A little less than a year ago, Inflexions, the French Army’s journal of reflection, titled its issue no. 50 “Between virtual and real”[1].
After a year of this war in Ukraine – fought above all in the reality of European territories and peoples, but also in people’s imaginations, through the media and social networks – it is obviously still topical. And, published after the 2022 Vivatech trade show, which showcased (among other things) “virtual reality” spaces and other “verses”, this joint civilian and military approach shed interesting light on issues at the heart of our companies and our societies.
Since then, the question of our relationship with reality has been raised again with the release to the general public of tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E or Midjourney, and with calls to pause research on artificial intelligence.
A call for vigilance
I had been struck, in several articles in this issue of Inflexions, by the reservations and calls for caution that several authors expressed.
Not that these professionals of war – whether they wage it or think about it – are hostile to new technologies. The main obstacles to the adoption of innovations by the armed forces are financial and industrial, rather than a lack of appetite or uses.
But because, at the heart of commitments that push the human condition to its extremes, and confronted with the psychological and cognitive dimensions of conflict, they know the risks and fragilities of what is described as “virtual”.
Factors that companies also know – all proportions kept – in their daily lives, especially since they have had to “live with” the new habits that took root during the Covid crisis.
Habits that have more to do with “distancing” than with the “virtual”, admittedly. But in both cases, is it not a distancing from reality, and a refusal of a full relationship?
The virtual: a crisis of meaning, and a sad passion
A first strong message in this issue of Inflexions was a warning against fleeing reality. What Patrick Clervoy calls “the warbler effect”: “there is a tendency in human beings to prefer a well-crafted virtual world to the evidence of reality”.
And for Arnaud Chevreul, this is because “aversion to uncertainty and the desire for mastery and control have always played a major role in the recourse to the unreal… (…) (virtual reality) helps decision-making and reduces risk, but also legitimises an action and gives the feeling of being sheltered in one’s decision”.
While Éric Letonturier writes that “the derealisation brought by the virtual should be read as relief from our unwillingness to accept, face and overcome reality and life as they are. (…) It is therefore a crisis of meaning that our contemporaries’ sad passion for the virtual reveals”.
In the case of the virtual, it is an “unreality”. But a “relationship” at a distance is also a way of taking “shelter”.
The fascination with new digital technologies is nothing new. And it may be justified, so profoundly do they transform our lives. But all too often it resembles fantasies – which, it seems, are best left unrealised.
This of course delights the merchants of dreams – or rather, of magic tools.
Ten years ago, the fashion was for “enterprise social networks” (“réseaux sociaux d’entreprise”, or RSE in French) – a term that played on the emerging acronym RSE (“responsabilité sociale d’entreprise”, corporate social responsibility) and on the rapid growth of consumer social networks. The promise of these digital platforms at the time: to weave bonds between a company’s employees…
Today, the spotlight is on content-creation tools based on AI (to which, nevertheless, very precise instructions must be given).
Having failed to “virtualise” relationships between humans, are we now being offered a relationship between humans and machines? It is probably simpler, because more reductive. And for the designers, it is a godsend.
Because the business model of digital tools is one of rapidly increasing returns. Unlike industrial production, where supplying products to customers entails manufacturing and distribution costs, the cost of supplying digital products becomes marginal. Even more than in the physical economy, winning additional customers can guarantee the jackpot… hence the race we have seen towards “tech” start-ups – whose social added value one might question – and the “bubbles” of this economy. Especially during a period of negative interest rates, when it was more attractive to “get rid of” capital than to keep it…
But what about users?
Do we use one tool or another (email, text message, WhatsApp, Teams…) purely for the pleasure of using it, or by default, when time is short or because of distance, when we would rather talk directly with the other person?
Has a tool ever given meaning, and therefore fuelled the desire for a relationship?
Remote interactions and meaning at work
This was in fact one of the themes that emerged from the survey we carried out in 2020, on the eve of the 50th day of lockdown – a threshold that submariners tell us is psychologically crucial. A period that led to the rapid generalisation of “virtual interaction” practices and “remote working”.
Four lessons emerged:
- A degree of surprise at having adapted rather well to this unprecedented moment – even if it now appears that unconscious or denied fractures, not taken into account, still have significant individual and relational consequences;
- But with the conviction that, since human beings are above all social animals, there was a strong desire to see each other again “for real” – and the return since then to “real” meetings bears this out. Even if it is interesting to observe the circumstances or “cultures” of certain companies, or certain actors, that lead them to continue holding meetings by videoconference while others favour, as far as possible, face-to-face meetings;
- A strong desire to change something in one’s life, particularly in the balance between personal and professional life. And in the daily life of our teams, we can see that this determination has not weakened, for many people at least;
- And – this was probably linked to the previous point – companies were expected above all to be able to give meaning to everyone’s work.
So, if the mere interposition of screens called into question meaning at work – or even the meaning of life – what will become of the dehumanisation of interactions through the use of new tools based on “artificial intelligence”, which today arouse a great deal of curiosity, and no doubt as many fantasies as fears?
Will it support creation?
By subcontracting to a tamed machine (because one must learn to master it) the most repetitive or most predictable parts, so as to devote one’s time to refocused or shifted added value?
Or will it accelerate the flight from reality? By providing ready-made answers to academic or professional requests in which one finds no meaning… or by taking refuge in a permanent satire of daily life, to which one resigns oneself rather than engaging, perhaps to change it, or at least try to influence it?
For music lovers, on this theme of creation, we recommend the podcast produced by SNEP (the French recorded music industry association, chaired by Bertrand Burgalat), Radio Nova and Les Inrockuptibles, « Aux studios – Les dessous de la musique » (In the studios – behind the scenes of music), marking 100 years of recorded music[2]. When technological developments can be “tamed” by those who want to preserve the mystery of creativity, and leave all the room to the human… while those who seek only repetition, volume and profitability hand over to machines and automation…
The mind contemplates, the body interacts
A second idea developed in the issue of Inflexions was the relative but intrinsic ineffectiveness of virtual systems.
Of course, they are useful, particularly for training. To practise, over and over, gestures that need to be acquired, at lower cost and with less impact on bodies and the physical environment.
But they do not match the “reality” of the physical world.
Any more than, in the world of our companies, “online” training sessions deliver the same quality of learning as sessions held in person (dreadfully called “en présentiel” in French).
Antoine Bourguilleau is a specialist in “wargames”. Beyond the games available on the market, these have been, for two centuries, extremely useful tools for training military leaders. And he argues that it is essential to resist the temptation to abandon physical “games” in favour of their digital avatars, because “computerising it (war) would have the effect of hiding all its approximations under a technological veneer, giving users a false impression of ‘realism’, when we precisely want these approximations to be visible and open to criticism”. When the “friction” of war turns out to be impossible to digitise completely…
And, to illustrate this situation, we can remember the lovely phrase by Laurie Bonin and Julie Corver: “while the mind contemplates the work, the body interacts with it, provoking a wave of sensations and emotions”.
Each of us has had the opportunity – some before the Covid crisis, a great many since – to take part in “videoconference” sessions, some of which made use of so-called “facilitation” tools: dematerialised transpositions of very physical tools.
And employees of large companies had no doubt experienced, for years before the pandemic, “teleconferences” in which the “big bosses” shared a certain amount of information… and during which it was possible to demonstrate “multi-tasking” talents…
With videoconferencing multiplied by new tools and new practices – crutches for enforced distancing – the image may have given the impression of regained closeness… until the number of participants made the impossibility of remote interaction obvious, and the cameras were switched off, once again allowing that marvellous ubiquity…
Remote management, an impossible quest?
Our second survey of the pandemic period focused on remote working, in September 2020.
And while the wish to make permanent the two days of remote working – later formalised in the negotiations that followed in companies and organisations – was already emerging, the answers made clear that this remote work absolutely had to be accompanied by a change in management practices, because everyone could, intuitively or through practice, measure the limits of a relationship at a distance.
Not necessarily for those who felt that their work – consisting mainly of individual output, “in a silo” – could do without (and for some, should do without, at least from their point of view) the attention and intervention of others.
But for all those whose “output” (and sense of meaning at work) also depends on interactions, in design as well as in implementation.
And it was the failure to take this “condition for support” into account that appeared again, and for the majority, in our third and last survey of this pandemic period, after the “curfews” and on the eve of the end-of-year lockdown: a clear statement of professional disengagement and of the fragmentation of collective dynamics. At least for those who attached importance to interactions, either out of personal affinity or because of the nature of their professional “output”, which requires exchanges and collective intelligence.
Because remote working is a real “distancing” of the other.
On this subject, Anne Muxel[3], research director at the CNRS (Cevipof/Sciences Po), cites a study by Alain and Dominique Schnapper that distinguishes between “exploitation activities” and “exploration activities”: “the inseparable nature of the knowledge and interpersonal relationships that characterise the company requires forms of collaboration between employees whose form may evolve, but which cannot be ensured entirely through screens”.
Just as Hannah Arendt – quoted by Anne-Sophie Moreau, to whom Anne Muxel refers – wrote in The Human Condition, about human activities: “Action (…) is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act”.
So, if distancing is isolation, what about abandoning oneself to virtual worlds?
Almost three years later, one can probably observe that “remote management” has only taken root in people’s habits by being organised around the times spent in the office.
Was it possible to be “trained” in remote management? Some training firms will no doubt say yes. For our part, we do not believe so, having observed, before the pandemic, the practices of large multi-site international companies which, despite having the technology suited to meetings via screens and substantial professional development resources, continued to favour “real” meetings at regular intervals. And the sociological and philosophical observations above confirm this purely experiential feeling.
“Management” is not merely the administration of resources. Because, as André Torre, quoted by Anne Muxel, points out, “a large part of the interactions between human beings pass (…) through attitudes, facial expressions, pheromones, conviviality over a drink or a meal, and can only be imperfectly reproduced at a distance”. It is therefore about creating bonds, generating and bringing interactions to life.
Since the end of the health alert (and even right after the first period of “paralysis”), we have also observed that the choice of how to interact can be considered an indicator of engagement.
For a quick exchange, one can phone – as we did before (and why switch on video, which prevents walking around and uses up energy for nothing?).
But to really interact, if one has the choice, one must meet again, and not only through a screen… Because it is also possible that full interaction is not really wanted (the screen then reverting to its original meaning of a partition). In that case, the form of the “meeting” becomes a “revelation” of the perceived and expected quality of the relationship – or of its absence.
The quest for the senses, too…
Because communication is not only a matter of eye contact – all the more so since, with new AI-based technologies, the “gaze” can be artificially “reframed” to give the impression of direct contact rather than one off-centre from the camera. But since everyone will know this exists, we can predict that, paradoxically, the authenticity of the interaction will suffer directly. Not to mention the possibility that, beyond the gaze, the entire “individual” on screen may be artificial…
Yet the image has been heavily promoted by digital tool makers to market uses that would guarantee an equivalent of a physical meeting… And this is no doubt also due – in addition to the economic opportunity of economies of scale – to the historical predominance of sight among the five senses.
Seven years ago, issue no. 74 of the journal Hermès, devoted to cognition, communication and politics, was titled « La voie des sens » (The way of the senses)[4]. With the aim, in Dominique Wolton’s words, of “going beyond the apparent victory, today, of sight and hearing, reinforced by the domination of screens. Revaluing touch, taste and smell in all their dimensions”.
For Éric Letonturier and Brigitte Munier, “the Western sensory hierarchy is a civilisational choice”. And even though Aristotle had conceived of a sixth sense, the “common sense”, “devoted to synthesising the other sensory organs”, more recent thinkers such as Kant or Simmel noted the primacy given to sight, then to hearing.
And Bernard Valade recalls that “the order of succession hardly varies”. For, according to Richard de Fournival in a 13th-century work, “man has five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch”.
Yet for the neuroscience researcher Helena Wasling, quoted by Anne Muxel[5], “touch is a form of ‘social glue’ that opens up the possibility of a feeling of mutual trust between people who have touched each other”. What if neuroscience explained this “cultural” habit that many companies know, where it has always been unthinkable to start a day in the workshop, or a meeting, without shaking everyone’s hand, at the risk of sending a real signal of mistrust?
But it is a very old hierarchy, which also draws, as Bernard Valade recalls, on Cartesian dualism and on “controversies over the relationship between matter and mind”. Or between “sensation” and “cognition” (Benoît Le Blanc and Bernard Claverie). And this probably explains why some reject this “appeal to the senses”.
So let us ask ourselves: what sensations are accessible in front of a screen? And above all, what shared sensations – which make the quality (positive or negative) of interactions?
In this respect, the professional practice of “facilitation” constantly reminds us of the importance of taking the five senses into account (without forgetting Aristotle’s sixth, of course), in the layout of the space but also through many other levers.
Let us take three examples: the first from the world of music, the other two from the military world.
Fans of rock and pop concerts will probably have noticed, for several years now, the appearance of red “Nord” keyboards. The key to their success? The return of “knobs”, potentiometers and the like… whereas their competitors had got carried away with screens and drop-down menus… Today, Yamaha is setting out to win back these stage keyboards with the same configurations…
Let us move on to the military world…
In an (online) article, a fighter pilot describes moving to aircraft with a “modern cockpit” (in which “buttons” have given way to screens, including in the pilot’s helmet), concluding: “About the only thing missing from the whole cockpit is the lack of ‘feel’”[6].
And even though he welcomes the “situational awareness” (the ability to fully grasp the elements of the context) he experiences in this new cockpit, his reluctance to take voice messages into account in flight sharply illustrates the cognitive saturation that every decision-maker experiences in extreme situations. Because if he cannot take hearing into account, it is probably because the multitude of visual messages fully absorbs his attention.
The same visual saturation probably lies behind the US Navy’s decisions to reinstall “physical throttles” on the control consoles of its most modern destroyers[7].
When it comes to safety in a crisis, “situational awareness” is key. So why deprive oneself of all the senses?
The human factor, a factor of safety and resilience
It is therefore also a question of safety. Something that also depends on the perceived sincerity of the information received.
That is why we are convinced that the spread of content produced by automatic content-generation tools will probably lead – almost paradoxically, in a context of technological acceleration – to a return to real interactions.
Because the race for “fakes” is the transposition, into the cognitive field, of the race between the sword and the shield.
In academia, the suspicion of plagiarism made easier by access to online sources had led teachers to equip themselves with statistical checking tools… And some students had hoped to fool the comparison system (and above all the teachers’ reading skills) by using (automatic, of course) translations of texts written in other languages… Until, no doubt, the prevention tools also incorporated this multilingualism.
For generated text or image content, analysis tools are already appearing… Bringing back the race between “black hats” and “white hats”…
And what if, to tell the true from the false, the answer lay in human interaction? And in academia, in the return of the traditional “oral examination”, relying on the professionalism of teachers? With their weaknesses, admittedly, but also their critical thinking and their ethics.
A shared inspiration, ethic and history
Because ethics, individual and collective, was a third avenue in the Inflexions issue for responding to the risks and threats mentioned.
And the pilots Romain Desjars de Keranrouë and Xavier Rival assert that “(the crew) must develop a demanding ethic”, quoting Gustave Thibon: “every external facility that does not create an inner demand degrades man”.
An ethic that takes time: “the virtual relationship hangs on the connection, and time is measured by the yardstick of momentary contact. The absence of duration favours the event over the annals, the present over memory, and therefore rules out the blossoming of a shared history, the decision to commit or the birth of a vocation” (Éric Letonturier).
Ethics is also what is carried deep within the organisation. An ethic specific to each human enterprise, because of its history, its leaders, its trades… An ethic that must be digested, metabolised and owned by everyone. And not be the object of a “social control” guaranteed by technology.
Here again is the question of “meaning at work”, when some are content with distancing “producers” whom they would not have to “manage” but merely to “administer”.
“The times ahead require military command to evolve from a force of conviction to a force of inspiration… Because the pressure of the technical and operational environment will increasingly make it necessary to think about action in an indirect register, the only one able to stimulate the creativity and subsidiarity that subordinate echelons will necessarily have to take on… In the armed forces as in life, inspiration seems to me a lever powerful enough to transgress the limits of the hierarchical order without weakening them, and to assert in all circumstances, and transparently, the mastery of the how through the why.” (Thierry Marchand, in Inflexions)
Meaning at work, like the meaning of the mission. And therefore, contrary to the temptation to see the other as a mere “exploiter” carrying out a limited instruction, the need to rely on them as an “explorer”, who adapts and opens up the field of possibilities.
“Managerialisation”: from quasi-objects to quasi-humans?
Because the “managerialisation” (“gestionnarisation”) of society is a risk – and, for some, a temptation – to which the article by Pascal Robert and Agnieszka Tona in the Hermès issue draws attention.
For them, the proliferation of “documentary quasi-objects” – the objects and documents of the digital world – may, because of the wealth of data they contain, which evolves over time, and their intertwining, lead to “producing incommunication”.
With digital tools, the richness of exchanges is reduced. For example, the often vain use of “emojis” to try to reduce misunderstandings when sending a text message… Or the poverty of meaning, and the sources of misunderstanding, in content generated by tools based on artificial “intelligence”.
For the authors, the risk is that human communication is forced to accept this degradation by bending to the limits of the tools: what they call “managerialisation”.
This probably explains why remote working was quickly adopted by bureaucratic organisations, in which “agents” are expected to carry out a given task, increasingly automatable because it calls for little initiative. And whom one certainly does not wish to “manage” – that is, to “lead” – but at best to “administer”.
This temptation to “managerialise” things and people is found in many other fields.
Take, for example, the development of BIM (building information modelling) in the construction sector. Often reduced to the “digital model” (a documentary quasi-object), this new technology was supposed to enable new collaborative practices, with simultaneous, or at least coordinated, input from the different areas of expertise. It was an opportunity to bring “Agile methods”, or at least their spirit, to this professional environment.
Today, too many players have forgotten this potential for breaking down silos, focusing solely on the technical dimension of the tool. As a result, the paper plan is simply replaced by a digital plan, the physical model by a digital model… while silo working is retained. With, consequently, purely technical issues of data compatibility, increased standardisation of outputs, and “power” issues between trades and implicit hierarchies.
Here again, a potentially missed opportunity to use tools to increase interactions, and a temptation seized to try once again to “manage” the relationship with the other in the most impoverished way possible – notably through “standards”.
Along the same lines, Anne Muxel’s book also discusses the “digitisation of intimacy”. With unexpected consequences, such as for the making of memory. Because “for a memory to come into being and remain alive, there is a need for lived experience itself, in its carnal and sensory dimension”. It would indeed appear that images from videoconferences are not memorised… And since no other senses are stimulated…
So, if there are no more memories but only data, what is the meaning of a digitised humanity?
Exploring the virtual, a real adventure?
To close this article with a new connection between the civilian and military worlds – like the one that opened it with the Inflexions issue, but in a lighter vein – let us also mention Tom Clancy, whose books imagined, and sometimes anticipated, certain conflicts. His “Red Storm Rising”, consigned to oblivion by some after the end of the Soviet Union, has come back off the shelves in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a European borderland and sovereign State.
In the late 1990s, he created the “Net Force” series, depicting the fragility of our connected societies and imagining scenarios that, fortunately, were always brought under control in the end. And also, for a younger audience, the “Net Force Explorers” series (not published in French). A world in which teenagers faced, in a virtual universe, very real threats – at the risk of their lives in the real world – by connecting, like the characters in The Matrix, through a very physical neural implant… They were 15 or 17 in 2000. So they are now between 35 and 40, and some of them are deeply involved in the conflicts of our world. Under arms for France, but also in companies, which have their full part to play.
Are they aware of the limits and weaknesses of an industry that is deploying, with billions in investment, tools that will, like any technical device, have an impact on our human societies?
Or are they carried away by the fantasy of getting rich quickly, or of escaping the real world?
As shown by the “career changes” of some service-sector workers in this age group, but also by the success of the film « Sur les chemins noirs » (On the black paths), based on Sylvain Tesson’s book and masterfully played by Jean Dujardin: what if, in the end, the real adventure was exploring the real? The world that carries us, and our humanity?
[1] https://inflexions.net/la-revue/50/ (in French)
[2] https://www.nova.fr/podcasts/aux-studios-les-dessous-de-la-musique/ (in French)
[3] Anne Muxel, « L’Autre à distance. Quand une pandémie touche à l’intime » (The Other at a distance: when a pandemic touches the intimate), Odile Jacob, October 2021.
[4] « La voie des sens ». Hermès, La Revue, no. 74, CNRS Éditions, Paris, 2016
[5] Anne Muxel, op. cit.
[6] https://hushkit.net/2021/01/21/what-is-good-and-bad-about-the-f-35-cockpit-a-panthers-pilots-guide-to-modern-cockpits/
[7] https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to-physical-throttles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls
Leave a Reply