I often used to say, you know, my grandmother had her rosary in her pocket to stay connected to the divine. We have our smartphones in our pockets to stay connected to all our contemporaries and to society.
My name is Olivier Servais. I’m a professor of digital and online anthropology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Originally, I wasn’t at all a digital anthropologist — for 15 years, I focused on the relationship between religion and the environment. But around fifteen years ago, I changed my research focus and gradually shifted toward studying play, online gaming, and then digital technology. And today, I realize that the analogy between religion and digital tech isn’t completely coincidental — there’s really something to say about it. So in the end, I’m quite happy to have transitioned from one to the other.
For several centuries in our Western societies, religion was a cross-cutting structural force. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, we saw a progressive — or at least partial — departure from religion. But starting in the 1970s, we saw the rise of digital technology: first with microcomputers in the 1980s, then with the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s. Mobile technology followed — Internet on phones became widespread in the mid-2000s, and then smartphones came around 2008–2010, along with tablets. That might feel like a long time ago, but from the perspective of humanity, it’s nothing — just a brief moment.
So I’d say that over the past 30 to 40 years, there have been two major transformations. The first is the mobile revolution: the fact that we have tablets, smartphones, cell phones, Wi-Fi infrastructure, 4G and now 5G — that’s a major shift. It means that tomorrow, there won’t be a place on Earth where I’m not connected. It’s not quite the case yet, but we’re seeing how this is completely transforming relationships between people. This mobility — the fact that the entire Internet infrastructure is accessible everywhere, right in our pockets — changes everything. In Belgium, my country, there are more smartphones than Belgians. This reshapes hierarchies, power dynamics, the ability to protest, to exist, to be involved politically — we saw it in recent elections in North America and Europe. So to me, this is a fundamental revolution that’s reshaping our societies. I don’t think we fully grasp yet how deep the impact is, and will be.
The second major shift is video games, especially connected video games. That’s a major transformation, because today, video games are the number one cultural activity in the world.
Now, there are technological challenges — not necessarily for sociologists or anthropologists — such as energy consumption, digital waste, and the need for circularity instead of just buy, use, throw away. There are challenges around speed and performance — which has somewhat stagnated. The problem is that everything was built on the assumption of endless growth in speed. But we’re realizing now that we’ll need major technological breakthroughs. These breakthroughs exist — we’re talking about quantum computing, longer-lasting and cleaner batteries, and major shifts in energy production — because we’re going to have to make trade-offs. In some countries today, power gets cut because we’re installing data centers for AI, and we’re seeing that the energy use just isn’t sustainable. So we’ll eventually need to ask ourselves: why do we want digital technology? Not everything will be possible, and we’ll have to make choices. Those are political questions — choices about what kind of society we want.
At the same time, we’ve put digital technology everywhere. In my country — and I believe it’s the same in Canada, France, and most of our countries — everything has been digitized: social services, entertainment, education, universities, businesses. We’ve become digitally dependent societies. But while we’re dependent on digital technology, we’re also seeing a slowdown in performance, and a shortage of the materials needed to build digital infrastructure. So what do we do? Broadly speaking, political leaders haven’t thought this through. We’re going to hit a wall, and we’ll have to face it collectively, as a society. It’s not easy — we clearly see all the benefits of digital tech, but we haven’t really thought through the downsides, partly because they’ve been hidden from us. But now, we’ll need to face them head-on. That’s a critical challenge.
Another key issue I see is our relationship to information.
Gérald Bronner, in one of his books Apocalypse Cognitive, talks about this explosion of information. We have access to everything we could want through the web — but all of it is presented on the same level. On YouTube, TikTok, we’re flooded with information — what we call “infobesity,” meaning we’re overwhelmed by so much information that we’re “obese” from it. But we’ve lost the ability to prioritize, to figure out who’s right, to identify the authority behind the information. When we hear five contradictory narratives, what do we do? This will get even harder with AI. AI doesn’t seek truth — its goal is plausibility. It has to sound realistic, not necessarily be true. So distinguishing truth from falsehood becomes extremely difficult. And that question of truth — which is at the foundation of our democracies — is, to me, essential. I don’t believe there can be democracy without a commitment to seeking the truth.
So I think we need to fight for education today. Across universities and the entire school system, we’ve seen financial disinvestment in recent years. I think that’s a huge mistake. We live in a hyper-cognitive society that demands we continue to develop critical thinking, reflexivity, and associative capacity.
So alongside legal frameworks — which are starting to appear in Europe, North America, and elsewhere — I believe that educating both young people and adults, citizens in general, about these issues is absolutely essential. I’m convinced of that. Regulation won’t be enough. Training only the so-called “experts” won’t be enough. We really need to recognize this as a civic issue — if we want to keep our democracies functioning in the future.
