What leverage can philosophy really get out of the digital revolution apart from a few suggestive metaphors?
Lévy: It’s a mistake to contrast ivory-tower philosophy with the get-it-done world of technology. A glance back at history shows that we have always used what I call “intellectual technologies” to do our thinking in the first place. After all, what are structures such as stories and rhetoric but technologies for organising our mental world? In fact I’m rather surprised that philosophers have on the whole had so little to say about the implications of digital technology. Surely what is really interesting is precisely the fact that computers are transforming our relationship with the fundamental categories of our mental life – our memory, perception and imagination. To put it more philosophically, computers have changed from the inside what it means for something to be a thinking subject. Your latest book, on “collective intelligence”, reads like a paean of praise to the democratic possibilities that fully interconnected cyberspace could open up. Why are you optimistic about the pattern
