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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork in a French digital ethics committee, this article examines how institutional ethics aimed at combating polarisation might reproduce the tensions it seeks to resolve around democratic norms and expertise, state legitimacy and knowledge politics, and cultural universalism.

Paper long abstract

Through both their political history and the practices they enable, digital technologies have proven to be vectors of polarization as well as tools for commoning. This ambivalence became especially manifest during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly concerning knowledge production and its translation into public policy. The health crisis also sparked strong opposition to digital technologies for epidemiological or social surveillance.

This paper draws on over two years of fieldwork (October 2019 - December 2021) within a French national digital ethics committee, created just before the pandemic began. Along with various other European initiatives, this committee promotes "ethical" or "human-centered" digital technologies, frequently presented as alternatives to dystopian models of state surveillance or surveillance capitalism.

Yet the way this committee presents ethics as a tool against polarization masks fundamental tensions that become manifest as members collectively draft opinions addressing, for example, ethical issues raised by telemedicine during the pandemic or digital tools for deconfinement. These tensions sometimes echo the polarization that the ethical approach claims to overcome: in the democratic construction of norms, in the relationships between politics and knowledge, and in the articulation between culturally situated values and universalist claims.

This ethnographic presentation of ethics-in-the-making highlights its ambiguities and internal tensions – made especially obvious by the context in which this committee was built. This detour through institutional ethics offers a sidestep to extend questions that have run through anthropology's history. Indirectly, it questions the possibility of opposing growing polarization without reproducing forms of domination.