Surveillance and civil liberties I rented a camera lens, and thirty minutes after delivery my phone warned me that an unknown AirTag was moving with me. Under the foam padding sat a tracker with an inventory number written in marker: AT 102. Protecting an asset handed to strangers is entirely legitimate, but a tracker that sleeps at my house for five days does not record a lens moving around, it records me. I only found out because of Apple’s anti-stalking alert, and not because of a line in the rental terms. The case does not turn on the principle of tracking. It turns on the silence around it.
Digital sovereignty In late June 2026, an intruder armed with two stolen passwords wandered freely through French taxpayers’ fiscal records, and the Finance Ministry only grasped the scale of the theft when a hacker calling himself ZeroBytes went public with it two months later. The remediation plan announced in the aftermath reads like a confession: no multi-factor authentication across the board, no consultation quotas, systems without monitoring sensors. Meanwhile, that same state is finalizing mandatory electronic invoicing and DAC8, the largest economic data vacuum in its history. The asymmetry is the whole story: an obligation to surrender everything on one side, a proven inability to protect it on the other. Until the state can demonstrate that it knows how to keep what it already holds, it has no standing to demand more.
Politics The French Senate wants to hunt down “domestic interference,” an oxymoron that turns the critical citizen into a foreigner in his own country. Let’s take them at their word: applied honestly, their own definition points not to alternative media or anonymous accounts, but to the circulatory system connecting the machinery of the French state to McKinsey, Lazard, FTI, and General Electric. From Bruno Le Maire at Macro Advisory Partners to the McKinsey nexus under judicial investigation since 2022, the list is long, documented, and signed off at every step by the official ethics bodies. At the top, the revolving door is an asset; at the bottom, citizen speech is a risk to be mapped before 2027. Domestic interference is real: it doesn’t post, it invoices.
Surveillance and civil liberties On July 8, 2026, the French Senate published Report No. 875 on the regulation of information in the digital space: fifty-six recommendations, the very first of which proposes to “render invisible” certain users as elections approach. Behind a largely accurate economic diagnosis unfolds a complete apparatus: a disinformation observatory, a legal definition of truth, offenses without intent, ethics-based accreditation, and media promoted by algorithms configured on government instruction. No one will be forbidden to speak; some will simply be unfindable, unfunded, unrecognized. Having outsourced its censorship to Brussels, France is now bringing the political administration of visibility in-house. A recommendation-by-recommendation analysis, written by one of the parties concerned.
Democracy Factual television news has vanished in France, crushed under the weight of permanent pundits, decorative special correspondents and ever-present political guests. This ousting owes nothing to an ideological conspiracy and everything to simple accounting: commentary costs a hundred times less than fieldwork. There’s no point mourning a golden age that never existed, though; the news broadcast of 1985 was no better, merely reverent toward power instead of chattering for the ratings. The public, for its part, isn’t innocent in this drift: it tunes out the moment you dig deeper, it flares up the moment people start trading insults. Institutional servitude yesterday, market servitude today, and in between, the viewer was never the point.
E-invoicing FICOBA in January, ANTS in April, Mentor at the end of April, impots.gouv flagged in early May: four sovereign vaults gutted in ninety days. On 1 September 2026, the State will force ten million businesses to push the entirety of their invoicing flows through one hundred and fifteen private platforms it has accredited. Sold as a fight against fraud, the reform in reality builds a complete graph of the private French economy, hosted at around a hundred operators, over which the State decides everything and answers for nothing. It’s the French invention of an unprecedented mechanism: responsibility without culpability, in which political risk is transferred to private operational risk with no transfer of the decision. We haven’t multiplied the targets: we’ve merged them.
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.
Economy Far from being a mobility solution, paid parking is a disguised tax whose national revenue jumped 84% after the 2018 reform. In Saint-Marcellin as elsewhere, the “squatter car” argument is just a smokescreen for rolling out automated LAPI surveillance and handing enforcement to private interests. This forced-turnover system eases nothing: it multiplies pointless trips, suffocates small retail, and taxes residents right up to their own front door. By turning public space into a financial product, elected officials prefer easy profit over the courage to enforce the existing Highway Code. It’s an institutionalized scam that hits the most vulnerable first, under a thin coat of green varnish.
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.