However, there is something of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation with this ontological position that Adrian Mackenzieidentifies as the ‘aporia of origin’: the human, or experience of being human, is not possible without the technical and vice versa.  The interesting resolution of this aporia is that the mental interior is only recognized as such with the advent of the technical exterior. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin thus: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorisation without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Technics and Time 1) .  So, technicity is both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’.  Therefore, the interior and exterior, and with them the contemporary understanding of the experience of being human and what we understand to be technology, are mutually co-constituted.

The forms of exteriorization Stiegler calls ‘tertiary retention’ are not simply the recording of inner process and sensory/experiential memory, but ‘long-term’ memory, which stretches across generations. Material examples of tertiary retention include things like libraries (and the various ways we may understand archives), oral lore, and the various technological means of recording memory, making it available ‘outside’ of any individual.  This is not only limited to representational mechanisms either.  The acts of manipulating the world, such as working or enclosing land, leaving traces of technically mediated living that can be recognised as such. So, we might contend that wheel tracks carved into a landscape over time are a form of tertiary retention too.

Stiegler argues that to be human (or dasein) is constituted through ongoing processes of individuation. This concept derives from Stiegler’s reading of Simondon, another French philosopher of technology, who posits that the constitution of individuality, and our awareness of being an individual being, is formed by processes of individuation, which are ongoing and never quite complete. Individuation is always and already a process of phenomenological and ‘psychic’ coming to know the world, through the various mental, sensory and physiological means by which we capture the world and it captures us. Individuation, for Stiegler, is pretty much always a trans-individuation between entities.  It is through others (especially people and things) that we understand the world and ourselves. As Stiegler asserted in a talk at Tate Modern in 2004:

“The “I”, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a “we”, which is a collective individual: the “I” is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a plurality of “Is” acknowledge each other’s existence.”

Technologies are crucial in these processes of individuation. From language onward, the human and the technical are co-constituted.  It is only through the exteriorisation of memory as ‘rentention’ that humanity knows itself.  Stiegler understands this as forms of retention. Primary retention is conscious thought, secondary retention is linguistically framed memory and tertiary retention is the inscription of knowledge in the world.  This isn’t just writing, but also any changing of the world around ourselves.  It is through this ‘technical’ understanding of the world that we understand the passage of time.

As James Ash cogently points out in a forthcoming paper: how the ‘now’ is established is contingent upon and relative to the technologies and practices of a specific locality.  There are of course other forms of time consciousness but how the ‘now’ is experienced is shaped through technology and technical knowledge.  These understandings of the ‘specious present’ are made durable through tertiary retentions that are taken up in habits and cultural forms.

The fixity of particular ways of knowing is understood by Stiegler, through an expansion of Derrida’s work, asGrammatisation: the processes of describing and formalizing human behaviour into logos: representations such as letters, pictures, words, writing and code, so that it can be reproduced. For example, as Matt Wilson and I contended in a recent conference paper: the visual language, terminology, and ways of making people, places and things discrete and codified employed by foursquare is a system of grammatisation. The system facilitates users connecting with friends and acquaintances and seeing what they’re doing, but it also narrowly defines the activities with which a user can interact.  As a brief illustration: ‘recommendations’ are orientated towards activities of consumption; ‘check-in specials’ are similarly oriented; and the categorisation of places that may be identified is also biased towards commercial activity.

Grammatisation processes are, according to Stiegler a form of pharmakon. Following Plato’s dialogues, a pharmakon is both a poison and a cure – a form of recipe, substance or spell.  In Phaedrus, Plato uses the concept of the pharmakon as a play of oppositions: poison-remedy, bad-good etc. For Plato, writing itself is a pharmakon, both a means of recording thought but also a producer of forgetfulness. Any pharmkon therefore is both a ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. So, for example, in the case of the grammatisation effects of foursquare, they too can have both positive and negative effects/connotations. Novel forms of collectivity may be engendered but the modes of interaction are limited.

However, Stiegler argues in his more activist writings that the rise in media technologies means a form of detrimental effect on our capacity for attention. He argues that we have somewhat moved away from the deep attention of cultural engagement and the positive production of desire, to hyper attention and the stochastic flitting of attention across many media. As Patrick Crogan has recently argued, Stiegler introduces his account of digital technologies by characterising the contemporary era as one in which the tendency toward the industrialisation of memory approaches. Stiegler argues, not least in his keynote for Paying Attention, that our collective experience of how we become individuals, or ‘trans-individuation’:

“has become the object of industrial technology, based on a social engineering, where attention and relational technologies develop via social networks etc. This social engineering has as its goal… the capacity to render [the social relation itself] industrially discretable, reproducible, standardisable, calculable and controllable by automata.”

Whether intended or not, the ‘social engineering’ of the corporatised ‘social web’, in which we are all enrolled as producers of value i.e. attention, is a direct attempt to (re)condition the technics of attention.

In a reworking of the concept of proletarianisation, Stiegler suggests that rather than losing ‘savoir-faire’ (the embodied knowledge of how to make/do) to technical apparatus, as Marx argued of the industrial revolution, the consumer is losing ‘savoir-vivre’ (knowledge of how to live), which is being replaced by apparatus, which are the products of the media industries.

So, processes of proletarianisation in the contemporary ‘knowledge’ economy are, according to Stiegler, causing the loss of faculties of self-critique.  Social media technologies, and those technologies of the ‘programming industries’ that lead to the loss of ‘savoir-vivre’ are, according to Stiegler, ‘psychotechnologies’.  Alexander Galloway describes psychotechnologies as: “games, computers, SMS, etc.; these constitute part of the culture industry; often construed as normatively negative”. As a result of this line of argument, Stiegler, and colleagues, argue that:

“in our current epoch electronic technologies, monopolized until now by the economic powers emerging from the 20th century as psychotechnologies at the service of behavioural control, must become nootechnologies, that is, technologies of spirit, at the service of de-proletarianization and of the reconstitution of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and theoretical knowledge.”

Bernard Stiegler’s way of thinking through these themes and his writing addressing not only the metaphysical, or ontological, conditions of the technicity of being, but also the contemporary and urgent political issues around living in a developed (particularly capitalist and technological) society is impressively ambitious and rather inspiring.  It is also worth noting that Stiegler puts his money where his mouth is. Stiegler left his job as director of the Institute for Research and Innovation at the Georges Pompidou Centre to found the Ecole de philosophie d’Epineuil-le-Fleuriel (the school of philosophy at Epineuil-le-Fleuriel) in central France, to aid in the education of high school students studying for their Baccalaureat, and to deliver a public summer school and a doctoral seminar, also made available online.  Additionally, and as he pointed out in his conference keynote, Stiegler is a founding member of the Ars Industrialis association, which campaigns to: “reconstitute a political project as bearer of a new affirmation of the role of public power, namely: to make a technical becoming into a social future.”

The Digital Cultures Research Centre have commissioned the above video as both documentation and a creative response to the Paying Attention conference held in Linköping last September.  The video features excerpts from the conference creatively re-interpreted by Sy Taffel.  We hope you like it as much as we do!

Goggles will recognize print ad and return web search results about the product or brand. This new feature of Goggles is enabled for print ads appearing in major U.S. magazines and newspapers from August 2010 onwards.

This is an interesting example of the ‘reterritorialisation’ (described by Martin Thayne in his paper at Paying Attention). The apparently fixed form of engagement with print advertising that relies on suggestion and a form of ‘inscribing’ memory is, with Googles, reframed as an immediate transaction for information. The specificity of the locus of engagement, the flicking through of a magazine the passing glance of a billboard is re-commodified as a calculable form of engagement: the advert can be ‘scanned’, links can be followed (the ubiquitous ‘click through’), which could (potentially) directly lead to a sale. The process can be followed and thus statistically modelled, in turn being integrated into estimates for ‘Return On Investment’ (ROI).

Not only, then, are our digital interactions tracked and modelled but so are our physical interactions. Tie this data to contextual data such as time of day and location and advertisers potentially gain a powerful means of targeting potential customers in particular places and at particular times. Of course, this relies on people actually using the software and ‘clicking’ on print/billboard adverts. A peculiar demographic might then potentially drive advertising strategies. For want of an example, and to misuse a stereotype, thousands of teenage boys scanning the latest lingerie advert would certainly skew such a statistical model!

Joking aside, the ongoing development of these ‘augmented reality’ applications offers the potential for the forms of real-time commercial digital tracking and modelling of our interactions with data to extend into everyday physical activities, thus further ‘reterritorialsing’ spaces of work, travel etc. as spaces of commerce.

The videos are also available below:

In his valuable discussion of how we might ‘relearn’ how to understand and describe the ‘complicated, messy, fluctuating tange of technical mediations and collectives involving specific bodies and times’, Adrian Mackenzie highlights Heidegger’s critical question:

How can we deal with the fact that technology today displays itself everywhere as a constantly shifting, open-ended and groundless ordering of everything that exists, and yet we find it almost impossible to think about how we are collectively involved in that ordering, except in terms of an increasingly untenable anthropocentrism which elevates us, as ‘the human’, to the summit of all things[?] (Mackenzie 2002, 4)

To say that to critically engage with this question is difficult is perhaps an understatement. However, a number of scholars have explored the concept of ‘technicity’ as a means of gaining some theoretical purchase on the technological nature of being. Technicity is not a settled concept (see Mackenzie’s Transductions for deeper discussion) but for the purposes of this review we might understand it as the capacities of a body which are indivisible from technologies. Accordingly, and following Steigler and Derrida (after Heidegger), we can understand technology not as a ‘supplement’ to bodies (or to cultures for that matter)-for neither body or technology comes ‘first’-but as the tools and equipment that necessarily co-develop with human beings.

Technicity is an elementary concept for understanding being in the world. Human ‘subjects’ should not be seen as stable. Instead, there is an ongoing process of ‘subjectivisation’ that is located in the body but incorporates a range of other actors. We are always and already ‘in progress’ – the experience of ‘subjectivity’ is a temporary settlement principally located in a body, but held in relation to affects, other bodies, and things. Following Mackenzie’s rendition of Steigler’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, we can understand technicity as the capacities and affordances of the body-technology ensemble. Important to note here is that neither ‘the human’ nor ‘technology’ comes first: they co-develop. The technicity of beings and technologies figures them as always and already in a localised assemblage of practices and a generalised ensemble of relations:

‘Technicity pertains to an iterability associated with technical elements and derived from a singular, site-specific conjunction of different milieus. Technicity can be found within different contexts broadly ranging between small sets of tools to ensembles composed of many sub-ensembles’ (Mackenzie 2002, 14).

Following Steigler, technicity offers a way of understanding how individual experience is exteriorised, which allows subsequent generations to experience, individually, a past that one has not lived and add something to it. As Nathan Van Camp argues of Stiegler’s rendition of technicity: “the human is not constituted through its opposition to the animal, but rather through its relationship with technics, or, as Stiegler calls it, inorganic organised matter”. Conference speaker Ben Roberts has suggested in previous work: ‘the exteriorisation of the human into technics–writing tools and so on–raises a fundamental aporia of origin’. Stiegler explains this aporia of origin thus: ‘The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorisation without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorisation’ (Technics and Time 1) .  Thus technicity is a double-bind between being both constitutive and a supplement of ‘the human’.

In the light of this conceptualisation of technicity, we can, and should, read the content of Paying Attention as various articulations of the ways in which the the socio-technical milieu of the attention economy exhibits, (re)conditions and is constituted by technics. As Patrick Crogan has recently argued, Stiegler introduces his account of digital technologies by characterising the contemporary era as one in which the tendency toward the industrialisation of memory approaches. As Steigler noted in his paper at Paying Attention: our collective experience of how we become individuals, or ‘transindividuation’

“has become the object of industrial technology, based on a social engineering, where attention and relational technologies develop via social networks etc. This social engineering has as its goal… the capacity to render [the social relation itself] industrially discretable, reproducible, standardisable, calculable and controllable by automata.”

Whether intended or not, the ‘social engineering’ of the corporatised ‘social web’, in which we are all enrolled as producers of value i.e. attention, is a direct attempt to (re)condition the technics of attention.

Tiziana Terranova, in her paper ‘The bios of attention’, offered an expert introduction to the biological/physiological foundations of attention and the bio-politics of its constitution as a commodity. For Terranova, the question is “how to re-conceptualise our understanding of attention as productive power in such a way as to subtract it from [a] reductive economicism”. We can thus understand attention as a capacity formed from technicity. Attention, therefore, is ‘the process by which value is produced as insperable from the production of subjectivity – that is from the invention and diffusion of common desires, beliefs and affects’. Attention must accordingly be seen as a relational product of the socio-technical milieu.

Ben Roberts addressed the economies of attention in coding open source software and the apparently crypto-neoliberal rhetoric surrounding them from economic theorists such as Yochai Benckler. For Roberts, the principal problem with such rhetoric is that it unproblematically argues that ‘creative labour is highly differentiated and thus less easy to hierarchically manage’. Following Galloway and Thacker, Roberts suggests that the ‘liberation rhetoric’ around distributed networks is in stark contrast to actual, contemporary, workings of power. To understand networked modes of production Roberts argues that we might need to rethink new modes of labour, which ‘liberatory’ economic theorists such as Benckler apparently ignore in favour of thinking only about means of production. Roberts ties this to Lazarrato’s understanding of immaterial labour, which he contrasts with Benckler’s theorisation of networked production. Roberts suggests that Free Software might be seen neither as the rising efficacy of liberated individuals, nor as new modes of production but as new forms of individuation. This means thinking of individuation as the “individuation of networks as a whole and the individuation of the component parts” (Galloway and Thacker 2007, 60). The network’s potential will thus only be realised in new forms of ‘trans-individuation’ (following Steigler – see above). The technicity of networked attention, understood as focussed forms of ‘immaterial labour’, is therefore realised in processes of trans-individuation betwixt and between networks (and their constituents).

Finally and more broadly, we can see the problem of technicity as underlying many of the issues raised by the diverse range of speakers at Paying Attention. For example, Stanza’s artistic interventions into the technical circuits of the city as a means of production illustrate and ciritque the ways in which attention and memory are enscribed in the physical manifestation of urban spaces. Elizabeth Van Couvering’s investigation into the political economics of internet search, as an industry, highlighted how new forms of technical logic have emerged in the re-figuring of the metadata that describe users as the most saleable asset. The performance given by Simon Poulter humourously set in relief the many and varied ways in which attention is conditioned and fixed in the mundane technical practices of everyday life.

In thinking about technicity we are questioning the assumptions which form the basis of established understandings of technology, usually as either the somehow separate driving force of society or as the upshot of cultural production. More specifically, in thinking about and questioning the technics of attention we are critically engaging with the basis for what has been characterised, in the discussion of Paying Attention, as the new economic, political and sociotechnical milieu of the networked society.

Ruth Catlow, co-founder of Furtherfield (with Mark Garrett) presented the work of the Furtherfield organisation as ‘critical practices in art, technology and social change since 1997′. Furtherfield are a ‘neighbourhood of grass-roots platforms for review, creation, exchange, exhibition, residencies, commission, learning and participation with 26k subscribers world-wide’. Catlow argued that through creative & critical engagement with practices in art & technology people become co-creators of their cultures and societies. Accordingly, through such forms of practice people can become the architects of their own forms of attention. Catlow argued that there are different contexts for paying attention to the everyday practices and politics of the furtherfield networks.

• reworkings and hacks of economic, social and cultural contexts
• preserving experimental platforms for developing thought, activity and experience outside of the mainstream and necessarily market driven contexts

In the UK there is a growing pressure from agencies, such as the Arts Council, to conform to the platforms imposed by the model of the ‘creative economy’, which pitch into arguments about the economic value of the arts that simply don’t work. The figures upon which such arguments are founded are the perpetuation of myth-building. Catlow argued that it is important for keeping a space open for recognising what exists outside of the economic context. As human beings, Catlow asserted, we are more than simply economic entities.

The artist Stanza similarly presented his work as an artist working between the spaces of physical galleries and the gallery that is his website. To open his presentation, Stanza performed a thought experiment: He asked the audience to think about an image of a place in London. Stanza then asked them to think about the image of the place the person to the right is imagining. Stanza then asked the audience to think about all of the places in the minds of each of the people in the room. The audience were then told they had to introduce time. Stanza argued that this experience, in many ways, illustrated the actual artistic method he has employed in a number of ways. What Stanza finds interesting is figuring the city as an open shell and one can plug lots of different forms of content into that space, which should be open, both in terms of control and production.  Whereas there are lots of ethical and social issues that subtend this, Stanza is mostly interested in the creative potential of the city as a productive space, present for manipulation and (re)mediation. This understanding of the city opens out, for Stanza, a means of critically reflecting upon the ways and means we are compelled to ‘pay attention’ in everyday life.

In a performance involving a variety of social media, a video produced in transit to the conference, and members of the audience, Simon Poulter directly questioned the various ways in which the apparent mundanity of everyday life demands our attention. The mix of familiar media, the physical presence of the performer and the ongoing stream of content from the social network Twitter places both demands on the attention of the audience and of the performer, which challenged the conventions of the conference space, apparently acceptable behaviour and the way in which such work can or should be documented.

At a more general level several papers offered a variety of insights into the ways in which attention is codified for particular purposes. In her paper about adolescents’ social networking practices and the infringement of social norms, Francesca Odella highlighted the shifting understanding of privacy. Privacy awareness amongst the adolescents studied by Odella was largely tied to ‘threat awareness’, i.e. violation of privacy vs. punishment for infringement. The means by which social norms are being arrvied at is shifting away from the family towards peer groups, thus, for Odella, the socialisation to rules is fundamentally changing. The ways in which attention is being channelled and regulated, in this sense, is shifting away from traditional forms normative control towards more dispersed forms of codification.

Aphra Kerr gave a wide-ranging paper concerning the various ways in which ‘trust’ is both conceptualised and codified, particularly in relation to computer security systems. Kerr argued that in traditional inter-personal economic relations the face-to-face nature of trust negotiation is fairly simple. However this is problematised when identity becomes ambiguous – this has of course always already been present in our social relations but this is exacerbated in digitally mediated relations. Within in the context of large-scale governmental framings of these issues, there is a constellation of particular actors that are shaping an agenda and discourse, which in turn is shaping the next round of ICT policies within the EU governmental discourses. Kerr suggests there is the potential for serious problems resulting from the relatively hidden political implications of the overly reductive technical understandings of ‘trust’ being employed. Kerr argued that it is important to start to trace through the discourses and actors in all of the empirical ways an means by which we address trust.

Marco Fioretti argued in his paper that digital media cultures are rich and powerful, but are also terribly fragile. They inherently contain the mechanisms for encoding the data of our lives, ey we do not attend to this fragility. Digital text or multimedia can be durable but it most often is not. For example, data stored on floppy disk is no longer accessible because the physical media have become archaic. This pertains to the architecture of software. Software are tools to create many other kinds of tools. Software creates habits and relationships, which Fioretti identifies as culture. It has become a cultural intermediary. Technology, particularly digital technology, is legislation according to Fioretti. Fioretti argued that we should refuse the use of proprietary file formats in universities. It risks a loss of access and it creates discrimination between students that can afford the technologies reuqired for access and those who cannot.

Michel Bauwens, in his wide-ranging keynote paper, articulated a range of ways that models for ‘open infrastructures’ (in the vein of open software) offer alternatives to the aggressively globalised market-based economic models that seem to tend towards monopolies. Bauwens argued that the attention economy can never be the basis of the capitalist economy, it can only be a derivative. He went on to argue that, through peer-to-peer environments, production through the mutual coordination of contributions on a global scale becomes a real possiblity. Bauwens argued that the present form of cognitive capitalism, which expropriates the wealth of social cooperation through financial mechanisms, and does not have a feedback loop to reward the value creators, is not sustainable. Thus, for Bauwens, a system that exponentially increases use value, but can only linearly monetize exchange value, creates a crisis of accumulation for capital, as well as a crisis of precarity for distributed labour. Bauwens argued that a radical alternative economy will arise based on the commons, which protects vital resources while ‘renting’ out their usage to market based entities. In this model, cooperation is no longer secondary to competition, but competition becomes secondary to cooperation. In Bauwens rendition of a peer-to-peer economy, competition occurs within cooperation, by for-benefit entities that succeed in attracting the most productive ecology around its shared goals and object of production. Globalism, for Bauwens, can be channelled for positive ends.

Two other speakers explicitly addressed the global effects of an attention economy at local scales. Rolien Hoyng addressed the issue of the internationalisation and commodification of the identity of Istanbul, in the context of the European Capital of Culture 2010 competition. Hoyng highlighted the ways in which a particular ‘globalised’ form of spatial imagination has been applied top-down as a means of controlling the representation of the city of Istanbul. Honyg argued that the European Capital of Culture model of remediating the past into a ‘clean’ marketable version of the city come into conflict with the networked performance of city identity. This demonstrates, for Hoyng, the broader issues of power and resistance in ‘media-ecological milieus’. Hoyng argued that by studying how migrants negotiate the values of technocapitalism, residing in speed, mobility and networking potential, she could analyze processes of intermediation: the adaptation of older technologies to newer ones and vice versa.

Fatemeh Javaheri gave a broad overview of the socio-cultural effects of access to the internet amongst Iranian youth in the early 21st century. Based in empirical work conducted in the early 2000s, Javaheri made observations about the effects of internet use on traditional social structures amongst the young. For example, while internet use has propagated some changes in the expression of cultural values amongst Iranian youth, sotrong family ties prevent an intergenerational gap forming. The pattern of formation of social relationships amongst Iranian youth has been significantly effected by use of the Internet, insofar as it has broadened horizons and allowed more time for connections, but it has not distinctively changed everyday social practices. The most significant effect on youth identity in Iran has been an exposure to the expression of globalised cultural values and a broader cultural literacy. The internet has thus affected how Iranian youth pay attention to information and ideas about culture and value.

Similarly, Constance Fleuriot addressed the need to make ethical issues central to the design and development of new media technologies. In her paper, Fleuriot laid out a methodology for drawing together a shared language for development as an integral step to agreeing shared values. At the heart of this process is the need to address the ethical implications of emerging technologies, in the process of their design. For Fleuriot this is imperative to avoid ‘stumbling into the future with our eyes shut’ so that we develop the right concepts, laws and societal values in the production new technologies.

Tim Kindberg highlighted in his talk that observation has become a central part of human existence and that there have been significant attempts to configure bodies, architecture and technologies to facilitate this. Kindberg specifically address large corporate actors as a particular cause for concern. The (under) valuation of personal data voluntarily disclosed to search and social networking services is a key issue for Kindberg. His thinking on this shifted during the ‘Pervasive or invasive?’ DCRC event about the ethics of Pervasive Media, where he offered the idea of invoicing Facebook for the use of his data. Kindberg offered some proposals for interventions that could raise awareness around these issues, for example a “Google Home View” stunt in which the photographic auditing of the insides of people’s houses would be documented as though it were to be used as part of Google Maps. Kindberg argued that if we were to follow the valuation of personal data to its extreme we should, in fact, have an open market for data trade, in which the processes are transparent and users can trade their data as a commodity, just as traders buy and sell other commodified resources (such as iron ore or crude oil).

Dan Dixon took the issue of surveillance in a more playful direction in his paper, focussing on the use of surveillance techniques and the aesthetics of surveillance in pervasive games. Dixon observed that pervasive games employ both tools and practices that carry cultural significances. One of the most interesting things for Dixon is a switching from paranoia to ‘pronoia’ the flip from surveillance being ‘evil’ to it being helpful or fun. There is a sense in which a ‘trust in the system’ is encouraged through pervasive games which Dixon argues mirrors the ways in which we ‘trust’ companies such as Google with personal data. For Dixon, these games sit unevenly between art, experience and experiment.

As a counterpoint to many of the other ways in which ethics and value were approached in the conference, Huey Li Li addressed alternative ways of valuing silence. Li offered what she characterised as an engagement with a ‘critical pedagogy for understanding ambiguity’. The central argument was that we should reclaim the pedagogical value of silence, which encourages students to engage in reflection. Li argued that To compel oppressed people to engage is speech can be a means of control, silent resistance can thus be powerful. In designing the resources for online learning and encouraging students, and people more broadly, to join virtual learning communities Li argued that we should facilitate engagement, however the user may wish to do so, rather than mandate it.

The exteriorisation of memory and thought through processes of writing (and subsequently reading) allow for the transmission of ideas between generations, which is both productive (i.e. in the production of culture) and negative (in the exercise of power over what is written). Through enscription, inter-generational transmission crosses a threshold where humanity passes from prehistory to protohistory when the first techniques allowing the transmission of temporal contents appeared. Accordingly, Stiegler argued that the elements of what Katherine Hayles calls ‘deep attention’ came together, an attentional form allowing for its own replacement by another form, which she calls ‘hyper-attention’ produced by the digital technologies of attention capture. If we want to analyse and understand the stakes of this transformation, we must analyse a process of ‘grammatisation’, that leads us from the appearance of the writing of grammata up to the digital apparatuses and the new attentional forms that they constitute.

Metadata first appeared in Mesopotamia and, Stiegler argued, the production of metadata has been the principal activity of those in power from the time of the proto-historical empires right up to today. Steigler argued that the powers that attempt to take control of the mechanisms of trans-individuation do so through the hegemonic production of this metadata. The problem here, for Stiegler, is that the exploitation of collaborative metadata is not itself collaborative in any way. It is never made the object of a critical scrutiny through which collaboratively trans-individuated knowledges would become precisely critical knowledges. They are not connected with the processes of psychosocial individuation through which ‘deep attention’ is produced.

Stiegler argued that the instruments and methods of the contemporary social web are constructed to smooth out the derivations and singularities of psychic individuals in order to agregate them through relational technologies. The aim of which is to unilaterally control the products of the collaborative production of metadata. But this situation is absolutely contingent. It can and, Stiegler argued, must be transformed by an invention that puts into motion critical collaborative instruments. In particular, Stiegler concluded, these should permit the formation of collaborative spaces of discussion which produce conflicts and critical debates that are made formally explicit in and through trans-individuation.