From Free Internet to Techno-Authoritarian Drift

My interview (in French) with judge Judith Allenbach of the journal Délibérée has just been published. It provides an analysis of the the Internet’s trajectory, from initial emancipation promises to contemporary techno-authoritarian drift.

Abstract

This interview traces my own journey from the Internet’s early utopias to contemporary forms of control and surveillance characterizing cyberspace. By articulating historical analysis and critical reflection, I stress how emancipatory aspirations accompanying Internet development progressively collided with commercial and security logics that profoundly transformed its nature.

The analysis identifies several key moments in this trajectory: network commercialization in the 1990s, surveillance capitalism’s emergence with Big Tech, state surveillance intensification after 9/11, and more recently, convergence between public and private surveillance.

This drift is characterized by normalization of control forms previously exclusive to overtly authoritarian regimes: algorithmic censorship, generalized behavioral profiling, facial recognition, predictive surveillance. The article emphasizes how these systems fit into a broader reconfiguration of relationships between state, market and public freedoms, where technology serves as a vector for growing restriction of individual and collective autonomy spaces.

Full reference: Tréguer Félix and Allenbach Judith, 2023, “De l’Internet libre à la dérive techno-autoritaire”, Délibérée, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 69‑77.