Felix Tréguer, L’Utopie déchue. Une contre-histoire d’Internet, XVe-XXIe siècle. [The Fallen Utopia. A Counter-History of the Internet, Fayard, 2019
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17504
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2038-3460
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Julien Rossi
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Felix Tréguer, The Fallen Utopia. A Counter-History of the Internet, from the 15th to the 21st Century, Fayard, 2019
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Book Reviews
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144-148
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Julien Rossi
2021/11/01
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17504
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Universitè Catholique de l'Ouest
2038-3460
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Felix Tréguer, The Fallen Utopia. A Counter-History of the Internet, from the 15th to the 21st Century, Fayard, 2019
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144                                                             Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

already extremely rich, persuasive, solid, and driven by gargantuan re-
search work. It bears witness to the authors’ remarkable ability to deal with
the extraordinarily inexhaustible subject of carbon, one which still leaves
much to be said, as Lee Bae’s charcoal reminds us.

References
Serafin, A. (2019) Lee Bae’s fascination with charcoal continues to burn bright, in
    “Wallpaper”, November the 22nd 2019 (https://www.wallpaper.com/art/lee-
    bae-exhibition-galerie-perrotin-new-york)
Hessen, D.O. (2018) The Many Lives of Carbon, London, Reaktion.
Hazen, R.M. (2019) Symphony C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Every-
   thing, New York-London, W. W. Norton & Company.
Malm, A. (2016) Fossil Capital, The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global
   Warming, London, Verso.
Renn, J. (2020) The Evolution of Knowledge, Rethinking Science in the Anthropo-
   cene, Princeton, Princeton University Press.



                                       ***

    Felix Tréguer
L’Utopie déchue. Une contre-histoire d’Internet, XVe-XXIe siècle. [The
Fallen Utopia. A Counter-History of the Internet, from the 15th to the 21st
Century], Paris, Fayard, 2019, pp. 350

Julien Rossi Universitè Catholique de l'Ouest

     A few decades ago, the Internet was heralded by many as a new frontier,
a promised land where freedom would reign. It would bring the world to-
gether in a global village, end conflicts, and challenge monopolies of old.
Today, the Internet has become almost frightening, and definitely highly
contentious. For example, end-to-end encryption has become more and
more widely accessible, but it regularly comes under attack by law enforce-
ment and intelligence agencies. Social media are accused of depriving their
users from their privacy and of facilitating the spread of dangerous “fake
news” and terrorist propaganda, fuelling calls for “content moderation”
mechanisms that amount to a restoration of censorship under a new name.
     These debates all seem rather new because the technology at play is
new. L’utopie déchue (in English: The Fallen Utopia), a book derived from
the author’s doctoral dissertation in political science, thus surprises us with
its subtitle: Une contre-histoire d’Internet, XVe-XXIe siècle (in English: A
Book Reviews                                                                145
Counter-History of the Internet from the 15th to the 21st Century). By
announcing from the onset that it is going to narrate the History of the
Internet from the 15th century onwards, this book reminds us that debates
that are framed as being about the Internet as a technology are actually the
continuation of a much older discussion on the level of freedom that
should be afforded to the public sphere, defined as the socio-technical as-
semblage (or dispositif) through which members of a society discuss polit-
ical matters. This debate has been ongoing for centuries, and predates both
computers and the Internet.
    Félix Tréguer, the author, is now a post-doctoral research fellow at the
Centre de recherches internationales at Sciences Po Paris, and is also affil-
iated to the newly created Centre Internet et Société of the CNRS.He is
also known for his involvement in La Quadrature du Net, an NGO he is a
founding member of, which advocates for the protection of human rights
on the Internet. This NGO has close historical ties to the free software
movement.
    L’Utopie déchue is a title that reflects a feeling of disillusion felt by
many activists close to the hacker and the free software culture. It is divided
in four sections, and fourteen chapters, not including the introduction and
the conclusion.
    While digital utopias born in the 1970’s brought an immense enthusi-
asm to the idea that computers could become a tool for emancipation,
many are beginning to question these beliefs in light of the development of
the platform economy, digital labour exploitation, pervasive surveillance,
algorithmic control and the establishment of enclosures controlled by
global tech corporations. What went wrong?
    To answer this question, section 1 of the book, “Genèse (XVe-XXe siè-
cle)” (in English: “Genesis 15th-20th Century”) starts off by reminding read-
ers of the link between surveillance, censorship and the census, which were
all the responsibility of two elected officials called censors in the Roman
Republic. He then tells the tale of a century-old struggle between the state’s
tendency to establish control over the public sphere, and attempts to sub-
vert it. When the printing press allowed the spread of new ideas, monar-
chies across Europe drew from new theories on sovereignty and the “raison
d’État” (in English: state interest) to invent new modes of surveillance and
censorship of the public sphere. This same scenario played out at the in-
vention of the radio, when states struggled to contain the expansion of am-
ateur and privately-owned radio stations. By the mid-20th Century, liberal
democracies, while guaranteeing freedom of speech, provided fertile
ground for corporate control aligned with state interests over the public
sphere.
    In section 2, called “Informatisation (1930 - 1980) (in English: “Digiti-
sation (1930 - 1980)”), the author recounts the invention of computers and
of the Internet. In the next section 3, called “Subversion (1980 – 2001)”,
he tells how computers, first seen as the ultimate artefact of industrial social
146                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

control embodied by the corporate culture and image of IBM, turned into
a promise of emancipation and of a free, democratic and borderless public
sphere freed from the influence of the state and from mass media oligopoly.
This new utopia is described as having also led to many practical realisa-
tions, like the personal computer or the World Wide Web. These practical
realisations heralded a new era of freedom and challenged the gate-keeping
powers of an oligopolistic cultural and media industry. They threatened
the equilibrium between freedom of expression and control of the previous
era, and section 4, called “Reféodalisation (1990 – 2020)” (in English: “Re-
verting to feudalism (1990 – 2020)” describes how a strong response from
states has led to what Félix Tréguer, quoting Shoshana Zuboff (2018), de-
scribes as surveillance capitalism: a system which tends towards total sur-
veillance and where humanity, translated into data, becomes the subject of
capitalistic accumulation.
    Throughout his book, he talks from a Foucaldian perspective where the
“state” is not so much an institution as a type of governing rationality where
power is not centralised but may be distributed across a variety of actors
(see: Foucault, 1998 [1976]). The level of entanglement between private
and public in Internet Governance, especially surveillance, makes this ap-
proach relevant. It is also unspecific enough that it can be applied to several
eras through which the actual institutional setups of states have greatly
evolved. The main shortcoming of this book is that this conception of the
state at times tends to lack sociological finesse. It does not matter, however,
as the aim of L’Utopie Déchue is not to provide an in-depth socio-political
analysis of specific public policies in a given domain of state intervention.
Instead, it situates contemporary debates on Internet governance, online
censorship and surveillance into a long-term account of a centuries-old
struggle, that has remained defined by the same fundamental divides de-
spite, or maybe regardless of the evolution of the technical elements that
co-constitute a public sphere it defines as a socio-technical dispositif. Seen
from this angle, censorship and surveillance are two sides of a same coin.
And although they are exercised on and through socio-technical means,
Félix Tréguer convincingly shows that the topic of contention is not the
computer or the Internet (or any other artefact) as such, but the politics of
public speech, human rights and the relationship between citizens and the
state.
    Yet in the concluding chapter of the book, Félix Tréguer leads his
reader through a sharp turn to the infrastructure, and ends up questioning
the very existence of computers on political grounds. He argues that maybe
these should become the topic of contention as such. The very title of this
concluding chapter, “Arrêter la machine?” (in English: “Should we stop
the machine”), sounds like a provocation. Current decision-makers are
committed to growth through perpetual, preferably permissionless, inno-
vation.Even privacy advocates who defended the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) usually presented their demands as a way to build
Book Reviews                                                               147
"trust" in the digital economy, not as a means to stop the construction of
such an economy or at least forbid some of its potential innovations. For
many years, policy and even scholarly discussions on topics such as digital
copyright, dataveillance or informational privacy has been focusing on reg-
ulating the use of technology through various legal, political and market
constraints and incentives. What Félix Tréguer tells us is that this is im-
portant, but perhaps not sufficient, and that this insufficiency could ex-
plain the failure of activists to effectively challenge the power structures of
surveillance capitalism.
     L’Utopie déchue ends on a reference to the work of Jacques Ellul, who
was an influential political philosopher and sociologist, as well as a
protestant theologian, who has published many books offering a critical
analysis of what he dubbed the "technological society." Arthur Miller’s As-
sault on Privacy, which was quite influential in the early debates that led to
the adoption of contemporary privacy and data protection legislation, was
published in 1971. It opened with a long quote of Jacques Ellul’s Technol-
ogy Society, followed by a socio-political analysis of computers in society,
a discussion of the right to privacy as part of a strategy to mitigate harmful
effects of information technology, before concluding on yet another quote
of Jacques Ellul.
     In 1964, Lewis Mumford had written about the opposition between
"authoritarian" and "democratic" techniques. Ivan Illich published Tools
for Conviviality in 1973, quoted by Félix Tréguer in his book, which
pleaded for a radical change in the theory and practice of human technol-
ogy. These normative and moral reflections on technology were not just
philosophical discourses limited to a restricted audience of contemplative
thinkers, but made their way into practice, and influenced the movement
in favour of personal computers in the 1970’s and 1980’s, as those were
seen as a way to steer away from authoritarian computing (embodied by
companies like IBM) towards a more democratic system. They were also
influential in the shaping of public decision-making. Since then, however,
there has been an intellectual shift from attempting to regulate artefacts, to
regulating their uses.
     Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been studying the role of
socio-technical controversies in the social construction of technology for a
long time. This approach has led, in the field of Internet Governance stud-
ies, to a "turn to the infrastructure" in which sociologists and political sci-
entists study the material layers of the Internet to unbind the relationships
between the material, the technical, and the political (Musiani et al. 2016).
Such studies usually take a non-normative approach.
     Félix Tréguer’s concluding interrogation, coming from the field of po-
litical science, is more radical because it is the product of engaged action-
research by someone who has long been a prominent human rights activist.
It calls for more than mere legal or even technical patches on a digital socio-
technical ensemble of networked computers that may be fundamentally
148                                                            Tecnoscienza – 12 (1)

authoritarian in nature. This is why he speaks about a need to “stop the
machine” (p. 308). In questioning whether we should accept the existence
of computers, in a way, he appears to suggest that the problem would be
solved if we got rid of computers. By doing so, it could be argued that Félix
Tréguer falls into the trap of some kind of reverse technological solution-
ism (Morozov 2014). His provocative suggestion, however, should rather
be understood as a call to reflect, and to make us look once more at tech-
nology itself, not only its uses or its controversies, through a moral and
political lens.

References
Foucault, M. ([1976] 1998) The History of Sexuality: The Will to Know, London,
      Penguin.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, New York City, Harper and Row.
Morozov, E. (2014) To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological
      Solutionism, New York, Public Affairs.
Mumford, L. (1964) Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, in “Technology and
     Culture”, 5(1), pp. 1-8.
Musiani F., Cogburn D. L., DeNardis, L. and Levinson N. S. (2016) The Turn to
      Infrastructure in Internet Governance. New York, Palgrave Macmillan US.
Zuboff, S. (2018) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Fu-
       ture at the New Frontier of Power, New York, Public Affairs.



                                      ***
   Julia Watson
Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, Köln, Taschen, 2019, pp. 417

Andrea Botero Aalto University

    The wetlands of my home town Bogotá (or humedales as they are called
in Spanish) are one of the most biodiverse ecosystems of the city and its
surrounding plateau. Today they are at the center of many development
pressures and controversies, as well as numerous conservation efforts.
From politicians, urbanists, designers, to activists, almost everybody has an
opinion about how these patches of “nature” should be either preserved
or dried out in the name of progress. However, few have said about how
we could work with the wetlands to thrive together. In contrast, research
efforts in the recent decades have uncovered that these wetlands are not
just the outcomes of the particular natural ecological conditions of the area,
