Has today's digital society succeeded in becoming mature? If not, how might a new Enlightenment philosophy and practice for the digital age be constructed that could hope to address this situation? Such a philosophy must take into account the irreducibly ambivalent, ‘pharmacological’ character of all technics and therefore all grammatisation and tertiary retention, and would thus be a philosophy not only of lights but of shadows. Grammatisation is the process whereby fluxes or flows are made discrete; tertiary retention is the result of the spatialisation in which grammatisation consists, a process that began thirty thousand years ago. The relation between minds is co-ordinated via transindividuation, and transindividuation occurs according to conditions that are overdetermined by the characteristics of grammatisation. Whereas for several thousand years this resulted in the constitution of ‘reading brains’, today the conditions of knowledge and transindividuation result in a passage to the ‘digital brain’. For this reason, the attempt to understand the material or hyper-material condition of knowledge must be placed at the heart of a new discipline of ‘digital studies’. The pharmacological question raised by the passage from the reading to the digital brain is that of knowing what of the former must be preserved in the latter, and how this could be achieved. This means developing a ‘general organology’ through which the social, neurological and technical organs, and the way these condition the materialisation of thought, can be understood. Integral to such an organology must be consideration of the way in which neurological automatisms are exploited by technological automatisms, an exploitation that is destructive of what Plato called thinking for oneself. The task of philosophical engineering today should be to prevent this short-circuit of the psychosomatic and social organological layers, a task that implies the need for a thoroughgoing reinvention of social and educational organisations.