Democracy Three days without bank transfers, two years to renovate a five-million-euro rural bridge, eleven months to repair three escalators at Châtelet, two weeks without internet in Saint-Marcellin. These situations are no longer accidents: they have become the cruising speed of a country that has lost its ability to do things fast and at a reasonable cost. At the root of this paralysis, four structural causes that reinforce one another; cascading subcontracting, administrative layering, the asymmetry of privatisation, devouring bureaucracy. A million euros has become the minimum unit at municipal scale, a billion at national scale, and the citizen ends up taking out a Starlink subscription to get what the State, the operators and the local authorities no longer know how to guarantee. A methodical slide and a way out, on condition of shortening decision chains and rehabilitating local doing.
Artificial Intelligence We spent two years debating the model. GPT-5 versus Claude 4.5, Gemini versus Mistral, million-token context versus prefix cache. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room stayed invisible: 90% of production RAG pipelines are swallowing a mush of badly extracted pixels, then act surprised when the LLM hallucinates. The problem isn’t in the brain. It’s in […]
Digital sovereignty A data leak every hour in France, 12.2 million people exposed in 2025, 36.8 million France Travail records on the dark web: this isn’t a fate, it’s an architecture choice. A family of cryptographic techniques, zero-knowledge proofs, makes it possible to prove your age, your residence or your income without transmitting a single piece of personal data. It has existed since 1985, it runs in production at Google, Apple and Cloudflare, it’s written into the eIDAS 2.0 regulation. It isn’t arriving in French administrations, and that isn’t a technical problem. When the State draws an advantage from a durably insecure environment to justify France Identité, the programmable digital euro and every new layer of centralization, the deployment of a cryptography that would render all of this useless isn’t an oversight: it’s a choice.
Digital sovereignty The National Gendarmerie runs an X account with a million followers, a formalized communication doctrine, polished hashtags, and a budget of nearly eleven billion euros a year funded by the taxpayer. The #FastAndFourrière hashtag, borrowing from American action cinema, turns every traffic stop into marketing content, in a complete break with the French military tradition of restraint. It isn’t the mission that’s at issue, nor its legality: it’s the posture, and above all what it reveals by contrast. Because while the institution tweets its speed cameras and its impound lots with emojis, its 2024 report devotes only four pages to the use of lethal force, and its internal reports rose 28% in a year. You don’t congratulate yourself for doing your duty.
Culture The Strait of Hormuz may be six thousand kilometers away, yet for two months it has been dictating the price of fuel at the pump and promises to weigh for a long time still on food prices and plane tickets: France, which imports 29% of its diesel from the Middle East, is the willing hostage of a dependence it has refused to reduce for fifty years. Macron sent the Charles de Gaulle there, a sovereign posture that poorly masks a short-term survival policy. But reducing this conflict to a question of barrels would be a convenient way of not looking at what lies behind it: Hormuz is the economic symptom, Beirut is the heart of the war, and the 2,454 Lebanese dead in six weeks aren’t a geopolitical abstraction. Manon Debs, Vernis Rouge, a French-Lebanese artist evacuated from Lebanon in 2006, has just released a song because she’s afraid for her own and because writing is the only way she knows to feel useful. Two Frances facing the same conflict: one watches the price of a liter, the other waits for news of a street it knows by heart.
Digital euro On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.
Artificial Intelligence Since April 8, Grok has been automatically translating all content on X, without you even noticing. No more clicking “Translate”: the algorithm now folds Japanese, Brazilian, or Nigerian posts straight into your feed. This invisible automation changes everything: language silos blow apart, creators reach global audiences, dissidents bypass censorship through instant translation. Of course, disinformation travels just as easily as information. But for the first time in history, billions of people can communicate with no language friction, and nobody seems to have grasped the scale of the earthquake.
Digital sovereignty The IMF is forecasting -0.2% growth in 2026. The real data (destroyed refineries, terminals out of service, sector-wide shortages) point to a -1.5% scenario for developed economies. Standard models reason in prices, not volumes, and ignore threshold effects: a 10% loss of energy triggers a 15% drop in heavy industry. Between the reassuring forecasts and the crisis ahead, no one is preparing the public, and every day lost is one day less to organize collective resilience.
Artificial Intelligence Anthropic first cut off unmetered access to agents, then, in the same breath, launched its own infrastructure service billed by the hour. The move is calculated, but it’s also honest. The real issue isn’t pricing: it’s what “managed” actually implies. Handing your agent over to an infrastructure you don’t understand means trading weeks of plumbing for a silent cognitive debt. Automating what you don’t understand isn’t automating; it’s outsourcing your incompetence with a better service contract.
Artificial Intelligence The 2018 U.S. CLOUD Act allows federal authorities to require any American company to hand over data hosted anywhere in the world, including in Europe. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are all subject to it, regardless of where their servers physically sit. Choosing Mistral isn’t enough: as long as access runs through Azure, the model stays hosted on American infrastructure under that same jurisdiction. Sovereignty begins the moment the model runs on infrastructure you control: a dedicated server in France, or Mistral’s own data center in Essonne. In 2026, with Ollama and quantized Mistral Small models, this architecture is no longer reserved for large corporations; it’s within reach of any team that already administers Linux servers.