Total Record

Guillaume Helleu , Anthony Masure (1)

1 LLA-CREATIS - Lettres, Langage et Arts – Création, Recherche, Émergence en Arts, Textes, Images, Spectacles

Adapted from the science fiction story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” [«Souvenirs à vendre»] by Philip K. Dick (1966), Paul Verhoeven’s feature film, Total Recall (1990), exposes us to a tyrannical corporation that is exploiting the mineral resources of Mars. Frequently dreaming of a return to Mars, despite never having been there, Douglas Quaid (named Quail in the story) seeks the help of Rekal Inc. whom he tasks with implanting fake memories of a voyage he never had into his brain. In the story, human memory becomes a hard disk that can be rewritten (reprogrammed) from the outside without the subject being aware of any manipulation. In Verhoeven’s film, Quaid wants to go to Mars to try to discover his true identity [véritable identité]. Inversely, in the novella, Quaid makes the choice to surrender himself to the Interplanatery Forces to save his life while having his past as a secret agent erased so as to not to succumb to any desires. This story directly interrogates the fluctuating nature of the human psyche: “Had you really gone to Mars as an Interplan agent, you would by now have forgotten a great deal; our analysis […] shows that a variety of details are very quickly lost to the person. Forever. Part of the package we [Rekal Inc.] offer you is such deep implantation that nothing is forgotten.” The psychotic nightmare in Dick’s novella worryingly prefigures the development of networks of information, in particular their ability to operate on a global scale as mechanisms of surveillance aiding in the alienation of populations…

Le protocole Bitcoin (2009) s’inscrit dans le prolongement des utopies crypto-anarchistes visant à développer une monnaie numérique sécurisée et distribuée sur le réseau Internet pour échapper à la centralisation du pouvoir par les banques et les gouvernements. Récupérées en grande partie par la finance spéculative, ces technologies à chaînes de blocs (blockchain) se sont progressivement développées et dépassent désormais largement le champ monétaire (applications distribuées, contrats intelligents, jetons de valeurs, etc.). Malgré la persistance de certains freins sociaux et techniques, les protocoles blockchain pourraient-ils prendre de vitesse la logique destructrice du capitalisme financier ?

Mots clés: capitalisme

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Informatique [cs]

Guillaume Helleu, Anthony Masure. Total Record : Les protocoles blockchain face au post-capitalisme. Multitudes, 2018, 71 (2), pp.70-79. ⟨10.3917/mult.071.0070⟩. ⟨hal-02926033⟩