From Cybersyn to social macroscopes and panopticon: humanity in the face of branching paths (David Chavalarias)

In the 1970s, the Cybersyn project took its inspiration from cybernetics to propose a Chilean distributed management system based on an extensive bottom-up information-gathering system. 50 years later, large scale bottom-up information systems have been deployed on a global scale in all areas, whether economic, social or health-related. These information systems are used today to built macroscopes and panopticon for the purposes of governance or citizen reflexivity. At the same time, human societies have reached an unprecedented level of complexity and interdependence that raises the question of redefining the relevant scale for analyzing social systems. In this talk, we will raise the question of the role, effect and use of information infrastructures on human societies and humanity in general. We will identify several possible futures among which we speculate that humanity will have to choose in the very short term.