English version -> Version française.

The Galilean moment of the networks ... You can not understand.

Those who say "The Digital", "The Machine Learning", "The Artificial Intelligence", etc. Those who imagine that the world is finally unified and stabilized around GAFAM and BATX . Those who see ethics as a sort of patch adapted to the market and events - events that are not really because it's always more of the same thing -. Those can not understand ...

In the history of networks, there have been several "Galilean moments" that have been refused. This is the case of the " Mbone" experiment in the mid-90s at the same time as the advent of the web. An entirely different topology of the Internet could have prevailed. In this case, neither Google, nor Facebook, nor the others would have existed in the form we know them.

The "Mbone" or "Multicast Backbone" is a network with a symmetrical peer-to-peer end-to-end protocol.

Why did not it develop? Well because Telecom operators have not seen their interest. The protocol was deemed "not scalable", which means that operators did not know where to put their cash drawers and governments did not know where to put their black boxes.

And yet it moves! ( "E pur si muove" Galileo Galilei (1633))

I feel like one of the last to remember that this network worked perfectly; that he was able to connect people instantly, without any middleman, and to do whatever they want to do!

Then other experimental networks were born, making the Mbone supposedly obsolete. However, these new networks have only been interested in the performance of the data flow, no longer at the symmetry of the protocol.

In short, "The Digital" seems to me like a world locked in its geocentrism. More precisely, we only know the first of the "anoptical perspectives": the "temporal perspective" which finds as vanishing points into the hubs of the network. If we remain stuck in this world, it remains only to evaluate the computing power of the hubs in question. In short to count the points, or to distribute the good and bad points as the GDRP is preparing to do it in order to try desperately to counter the obscurantism of the platforms and the posthumanism of the gurus.

But as the Mbone has shown, there is a second "anoptical perspective": the "digital perspective" that describes the functionning of peer-to-peer distributed networks. In this case, there are no more "vanishing points" but "vanishing codes": the codes under which the agents exchange and form assemblies. On such a network, phenomena emerge in quite another way, probably following a process similar to a "conversation" ...

But hey, you can not understand ...

An article by OlivierAuber , originally published on Facebook and reproduced with his kind permission.
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Sources of "inspiration" (disagreement) :

Luciano Floridi (2018), Soft Ethics and the Governance of the Digital
https://www.academia.edu/35948664/Soft_Ethics_and_the_Governance_of_the_Digital

Jean-Paul Delahaye; Clément Vidal (2018): Universal Ethics: Organized Complexity as an Intrinsic Value
https://zenodo.org/record/1172976

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In other words

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