Stéphane Degoutin: Cloud Computing

This book unfolds like a Chinese landscape painting that the eye slowly takes in. I use this metaphor because I am describing a panorama. It is not made up of mist-shrouded mountains or wind-swept bushes, but of data centres, delivery warehouses, and the flow of social media…

I am exploring the hypothesis that the internet forms part of a broader trend towards breaking society down into smaller components, thereby making its mechanisms more fluid. A concept from chemistry – the reduction of matter to powder before reassembling it – is also applied to social relationships, memory, and humanity in general.

Just as reducing matter to powder accelerates chemical reactions, reducing society to powder enables the accelerated decomposition and recomposition of the substance of which humans are made. It enables a proliferation of reactions within society, of humanity’s output, of social chemistry: the combinatorics of passions (Charles Fourier), the hyper-fragmentation of labour (Mechanical Turk), the decomposition of knowledge (Paul Otlet), the Internet of neurons (Michael Chorost), and society through the aggregation of affects (Facebook). This is what I call the ‘cloud society’.

Members of the jury

• Thesis supervisor: Antoine Picon (University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, City, Transport and Territories Doctoral School, Techniques, Territories and Societies Laboratory)
• Joint supervision of the thesis: Pierre Cassou-Noguès (University of Paris 8, Doctoral School of Practice and Theories of Meaning)
• Emmanuel Mahé (École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs)
• Nicolas Thély (University of Rennes 2)
• Nathalie Roseau (École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, LATTS)
• Karen O’Rourke (Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne)