CONCEPT
Neganthropy
Stiegler's term — coined against the entropic tendencies of the automatic society — for the deliberate production of organization, knowledge, and life in opposition to those tendencies.
Neganthropy is Stiegler's thermodynamic metaphor for the specific form of work required in the age of automation. If the automatic society tends toward entropy — the dissolution of knowledge, attention, and the conditions for individuation — then the pharmacological program must produce the opposite tendency. Neganthropy is the active generation of the cognitive, attentional, and relational capacities that the technical milieu erodes. The term adapts Schrödinger's concept of negentropy in biology (the tendency of living systems to sustain organization against the thermodynamic drift toward disorder) and applies it to the cultural and cognitive domains.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thermodynamic framing is deliberate. Stiegler argued that civilizations, like biological systems, require continuous work to maintain their organization against entropy. The specific entropic dynamics of the automatic society — the dissolution of savoir-faire, the destruction of attention, the erosion of the long circuits through which meaning is built — are not accidents but structural tendencies that become dominant when the conditions for counter-production are absent.
Neganthropy is not