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The Tyranny of Algorithms: Freedom, Democracy, and the Challenge of AI
A clear-eyed, timely investigation of the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence to individual freedom, social cohesion, and the democratic process—and a radical proposal on how to fight back.
In this sharp, urgent book, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and former resistance fighter Miguel Benasayag warns of the great danger posed by the growing role of big data and algorithms in deciding the contours of individual lives and the direction of the world. From mass surveillance to predictive law enforcement to data-driven social interactions, AI has already colonized most aspects of our lives and determines the decisions of companies, financial markets, and governments.
Structured as a conversation with anthropologist Régis Meyran, The Tyranny of Algorithms rejects the sterile dichotomy that sees the promise of a “transhuman” future placed in opposition to the desire for a return to a pre-digital past, and examines how societies might meet the unprecedented challenge posed by AI to personal freedom and democratic institutions.
The solution, argues Benasayag, doesn’t lie in the systemic rejection of advanced technologies and digital architectures but in the search for new forms of integration with machines that put human needs, bodies, and emotions at the center.
“Miguel Benasayag tackles many of the key challenges of the present with courage and compassion. He is one of the intellectual giants of our time.”—Il Manifesto
In this sharp, urgent book, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and former resistance fighter Miguel Benasayag warns of the great danger posed by the growing role of big data and algorithms in deciding the contours of individual lives and the direction of the world. From mass surveillance to predictive law enforcement to data-driven social interactions, AI has already colonized most aspects of our lives and determines the decisions of companies, financial markets, and governments.
Structured as a conversation with anthropologist Régis Meyran, The Tyranny of Algorithms rejects the sterile dichotomy that sees the promise of a “transhuman” future placed in opposition to the desire for a return to a pre-digital past, and examines how societies might meet the unprecedented challenge posed by AI to personal freedom and democratic institutions.
The solution, argues Benasayag, doesn’t lie in the systemic rejection of advanced technologies and digital architectures but in the search for new forms of integration with machines that put human needs, bodies, and emotions at the center.
“Miguel Benasayag tackles many of the key challenges of the present with courage and compassion. He is one of the intellectual giants of our time.”—Il Manifesto
79 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 22, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 17, 2025
despite being perfect bound in its physical form, or ephemeral traces in its digital form, this is a pamphlet (pan-philos) in the historical and best senses of the word. First published before the most recent wave of Turing Test passing chatbots, this short interview between an anthropologist and a former guerilla (among other things) nevertheless gets to the/a core of what AI represents in terms of the changes afoot.
Split into three parts, we learn about the evolving project of Western rationality: a historical progression of desacralising the church and society in favour of an individual, rational contact with the divine. Eventually, we delegate the task of ultimate rationality to our machines. The current AI fervour represents a literally religious collective excitement and/or dread that maybe the machines will live up to this task.
We also learn about post-democracy, whereby 'conflictuality', the friction of coexisting with the Other, at the heart of democratic process and life, is replaced by domination, the denial of the Other: the management of life by technocratic means. Resistance is no longer recognised as such, there is no Other to resist. When the technocratic machine struggles, it is not against Resistance, but simply against noise, symptoms or insufficiently specified or solved problems.
Finally, Benasayag suggests in his theory of action that the way forward here is to embrace or accept the intellectual historical context we're in: there is no retreat from the machines, but to surrender to them is equally undesirable. Gone are the Victorian clockwork universes of predictable causality. Complexity, as a primary, current historical/cultural context for understanding the globalised world, prevents us from being able to act so that we can have justified faith in the outcomes of our actions. But we must act anyway. His path is a path of radical unknowing, living in the moment, acting, resisting, living, trying, simply because here we are.
Recommended reading. Don't automatically believe the technocratic hype of today… this book helps cut through that, although it does also suffer from a bit of hand waving hidden behind fancy words and political enthusiasm.
A good tonic against the modern cult, now culture, of efficiency as the dominating virtue. Benasayag calls for dysfunctionality, in the best sense: to be functional is to be efficient, but efficiency is for machines, and we would do well to resist being colonised by our machines, by the tide that would claim us as functional beings, and to reclaim our right to simply… exist.
Split into three parts, we learn about the evolving project of Western rationality: a historical progression of desacralising the church and society in favour of an individual, rational contact with the divine. Eventually, we delegate the task of ultimate rationality to our machines. The current AI fervour represents a literally religious collective excitement and/or dread that maybe the machines will live up to this task.
We also learn about post-democracy, whereby 'conflictuality', the friction of coexisting with the Other, at the heart of democratic process and life, is replaced by domination, the denial of the Other: the management of life by technocratic means. Resistance is no longer recognised as such, there is no Other to resist. When the technocratic machine struggles, it is not against Resistance, but simply against noise, symptoms or insufficiently specified or solved problems.
Finally, Benasayag suggests in his theory of action that the way forward here is to embrace or accept the intellectual historical context we're in: there is no retreat from the machines, but to surrender to them is equally undesirable. Gone are the Victorian clockwork universes of predictable causality. Complexity, as a primary, current historical/cultural context for understanding the globalised world, prevents us from being able to act so that we can have justified faith in the outcomes of our actions. But we must act anyway. His path is a path of radical unknowing, living in the moment, acting, resisting, living, trying, simply because here we are.
Recommended reading. Don't automatically believe the technocratic hype of today… this book helps cut through that, although it does also suffer from a bit of hand waving hidden behind fancy words and political enthusiasm.
A good tonic against the modern cult, now culture, of efficiency as the dominating virtue. Benasayag calls for dysfunctionality, in the best sense: to be functional is to be efficient, but efficiency is for machines, and we would do well to resist being colonised by our machines, by the tide that would claim us as functional beings, and to reclaim our right to simply… exist.
November 3, 2024
Interesting exploration of AI and the complex links to ideas of the individual, politics, prediction, and democracy.
February 1, 2025
my copy has highlighted passages of sublime beauty but also, a magnitude of pencil frowney faces and "waste of my time !!" scratched onto the last page. nothing of substance but scattered with quotable sentences. waste of my time !!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews