Duality
Duality is the name of my digital notebook collecting reflections on topics related to digital technology. Giving a name to this project is a way to structure it through a narrative thread and to set a framework to channel these reflections without confining them. It is also to continue doing so as current events, readings and experiences unfold.
Throughout my writing, I try to challenge my own perspective. I try to write about digital technology with a critical but non-dogmatic eye. What I observe often reveals tensions, ambivalences and even contradictions. For example, I use generative AI daily while also criticising it. I reflect on technological autonomy (aka technological sovereignty) but remain captive to certain software or hardware devices.
Duality is a permanent exercise in composition rather than a search for balance. Duality is what is composed of two elements of a different nature. At this stage, I cannot consider that a balance can be found in the use of technology. If one finds a balance, it can only be ephemeral and temporary because subjects evolve so quickly that this balance is precarious.
Duality is also a method, an approach to technology. This method is inspired by pharmacology, as conceived by Ars Industrialis, the international association for an industrial politics of the technologies of the spirit.
According to Christian Fauré:
La pharmacologie fait référence au pharmakon grec qui signifie tout autant poison que remède ; « c’est selon », comme on dit. Or, c’est ce « selon » qu’il s’agit à chaque fois d’expliciter dans les démarches pharmacologiques en acceptant d’accorder un statut particulier à cette ambivalence essentielle du pharmakon ; un statut qui va nous inciter à penser par compositions plutôt que par oppositions ; un statut qui nous autorise également à renvoyer dos à dos technophiles et technophobes qui partagent tout deux une vision duale et binaire des choses qui les oblige à penser par opposition. (Réseaux sociaux : Culture politique et ingénierie des réseaux sociaux, p.108)
My translation: “Pharmacology refers to the Greek pharmakon, which means poison as much as remedy; ‘it depends’, as the saying goes. Yet it is precisely this ‘depends’ that pharmacological approaches must make explicit each time, by agreeing to grant a particular status to this essential ambivalence of the pharmakon; a status that will lead us to think in terms of compositions rather than oppositions; a status that also allows us to dismiss both technophiles and technophobes, who share a dual and binary view of things that forces them to think in terms of opposition.”
Duality is finally a struggle and a fight between my technophilia and a form of techno-criticism. It is accepting that harmony cannot be found and assuming the subjectivity of my view on the subject.
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Glossary
Throughout the publications, certain concepts recur, become more precise or are forged. The glossary gathers their definitions: neologisms, theoretical notions and structuring terms used in these reflections.
The phenomenological experience
Rather than prospectively documenting my AI uses, I asked GenAI to retrospectively analyse all our exchanges to create a “journal”. An ethnography of my own practices built from the traces left in my conversations.
An approach that embodies the very duality it seeks to document: using the tool to analyse how the tool transforms my practice. The result exceeds my expectations. An experience to repeat annually to map the evolution of this delegation and cognitive transformation.
Phenomenological experience of generative artificial intelligence
Entry Point
November 2022, ChatGPT was born. Since then, not a day goes by without the subject of AI being raised in the public sphere. I did not escape this tsunami. I regularly use generative devices and I decided, from 2025, to write in order to think, to protect myself and sometimes to fight. I share texts on technology and the digital in a long format. From September 2026, I am trying a second format. Shorter, following an approach to thinking highlighted by Günther Anders: the “philosophy of the occasion”, which consists in seizing an event as an entry point towards a concrete reflection. One objective, several paths. Duality, again.