On May 22nd, 2023 at 5.30 pm Stephane Grumbach, Professor at University of Lyon, France, will hold a seminar on "The emergence of control society at the time of planetary boundaries" in Rogers Room.

The Digital is radically changing societies. If it serves optimization purposes (the grail of IT), the current evolution is accompanied by effects that seem to go beyond a simple Schumpeterian transformation. Its driving force is a revolution in the control of flows, initially of data flows by digital actors, but as a consequence, eventually of all flows: matter, energy, knowledge, as well as the living, including humans. The classical interactions of society are progressively falling under the control of remote intermediaries, the platforms, which are essentially not involved in the production of goods or services, but only in the intangible exchanges that make multi-sided markets possible. This transformation is radical, shifting the locus of power and generating fundamental information asymmetries. Platforms are a new object of governance. They provide a growing share of essential services, play a decisive normative role and have an unparalleled coercive force. They also constitute a new object of geopolitics. New balances are therefore developing between platforms and States, and also between nations according to their control of digital power. This mutation operates while human societies are facing the necessity to adapt to undesirable changes in their global environment. The seminar will show how geopolitics is rapidly evolving in these threatening conditions.

Stéphane Grumbach, senior scientist at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, is a specialist of data systems. He has worked on theoretical issues in informatics regarding the processing of complex data types, such as spatial, statistical, as well as biological, and has designed the first compression algorithm, Biocompress, for DNA sequences. His interests have evolved to more global questions related to the impact of digital systems on society, such as the geopolitical implications of the digital, which triggers new imbalances and asymmetries between nations ; the contrasting visions promoted in different regions of the world, such as North America, East Asia and Europe ; the emergence of a control society, while human societies are facing the challenges of a more constrained global environment ; and more generally the contemporaneity of the anthropocene and the digital revolution. He joined IXXI, the Complex Systems Institute at ENS Lyon, in 2014, is affiliated with the GEODE Project on the Geopolitics of the Datasphere, and works in collaboration with the Research Institute on Humanity and Nature, RIHN in Kyoto. He teaches Digital Economy in SciencesPo Paris. He has been strongly involved in international relations, has spent eight years in China, first as science counsellor in the French Embassy, and then in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he headed the Sino-European IT Lab, LIAMA.