Artificial Intelligence On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that a swarm of 10,000 agents had solved Navier-Stokes in 88 hours, an Anthropic researcher resigned accusing the labs of gambling with our lives, and the OECD published the worst PISA results in French history. The night before, on LCI, a presidential candidate had found nothing to say about Pompidou. One thread runs through all of it: everyone is speaking in the future tense, and no one is rereading the past. Some because they are manufacturing the future by the token, others because they no longer have a past to draw on. The question for France is not whether AI will kill us. It is who, here, will still be able to read the proof.
Cars Before long, driving a car by hand will be illegal as ordinary transportation, the way smoking on an airplane eventually became unthinkable. It won’t start with a decree but with an insurance premium. The Cybercab launch in Austin, Waymo’s 200 million driverless miles, and France’s six-week reversal on Tesla’s FSD all point the same way. This piece makes that case, states plainly what could prove it wrong, and ends with a confession: writing it mostly made me want to go driving.
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.
Artificial Intelligence Napoleon, Cleopatra, or Josephine Baker telling you their life story to camera in thirty seconds: these AI-generated videos are everywhere on Instagram and TikTok, and as entertainment they work rather well. The trouble lies elsewhere. AI doesn’t know history; it assembles likely patterns, which is why historians keep flagging one anachronism after another. Watch them as fiction and there’s no harm done. The risk starts when the testimony format passes itself off as a source, especially on sensitive subjects. And when a synthetic Josephine Baker signs off with a question about which country we belong to, that isn’t history anymore, it’s ventriloquism.
Democracy In late August, LCI aired the Medef debate: seven chairs, seven candidates for the 2027 French presidential race, and no published selection criteria. Behind that stage sits an invisible round of voting, in which invitations, polls, airtime, and published sponsorships assemble the shortlist that voters will merely ratify in April. The seven disagree in real ways, but only within the walls: nobody there ever questions the walls themselves, from the European Union to the death penalty, birthright citizenship, or the church-state settlement of 1905. A democracy that never lets certain questions reach the ballot turns its political choices into dogmas. The test is not whether those ideas are good, but whether they can be beaten fairly or only ruled out in advance.
E-invoicing One in two French micro-entrepreneurs reports no revenue at all: half the scheme is an intermittent France of trial ventures, side income, and businesses in transition. To that dormant half, the e-invoicing reform says: pick a private operator and appear in the directory, not in order to invoice, but in order to be capable of it someday. The mandatory-subscription argument is wrong, though: thirteen of the nineteen offerings audited by l0g include a genuinely free tier. The real toll lies elsewhere, in a cognitive barrier to entry and in the precariousness of a free tier that has no reason to survive for customers who generate nothing. By scrapping in 2024 the free public gateway promised in 2020, the state locked in the intermediary requirement and put a price on its entrepreneurs’ sleep.
Digital euro The ECB promises an offline digital euro “just like cash”: no network, anonymous, resilient. But this digital cash can only exist inside a tamper-proof chip in your phone, one whose access is controlled by Apple, Samsung, and Google and which Article 33 of the regulation must legally compel them to open. A capped wallet, an applet updated remotely, anonymity bounded by AML checks at loading and unloading: you no longer own your money, you rent space on a chip. The banknote never had to ask permission to circulate. That difference has a name: the freedom to pay without asking.
Society On France’s “free flow” stretches of motorway, the barriers are gone, replaced by a seventy-two-hour countdown nobody told you about. Miss it and the bill climbs to 10 euros, then 90, then 375, for a toll that was worth six. Motorway companies can obtain your mailing address, but they only write once the penalty has accrued. Article 529-6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets them record the offense themselves and keep the proceeds. A business model that thrives only on the user’s ignorance isn’t progress, it’s a trap.
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.
Society Hundreds of consumers are telling the same story on social media: “CBD” bought in a legal shop, then hallucinations, tachycardia, sometimes the emergency room. French customs have documented the reason: hemp flowers sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids like EDMB-4en-PINACA, a hundred times more potent than CBD and invisible to standard drug screens. Contrary to the conspiratorial reading, the state never wanted these shops: it tried to ban them and lost twice in court. But it has since built no oversight, no traceability, and no testing requirement, because this gray market suits every level of society. An investigation into France’s third drug, the one nobody will claim.