Icodynamics: the unintended consequences of the digital revolution

Internal webseminar by Saadi Lahlou, Director of the Paris IAS and Social Psychologist, London School of Economics. This communication will be analysed through the notion of "icodynamics".

Digitization which comes with the third industrial revolution, creates a dual space of our lived world. A space where objects, people, organizations and even thoughts have their “digital twin”.

As a consequence of automatization (which is the driving force of industrial revolutions), decisions will mostly be taken in this digital world, on the digital twins that are the digital projections of first-world entities.

Icodynamics is the process by which agents take this state of affairs into account and start acting in order to optimize their digital twin. Objects are being designed or tweaked so as to optimize their represented image in the digital world rather than their affordances in the first-world.

I shall expose the mechanism and the emergent issues that ensue. The Enron and Volkswagen scandals, the election of populists, fake news, and some aspects of social network life are examples of the consequences of Icodynamics.