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Abstract: This article traces the evolution of the concept of proletarianisation from its Marxist origins through Bernard Stiegler’s cognitive extension to its Scybernethical reformulation. We argue that proletarianisation is not merely economic exploitation but a fundamental anthropological process: the loss of knowledge — know-how and know-thinking — produced by the externalisation of human capacities into technical devices. The contemporary deployment of artificial intelligence, a global infrastructure whose internal logic remains opaque even to its creators, serves as the emblematic illustration. The article concludes with deproletarianisation as the counter-operation at the heart of the Scybernethical project.
Definition
In its Scybernethical sense, proletarianisation is the loss of knowledge (know-how, know-thinking) produced by the externalisation of cognitive and gestural capacities through our interactions with automatic devices. Unlike the Marxist reduction, which limits it to the expropriation of the means of production and wage alienation (“class struggle”), the Stieglerian conception of proletarianisation — taken up and extended by Scybernethics — is a fundamental anthropological process that runs through the history of technics: each wave of grammatisation (writing, printing, digital) produces a loss of knowledge at the same time as it makes its diffusion and transmission possible.
The proletarian is no longer only the one who owns nothing but their labour power, but the one who has lost the knowledge of what they do — gesture externalised into the machine, decision captured by the algorithm, attention formatted by the technical infrastructure.
Etymology and Genealogy
- Latin proletarius: citizen of the lowest Roman class, possessing nothing but their offspring (proles = progeny)
- Marx (19th c.): the proletarian as wage worker expropriated from the means of production, reduced to selling their labour power. Proletarianisation = alienation through capitalist exploitation of labour.
- Stiegler (21st c.): radical extension — proletarianisation is no longer merely economic, it is cognitive and psychic. Two main losses: know-how (gestures externalised into the machine) and know-thinking (knowledge, attention, desire captured by AI and algorithmic devices).
- Rigon / Scybernethics: further extension into cognitarisation — the externalisation of intimate cognitive capacities (attention, memory, desire) into digital devices, producing a loss of the capacity for psychic and collective individuation.
No break with Marx, but a partial demarxisation: the schema of economic exploitation is a particular case of a broader process that touches the technical condition of the human being as a being of default (le défaut qu’il faut, Epimetheism).
Mechanism
Proletarianisation follows a characteristic cycle:
- Grammatisation: a continuous flow (gesture, speech, decision) is discretised into reproducible units (grammes)
- Externalisation: these grammes are incorporated into a technical device (tool, machine, algorithm)
- Loss: the knowledge once carried by the gesture or decision no longer needs to be interiorised — it is accessible in the machine, but outside oneself
- Dependence: the user becomes dependent on the device to do what they once knew how to do without it
This cycle is not an accident: it is the very condition of technical progress — each innovation grammatises a form of knowledge to make it transmissible, but in return it proletarianises whoever no longer needs to embody it.
Illustration: AI and the Neural Black Box
An emblematic example of this loss — and of the contemporary obsession with efficiency and blanket utilitarianism that accompanies it — is the development of a worldwide techno-logical revolution in artificial intelligence based on a modelling technology, formal neural networks (PDP), whose internal logic we are collectively unable to understand in any fine-grained way.
The paradox is striking: never has a technical infrastructure of this scale been deployed with such a fragmentary understanding of its own functioning. Engineers optimise performance metrics (accuracy, loss) without being able to explain why a prediction emerges; users delegate decisions (recruitment, diagnosis, justice) to devices whose logic escapes them. This is the proletarianisation of know-thinking on a civilisational scale: the technical gesture (programming, training, deploying) is mastered, but the knowledge of what is actually happening inside the black box — the fine-grained understanding of the modelling — is lost, externalised into architectures that their own designers struggle to interpret.
This is not a bug: it is the very signature of proletarianisation — knowledge has not disappeared, it has become inaccessible, encapsulated in a device whose complexity exceeds the introspective capacity of its users and even its creators.
Proletarianisation and Its Opposite: Deproletarianisation
Proletarianisation is not inevitable: it calls for a counter-operation that lies at the heart of the Scybernethical project.
Deproletarianisation is the process by which a subject or collective reclaims the knowledge that was lost — not by rejecting technics, but by establishing a relation of co-individuation with it: knowing the machine in order to individuate with it rather than through it.
Concretely:
- Understanding the algorithms we use (technical education)
- Maintaining non-mediated practices (manual gestures, direct relationships, silence)
- Designing devices that restore knowledge rather than capture it (transparency, open source, contributive architecture)
- Dia-grammatisation as a second-order operation that runs through grammatisation without dissolving into it
Deproletarianisation is a form of dia-logical dialectics: maintaining the tension between embodied knowledge and externalised knowledge, without rejecting technics nor surrendering to it.
Connections to the Conceptual Network
- Technopolitics: proletarianisation is the reverse side of algorithmic governmentality — automation produces a loss of singularity that only a deliberate technopolitics can counterbalance.
- Pharmakon: proletarianisation is the poison effect of grammatisation, its remedy side being the transmission and access to knowledge.
- Grammatisation / Dia-grammatisation: grammatisation discretises the flow, proletarianisation is its social and cognitive consequence; dia-grammatisation is its second-order counter-operation.
- Automation: the incorporation of gesture into the machine — the ultimate phase of grammatisation, where knowledge is not only externalised but automated, making its interiorisation seemingly superfluous.
- Cognitarisation: the specifically Scybernethical extension — proletarianisation applied to cognition itself (attention, memory, desire).
- Bernard Stiegler: the principal theorist of cognitive and technopolitical proletarianisation.
- Antoinette Rouvroy: algorithmic governmentality as an advanced phase of proletarianisation.
Critical Note
The term “proletarianisation” is often misunderstood because it is immediately referred back to its reductive Marxist sense (class exploitation, wage alienation). In its Stieglerian and Scybernethical acceptation, it is not an economic theory but a phenomenology of the loss of knowledge through the history of technics. Reducing it to “class struggle” is a misunderstanding that prevents us from seeing the concept’s relevance for analysing the cognitive and relational effects of contemporary digital technologies.
Sources
- Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3 vols. (1994-2001). Stanford University Press.
- Stiegler, Bernard. The Automatic Society (2015). Polity Press.
- Stiegler, Bernard. Dans la disruption (2016). Les Liens qui Libèrent.
- Marx, Karl. Capital (1867). Volume I — section on primitive accumulation and the proletariat.
This article is adapted from a working note relating to a forthcoming book on Scybernethics. For a complete introduction to Scybernethics, see the online manifesto (scybernethics.org).
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