On June 23, 2026, by forty-three votes to fourteen with one abstention, the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted its position on the digital euro. Its chair, French MEP Aurore Lalucq, hailed a “historic day” for the Union’s monetary sovereignty. The plenary vote will follow in early July, then comes the trilogue, […]
Everyone now repeats that you should design loops instead of prompting your agents, and at its core that’s true: the loop is the real shift in AI. But these pitches consistently leave out two costs, the tokens that compound with every iteration and the heavier one, sovereignty, because the funnel always ends at a proprietary product to which you hand your keys, your data, and the power to act in your name. This article lays out plainly what a loop actually is, says when it’s a trap rather than a gain, and shows how to rebuild it entirely on your own, on your own infrastructure. Because the only question worth asking isn’t which product saves you the most time, but who owns the loop.
There is a humiliation so routine by now that we barely register it: failing, as humans, the very test meant to prove that we are human. We squint at a grid of traffic lights, hesitate over a sliver of crosswalk that spills into the next square, try again, and all the while the bots we […]
This spring, a handsome poster made the rounds in Saint-Marcellin. It celebrated the municipal cemetery as a heritage site worth visiting, complete with a guided tour and a poetic theme devoted to the passions of the departed, all under the banner of the Printemps des cimetières, France’s national weekend of funerary-heritage discovery. The intention is […]
On June 16, at its Compile conference, Cursor unveiled Origin, a Git forge designed no longer for humans but for the swarms of agents that push code around the clock. The press saw a GitHub competitor; the real story is the concentration that closes in when a single player brings together the compute, the model, the IDE, the forge, and your working data, a structural risk that would be identical with any other giant. Faced with this single point of control, self-hosting stops being a power user’s affectation and becomes a strategic position, provided you admit one thing: it will no longer be enough to store your repositories, you will have to run your own agent orchestrators or be sovereign but cripplingly slow. The real exit brick, then, is not just Git for the code, it is MCP for the agent, the pairing that lets an open editor restore the same power without handing everything to the dominant owner. My bet for the next three years: not a tipping point but a polarization, in which standardization remains our best way out.
On June 12, SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history. Four days later it bought Cursor for $60 billion, then unveiled Origin, a Git forge built for agents. The press boiled it down to the purchase of an IDE and missed the point: one man is buying, layer by layer, the right to decide what counts as true, first in code, soon in knowledge itself. The real bottleneck is no longer producing code, it’s arbitrating what deserves to be merged, and for training agents that validation layer is worth more than all of GitHub’s public corpus combined. Yet there’s a crack in the narrative of inevitability: the keystone, Anthropic, is the one piece Musk cannot buy, even as he already supplies part of its oxygen. The real question is no longer to understand his plan, but to decide how much longer we keep renting him the future.
There is an irony here I find almost delicious, and it is the only delicious thing in this whole affair. The moment my phone becomes unreadable is precisely the one Apple has spent ten years selling me: bright sunlight. Bright sunlight, then. You pull out the device to read a map, frame a photo, glance […]
Qobuz has just announced 45.7% growth and a move into the black, a fitting vindication for a French company that bet on uncompromising quality rather than ad-funded free tiers. As a loyal user of its purchase-and-download service alone, I see in it both an aesthetic pleasure and an act of sovereignty. Yet thirteen years after paying for it, the very “Hotel California” that introduced me to the platform is now denied to me for re-download, its rights revoked by the label, its invoice vanished along with it. This mishap raises the real question, that of a “purchase” that is in truth only a revocable access license, and it reminds us that a digital good slips from our grasp the moment an intermediary holds it in our place. The only ownership that counts is the kind you bring home and hold physically in your own hands.
If our loves last less than our parents’ did, it isn’t that we love any less well; it’s that the bars that once held couples in place, shame, religion, economic dependence, have fallen away, and that for a long time they stood in for something they were not: love. The numbers bear this out, from the peak of divorce around 1980 to its retreat among the most educated, by way of that curve of marital happiness that climbs again late in life only because the unhappy ones divorced along the way. But being in love is not love: it is merely a biological intoxication in which we project our own desires onto another, and true love begins precisely where that magic dies, in the demanding choice to take in a real human being, cracks and all. Stripped of every constraint, this discipline now rests on qualities that most people demand of others while never cultivating them in themselves. And so trust collapses, not under the blows of a few monsters, but under the millions of small cuts inflicted by perfectly ordinary people who, every time, had a good reason.
The murder of little Lyhanna Rameau Bernard revived, within hours, the two totems of the news cycle, the death penalty and chemical castration, the latter backed by 83% of the French in a CSA poll. We pretend not to know that it has existed since 1998, that it remains tied to medical consent, and that the word “mandatory” shatters against the refusal to conscript a doctor. But the real scandal lies elsewhere: triptorelin, used to chemically castrate an adult rapist, is exactly the molecule, Decapeptyl, that we inject into children, within its marketing authorization for precocious puberty and off-label as a “puberty blocker” for minors questioning their gender. Here is the world turned upside down: what we hesitate to impose on our worst criminals in the name of bodily integrity, we administer to healthy children in the name of a fashion, without the slightest proof that the effects on bone and brain are reversible. For what would have saved Lyhanna was not a syringe, but a justice system that acts on complaints instead of filing them away.