Digital critique

Olivier Alexandre, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Sébastien Broca (dir.), Réseaux, n^o 231, 2022/1, Critiques numériques [Digital critique], La Découverte, 294 p.

This issue is available in English on Cairn International.

The term techlash, first used in the pages of The Economist in 2013 , has since enjoyed some success as a result of mounting criticism of Silicon Valley corporations and, more generally, of digital technologies .

This introductory article to the thematic dossier reminds us that the increasing number of challenges to Silicon Valley is part of a longer history of social mobilization and critical theories of computing and networks. The aim of this dossier is to re-read the history of the digital age through the prism of criticism. The historiography and sociology of these critiques enable us to reconstruct the stages in the construction of the digital as a homogeneous object, despite a multitude of practices, spaces and meanings. They also shed light on the themes that have accompanied this development. This introduction outlines a sociohistory of digital criticism from the late 1970s onwards, highlighting both the continuity and renewal of critical motifs from that period to the current techlash. From there, the dossier offers analytical tools that testify to the influence of older philosophical and political lineages such as social critique, liberal critique and ecological critique. The study of digital criticism thus re-enacts the classic opposition between internal and external criticism. Finally, the article reflects on the “digitizations of critique”.