The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism

by Bernard Stiegler

Half a century ago Adorno and Horkheimer argued, with great prescience, that our increasingly rationalized world was witnessing the emergence of a new kind of barbarism, thanks in part to the stultifying effects of the culture industries. What they could not foresee was that, with the digital revolution and the pervasive automation associated with it, the developments they had discerned would be greatly accentuated, giving rise to the loss of reason and to the loss of the reason for living. Individuals are now overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of digital information and the speed of digital flows, resulting in a kind of technological Wild West in which they find themselves increasingly powerless, driven by their lack of agency to the point of madness. How can we find a way out of this situation? In this major new book, Bernard Stiegler argues that we must first acknowledge our era as one of fundamental disruption and detachment. We are living in an absence of  epokhē  in the philosophical sense, by which Stiegler means that we have lost our path of thinking and being. Weaving in powerful accounts from his own life story, including struggles with depression and time spent in prison, Stiegler calls for a new  epokhē  based on public power. We must forge new circuits of meaning outside of the established algorithmic routes. For only then will forms of thinking and life be able to arise that restore meaning and aspiration to the individual. Concluding with a dialogue between Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in social and cultural theory, media and cultural studies, philosophy and the humanities generally.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Technology

380 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2019

About the author

Bernard Stiegler heads the Department of Cultural Development at the Pompidou Center in Paris and is co-founder of the political group Ars Industrialis. Stanford University Press has published the first two volumes of Technics and Time, The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) and Disorientation (2008), as well as his Acting Out (2008) and Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010).

Reviews

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

the Age of Disruption is a good book, although it is heavily laden with philosophical jargon that is sort of unique to Stiegler. To read this (and understand it) people should have read Dialectic of Enlightenment (at least) first. It won't make sense without prior information. That said, with full context of Stiegler's arguments, I think he is correct that digital technologies introduce a disruptive element into the memory processes of people and that this operationalizes in a variety of ways. People can become politically nihilist, suffer from mental illnesses, or engage in drug abuse. It is important to understand what Adorno and Horkheimer mean by Barbarism as well, as Stiegler routinely uses the phrase "New Barbarians," or "New Barbarism," to describe the current situation which results from interaction with capitalistic digital technologies. This was forseen by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Culture Industry in the 1940s. People become proletarianized, or stripped of their knowledge of how to live and how to do. This extends to the highest rungs of society. Stiegler cites Alan Greenspan testifying that he did not understand what went wrong in the economic collapse of 2008 as an example of this.
Overall, I give this a 4, because it is worth reading, but you need to have read a lot of different philosophy stuff to understand what Stiegler is doing here. As such, it limits its potential reader audience, which could be much wider if Stiegler used less jargon and philosophical examples. But if he had done this, it would not be a Stiegler book.
Worth reading if you're really into continental philosophy or critical theory.

[Fabiana · Rating 1 out of 5]

*note: this review is going to be incredibly annoying and long winded !!!*

For a book supposedly on "technology and madness in computational capitalism," it was incredibly vapid. I think so many important concepts (from Deleuze, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bataille, even Derrida for christ's sake) were chewed up and spat right the fuck out, leaving nothing behind but a spit trail of strung-together greek characters and desperation. Like, we get it, Mr. Derrida #2 over here. But that's my generalization of the work: exhausting, repetitive and offers absolutely nothing to what it is supposed to be on. You are beyond better off reading the philosophers he apparently read (i'll get into it later) on your own rather than reading this garbage.


There appears to be an obsessive preoccupation with the "absence of an epoch," parading around the figure of Adorno & Horkheimer's "new barbarian(ism):" intensely nihilist, destructive, and devoid of Husserlian protentions. This work heavily relies on these types of characters ('new barbarian,' whoever the fuck poor Florian is) to evoke some kind of urgency about our collapsing world, that it will only get worse in the absence of an epoche. I would also like to note how careful Stiegler is in his prejudices & wording because the term "terrorist" was only used once (from what I caught), and yet referred to 'jihadists,' and the events of 9/11 (which in 2016 you'd think there would some acute awareness of what truthfully led to the bombing of the twin towers) as 'barbarian' and the "'administration of savagery'" (36). Because these 'barbarians' have different motivations than your average 'terrorist,' I guess it must, just has to, mean they are completely different things. Just really turned me off while I was reading this sludge.


I could get into the Anthropocene/Neganthropocene bullshit (which I think just highlights the author's incessant need for order and control of a seemingly ending-world, attributional to his prison lifestyle? Can't jump to conclusions...) but I don't even want to waste my breath on this. Where there are no mentions of cybernetics or of biopolitics (biopower/biopolitics finally making a barely attended to appearance in the last chapter), there lacks a credible analysis of contemporary capitalism for me. This is where I was unsatisfied the most, that in evoking Foucault & Deleuze on "societies of discipline to control," his interpretations were insipid. He states that "Social groups stuck by collective disindividuation are, and will increasingly be, prone to losing every reason for living, hence to losing the very notion of reason qua convergence of protensions - and to losing the notion of the value of life itself, especially when this noetic life, which is thoroughly organological and pharmacological, reveals itself to be such." Right.. Apparently we have completely lost hope in everything on account of this "disindividuation," leading to textbook psychological 'antisocial' behavior. This is precisely why you will rarely ever see me reading works written after 2010 because they are all horrible and nostalgic. They all want to predict the rapture and to prove their predecessors wrong with the next new hit word (psychopower).

In somehow refabricating an epoch, thus restoring the magic of the world with its protensions, we can return to gauging and quantifying human behavior for the benefit of *a l l*. This "age of disruption" marked by "Hyper-synchronization prevents the power of calculation from being socially individuated by the incalculable...dissolved into entropic becoming." (46) Frankly I think if we just paid attention for one minute we could see the results of the self-deforming caste of capitalism shaping and molding around hyper-individualized markers that breed new customers and profit off of their every move, then we can see why this statement is fucking stupid. He does an excellent job of masking what he really thinks (probably eugenic, elimination of the incalculability of madness, since "[...] madness becoming the norm" (111) is something he wrongfully interpreted).


Before I let this get even longer some closing points I want to make are: 1) I think his reading of Foucault is abysmal. You can clearly see how he rejects the latent anarchism in Foucault's work, ignoring his most fundamental concepts in order to flesh out his own. There is no indepth drawing conclusions, just paraphrasing and blatant misreadings. Really, really painful to see. 2) If anyone wants real, applicable commentary on the world and where its headed just, for the love of god, read Agamben or Tiqqun. They see the beauty in being unable to predict the outcome of the world because that doesn't mean there is an absence of epoch, but a becoming-epoch, that there is one just on the threshold of happening ( 'towards a destituent potential' and so on).

This work was awful and I regret spending $33 on a physical copy. I just wanted to get to his interpretation of Foucault and I guess when I did, I shouldn't have. 1 star for introducing me to the Derrida v. Foucault on Descartes (I definitely didn't annoy various people I know about this finding). Very disapointing, but proof you can just write anything and get away with it.

[Lars K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic work. Some chapters are even harder to understand than others, but they amount to a great overall insight into our current 'Anthropocene' epoch and the extremely disturbing situation humanity is in at the moment. Probably would have been 5 stars from me if I had a deeper grasp of Heideggerian theory.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The twisted turns in the mind of a Primitivist. He would keep the plane, as the ticket is paid by the taxpayers anyway, but to hell with these computers that don't even speak proper French!

[Nestor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand, and share, the author's outrage at the lack of morals, the madness of unbridled capitalism, (new) technologies, and the Californianism that this new era brings to society. However, I find the book a bit flat and lacking in depth with continued use of Greek words. or the invention of new words to express his thoughts. The continuous crushing and references to other authors do not help, it prevents a smooth reading. Continually self-referencing doesn't help either despite his effort to show his worth of time in prison.

I believe that any concept, any word can be properly translated to any other language without much problem. It's not that words or concepts are exclusive of one language and Greek/Latin is superior. Properly doing any language, any word in any language is enough to describe any concept, there's no need to appeal to Latin/Greek, as Christian/Catholic Religions do, to express an idea, that's more a way to hide something than to explain something. After all, using bombastic words in other languages is what religions and dark people do to hide themself and seem to be more important than they are. The translation from French to English is very poor I found many errors.

I rescue the following sentences:

- Ignorance always leads to servitude.
- Western society has globalized itself as a process of disinhibition of which nihilism and the
Anthropocene are the geopolitical and biospherical concretizations.
- The end of the Anthropocene, in the age of disruption that turns it into an Entropocene, seems to
exhaust all consistencies (that is, all reasons for living, acting, and hoping) in the growth of a
the desert where legal vacuums accumulate and prophets of doom proliferate.

[Lawrence]

Read the sample only

[Emma Hodgson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is dense and difficult, but worthwhile. If you hve the patience to get through it, I highly recommend.

[PK Lawton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption is a pivotal contribution to critical media theory, offering a rigorous and philosophically grounded account of how computational capitalism reorganizes time, subjectivity, and technics. Building on the legacies of Simondon, Heidegger, and Derrida, Stiegler advances a theory of symbolic misery, wherein communication technologies, rather than enabling individuation, facilitate epistemological proletarianization and cultural entropy. His diagnosis of disindividuation—the systemic externalization of memory and cognition into algorithmic systems—provides a powerful conceptual apparatus for understanding the psychological and political dimensions of platform capitalism, especially in the post-social media landscape.

What distinguishes this text from other critiques of the digital condition is its refusal to remain at the level of ideological critique or empirical reportage. Stiegler interrogates the absence of epoch—a temporal collapse that forecloses collective horizon-making—and calls for a counter-movement grounded in neganthropy: the production of care, memory, and epistemic differentiation. While the text is at times syntactically dense and theoretically abstract, it rewards sustained engagement. For scholars interested in post-Marxist critiques of technology, the affective dynamics of late capitalism, or the biopolitics of automation, this book is indispensable. It does not offer a roadmap out of our current crisis, but it supplies the conceptual coordinates to name it with precision