I.3. Is a positive future accessible?
Among the different factors in the metamorphosis, we will therefore have to discern those which work towards the conservation of our humanization process and those which work towards its demolition without the possibility of reconstruction. The big dream of the Tofflers and then of the “internetophiles”, that of a general “de-massing” supported by technologies in favor of diversification and cultural hybridization, creating a rise in awareness of the challenges of the common good and of interdependence, is not yet here, even if the first weak signals are present and there is undeniable progress. The standardization required by technologies, including the most recent ones resulting from the development of artificial intelligence, for example, continue to standardize the human and direct them towards the numerically most probable situations, including in matters of consumption. We can thus speak of entropization leading inexorably to the death of systems. Maël Montévil speaks of a sterilization of human activities required for the convergence of the said activities with the algorithmic capacities of machines. Hannah Arendt already alerted us regarding language in The Human Condition (Arendt 1958). Basically, we are faced with a growing rejection of exo-distribution (EXD), which hierarchizes, and in all fields. In this, it is indeed a new episteme that is emerging.
It is high time that the adequate anti-entropy was invented at the heart of our socio-economic systems, as has existed in the living world for almost 4 billion years. We badly need it to stem the migration towards the maximum entropy of our biosphere and sociosphere. The concept of anti-entropy was introduced by Francis Bailly, Giuseppe Longo and Maêl Montévil (Stiegler and Montévil 2019) to resolve the incompleteness of the concept of negentropy (negative entropy) to characterize what happens in the living world. Indeed, entropic regulation allows it to keep organisms alive for a given time and, thanks to reproduction, allows maintenance over a very long period of time as regards a species or a biological ecosystem.
Today, the most catastrophic scenarios based on the theory of a general and concomitant collapse (climate, ecological, demographic, financial, in petroleum, etc.) are blossoming, and supposed to result in a sudden global collapse (Diamond 2005; Servigne and Stevens 2015). However, the majority of the world scientific community refutes this thesis in favor of a succession of various collapses more localized in time and space, whose point of irreversibility, depending on their nature, would be around 2050. It is no less catastrophic but subject to a certain progression.
However, I put forward the idea that the consubstantial learning capacity of the living world generates before our eyes a contributory metamorphosis which may lead us towards socio-cultural and socio-organizational structures similar to those that emerged from the evolution of the living world which has met the theoretically impossible challenge of entropy. To reiterate, all matter tends towards a constantly increasing entropy which constitutes at the nanometric level a migration towards the most probable quantum configuration. It is inexorably subject, as a system, to increasing disorder, to a potential, which by dissipation of energy within the system, leads to its disappearance as an organized system from the point of view of its ordered complexity. This is what we call in everyday language natural wear or aging. However, we have seen previously that this link between entropy and disorder must be handled with care depending on the scale on which we are. Indeed, crystallization by glaciation, for example, is indeed a migration towards a structure that is very organized on the molecular level as well as reduced to nothing in terms of any vital activity of a biological system. Thus, complexity is not synonymous with disorganization or disorder. The biosphere has endured for over 4 billion years, from the appearance of the first living organism, presumably a prokaryote reminiscent of current bacteria, to the present day.
An impossible challenge has therefore been taken up by the biosphere. As stated, it has survived 4 billion years and has never irreversibly and fatally challenged the whole planet’s energy balance. At this point, we may stop for a moment. Indeed, it is evident that during these 4 billion years, collapses occurred leading to the brutal and global extinction of species or families of species. The best-known case is that of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, as well as that of large mammals.
From this perspective, global warming could lead to the end of the human species and of a large number of insect and mammal species, which would constitute an “intelligent” way for the biosphere to avoid the global and total extinction of the living world, i.e. itself. This scenario of the total extinction of the biosphere is almost impossible. For example, there are already organisms that manage to use the energy of the Chernobyl radiation for their growth. But to expect it, or even to resign oneself to it, is a selfish insult to future generations. I think of this when I look into the eyes of my granddaughters and when I imagine them looking into those of their progeny, and so on. “Time is greater than space” (Pope Francis). It is therefore a question of looking rather at how the “living system” as a whole has managed and organized its conservation forces in the face of the forces of alteration, its anti-entropy in the face of entropy, its anti-chaos in the face of the inevitable chaos of complex systems over time. It is a question of being inspired by it in order to allow the global living system, including humanity, to preserve itself in a healthy continuation of its process of humanization.
I.4. Is the search for a new alliance with nature driven by the crisis of meaning?
Three centuries of unrivaled dominance by the coupling of mathematics and physics at the heart of the classical scientific revolution (Newtonian physics) led to a large-scale cultural, civilizational and philosophical revolution. But overall, the third millennium will be quantum and biological or it will be nothing. It will proceed from a science of the complex where everything is connected, and be governed by infinite precaution, the alliance with nature and the end of mechanistic and reductionist vision, faced with the quantum mystery. For the living world is an immense patchwork, a tangle of organized, ordered complexities, synchronous and asynchronous ecorithms (Valiant 2013). It is irreducible, because any attempt to define a locality based on a formal construction which characterizes it immediately encounters the influence of the non-local or, on the nanometric scale, the quantum mystery where everything is connected to it.
And what if it were enough to listen to the living world? If we look closely, these structures mimicking the living world emerge everywhere as forms of imperfect responses, a patchwork yet promising in their capacity to regenerate meaning and hope. Thus, this bio-mimicry of the systemic organizations of the living world towards which we would migrate would be a solution emerging from within the living world. And this would apply not only for our models of human interworking, our social organizations, but also for the technological object itself, which could enter a new era, that of the alliance with nature rather than its exploitation without limits and its outright reduction for our own ends. It is about mimicking nature (biomimicry) and developing with it contributory, lasting and regenerative “complicities”, including a reinvention of technosciences as a cultural object.
I.5. An unavoidable gamble?
Thus, I believe that because of the general crisis of meaning which we are experiencing, a learning mechanism consubstantial with the living world is engaged. Will it be powerful enough and fast enough to stem a scenario of even gradual general collapse, or at least limit its disastrous impact? This debate is crucial, because faced with a general rise in theories of global collapse, we see that several attitudes are emerging. The first, most extreme, is to prepare to survive individually or in small communities in a context of general chaos. These are the survivalists, with the most extreme among them going so far as to arm themselves heavily in order to resist potential “barbarian” invasions.
Another attitude consists of trying to amplify and accelerate, in a technoscientific effort without limits, based on a form of techno-worship, a radical technical response to the ecological and climatic challenges, problems arising moreover largely through the technosciences themselves. But in this scenario, the solution would make the problem worse. Some are geo-engineering projects such as the dispersion of
