SOL France.
– Thierry Magnin for his advice and proofreading. Thierry Magnin is a professor of physics, theologian and philosopher, and the author of numerous works on the ethics of science.
– Jean Pierre Rosa for his precise proofreading. Jean Pierre Rosa is a philosopher.
– Gerland Lees for his work on the translation of the text. Gerald Lees is a language consultant and translator.
Introduction
The digital revolution is systemic in nature. It is primarily epistemological, indeed gnoseological. It is bringing about a metamorphosis of science and technology as a cultural object. This metamorphosis is taking place at the heart of a fundamental duality of the human soul: the place/link duality. In addition, the new forms of potential released by science and technology are foundering on the ecological and anthropological challenges of their implementation. Perceived, according to one’s beliefs, either as salutary or apocalyptic, the outcome of the debate on the very nature of their development and their use is crucial today. It involves both a choice regarding the way of life and an orientation towards the continuation of our long process of humanization. It concerns the whole of humanity. All this contributes in the social and cultural field to a crisis of meaning and joy. This crisis, like any crisis in the living world, mobilizes forces for conservation against forces for alteration; against deconstruction,
