Like sexuality, madness, or civil society, the social is real, although it has not always existed. The techno-social hypothesis is thus premised on the idea that the social never possessed an intrinsic or preexisting reality, but rather what, with Michel Foucault, we might call a historical, that is a “transactional” one. It is rather about the fundamental role played by “the social” in the modern age, and how contemporary digital and computational networks as technical beings do not just generate, as Gilbert Simondon suggested, a natural and technical milieu, but also a directly (techno-)social one. The techno-social hypothesis is not about how, as Bernard Stiegler claimed, social media have bypassed “the traditional networks of proximity that have defined the social since time immemorial.” 1 Neither is it about how technology has subsumed and colonized social life, and how this process might be reversed to gain access to a more authentic, embodied sociality. It also poses the question of how this new inseparability should be understood. The techno-social hypothesis concerns the idea that, over the last three decades or so, the technological and the social have become thoroughly enmeshed with each other. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
Los Angeles, 2001. First Street bridge at bottom, Highway 101 at center, Cesar Chavez Bridge at center rear.
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