Mickaël Berrebi (E13), Author: “Humanity Will Continue to Dominate Machines”

In La nouvelle résistance [The New Resistance], Mickaël Berrebi (E13) describes how citizens, startups, hackers and NGOs are organising to limit the power of the world’s digital giants. We meet the author.

ESSEC Alumni: In your previous book, L’Avenir de notre liberté [The Future of Our Freedom], you sounded the alarm about the threat that the GAFA companies are posing to democracy. What picture of the situation do you paint in your new book? 

Mickaël Berrebi: In L’Avenir de notre liberté, we focused on the influence that the GAFA companies have over our society. This political, technological and financial power is, in itself, nothing particularly new if you compare it to that of the big trusts of recent economic history. In fact, the novel aspect of the GAFA companies is their ability to impose their vision and their plans for society on others. Thanks to politicians’ inability to determine and manage their own technological future, the GAFA companies have replaced them with ease.
However, social changes are never begun by politicians. On the contrary, they’re the product of multiple elements that are often ignored at first because they are the domain of minorities. Describing these resistance phenomena is one of the goals of our latest book, La nouvelle résistance.

EA: What forms of resistance have you identified?

M. Berrebi: A number of contested areas are emerging, more or less all over the world, both in terms of topics that link technology and society, such as fake news, data confidentiality, and improper behaviour linked to tax optimisation and abuse of a dominant position, as well as more philosophical subjects, such as the deification of technology, excessive virtualisation, and humanity’s fear of its imminent replacement by machines. In our book, our position is clear: humanity, as it always has, will continue to dominate machines.

EA: How did you analyse the many resistance movements? 

M. Berrebi: We chose to borrow the well-known model of the economist Albert Hirschman. According to Hirschman’s model, in the face of deteriorating quality of goods or services provided by a company, there are three possible responses. The first, Exit, means defecting and going elsewhere. The second, Voice, involves speaking out to tell the business of your dissatisfaction. And the third, Loyalty, covers those people who prefer to remain loyal to the company because they see the costs of ending the relationship as too high. We added a fourth option to Hirschman’s model, which involves offering a tangible alternative that breaks entirely with the current state of things. We call this the new resistance.

EA: Do you have an example of this new resistance? 

M. Berrebi: Let’s take the example of those people who are opposed to excessive virtualisation. An extreme minority of rebels opt for defection, by choosing to live a disconnected life or by advocating a return to the material world. Examples could include the renewed interest in vinyl over audio streaming or certain secret services’ return to typewriters. Others choose to raise awareness, such as the Time Well Spent organisation founded by ex-Google employee Tristan Harris and other former Silicon Valley employees, which focuses on issues of digital addiction. Still others are rethinking their conception and use of technology on a daily basis without giving it up. The ‘Slow Tech’ movement is a good example of this.

EA: What results are these kinds of resistance obtaining?

M. Berrebi: Depending on the topic, resistance movements are at varying stages of progress. Overall, we’re still only at the beginning, but in some fields, a number of scandals have helped to accelerate the process of persuading the majority of people, such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

EA: How are the digital giants reacting to these challenges?

M. Berrebi: Some GAFA companies are trying to adjust their positioning and their public messages. Google became Alphabet in 2015, thus giving investors the impression of a level of separation between the Group’s various activities; Gmail launched “Confidential Mode” in summer 2018; Mark Zuckerberg announced in early 2019 that he wanted to strengthen security for users, etc.

EA: What remains to be done to reverse the trend? 

M. Berrebi: Two conditions need to be met. The first, of course, is to successfully expand the resistance from a minority to the general public. Members of the resistance don’t have the strength, or the skills, or the numbers to get their point of view across. It’s up to them to persuade others and get them to rally round.

EA: And the second condition? 

M. Berrebi: The other condition is to propose an alternative political project. Although great resistance movements throughout history are often summed up as a single action or a key date, they in fact exist as a lasting phenomenon and are the result of an in-depth social project with a long-term political vision. This means that it isn’t enough to simply “defect from” technology or to “speak out” to denounce observed abuses. For new members of the resistance, it is essential that their actions are supplemented with concrete alternatives and a short-, medium- and long-term political project.

Interview by Louis Armengaud Wurmser (E10), Content Manager at ESSEC Alumni

Want to read more? Please join ESSEC Alumni for us to be able to bring other quality contents about the community to you.