Les Furtifs d’Alain Damasio par Hervé Rivano

Série podcast : “Les scientifiques lisent aussi de la fiction”

Dans chaque épisode de cette série de podcasts coproduite par l’Ecole urbaine de Lyon et We are Europe, un ou une scientifique choisit quelques pages de fiction qui ont particulièrement retenu son attention. Après la lecture de chacun des extraits, l’invité(e) explique comment le passage entre en résonance avec son travail, suscite son imaginaire théorique ou lui ouvre de possibles nouvelles pistes de recherche.

Un podcast coproduit par l’Ecole urbaine de Lyon et We are Europe

Episode 1 : Les Furtifs d’Alain Damasio (La Volte, 2019)

Invité : Hervé Rivano, Professeur en Informatique à l’Institut national des sciences appliquées de Lyon (France).

Série conçue et réalisée par Lucas Tiphine

Lecture des extraits et montage par Laure Porthé

Mixage par Fabien Abadie

Dessin de Lou Herrmann

English podcast transcript dedicated to non French speaking listeners revised by Lucas Tiphine based on a translation made with online automatic translator Deepl.com/Translator.

Jingle :

In each episode of this podcast series, a scientist selects a few pages of fiction that have particularly caught his or her attention. After the reading of each of the excerpts, the guest explains how the passage resonates with his or her work, stimulates his or her theoretical imagination or opens up possible new avenues of research. First episode with guest Hervé Rivano professor in Computer Science at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon (INSA) around Les Furtifs d’Alain Damasio published by La Volte in 2019.

Introduction by guest Hervé Rivano :

My name is Hervé Rivano, I am a professor in Computer Science at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon (INSA).

I lead a research team, AGORA, which works on networks, connectivity, digital technologies, in order to develop new services for the « smart city », with all the caution that it is necessary to have around what exactly involves this concept.

At the Ecole urbaine de Lyon (NB : an urban studies research program institute based in Lyon), I run a research studio with researcher Lou Herrmann called “smart city, learning city”. In this research studio, we try to take a step aside from an approach focused on technical developments to reflect on what the smart city is, who are the citizens of the smart city, and all the pedagogical efforts that must be put in place for smart cities to be as democratic and shared as possible.

And so we are necessarily interested in all the risks and excesses which these technical systems can lead to in the context of the urban environment social relations.

This is why Alain Damasio’s novel, Les Furtifs, is particularly interesting because it has a context around very digitalized cities — mostly controlled by large private companies — in which for instance violations of individual freedoms and privacy occur.

The book is also relevant to my researches because fiction allows to invent technical devices that are not necessarily in line with current real developments; for instance, the way of imagining city-dwellers relationship with data is very stimulating in the novel; and it is from this angle that we will approach it in this podcast.

Reading of extract n°1 : On how Les Furtifs designs a city in which data have a physical presence in public spaces (Chapter 2, p.41–42)[1].

Analysis of the extract by Hervé Rivano :

In the excerpt we have just heard, we can consider how Les Furtifs’ digital environment is not only immaterial, but finds a concrete translation in the urban space; especially with the coloured clouds in which you have to place yourself in order to access data.

This is a rather interesting point of view since today, in our daily digital practice, what we call the cloud is, on the contrary, a search for what has been called ubiquitous computing; that is to say that we have access to data everywhere, without borders. In Les Furtifs, Damasio confronts this idea and gives a material translation to the storage of data: particular zones of the urban space exist in which we can place ourselves to retrieve information. In addition, there is a principle in the book according to which, because a city dweller has gone to a particular place, he or she will have access to data that other city dwellers have wanted to share in that specific place. Damasio therefore imagines a form of socialisation between city dwellers in public spaces based on a geographically anchored sharing of digital data.

This question of data « concretness » can be related to the old communication technologies that we had in the urban spaces historically, such as telephone booths, physical places where we could access telecommunication networks ; or also, less known, the Bi-bop, which few people surely remember. It was a kind of French ancestor of the mobile phone deployed in particular in Paris and Lille (two french metropolises). Each user had a portable handset with which he or she moved around the urban spaces. And he or she could only be reached when he or she was under the cover of a bi-bop antenna, whose presence was indicated by specific signs with small panels. The Bi-Bop was an economic failure and soon disappeared.

To summarize, this issue of data reporting and communication is at the heart of the smart city materiality. It is a crucial subject. The interpretation made of it in Les Furtifs is relatively simple, but it raises in fact very deep scientific questions.

Reading of extract n°2 : On the over-abundance of sensors (and therefore data) in the city and the risk of “digital dazzlement” it can lead to (Chapter 4, p.97)

Analysis of the extract by Hervé Rivano :

In this passage, there is a litany of technologies and sensors that are used by Ner, one of the characters, to try to measure the presence of the famous furtifs. And the conclusion of the excerpt resonates with a crucial issue of the smart cities that we imagine to be increasingly equipped with sensors : « Il voulait voir, Nèr. Tout. Et à travers tout. Quitte à s’éblouir. Quitte à s’aveugler. » (literal translation : He wanted to see, Ner. Everything. And through everything. Even if it meant being dazzled. Even if it meant being blinded).

Indeed, we find ourselves, perhaps for the first time in the technical history of mankind, in a position to measure the same phenomena from many different points of view that are heterogeneous and complementary. One example is car traffic, which can be measured with magnetic loops that give the number of passages at a given place, video cameras that make it possible to identify the different types of vehicles, but also sound sensors that give the noise volume generated by traffic, pollution sensors to measure emissions and possibly even weight sensors to evaluate the pressure on infrastructures.

So we have the same phenomenon, car traffic, which is measured in many different ways. And it’s a bit like what Ner is doing to spot the furtifs with different tools. This overabundance of data raises a lot of questions about how we collect, sort and store it. There’s a vast amount of research on this subject in computer science and digital science. But it also raises another challenge: this information certainly sheds new light on urban functioning and its uses. However, there is a risk of being “dazzled” by this abundance and forgetting about phenomena that are not documented.

If we consider again road traffic monitoring, we could imagine that if we are able to know exactly how vehicles move at a given moment, where users want to go, we could then be able to guide them, for example to parking spaces, in order to make city traffic more fluid and reduce pollution. It is well known that a large proportion of slowdowns in the city are caused by car users looking for a place to park. This is not wrong, but only if we forget that by making traffic more fluid, we may in fact increase the number of vehicles in the urban space because users who preferred other, more fluid modes of traffic such as cycling or public transport, will once again be inclined to use a motorised individual vehicle.

Hence, the fundamental problem is not so much that it takes time for users to find a parking space, but that there are too many vehicles in the city centers; that city dwellers may lack alternatives to avoid using their cars. The increase in urban traffic data may help us to improve one problem after the other, but these are only symptoms of a broader issue.

Reading of extract n°3 : On the need for smart city technologies citizens education (Chapter 10, p.276)

This excerpt describes, among other things, the increasing control of technology over the atmosphere of the city and the way it is experienced by city dwellers; the novel character reminds us that at the beginning of the smart city it was about the concrete, the palpable — the surfaces, the screens — then more and more about the impalpable — sound, light, air — ; and finally, the ultimate, in the novel, is the control of individuals emotions through technologies.

This idea confirms the importance of giving people enough pedagogical, cognitive and intellectual material to avoid them being manipulated; to be able to always have a reasoning process, whereas the big digital companies offer us emotional, reactive and sensitive material with the aim of capturing our attention as much as possible, especially in order to be able to sell advertising.

Education about digital technology, about what is a data, about what is a digital service is essential; also so that citizens can participate in a democratic process on the regulation of digital companies impact on the urban spaces. It is indeed impossible to have an enlightened debate on the ethical limits to be placed on artificial intelligence, on the respect of privacy and individual freedoms, if individuals have not been trained in the digital technologies basic functionning.

And this is something we are engaging with a lot in the “smart cities, learning cities” studio of the Ecole urbaine de Lyon, at all ages of life, from primary school onwards, to help train citizens who are able to take part in choosing the role they want for smart city technologies.

Reading of extract n° 4 : On digital control over one’s own personal environment on and through technology, urban segregation and capitalism (Chapter 15, p. 409–410)

Analysis by Hervé Rivano :

In this passage, Alain Damasio uses the metaphor of the digital bubble that we already know today in the study of social networks. He pushes it to its limits with the concept of “technococon”, which describes a form of comfortable confinement, of protection from others. He also forges the concept of “reul” which is the possibility offered to individuals to have their own reality according to the beings they want to interact with on a daily basis.

If we go back to the situation today, we already have these digital bubbles in the spheres of information which, through recommendation algorithms, push us towards contents close to those we have loved or spent time on before. These algorithms are based on a principle that is not stupid, which is to say that there is so much information available that it is useful to have a selection to avoid wasting time or missing things that might interest us. But of course, by the same token, we deprive ourselves of a part of otherness, a part of « serendipity », a neologism that describes the fact of coming across something by chance that will interest us even more than what we were looking for initially.

And then there are also very important financial stakes: the content that is offered is not only proposed according to the user’s history but also according to the benefits that the platforms that host it can derive from it.

In a way, this is what happened during the 2016 US elections during which certain companies tried to influence the votes of people who informed themselves on social networks by offering them targeted content.

In the excerpt from Les Furtifs, a dimension linked to urban segregation is added to this. There are city dwellers who suffer from spatial segregation because they do not have the means to live or move around in certain parts of the city. And in the novel it is very well treated with the idea that depending on the subscription you have paid for, you have access to a certain street at a certain time or not.

The counterpart of this segregation suffered according to one’s level of wealth is that chosen by the wealthiest who do not want to be in physical proximity to the poor or even the middle classes sometimes. This phenomenon obviously exists today, for example with residential neighbourhoods whose access is regulated and monitored.

In Damasio, the « reul », which is a form of segregation achieved by digital technology, paradoxically allows once again to cross in the physical space with people one wants to avoid since they will be masked for the user. For an outside observer looking over the city imagined by Damasio, there is therefore certainly more mixing, except that from the point of view of individuals, everyone has a different experience and is no longer confronted with otherness at all. Damasio proposes to call this “dissociété” in the novel : everyone will live their own desirable society without interactions that will eventually make them change their own representations. As far as I am concerned, I find this perspective particularly frightening….

Extract 5 : On the use of sonic weapons — and more broadly on the sound that is omnipresent in Les Furtifs’ universe (Chapter 2, p.52)

Analysis by Hervé Rivano :

This passage deals with sound, mainly sonic weapons, and the ability of the city police forces to repel crowds with these weapons.

Sound is omnipresent in the universe developed by Alain Damasio: through these weapons; through les furtifs, who communicate with each other through sound, and who are virtually only made of sound; there is also at one point a kind of human crowd that manages to gain the upper hand over the police by starting to make music.

When I read Les Furtifs, I thought that sonic weapons were really science fiction, but in fact they are already in circulation. Sonic cannons were used in particular against the revolt movements that took place in Hong Kong in 2019.

And what questions me as a scientist, especially with my telecommunications researcher cap, is that sound is precisely an essential means of communication in everyday life, if you think for instance of speech. This dimension is not absent in Les Furtifs, but sound is not primarily linked to this in the book.

And this corresponds a little to a technology evolution that we can observe at present: sound is used less and less to transmit information. For example, until about ten years ago, progress in mobile telephony was reflected in an improvement in the calls sound quality. The same applied to television, for example with home cinema.

And we are realising that today it is images, video and text that count by neglecting the telephony part in the true sense of the word, which requires that callers are available at the same time and which takes time. And so it is interesting to see how in Les Furtifs, the future of sound is primarily offensive and no longer a search for understanding through communication.

Conclusion by Hervé Rivano

To conclude, for me as a researcher on smart cities technologies, Alain Damasio weaves a very stimulating universe in his novel Les Furtifs.

It is credible on certain technological and political aspects, for example the fact that some cities could be in the future completely privatised and managed by brands. This is already the case for football stadiums, and there is no reason to believe that this phenomenon will not increase in the coming decades.

On the issues of individual alienation through digital technology, here too there are elements which are in the continuation of what already exists and which raise interesting questions.

The conclusion that could ultimately be drawn from the extracts chosen in this podcast, is that, as citizens, if we let things be done, there is a chance that society will move in the direction imagined by Damasio.

But we are not yet in the world of his novel Les Furtifs. We are not bound hand and foot, and there is a lot to think about, to create uses, political controls, counter-powers, ethical limits that would make the future imagined by Damasio completely dystopian.

Society’s capacity to accept or refuse uses is very strong and we must be aware of this. If we collectively refuse to go in one direction, then that direction is likely never to exist.

BIOGRAPHIES

Alain Damasio is a French writer of sci-fi and fantasy.

Hervé Rivano is University Professor at INSA Lyon. He is the head of the Inria/INSA Lyon common team Agora of the CITI lab. The team focuses on wireless networks for digital cities.

CREDITS

Book : Les Furtifs by Alain Damasio (La Volte, 2019)

Guest : Hervé Rivano, Professor of Computer Science at the Institut national des sciences appliquées de Lyon (France).

Series producer : Lucas Tiphine

Excerpts reader and podcast editor : Laure Porthé

Audio mixing : Fabien Abadie

A podcast coproduced by the Ecole urbaine de Lyon and We are Europe :

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[1] All pages references are based on the original edition, published in 2019 by La Volte. Novel excerpts are not translated in this transcript.