"Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made"
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Power, in Lyotard's telling, stops looking like a tank and starts looking like a database. The sentence is built like a warning siren disguised as a bureaucratic memo: "right decisions" sounds neutral, even comforting, yet it smuggles in the assumption that decisions can be made right by feeding the machine enough stored information. Lyotard doesn't simply predict computerized governance; he diagnoses a shift in political legitimacy. When knowledge becomes something processed, stored, and retrieved by systems, the real fight is no longer over ideology alone but over access, custody, and gatekeeping.
The subtext is suspicion toward technocratic common sense. "These machines must have in storage" implies a new dependency: decision-making is outsourced to infrastructures that demand continuous inputs, standardized formats, and legible data. That requirement quietly disciplines society, privileging what can be captured and computed over what can't: lived experience, ambiguity, dissent, the local. The phrase "central question" signals a regime change. Politics becomes an access problem, not a debate problem.
Context matters: Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979) is a report on how advanced capitalism retools knowledge into "information" and treats it as a commodity. In that world, whoever controls storage and networks controls the criteria for what counts as truth, competence, even reality. It's not prophecy so much as an early map of today's platform economy: the power to decide is inseparable from the power to curate the dataset that makes decisions appear inevitable.
The subtext is suspicion toward technocratic common sense. "These machines must have in storage" implies a new dependency: decision-making is outsourced to infrastructures that demand continuous inputs, standardized formats, and legible data. That requirement quietly disciplines society, privileging what can be captured and computed over what can't: lived experience, ambiguity, dissent, the local. The phrase "central question" signals a regime change. Politics becomes an access problem, not a debate problem.
Context matters: Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979) is a report on how advanced capitalism retools knowledge into "information" and treats it as a commodity. In that world, whoever controls storage and networks controls the criteria for what counts as truth, competence, even reality. It's not prophecy so much as an early map of today's platform economy: the power to decide is inseparable from the power to curate the dataset that makes decisions appear inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Privacy & Cybersecurity |
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