LUCAS PAOLO SANCHES VILALTA

This thesis analyzes the concept of information as a key element for understanding the radical ontological, epistemological, and ethical-political transformations brought about by the digital dispositif in our contemporary era. That is, we propose to investigate information as arkhé, as the material principle of constitution and governance of a general system of communication and organization that underlies the reconfigurations of knowledge, power, and subjectivities. To this end, drawing on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, we undertake an archaeogenesis of information, showing how it expresses an ontological discontinuity and an epistemic transformation that fundamentally characterize digitality. On the one hand, information expresses a radical realism of relations, proposing that within what we commonly call "reality"—among matter and energy—what truly exist are relations and processes, rather than entities or individuals. The human ceases to be the standard by which all things are measured, and information takes its place as the minimal unit of relation among all beings—something evident in genetics, molecular biology, statistical mechanics, and other scientific fields; as well as in the bit as the fundamental unit structuring technical relations and the very existence of digital technologies. On the other hand, the epistemic figure of the human gives way to the machine as the new paradigm that determines modes of existence not only for human and technical beings but for all physical and living beings. This is no longer a matter of the opposition between mechanism and vitalism, which characterized automatons and pre-cybernetic machines, but rather of living machines that merge computation and cognition, adhering to both the organic and the social in transindividual existences. By analyzing in detail the historicity and evolution of the technicity of information and digital technologies—from Jacquard’s loom to Artificial Intelligence—we describe the genesis of digital information so that we can then map the digital dispositif as a system of data, algorithms, and interface-platforms, which can be examined through its material, logical-symbolic, connective, and expressive dimensions. We also show that Artificial Intelligence does not consist in the emulation of human intelligence but rather in systems of co-individuation and the sequestration of social and collective intelligence. Never before has technology been so transindividual, and from this realization, we finally analyze the ethical-political transformations implied by the new ways for connecting, communicating, and existing that the digital imposes. We examine how transduction protocols, modulation algorithms, and organizational platforms shape the political struggles and existential challenges of our present.