Telecracy Against Democracy

The text we publish here is the first chapter of Bernard Stiegler’s La Télécratie contre la Démocratie. The broad argument of Stiegler’s book (and of this introductory chapter) is that what he terms “telecracy” is ruining democracy by short-circuiting the normal mechanisms of politics and destroying the foundations of citizenship, as understood since the Greeks. As a result, television and the wider “televisual” program industries have become the central political issue within our societies.