Let’s start with the weaknesses of our cognitive structures. The disarray created by the pandemic led to its initial diagnosis through ideological bubbles and horizontal communication networking. The resulting ‘spinning of perception compasses’ disrupted critical intervention efforts in the immediate aftermath of the emergency, particularly in communities with overly rigid or permissive leaderships, regardless of the political regimes in force.7 One just has to look at how the Chinese state’s hermeticism ultimately constituted the best escape hatch for the virus to all of China and beyond. Or how posturing by the US head of state exacerbated the healthcare stalemate. This dispersal of perceptions also weighed on public debate and the corrective measures that were projected on economic models.

Due to the central role digital networks have played since the onset of the crisis, they have undoubtedly been affected by this ‘spin’ and found themselves somewhat in the crossfire. IT resources have been deployed heavily in response to the emergency, albeit not without errors or backpedaling.8 For many businesses and governments,9 the crisis has forced a rapid advancement in computerization,10 something that had previously been strategically undervalued or delayed.11 Of course, the revenues of many IT services – excluding various privileged sectors – have declined.12 Nevertheless, this line of business has made a double gain in legitimacy, boosting economic growth and consequently fitting into most economic recovery plans in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and elsewhere.13 But in turn, and below the media radars, the effectiveness of computerization in certain areas has inevitably led to a new wave of feudalism by furthering an all-out dependence, monopoly, and a spectre of surveillance. Feudalism, as a particular form of predation, is a relationship in which one of the two parties is able to extract wealth by force or impose a transaction on the other.14 It is akin to the conquest and control of territories, this time not in the geographic space but in the economic sphere, by a new breed of ‘lords’ who are disposed to wage battle at their borders to defend their domination and eventually redistribute their excess wealth as an act of charity.

In the US, the head of the White House rants about the country’s tech monopolies and the Attorney General has announced that he wants to initiate antitrust proceedings against Google. If we are to believe Standard & Poor’s analysis, the six digital giants – namely Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft – have broken previous stock market valuation records, holding nearly a quarter of the world’s total market valuation amongst themselves. Their market value increased by around 43 percent between January and September 2020, while the rest of the large companies on the same index saw their cumulative value decline by 4 percent.15 In Europe, against a backdrop of re-industrialization and computerization of services, the recent concession of national sovereign data by governments to US corporations has generated much outrage. Despite the General Data Protection Regulation (2018) and the invalidation of the Privacy Shield voted on at the European level in July 2020, France, for example, has decided to implement its national Health Data Hub with Microsoft.16 Furthermore, almost everywhere, under the garb of security measures, the temptation for surveillance has gained ground both in authoritarian regimes as well as in democracies that, at least outwardly, preach about citizens’ rights. On top of this, we have seen a resurgence of cyberattacks and hijackings (including those on health systems) that have been engulfed in the vortex of the pandemic to monetize a share of the destruction.17

This sequence of events leads us not far from a Hobbesian state of nature whose cacophony would encourage us to revisit the social contract at the heart of our societies. The idea is not that far-fetched either. For now, we will measure the change of scale achieved by ‘network rapacity’ by taking a look at one of the first such theses published in 1998 in Hijacking the World: The Dark Side of Microsoft, and those compiled by Shoshana Zuboff in 2019 in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The titles speak for themselves. This particular rapacity of networks, as Niall Ferguson reminds us,18 is only touched upon by the sycophants of the techno-industrial revolution who hardly evoke the idea of negative externalities and are worried about the rising frictions of globalization. The boost provided by the pandemic to digitization has also led to a spurt in its forms of predation, letting the new digital economy emerge by the force of circumstances in the backdrop of an inappropriate ‘apprehension by thought’. The confusion, the superficiality of discourses, and the rise of oxymorons (‘inclusive growth’, ‘inclusive labor markets’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘netizen’) reflect a growing disconnect between these different plans.

Schematically, for the proponents of dominant neoliberalism, the ‘digital revolution’ is a central vector of growth that must be made to coincide with the postulates of liberal or state regulation of markets, perfect competition, and the primacy of shareholder value; it will usher in a green economy or the “great reset”19 that would embody the new course to follow in order to meet global challenges. Here, digitization is seen as one disruptive innovation, among others. This is the perception of the Sino-American duopoly and it is the vision that President Xi Jinping has just outlined20 amid geopolitical tensions that intensify the competition around electronic technologies. For the heterodox – from Marx and Keynes to Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith, or Jeremy Rifkin among others – whose theoretical field widens to socio-cultural dimensions, digitization is a novelty that perpetuates the inequalities of wealth, asymmetrical relations, and the primacy of finance. They criticize the general equilibrium theory preached by neoliberalism. For others, for instance Yanis Varoufakis, Thorstein Veblen, Gaël Giraud, or Pierre Calame, the digital is a relative, even ‘technicist’ innovation, which distills changes in the physiognomy of societies and must be put at the service of a transition towards a more sustainable economic matrix, a matrix which cannot be reduced to the dominant economic trends. Digital networks are also seen as a technical element. This is true for the Green New Deal proposed by the Democratic Party in the US, which oddly, in the country of Silicon Valley, mentions low technology but ignores digital innovation.21 In all these cases, IT, thus distanced and reduced to the ‘digital’, only serves political ends – not a negative in itself – and is relegated to the background. Above all, it is not seen as a ‘new technical system’ – a synergy of fundamental techniques to organize the economy and the society, which has consequences for the anthropological field. We will elaborate on this concept a little later.

Ultimately, it is as if the brutality of the collisions triggered by the digital continent continues to elicit behaviors oscillating between fascination, mimicry, and blindness on the one hand, and refusal and negation on the other. The current transition to a new technical system is a period of turmoil in which entrepreneurs with the first-mover advantage generate high profits, while others remain prisoners of older forms of organization to which they have become accustomed. Computerization still appears to be a phenomenon ‘endured’ by the majority of economists and elites who perceive neither its full potential nor the dangers to which societies are exposed with its emergence. Potentialities are on the side of a new economy that enhances quality, functionalities, services, automation of repetitive tasks, clean power energy, full employment, and new forms of intelligence relying on the alloy between human brains and the programmable automaton. In this respect, if we conclude that the pandemic offers only a small window of opportunity to advance these digital issues, it is because the reform proposals and the political subjects that campaign for these potentialities are, for the moment, too external to the political and social spheres in general, and the ruling spheres in particular.