In his book D’où nous viennent nos idées? [Where Do Our Ideas Come From?], author and professor Éric Méchoulan underlines the fundamentally immanent nature of ideas:
Those who master techniques, who authorize their effects, who ensures broadcast count as much as the author of this or that work, as soon as one considers the fact that meanings do not transit from one brain to another in an immaterial and immediate manner.
In the light of such statement, the author of a Facebook or Twitter post is also the platform itself, which constitutes its writing context, its broadcasting medium, its (material) condition of existence. The author of a letter written in software such as Microsoft Word also comprises the company itself, since it is a manner to put ideas in the world that is designed by the computer engineers.
Any idea redacted through a given software is therefore in (equal?) part produced by this same program. Méchoulan means to reiterate the profoundly material aspect of ideas. Technique, and by extension technology, is knowledge materialized.
It is a new environment of production of truth assertions that articulates itself in the construction of a common culture (while its building is difficult to see), while the materiality of certain media is being erased or revealed. We see just how important it is necessary to link the elaboration of ideas with the construction of a public and the history of truth and the invention and the broadcast of media.
Who are the new intellectuals of the 21st century? The masters of code, of programs, these hidden texts which give rhythm to everyday life?
It is paramount that we study with attentively—some may say urgently—this “environment of production” of common culture, led by a handful of “machine gods.”