Book

The book "Internet peut-il casser des briques? Un territoire politique en jachère" has just been published. It is a collective work by the Technologies think tank of the Forum d'Action Modernités, edited by Philippe Aigrain and Daniel Kaplan. Jean-Louis Frechin, director of Nodesign, is one of the contributors, describing the emergence of a new system of objects driven by services, connected objects and new modes of production pioneered by FabLabs. The book is based on the hypothesis that the Internet is a matrix for producing utopias, although the transformative potential of these utopias has yet to be fully deployed. The Internet is both the height of capitalism and a factor in the crystallisation of new citizen movements. On the one hand, the Internet embodies the largest stock market capitalisations, mega-successes and the illustration of a thousand theories on the circulation of information. But on the other hand, there is a citizen's Internet that conveys a desire for equality and freedom and is at the root of the continuous flow of innovations that the commercial Internet captures. This duality, which is intrinsic to the Internet ecosystem, should be seen as a positive sign of transformation, because the new modernity is based precisely on learning to separate what is economic and market-driven from what is empowering. 
To illustrate this point in concrete terms, the contributors to this book have chosen to describe 9 examples of utopias:
– 3 utopias are related to the impact of new technologies on our lives: Smart Cities, neo-objects and FabLabs, Creative Cities;
- 3 others refer to the organizational models of a knowledge and innovation economy: creative commons, drug risk management, knowledge sharing;
– 3 others finally refer to the reformulation of the social and political pact: digital entrepreneurs/social entrepreneurs, digital activism, web politique.bâtis

Editions Descartes & Cie

2013