Les leviers de l'hégémonie technique : l'informatisation de la Sécurité sociale et la question de la politique des techniques

Since Langdon Winner sparked debate on the politics of artefacts (1980), authors in philosophy of technology have elaborated competing theories regarding the politics of technology, which share similar understandings of politics as intrinsic properties of artefacts, examined as standalone objects, associated with their agency (Verbeek, 2006; Latour, 2007; Marres, 2012). The history of the computerization of the French National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) during a period of conflictual reform (1963-1979), offers a rare historical case study to develop critical and more relational conceptions of the politics of technology. Despite the existence of multiple possible computer “configurations” in the health sector in the early 1960s, the CNAM, working in alliance with its supervising ministries and French computing industry, succeeded in imposing a specific, “medium” configuration over the interests of other actors (e.g., trade-unions and local agencies). Beyond being a merely technical choice, this configuration irreversibly centralized both information processing and institutional decision-making power. By detailing the levers of this imposition over a decade - wherein dominant actors coercively imposes their “definition” of technology, and the technology’s functioning naturalized these actors’ institutional position, reinforcing power relations by other, more consensual means - the paper offers a fine-grained, processual account of the constitution of a form of “technological hegemony” (Feenberg, 1999). Adopting an empirically informed approach to philosophy, the paper discusses the relevance and contours of this notion and highlights the limits entailed by an artefactual approach to its examination. Returning to Gramscian understanding of hegemony, it proposes a more relational understanding of politics, conceived as extrinsic properties of technology that emerge from the interaction between technological development and the social and power dynamics of a given institutional context. This renewed technopolitical account also invites a reconceptualization of the associated notion of “technological democracy” (Callon et al. 2001; Latour 2004; Winner 1992), understood neither as plural participation in public debate over technological choices nor as participation in artefactual conception and design (Ehn 1989), but more substantively as the capacity of minority actors to effectively orient the institutional development, deployment and use of technology, thereby reopening emancipatory technological horizons and possibilities.