Our attention is under constant pressure, making it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Even film students now struggle to watch an entire film, according to The Atlantic, which reported that some professors are reintroducing “slow cinema” classes to help students relearn how to focus. And this is not just a vague impression: research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine shows that our average attention span on a screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds today. We therefore need to introduce new strategies to redirect our attention toward more voluntary, chosen modes of focus, rather than purely reactive and passive ones.

A practice on RedNote spotted by Radii, is exploding: color-walking, or 彩色散步. The principle is simple: choose a color, go out into the city, then photograph the elements that match it. The images are then shared on the social network as carousels, often made up of 9 photos, sparking exchanges around discoveries, routes, and visual associations. Nearly 2 million posts have already been shared.

The idea is not new: William S. Burroughs had already evoked, in his perceptual exercises, the idea of “walking on colors”: choosing a color in the street, then looking only at that color until it begins to detach itself from the background. Stanford Humanities Center directly connects color-walking to this Burroughsian intuition: color becomes a guide, a way of making visible details that we would otherwise have ignored.

Contradicting algorithms and the feed

Algorithms and social networks push us into increasingly closed-off aesthetics. Pleasing ones, of course. Sometimes even comforting, since they give us the impression of being understood, recognized, served content that matches our most personal tastes. But they also limit our imagination and our ability to let our brains breathe.

Through logics of concatenation, images and videos come to us already sorted, optimized, connected to one another by invisible similarities. The grammar becomes so dictatorial that less conventional narrative patterns can start to feel jarring. No hook in the first two seconds? I move on. No face, no immediate tension, no clear promise? The content almost feels as if it has started badly.

And yet this habit is absolutely not normal. It serves our reflexive attention, but misses other ways of nourishing the mind.

We need to learn how to contradict algorithms by imposing new constraints on ourselves.

This is where color-walking becomes interesting: choosing a color means creating a non-algorithmic filter. A human, slow, tangible filter. A filter that forces us to notice apparently insignificant objects in the city and decide to make them important.

Color-walking is a small manifestation of re-enchantment: a way of learning to see again without waiting for the algorithm to look on our behalf.

A constraint to produce presence

In the case of color-walking, the constraint is highly accessible: look for blue, green, yellow… But this constraint immediately changes our relationship to the world. It turns walking into an investigation, the street into a playground, daily life into poetry. Everything can suddenly become meaningful if we make the effort to take the leap into the stars, searching for the absolute or the marvellous in the smallest details of reality.

Attention, in this context, looks more like a vivid and clear possession by the mind of one object among several simultaneously possible ones. Attention is never only what we look at. It is also what we choose to exclude in order to make the rest exist more fully.

And perhaps this is why the trend resonates: it does not suggest leaving the Internet, but rather recovering an active gesture in the making of images. We still photograph. We still share. We still post. But the origin of the gaze has shifted. It is no longer the feed that imposes the image. It is the walk that brings it into being.

The rebellion in motion: becoming authors again

Many initiatives around the world encourage us to start walking again. The more than 4,000 Space Invader mosaics scattered across city walls can be scanned through a dedicated app; this free activity steps outside the classic algorithmic circuit by creating a pretext for a walk. Very often, at the foot of a work, people scanning it begin to talk, exchange a smile, compare their scores or their discoveries.

This detail matters: these practices do not reject the digital. They displace it. They use it as a pretext to pay attention to the world again.

Color-walking, Space Invader hunts, photo walks, thematic strolls, or collections of urban details all belong to the same family: attention rituals. Simple practices, close to an arte povera of the gaze, in which one creates something with almost nothing. They remind us that our gaze does not have to be merely captured. It can still be exercised.

And perhaps the true rebellion today does not consist in disappearing from platforms, but in becoming authors again of what we bring to them. After living for so long inside feeds that choose for us what deserves our attention, we may be starting to invent tiny rituals to reclaim possession of our gaze.

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The Stat of the Week: +65%

According to Kantar’s latest study for Meta, Beyond the Search Bar, 65% of consumers feel more confident in their purchases thanks to searches carried out directly on social media. What is at stake here is trust and the mechanisms of proof and peer validation.

Amazing links

• The Search shift (Meta)

• Scoping Substack ( sur Notes)

• The machine looks back ( in Default Blog)

• a love letter to the criterion closet, the most intellectual thirst trap ever made ( in LOVR GIRL)

• VWFNDR™ + MBL — 001 (VWFNDR)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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Consumer-facing digital ecosystems were built around the image. As reminds us, in the early 2000s, websites focused on singular brand experiences. It was only with the explosion of e-commerce that interfaces started to look alike, dictated by the efficiency of the click.

To show, publish, prove, document: platforms taught us to work on surfaces: the profile, the photo, the video, the format, the hook, the thumbnail, the vibe… Even voice, now massively used in TikTok content, is often just an additional layer designed to captivate the retina.

As AI-generated content becomes more credible, the question of authority, value and emotion shifts. If machines become masters of these surfaces, then their reproducibility leads to an erosion of their power as proof. What used to impress becomes generatable. What seemed authentic becomes suspicious. The effect of presence replaces real presence.

What remains after the image

It is within this shift that we are beginning to look for the human elsewhere. Not only in what can be seen, in this form of permanent present, but in what resonates and will remain.

I love this sentence by Moon Kyu Lee 이문규:

This is exactly what gives social media, and our online exchanges, their strength. Small moments of truth, a conversation we will remember for the rest of our lives because it has been engraved in the heart.

An important conversation is never reducible to its content alone. It has a temperature, a rhythm, a density. It leaves a mental trail. What matters is not only what was said, but the way it continues to act within us.

A waka poem by Empress Shōken says precisely this: flowers may indeed beautify an appearance, but the fragrance of sincerity is the true elegance of the heart.

Machines know how to produce flowers. Platforms know how to organize their circulation. But what changes our lives often lies in the fragrance: sincerity, attraction, disturbance. The return of the sensible is not a rejection of technology. It is rather a new demand: not to let our lives be reduced to optimized surfaces.

Platforms are already looking for other senses

This shift is visible in new technological imaginaries. Platforms are all trying to appropriate our memories and the recollections attached to them in order to offer something other than an experience of the present.

Spotify, for example, has just launched a personalized experience for its 20th anniversary that is no longer limited to the past year, but goes back through a user’s entire listening history: first streamed song, most-listened-to artist, most-played tracks. This is no longer simply an annual Wrapped. Spotify is no longer selling only flow, but reminiscence.

Voice is returning everywhere. Conversational interfaces are becoming more intimate. Immersive environments are trying to activate the body. Haptic, sonic, spatial, and sometimes even olfactory experiences promise a less flat digital world.

We no longer only want to look at a screen. We want to feel a presence. To enter an atmosphere and inhabit it. To be enveloped by something other than a feed. The future of platforms will no longer be only visual; it wants to be atmospheric.

But adding touch or nostalgia is not enough to recreate reality. A smell is not merely chemical information, and nostalgia is not a recommendation algorithm. What truly touches us is always situated: it comes with a context, a story, a person. The smell of coffee matters because it was there when someone spoke to us. It is the key that reopens a moment.

The sensible, then, is not an additional layer of experience. It is what connects an experience to a life.

Yet this search for connection runs into a new paradox, revealed in the latest Ipsos bva study for Groupe VYV and the CNIL. AI has already become an intimate interlocutor for a significant share of young people: 48% of young French people use AI tools to talk about personal topics, and this figure rises to 68% among those showing signs of anxiety disorders.

The reasons are clear: AI is always available, does not judge, and acts as a risk-free confidant. It is a presence without human friction. But this is also where the unease begins. 61% of young users see AI as a confidant, 54% as a friend. AI is no longer merely a tool; it is occupying relational roles.

This shift is vertiginous because it installs an “odorless” conversation. A fluid form of speech, but one detached from a body and a shared memory. It can soothe, but it does not carry the trail of a true encounter. Almost one young person in two also feels that this can lead to isolation. AI becomes a response to loneliness while reinforcing the conditions of that loneliness.

Desire for reality

We are rediscovering the need not only to be understood, but to be reached by someone who also exists outside the sentence. A presence capable of answering us, but also of resisting us and moving us elsewhere.

This helps explain the current explosion of real-life events and “fourth places.” We are not looking for more immersive content; we are looking for frameworks where our presence can once again be fully hic et nunc. A place. A table. A voice. A silence.

Because a living society is not built with images that circulate, nor with answers available at all hours. It is built with presences that remain.

The fragrance of reality is precisely that part of a relationship that continues to transform us once the screen has gone dark.

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The Stat of the Week: +54%

According to Launchmetrics, since 2019, the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle industries have seen a 54% increase in physical events. The return of the real, once again.

Amazing links

• The Future of Search Is Boutique (Future)

• Forget Influencers. Welcome to the World of the ‘Alternatively Influential.’ (WSJ)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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The refrain that social media isn’t social anymore is getting louder, both online and in real life. This risk of retrotopia, to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s idea, has always worried me: a nostalgia that encourages withdrawal from the public sphere, a comfortable screen behind which everyone can mythologize their own digital past. What we should be doing is precisely the opposite: not mourning social networks, but imagining their renaissance.

Globally, Meta may have lost 20 million “family daily active users” (DAP) in the first quarter of 2026, but that is a drop in the ocean compared with the 3.56 billion DAP active in March 2026. Above all, Meta does not represent all social networks, and Meta’s obsession is now largely focused on new sources of revenue through AI. So the question is not whether people are leaving social networks. The question is where they are moving their desire for connection when the major platforms become uninhabitable: toward more discreet, more chosen, sometimes more alive archipelagos.

Social networks are not less social than before. Perhaps, on the contrary, they are more social than ever. But this sociality is saturated, inflammable, automated, optimized, often in contradiction with the desire to build a common world.

If the resentment is real (and for objective reasons) several signs show that people have never been so intent on recreating social life. It has simply moved. Elsewhere, differently, and sometimes against the dominant platforms.

Before the feed, the messaging frenzy

We cannot understand social networks without going back to the original reasons why we loved connecting to the Internet so much. The Internet was not only an information technology. It was a technology of waiting.

In 2001, 56% of Internet users (for instance in France) considered email to be the most indispensable service provided by the Internet. Between 1997 and 2000, the number of email users rose from ten million to 505 million. An entire social grammar was taking shape: waiting for an email reply, a kind of wonder made of slowness and trial and error, the joy of discovering links, resources. It was the age of personal pages, forums, tiny worlds.

Putting a website online was sometimes so complicated that, paradoxically, immense attention was paid to the few readers who might pass through. And, conversely, the reader-internet user who landed on an interesting web page would not hesitate to value its author, to write to them, to quote them, to recommend them elsewhere.

The Web was not yet a feed. It was a surface of appearance. We navigated it more than we let ourselves be administered by it. The lived world was then expanding.

In 2009, nearly 25% of the population in Europe was on social networks. Four main reasons explained why people used them: staying in touch with others, exchanging news, sharing information or common passions, following friends sometimes hour by hour. It was a time when people felt they were part of a whole, living through early experiences of extimacy: deeply experiencing events far removed from oneself and feeling concerned by them; and, conversely, being able to reach millions of strangers through one’s own stories.

And yet this was already not a magical or virtuous world. Influence wars were already taking place, disinformation was very present, and the overrepresentation of dominant elites was already established. There was very little governance, which meant that individuals alone were already expected to handle the burden of moderation or regulation.

And as a reminder, in 2009, not so many governments were properly equipped to understand even part of what was happening around the Internet: digital technology was not even included in the French government’s recovery plan, as Le Monde noted.

So the problem is not that we lost a paradise. The problem is that we transformed a very imperfect promise of a lived world into a system of capture.

From navigation to anesthesia

In March 2025, 66% of French people used social networks every day. But one factor complicates the picture: “passing the time” had become the second most common motivation, cited by 47% of them.

But passing the time is the opposite of joyful navigation: it is scrolling, the feed, the compulsive filling of an attentional void with an endless stream.

Dominant platforms, instead of focusing on the four other criteria (staying in touch, exchanging news, sharing passions, following friends) worked deeply on entertainment: easier to monetize and sell, more legible as a product, simpler to optimize. To put it bluntly: platforms became too social in the experience of content, rather than working on the weak ties that animate people. Content comes before connection. Spectacle comes before relationship.

Everything is socialized there: the face, the reaction, the opinion, the comment, the viewing, the sharing, the anger, the irony, the indignation, the envy, the shame. But this permanent socialization does not mechanically create connection. It often creates presence without reciprocity, interaction without relationship, exposure without a common world.

This excess of sociality has translated into at least three inconsistencies.

1. The figure of the influencer without any real exegesis

Twenty years ago, influence was often divided between authority and popularity. Authority was largely controlled by peers; the more an individual was cited in reliable spaces, the more they were valued by Google, by the press, by other blogs, by communities of reference. Authority took time to mature, to grow its reputation.

Except that authority is not enough to generate enough money. Since platforms needed incarnation to attract large audiences, they focused on the popularity of certain accounts. They propelled individual-formats into stardom. The typical example is Khaby Lame, whose silence and universal gestures became the perfect lead product for TikTok: a pure reaction to content previously published on TikTok, without context, made to be consumed everywhere, without any language or thought barrier, while remaining looped inside the platform. He does not exit the flow: he makes it even smoother.

The influencer became a profession, not always a true recognition by third parties. And yet influence should be something other than the ability to accelerate the circulation of content. But that is precisely the skill platforms have pushed; taken to the extreme, the very identity of the individual disappears in favor of high-performing formats that primarily serve the platform.

In reality, the platform has become the main influencer in its own ecosystem.

2. The race for the social hook

On TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube Shorts, the goal is to stop the scroll and encourage people to watch the same content again. The subject sometimes becomes secondary. What matters first is capture: holding before saying, hooking before thinking, provoking before building.

By trying so hard to stop the movement of the thumb, platforms have ended up damaging the very possibility of attention.

3. Content intensification and surrounded solitude

Since the number of hours spent online cannot increase indefinitely, platforms increase the density of what happens there. Micro-content, short formats, sound loops, reactions, excerpts, cut-ups: everything is designed to be consumed in a few seconds, but repeatedly in the interstices of our lives, while imposing a temporality opposite to that of the social almanac.

What is demanded is no longer really attention, but reflex validation. A brief laugh. A brief indignation. A brief recognition. Platform features themselves are designed to capture micro-validations and interpret our micro-gestures.

Today, everyone receives their own emotional calendar, their own feed, their own urgencies, their own indignations. We are together online, but rarely in the same place.

Content can then perform without being alive. A lot of content performs precisely because it is no longer alive and because it unplugs our brains. The feeling of “passing the time” eventually turns into digital guilt.

Trust people

I believe the rage against social networks is the premise of a renaissance of digital social connection. Just as fever signals a body that is fighting.

But let’s be honest about what that implies.

Users are not fooled. They are saturated by this inflation of social content that paradoxically leaves them more alone than ever in front of their screens. It is not an absence of sociality: it is an overdose of sociality without a frame. Too many faces, too many opinions, too many causes, too many reactions, and fewer and fewer common rituals to know what to do with them.

People’s response is neither total disconnection nor resignation. It is something more interesting, and quieter: a permanent re-engineering of uses, often invisible to the platforms themselves.

The more systems simplify relationships, the more humans complexify their ways of being together. When a platform imposes a feed, people invent more private circles. When it imposes visibility, they create secondary accounts. When it imposes performance, they return to the draft. When it imposes short content, they recreate long conversations elsewhere. When it imposes algorithmic recommendation, they restore forms of human curation.

This is not a disappearance of the social, quite the opposite. It is a migration away from the places where dominant platforms know how to measure it.

And this is where nostalgic discourses fail: they look for the social where it used to be visible, in public timelines, Facebook statuses, commented blogs, early tweets.

They miss what is happening in the margins: the Signal group that becomes a monthly dinner, the newsletter that becomes a club, the Discord that becomes mutual aid, the niche community that eventually produces a real-world ritual. Tiny, imperfect, cobbled-together spaces, but they all say the same thing. Connection is still looking for forms. It has simply become more conscious, more selective, more demanding to build. And because of that, more precious.

This is where the notion of digital liveness becomes central. Digital liveness is not just being connected. It is not posting, reacting, commenting, sharing. It is the moment when we no longer consume a platform, but feel ourselves exist inside an exchange. It requires a presence to the other. The joy of alterity. A situated truth, imperfect but lived, less performative, less optimized.

The challenge, then, is not to return to an old Internet. The challenge is to rebuild conditions of liveness within a saturated Internet.

What I call fourth places is one concrete expression of this: not the home, not work, not only cafés or parks, but the digital extended into the real. Spaces that do not always begin with a physical place in the hope that a community will form, but with existing digital connections seeking deeper engagement in the real world. The social then becomes non-linear.

It no longer follows only the old model:

party → program → activism → vote → institution

It also moves through other chains:

emotion → cause → content → conversation → community → micro-action → place → ritual → sometimes institution

We must also name what this implies politically. This silent recomposition of social connection will not happen on its own. It needs infrastructures, both digital and physical, designed for humans rather than audiences. It needs a form of governance that stops treating the Internet as a problem of moderation or security, and starts treating it as an issue of civilization. And above all, it requires that we stop underestimating people.

To say that social networks are no longer social is often to confuse the disappearance of relational comfort with the disappearance of connection.

The social has not disappeared. It has protected itself. It has become more precious because it once again requires an effort: a clear contract among the members of a community, rather than letting algorithmic influence govern in their place.

Perhaps that is, in the end, the real promise to keep: not to recover paradise lost, but to organize paradise found.

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The Project of the Week: The Spectacle of Books

In the Netherlands, in Utrecht, a library offers a selection of 3,000 books that have never been published. Run by professionals and volunteers, The Spectacle of Books aims to create a connection between stories that have never been read and a reader.

Amazing links

• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (Knight First Amend. Inst.)

• Vine makes a comeback (Social Media Today)

• Friendster has returned! But you can only connect with offline friends. (Mashable)

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The intimate sphere is permeated on all sides by our digital environments. The social noise has become so loud that we now see countless strategies designed to cut it off, from the way we arrange our homes to the emergence of a genuine ecology of attention. But the goal is not merely to flee platforms. It is also to recover the conditions for a higher-quality social bond, far from the oppressive spectacle of digital life: spaces where we can speak without performing, meet without being absorbed by the feed.

By turning intimacy into social fuel, platforms have created this paradoxical need: not to disappear from the world, but to remake the world differently. This is where the figure of the fourth place emerges: a hybrid space, often born out of a digital connection, but oriented toward a denser, more deliberate, more living form of presence. Intimacy is no longer simply data to be exploited, but a shadowy territory to be sanctuarized. Because, to preserve its binding force, it must first be protected from the light:

Intimocracy generates a need for personal refuge

Platforms ask us to share ever more of our fragilities, our daily lives. Our intimacy is solicited online by commercial universes driven by brands, which no longer merely tell stories, but seek to capture our rawest emotions. Politicians, too, attempt to create a permanent parasocial bond, made up of simulated closeness, scripted confidences, and continuous presence. An exhausting combination in which one can lose oneself.

Intimocracy is the moment when intimacy becomes an infrastructure of visibility. To be heard, one must narrate oneself; to exist, one must expose oneself; to be credible, one must reveal one’s wound. Personal experience, emotions, and self-narration then take precedence over the collective. The public sphere, and especially social networks, becomes the place where intimacy is displayed. Vulnerability and performative authenticity become the very essence of platforms.

A new micro-architecture of everyday life is therefore emerging, in order to rebuild the psychic and physical boundaries that technology has made porous. A kind of quasi-clandestinity from the algorithm.

We need refuges. Temporal refuges first. Many people choose to wake up very early, before the ordinary social rhythm begins, in order to be fully themselves. In Japan, this is called Asa-katsu (朝活). The practice consists of using the first hours of the day for personal activities such as reading, studying, meditating, walking, or writing, before the social and professional machine starts up. Here, refuge means getting ahead of the world. A few hours during which one is not yet available.

Apps and objects also exist to better control our connection time. Brick, for example, allows users to filter the apps and notifications they can access. To regain full access to their phone, they must physically tap their smartphone against an actual brick. This trend marks the return of friction design. While platforms spend billions making the user experience as smooth and addictive as possible, users are now paying to reintroduce physical friction into their daily lives. It is the same logic that pushes some younger people to turn to dumbphones on weekends: erecting a material wall between themselves and the notification.

Refuges are also physical. The cloffice, a contraction of closet and office, popularized during the Covid-19 pandemic, has become a standard, especially for apartment dwellers. Interior designers are seeing growing demand for workspaces that can be physically closed off or hidden away at the end of the day. The goal is not only to save space, but to sanctuarize the personal sphere by removing computer equipment from sight. Work is no longer merely organized: it must be able to disappear.

Monk mode is also in vogue. It can take the form of retreats in actual monasteries, silent and sometimes phone-free. A global phenomenon: on Xiaohongshu, Chinese users share thousands of tips for making the most of these retreats, which ultimately aim to reset the social machine and restore fragmented attention.

This is precisely the paradox of our time: this visceral need for silence is expressed and documented on the very platforms it seeks to escape. On TikTok, the hashtag #monkmode turns digital disappearance into a new aesthetic performance. Even retreat becomes publishable. Even the desire not to be seen can become a style, a choreography, a piece of content.

All these gestures may seem tiny. Waking up earlier. Shutting one’s desk inside a closet. Tapping a brick to block apps. Switching to a basic phone on weekends. Spending a few days without a phone. And yet, they all say the same thing: the contemporary individual is no longer simply looking for calm. They are looking for a space where they do not have to produce themselves. A place where no interface asks them to respond, publish, perform, optimize, document, prove that they are well or that they exist.

But these refuges do not only express fatigue. They also prepare a new kind of availability. Cutting out social noise does not mean cutting off connection; sometimes, it is the condition for finding it again differently. Before we can rebuild society, we need to recover an inner space where we are no longer entirely governed by the demands of the feed.

Third and fourth places

In the United States, cafés and libraries are no longer quite part of many people’s everyday lives. In societies highly dependent on cars, some even come to experience the car interior as a quasi-third place: no longer merely a means of transportation, but a private capsule between two obligations. A place where one can finally isolate oneself, an acoustic and visual decompression zone where one temporarily escapes social noise.

@gabby.zeroninebeep beep #culture #thirdspace #newyork #california #fyp

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But this retreat into the cabin of a parked car points to a deeper dynamic: the need for places where presence becomes possible again.

Historically, sociology distinguishes the first place as the home; the second as work; and the third as spaces of sociability, such as cafés, libraries, or public squares.

In its early days, the web promised to become this great global third place: an open, conversational space, traversed by communities, discoveries, and encounters. But by becoming chambers of performance and algorithmic surveillance, social networks have gradually degraded that promise.

The fourth place is born from this degradation. It is not a flight from the social, but an attempt to remake social bonds differently. It often begins in the digital realm — a newsletter, a Discord server, a book club, an affinity-based community — but seeks to produce something other than a feed: a meeting, an appointment, a ritual, or more generally a lasting conversation.

This is where it differs from paracommunities. A paracommunity functions through immersion, algofluence, and passive belonging. The fourth place, by contrast, requires chosen presence. It brings listening, reciprocity, trust, and shared temporality back to the center.

Digital space is no longer only a place where one shows oneself, but the possible threshold of a denser bond. The fourth place is therefore less a sanctuary against others than a sanctuary with others. A space where one stops being an audience and becomes a member again. Where one stops being a profile and becomes a presence again.

After the home, work, and third places, the fourth place may become the new space of digital liveness: the space where intimate digital bonds finally find a body, a rhythm, and a human quality.

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The Stat of the Week: 52.9%

According to a study by Imperial College London and the Internet Archive, 52.9% of website content is generated or assisted by artificial intelligence. The study shows that while AI is indeed reshaping the Internet landscape, making it more repetitive and artificially positive, several of the public’s worst fears, such as the loss of factual truth or a total homogenization of style, are not supported by the current data.

Amazing links

• intimacy is being all of you and being chosen with all of it (mixtapes by gor)

• The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness (Google DeepMind, Alexander Lerchner)

• The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet (Imperial College London x Internet Archive)

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In video game culture, testing the limits of a world is part of the ritual. Speedrunners - players who try to finish games as quickly as possible by exploiting bugs, shortcuts, and engine flaws - have built entire mythologies around this practice.

When a player goes out of bounds, the world stops holding together. Textures slip. Characters’ bodies fall into absurd poses. Space empties out. The engine no longer knows what to display. This moment fascinates because it reveals a hidden truth: the game world, however immersive it may seem, is only a finite construction, designed for obedient players. The moment someone refuses the intended path, the scenery tears open. The raw code appears.

This desire to step outside the frame no longer belongs only to video games. It is now spilling into real life, in the form of performances filmed, documented, and shared across social media. As if an entire generation were now seeking, in the physical world, that same breaking point where the system reveals its mechanics.

Out of bounds: making systems derail

More and more videos are circulating that follow a simple principle: enter a closed-off place, push your progression as far as possible, then film the moment the human machine starts to break down. Luxury hotels, corporate headquarters, restricted spaces, closed institutions: everything becomes a run. The point is not so much to get in as to see how far one can go before security intervenes, before expulsion, before authority takes back control.

It is in this context that the Church of Scientology has become one of the favorite targets of a new viral format on TikTok. At the very moment when its online recruitment campaign is worrying many European governments, its reputation for control and coercion makes it the perfect setting for the speedrun: get in, film, move forward as far as possible, hold out until security takes over.

@swhileyyDeepest recorded run in scientology #hollywood #la #scientology

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These videos rack up tens of millions of views and spread like wildfire.

And the payoff is a thrilling feeling for the speedrunner and their community: having disrupted the established order. Having hacked the system, if only briefly. Having ridiculed the fear or fascination that certain cults, certain powers, can exert.

Feeling more alive than ever

These videos are often framed as a form of transgression, even as a kind of amateur gonzo journalism. I think they are something else: a way of feeling alive, fully present. When the speedrun ends, we do not actually learn more about the sect or the infiltrated organization. What we come for is the human glitch, the accident in a well-oiled machine. A kind of jolt in which the camera itself is the transgression, in which a brutal encounter with a limit is manufactured.

Everything in these sequences gives the impression of recovered digital liveness—the quality or state of feeling alive online. There is unpredictability. Discomfort. Total presence in the moment. The run seems to wrench the body away from the torpor of regulated, normalized, surveilled environments. It promises direct access to something raw.

And yet that promise is trapped by its very nature.

The creator thinks they are testing the limits of reality; they are immediately executing a format. Perhaps even one of the formats most compatible with today’s attention economy: risk, tension, prohibition, pursuit, escalation. The raw code they uncover in the corridors of Scientology or in the lobby of a corporate headquarters is handed over to the platform. The refusal of the script becomes a script.

Algorithmic influence - or algofluence - has colonized transgression itself. It has turned the desire to escape formats into a format. The creator thinks they are testing the limits of the real, when in fact they are performing one algorithmic run among many, perhaps the most profitable one of their week.

Paradoxically, in a video game, going out of bounds can produce a moment of truth. The pixel world fails to hold together. The scenery reveals its seams. The system admits that it is constructed, contingent, limited. A kind of conceptual honesty.

On social media, that revelation happens much more rarely. The camera is already there. The platform too. The space of distribution has already prepared a place for the exploit. The glitch does not appear as a glitch; it appears as content.

From Zoē to algorithmic Bios

This is where the philosophical distinction between zoē and bios can help us see more clearly.

Zoē is bare life: the simple fact of being alive, elemental pulse, breath, fear, momentum. Bios is qualified life: life narrated, organized, inscribed in a recognizable form. A life already filtered through language, story, and social representation.

These videos promise the former, but immediately deliver the latter.

They give the impression of access to something raw: the running body, the racing heart, the instant when everything might tip over. But that intensity is almost immediately converted back into a platform bios. It becomes an episode, a distinguishing sign, a piece of personal-brand content. What belonged to presence is converted into narrative. What belonged to the body becomes legible, monetizable, shareable.

Vivance appears there, but only under conditions. Under influence. It is not so much lived against the platform as organized for it. That may be the paradox of our moment: even our strongest desire—to feel that we truly exist—ends up reinjected into the circuits of visibility.

We think we are leaving the map. We discover only another room in the apparatus.

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The Stat of the Week: 1.7 million

On TikTok, there are already 1.7 million videos tagged #speedrun

Amazing links

• OpenAI Proposes A ‘Social Contract’ For The Intelligence Age (NOEMA)

• Pilates Princesses, Trad Wives, and the Death of One-Size-Fits-All Femininity (Post Culture by Sibling Studio)

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“Am I normal?” This existential question runs through our ever more connected identities, as we increasingly delegate parts of our intimate lives to AI.

Google search trends have shown this for more than three years: searches on the topic were already rising sharply before AI became mainstream. But over the past six months, that pressure seems to have intensified even further.

As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, it is starting to function as a kind of intimate interface. By turns confidante, tool, companion, sometimes even bestie, it accumulates billions of fragments of ourselves. Our biometric and medical data, of course, but also everything that had previously remained largely unsayable in digital form: our doubts, our fears, our hopes, our contradictions.

By storing our exchanges, machines gradually cut up our inner lives into tokens: exploitable, sortable, correlatable fragments that are intelligible only to them. Ambiguity loses ground there, replaced by a taxonomy of our emotions. There is a muted kind of violence in this: the violence of depriving us of our opacity, of that essential right not to be entirely decipherable.

Two antagonistic forces facing the connected human

On social media, extreme, caricatured, and miniaturized positions are overrepresented.

This is a deep problem, because younger people, at least in the United States, are increasingly turning to social media for advice about what they are feeling, according to a study by Lifestance. The risk is that a certain kind of content, heavily suggested by algorithms, starts to be perceived as the norm. Especially in moments of fragility: we start looking for answers in moments of doubt, when what we really want is reassurance.

By contrast, conversations with AI tend to favor a kind of bland consensus, smoothing over positions and reformulating distress in a calmer, more orderly, more acceptable language, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.

Caught between these two forces, the user hesitates. On the one hand, social media presents exaggerated, simplified, spectacular versions of human experience. On the other, AI returns measured, coherent, almost overly balanced responses. Between caricature and consensus, it becomes difficult simply to inhabit what we feel without immediately seeking to compare ourselves, locate ourselves, or have ourselves validated. As though the living had been replaced by its calculated mirror.

Refusing validation by a machine, accepting our weirdness

The fictionalization of our lives has been heavily encouraged by social media, pushing us to create an algo-friendly version of our identities. Under the guise of tools like CapCut, we can see that certain aesthetics and certain edits tend to perform better than others overall. These are therefore less tools for original creation in the strict sense than tools for the templating of content.

That does not prevent the talent or inventiveness of certain creators. But it does create a formal pressure: your life has to be told in the right codes, at the right pace, with the right framing. The effort required to be truly original on these platforms probably explains part of the contemporary fatigue of self-expression: you have to be singular, but within already pre-chewed formats.

The phrase “one for me, one for the algorithm” is telling. It means that creation now has to happen in duplicate. One piece of content to express something of yourself, another to satisfy the logics of visibility. A desire, then its platform-compatible translation.

What we are seeing return, then, is weirdness, the weird, not as a pose, but as a way of rebuilding a less calculated kind of connection. A form of expression that no longer seeks first and foremost to perform, but to resonate with a few real people, often in less public spaces. A way, too, of taking back control over access to intimacy in order to choose more carefully how to tell our stories.

This is, for example, the mother of this Substack writer, who sends her daughter videos in which she greets her garden every morning. A disconcerting ritual that no marketing manual could have anticipated, but one that matters deeply to the two of them.

It is also a clumsy voice note, a rough edit, an image with no strategy behind it, an absurd gesture understood only by a few close people. In short, everything that still escapes perfect legibility and nevertheless continues to create connection.

In fact, these kinds of practices show just how important digital literacy is, as the French AI and Digital Council (CIANum) has pointed out:

Obfuscation is becoming a discipline in its own right. Beyond intimate weirdness, some creators practice data poisoning or deliberate obfuscation, speaking in code or using formats that are unreadable to AI, in order to escape this taxonomy. Weirdness then becomes a genuine survival technique.

What is at stake today may not be learning to describe our lives better to machines. It may be preserving zones of ourselves that do not need to be validated by them. Zones that are unclassifiable, contradictory, opaque. The right, ultimately, not to be entirely normal for a machine. To be anti-normies.

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The Stat of the Week: 47,000

Patreon, the subscription-based platform, continues to expand its model, focusing on the relationship between creators and communities rather than simple reach. There are now 47,000 podcasters earning money through 7.6 million paid memberships.

Amazing links

• No such thing as neutrals (For Scale)

• Voices of Gen Z: The AI Paradox (Gallup)

• The Secretive V.I.P. Programs That Keep Gamers Spending (New York Times)

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It all began with a reflection from Solène (Letters From A Girl): a fault line runs through our online lives, between what the digital records about our origins and the much broader reality of what has shaped us. Platforms never record an entire life: they capture visible fragments, then turn them into a legible narrative.

The idea may seem almost anecdotal. And yet it says something central about our time. As our lives take shape online, the question of origin becomes increasingly unstable, and sometimes even conflictual. Not only because we always rewrite our beginnings a little, but above all because platforms impose a very specific narrative framework on what we can say about ourselves. This directly affects the way we shape our identities and, by extension, the way social ties are formed.

A digital narrative that forgets what lies off-frame

Our roots, the neighborhood where we were born, the environments we move through, the encounters that leave a mark on us: for centuries, human beings have been shaped by multiple materials. There is chaos in that, small arrangements with the truth, successive reconstructions, sometimes ruptures. An origin is almost never a neat block. It is a living draft, sometimes contested.

Above all, each of us in principle retains a certain freedom in relation to this: the freedom to reconstruct ourselves, to deconstruct ourselves, to change the story, to embrace contradictions, or simply to leave certain things in the shadows.

The problem is that platforms cannot process this complexity. By design, they impose a much narrower digital narrative. The algorithm’s permanent present compresses memory. What we are witnessing is a miniaturization of our identities.

Tavi Gevinson spoke of a kind of straitjacket in Fan Fiction: A Satire. The expression still feels exactly right to me. First, because platforms miniaturize our identities into a kind of present-day calling card. In a few lines, we are supposed to say who we are, convey our orientation, our tone, our vibe, our point of entry. This is already difficult for anyone; it is also deeply exclusionary. Not everyone knows how to condense themselves. Not everyone wants to summarize or market themselves.

But this reduction is not merely stylistic. It is also social. When we mention our origins online, we are not telling them to a situated interlocutor. We project them before multiple, unknown, simultaneous audiences. The context collapse described by danah boyd produces a mechanical effect here: it pushes us to choose the version that is the most legible, the most immediately understandable, the most universalizable. Our origins then become either flattened, out of fear of being misunderstood; or exaggerated, in order to quickly signal a position, an identity, or a belonging; or simply absent, to avoid risk altogether.

The off-frame, erased

And this is probably the most serious point.

Platforms do not merely reduce what we tell about ourselves. They also erase the off-frame: everything that existed, and still exists, alongside digital presence. Unpublished attachments. Places without images. Socialities without traces. Hesitations. Versions of the self that were not yet ready to be shown. All the things that nonetheless make up the substance of a person.

This means giving platforms a dangerously large role in our shared life. When we know that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 disappeared within ten years, the archive we use as “proof” is in fact a memory vacuum. We build certainties on debris.

The accessible digital narrative can then end up in almost total contradiction with what the person has become, or even with what they already were at the time. An online presence shows a stabilized form, sometimes strategic, sometimes accidental, sometimes unfinished; then that form ends up serving as retrospective proof. As though it told the truth of beginnings.

But a life never begins in its most legible version.

Against the digital mythology of beginnings

The platform does not want a person, it wants a character, easier for the algorithm to categorize. It therefore pushes us to share founding narratives. The first post. The “how I started.” The zero moment. All platforms encourage a certain mythology of beginnings: that of an identity already oriented, already coherent, already destined to become what it now is. They are influenced by the logic of TV and film pitches. They force a kind of narrative reverse-engineering of our lives. It is the famous rule number 7 from Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling, formulated by Emma Coats:

This logic is seductive. It reassures. It makes trajectories easier to understand. It also facilitates audience adhesion, because people like knowing where someone comes from. But it produces a formidable illusion: the idea that our truth was already there at the beginning.

This is where Ernst Bloch becomes precious.

In The Principle of Hope, Heimat is not the place of origin that one would finally recover. It is not the lost home. It is not the past rediscovered. On the contrary, it is a place that has not yet been inhabited, a horizon. Something that may shine from childhood onward, but that still remains ahead of us.

This idea completely inverts the logic of platforms. Where they fabricate a mythology of origin, Bloch moves origin forward. He suggests that what is truest in us is not necessarily behind us, in an initial story, but ahead of us, in a form of life not yet fulfilled.

Toward a digital Heimat

If we take this idea seriously, then authentic digital origin should not be thought of as a starting point to document or optimize. It should be thought of as a relational, symbolic, technical horizon: a digital place where one might finally inhabit an identity without reducing it to a calling card, a narrative brand, or an instant signal.

The problem with platforms is therefore not only that they archive our lives badly. It is that they teach us to look for our truth in the wrong place: in the founding narrative, in the coherence of beginnings, in the most visible traces.

And yet our origins are often diffuse, contradictory, off-frame. And perhaps, online as elsewhere, what we call an origin is not what launched us, but what we are still trying to make habitable.

Platforms push us to tell our beginnings as if they already contained our truth. But an identity is not a first post. It is not a bio. It is not an origin optimized for multiple audiences. What is truest in us may not lie behind us, in a founding narrative, but ahead of us, in a digital place we have not yet learned how to inhabit.

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Initiative of the Week: Hodio

The Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez has announced the launch of Hodio, a tool developed under the umbrella of the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (Oberaxe). Its purpose is to systematically measure the presence, evolution, and reach of hate speech across Spanish digital platforms. It is a broader social debate that puts the spotlight on the growing need for governance of social media.

Amazing links

• UMM, I GUESS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT TASTE AGAIN (The Sublime)

• Where do bad choices come from? (Seth Godin)

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Sleep is one of the first casualties of time spent online. For physiological reasons, first of all: nighttime social media use delays sleep onset, reduces total sleep duration, and worsens sleep quality. Three distinct but cumulative effects, identified in a 2024 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Our perception of our own sleep quality also shapes how we feel the next day, according to The Scientist. In other words, if we feel that we slept badly, even without any major physiological deterioration, our mood, attention, and cognitive abilities can genuinely suffer the following day.

I often talk about digital liveness: that way of being alive through digital flows. What is striking about sleep is that it should be its exact opposite: a space of life without flows, without mediated presence, without signal. The moment when we stop being traversed simply in order to be.
And yet the algorithm knows neither pause nor night. Its logic is one of continuous extraction, twenty-four hours a day, indifferent to our biological needs. Nighttime scrolling is not an accident; it is the product of architectures designed to colonize even the dead hours, the only ones platforms had not yet fully captured.

Sleep: the ultimate frontier of optimization

Sleep, in turn, has been seized by the race for productivity. What once belonged to withdrawal, surrender, or unconsciousness has become a variable to track, improve, and correct. Even the night must now produce something: recovery, performance, scores, data. As Eugene Healey writes, even unconsciousness has become a territory to optimize. This grip belongs to societies increasingly organized around continuity, around a world active twenty-four hours a day, with no real night.

In this game, the most vulnerable populations pay the price: children, exposed very early to nighttime digital use, but also migrant workers and all those whose schedules are aligned with the silent functioning of cities.

A perfect absurd example: in Dubai, GymNation has just launched a guided napping session. Called NapTime, this weekly module promises more effective recovery, without phones.

As mentioned by on her Substack, sleep has become a strategic issue for many companies. Estée Lauder appointed its first “Global Sleep Adviser,” Dr. Matthew Walker, while investment in sleep tech has more than doubled and the sleep economy was valued at $585 billion in 2024.

Sleep is now staged as an activity to be monitored, measured, and sometimes even broadcast, as with sleep streamers. What emerges here is the old techno-productivist dream of a body transparent to itself, measurable even in its surrender.

Algofluence versus the circadian rhythm

The disruption of the circadian cycle is a problem. According to Harvard Health, blue light from screens suppresses melatonin for about twice as long as green light of comparable brightness, and delays the circadian rhythm about twice as much, three hours versus one and a half.

FOMO also tends to delay bedtime, especially among students, and intensifies digital fatigue. They fall into patterns of rumination; the fear of missing something drives them back toward social media, blocking the activities that prepare us for sleep. On top of this comes digital fatigue: among the most dependent users, the risk of sleeping only five to six hours is multiplied by 2.2.

Checking social media is, in itself, an emotional investment: suggested content is constantly designed to hook us, make us react, and generate feelings that are often paradoxical and disconnected from our own realities. While bedtime should be a moment of calm and breathing space, it is overstimulated, endlessly excited.

In that sense, fighting to reclaim our sleep also means reclaiming the only zone of existence that algofluence cannot yet fully reach, at least in theory.

Resistance through disconnection

Different actors are now trying to re-sacralize sleep, first by forcing a public conversation around it. In Toyoake, Japan, Mayor Masafumi Koki pushed through a non-binding ordinance in 2025 encouraging residents to limit their recreational smartphone use to two hours a day. The goal is not so much to punish as to reopen a collective debate about digital habits, rest, and family life.

This re-sacralization also passes through education. In France, public schools and parents’ associations are multiplying efforts to raise awareness about the place of the phone in evening routines. Sleep is no longer a purely private matter, but an issue of collective organization and public health.

It also takes shape through the return of micro-social rituals. In an interview with Perfectly Imperfect, the artist Tama Gucci recommends telling friends or one’s community that one is going to sleep. A simple way of signaling withdrawal, of making it clear that one will no longer be available. The gesture recalls the chatroom era, when people signaled their exit from the conversation more explicitly. Where smartphones have mostly perfected notification filtering, these practices reintroduce a clear social signal: I’m stepping away, I’m logging off, I’m going to sleep.

Sanctifying sleep also requires very concrete material choices in our living spaces. On r/digitalminimalism, one recurring piece of advice is to remove the smartphone from the bedroom altogether, recreating a physical break with the flow.

Sleep should no longer be an adjustment variable for either our productivity or our digital lives, but an act of biological and political resistance. By trying to optimize our nights through technology, or by letting algorithms nibble away at our hours of rest, we turn what should be a regenerative emptiness into a saturation of data and stimuli.

Reclaiming sleep is not just about buying ourselves better health or a less tired face the next day. It means deciding that certain zones of our existence must remain offline, beyond calculation, beyond the flow. In a world that demands our total and permanent presence, sleep may well become one of the last acts of disobedience: ceasing, for a few hours, to be a resource to extract.

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Stat of the week: 430,000

According to the Fed, 430,000 U.S. households are now worth $30 million or more. When it comes to social networks, it’ll soon have an impact on how the design and the infrastructure of social links are going to be thought.

Amazing links

• Casino Sociale (Is It Supposed To Be Like That?)

• Contemporary Perception is Hybrid (Right Click Save)

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For a long time, an image, a selfie, a video, or a turn of phrase was enough to prove that we were human in our online exchanges. A photo attested to a presence. A voice seemed to guarantee a source. A way of writing pointed back to an identifiable person. We still lived in a regime where certain traces carried authority.

In chatrooms, moving from an encounter to instant messaging and then to the use of a webcam followed a logical progression: first you encountered words, then a body.

That logic has partly reversed with feed-based social networks: physical representations are immediately accessible on an Instagram account; conversely, the absence of a profile photo on LinkedIn raises suspicion. Stories, voice notes, spur-of-the-moment videos, and messages written on the fly have gradually formed a grammar of ordinary, expected presence: a set of signs of life, of aliveness.

Artificial simulacra and cascades of information

Images did not wait for AI to become interpretive battlegrounds. A video that some take as irrefutable proof can just as easily be inverted or absorbed into the opposite ideological reading.

So the problem is not only that machines can imitate reality; it is also that our trust in visible digital signs has been weakened, something the phenomenon of cybercascades has made visible for a long time:

Artificial intelligence tools can now produce credible faces, and sometimes even synthetic emotions. This is not only about content optimized for clicks; we are actually developing genuine attachments to our AI companions, which are becoming something like algofriends.

The asymmetry is dizzying: platforms ingest our voices, our faces, our styles, our most intimate thoughts, and redistribute them as generative material. And they do so without recourse, without compensation, without even a notification.

It is no surprise that figures like Matthew McConaughey have filed numerous patents to protect distinctive features such as their voices. Nor that some hacktivists are escalating by poisoning AI systems through so-called data poisoning techniques.

For ordinary people, that kind of protection is simply out of reach.

We may be entering an era in which authenticity no longer rests on appearance, but on more fragile and deeper traces: continuity, relationship, hesitation, context, flaws, rituals of presence.

De-perfecting our digital presence

As AI perfects the imitation of our surfaces, we are beginning to look for the human elsewhere again, and to love less spectacular but deeply endearing forms of proof. In no particular order: an annoying delay in replying; a shared memory; a minor contradiction; a joke that only makes sense between two people; an apparently useless detail; the ability to remember an old exchange; the context of a particular moment in time. In short, the extraordinary capacity of our brains to store stories and then reactivate and remix them endlessly.

An AI might say that we humans hallucinate, when in fact it is precisely these creative, poetic leaps that make us more real.

It is no longer the clearest signs that authenticate, but the most embodied ones, the ones that thicken the social bond.

There are many examples of this need. Signal groups replacing public timelines; personal newsletters reconstructing something of correspondence; closed Discord servers where people remember users’ names. Or quite simply humor and irony. The platform Your AI Slop Bores Me, launched in March 2026 and viral within days, reverses the Turing test: humans play the role of AI in order to answer other humans’ questions. To ask a question, you first have to answer one by imitating a machine. The absurdity is the message.

So many microscopic retreats into spaces where someone, somewhere, remembers you or feels you.

Word of mouth is becoming social gold again. Since Contagious, published by Jonah Berger in 2013, we have known that less than 7% of word of mouth happens online, which means that more than 90% of recommendations take place in spaces that are untraceable, unindexable, and unmonetizable by platforms.

Trust is shifting back toward human mediation

This movement does not concern information alone. It also touches mental health, the sense of reality, and relational fatigue. We are slowly emerging from a decade in which part of the platform ecosystem promised to simulate closeness at scale: performed friendships, content intimacy, visible emotions, the constant companionship of feeds. But this abundance of social signs did not necessarily produce more connection.

One point seems important to me here: not all digital spaces are equal, and not all platforms produce the same relationship to life and aliveness. The World Happiness Report 2026 shows this very clearly when it distinguishes, in Latin American data, between platforms centered on social connection (such as WhatsApp) and those dominated by algorithmically optimized content (such as TikTok): the former are associated more positively with well-being, while the latter are less so. The report also notes that communication, learning, and creative uses are generally better correlated with life satisfaction than uses dominated by scrolling, gaming, or pure entertainment, and above all that the feeling of belonging matters far more than simply reducing time spent on social networks.

The report thus shows that in Latin America, despite intensive use, well-being remains high because digital platforms primarily serve to nourish tight-knit, preexisting social networks. By contrast, in Anglo-Saxon countries, the digital seems to have substituted for real-life encounters rather than complemented them.

New rituals against the cybercascade

The cybercascade is exhausting. It frees itself from signs, contexts, and nuances. It scrolls past forms of presence detached from their environments. A piece of content appears in a feed and we barely know why. In the end, it homogenizes voices. It accustoms us to receiving signals without ever encountering the conditions of their existence, the reason they were created. That may be why it also produces this strange contemporary feeling: seeing huge numbers of humans on our screens, and meeting fewer and fewer of them.

In response, new rituals are taking shape.

First, the refusal to be synthesized. Refusing to have one’s voice cloned, one’s face reused, one’s style ingested and redistributed as mere generative material. This refusal is not only legal or economic; it is also symbolic. It means: I am not reducible to my surface traces.

Second, the revaluation of fourth spaces: those hybrid spaces that are neither entirely private, nor entirely institutional, nor fully commercial, where slower forms of presence can be recomposed. Places where one does not come merely to consume information, but to participate in an atmosphere, a continuity, a human fabric. As content becomes easier to imitate, relational environments become more precious.

Finally, the pleasure of co-construction. Wikipedia remains an interesting example here because it rests on something other than the mere broadcasting of content. It rests on gestures of correction, documentation, discussion, verification, and regulated disagreement. On February 11, 2026, ENS-PSL, in collaboration with Wikimedia France and the association Les SansPages, organized the third edition of its “Women in Science” edit-a-thon—a full day devoted to creating, expanding, translating, and illustrating pages dedicated to women scientists on the online encyclopedia. The project page bears witness to it: dozens of contributors collectively produced articles, left behind arbitrations, sources, and formatting decisions.

This kind of space matters more and more because it is becoming harder for AI to simulate. You can generate an article; it is much harder to generate the social thickness of a shared elaboration, of a collective project.

Perhaps that is what the new human signs are, in the end: no longer isolated proofs, but fabrics of proof. No longer a face, but a continuity. No longer a video, but a web of relationships. No longer a voice, but a way of inhabiting time with others.

In the world that is coming, authenticity may be less a matter of resemblance than of ‘reliance’, to borrow Edgar Morin’s term: that capacity to weave ties where fragmentation has undone them.

Of course, we will continue to ask for visual proof, verification, certification, badges, identification procedures. But these technical guarantees will not be enough to answer the deeper need expressed behind them: the need to feel that there really is someone there. Someone who cannot be reduced to a credible output. Someone whose presence exceeds their own signs.

In a universe saturated with imitations, the human does not disappear. It changes address.

We will look for it more in hesitation than in fluidity, in memory than in performance, in relationship than in image, in sensitive signs than in spectacular ones.

And perhaps that is the paradoxical opportunity of this era: by trying to make everything visible, calculable, and synthesizable, we are rediscovering that what truly points toward a human being is not always what is most easily seen.

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Stat of the week: +260%

At Reddit’s Internet Awards, the “Community of the Moment” award goes to r/bald, a community that brings together people living with alopecia or simply those who are bald. Views on r/bald content have risen by 260% over the past year, reaching more than 974 million views. The forms of solidarity that emerge there show that, when well organized and supported by a platform, a community can help shift certain taboos while also fostering respect among its members.

Amazing links

• Ragebait Me, Pls (Burn After Reading)

• Finding Photography’s Pulse (Right Click Save)

• ‘She’s a real Scorpio’: Gen Z’s love for astrology is showing up in their jewelry (CNN)

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In her latest book, Ethno-design — Reinventing Innovation to (Sur)vive in the 21st Century, anthropologist Fanny Parise discusses industrial animism. In other words: our growing tendency to attribute intentionality, agency, and even emotions to technological objects (AI, algorithms, robots, and so on). A permanent simulation of humanity, and not one without risks.

But what happens when an object tucked away in a drawer suddenly comes back to life, almost fifteen years later? That is what happened to me last week when I changed the battery in my old Xperia.

A versioning of our lives?

Software developers often talk about versioning as “the mechanism consisting in preserving the version of any software entity so that it can easily be retrieved, even after newer versions have appeared and been deployed.”

Applied to our digital lives, the idea is dizzying: where have the previous versions of ourselves gone? We spend hours online, and yet access to our older connected lives is surprisingly difficult. Platforms archive almost everything about us, especially for ad targeting, but give us almost no tools to navigate our own history.

This is a fundamental asymmetry: our historicity resides on their servers, not with us.

The continuous updating of apps, interfaces, and formats gradually erases the traces of our previous uses in favor of a permanent present. Everything is designed to relaunch the flow, rarely to go backward. An interface offering easy access to our life logs would also be an invitation to pause, to interrupt the scroll, to step outside the regime of attention capture.

On the one hand, platforms know almost everything about us. On the other, they leave us very little room to reread our own digital biography.

A material accident to access our past: a digital Pompeii

Turning on an old smartphone without an internet connection becomes, then, a precious accident. By rebooting, this Xperia gave me access that platforms had structurally denied me.

Apps that had disappeared or become ghostly (Foursquare, for instance) brought memories back to the surface. A few saved text messages were enough to reopen an entire stretch of my life between 2012 and 2014. Even Instagram, frozen in an almost original design, took on the air of a sanctuary.

By coming back to life in a temporality no longer its own, this object gave me the impression of opening up a digital Pompeii: screens halted in mid-motion, apps presenting only fragments of themselves, profiles literally decapitated, interfaces stuck before their successive metamorphoses. Not a reconstructed past, but a past preserved in its own forms, waiting for an archaeologist.

What I recovered was not just content. It was an older grammar of myself.

Without earlier versions, no continuity of self

Paul Ricoeur showed that we can only understand ourselves through a narrative identity: we hold together over time because we are capable of telling a relatively coherent story of what we have been, what we are becoming, and what links the two. But what becomes of that continuity if access to our earlier states depends on an old charger found by chance, a replaced battery, or a device miraculously brought back to life?

On social media, everything pushes us to compress our stories, to miniaturize them, to make them more immediately legible and more performative. Added to this is the constant friction with the stories of others, which affect us, move us, and sometimes suddenly expose us at scale. Our extimate self-narrative is therefore no longer merely fragile: it is constantly being reformatted.

Versioning our lives could be one way to recover a measure of breathing room and gain a clearer view of who we are.

Fanny Parise warns us about industrial animism: the risk of attributing a soul to objects that have none. But perhaps the real danger lies elsewhere. Platforms do exactly the opposite: they simulate an intimate knowledge of us (recommendations, memory of our tastes, the illusion of personalization) while depriving us of the tools to know ourselves over time. They play at being human. And in the meantime, they make the human being amnesiac.

The ethno-design of future social networks could rest on interfaces that give us back our historicity. Not to imprison us in it, but to allow us to free ourselves from it knowingly.

Digital versioning may not be an archivist’s comfort. It may be a minimal condition of identity. Not in order to live in nostalgia, but simply to still be able to locate ourselves in time.

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Stat of the week: 27%

According to GSMA, 27% of people keep their old phones for fear of losing the memories stored on them, which helps explain the 5 to 10 billion smartphones currently lying unused in drawers around the world.

Amazing links

• The vanity project (Bustle)

• Beyond “fake news”. How information integrity creates a building ground for disinformation-resilient society? (Sciences Po)

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I recently bought a Kodak Charmera, a digital camera that doubles as a keychain. An object weighing 30 grams of electronics, shooting at 1.6 megapixels. Objectively terrible quality by the standards of the latest smartphones. And yet, the Charmera captures the spirit of the times and a deep desire: to accept imperfection in order to add our own intimate texture to our digital content. It is perhaps a way of fighting social media fatigue: documenting everything, again, because digital perfection has ended up erasing memory in favor of performance. Where the iPhone smooths reality to make it acceptable to the algorithm, the Charmera textures it to make it ours.

Social media empties reality of its substance

Since the rise of selfie mode, we have grown accustomed to taking shot after shot to get “the right one.” Google and Apple now automatically group these dozens of photos to suggest the best one. This delegation of our gaze to a machine reveals something obvious: Instagram and TikTok have not only shaped certain aesthetics, they have domesticated the way we narrate our lives. Unlearning the habit of shooting 20 photos of the same scene, just to satisfy the social network, has become an act of resistance.

shared a related idea recently: social media platforms consistently portray physical places as fantasized versions of themselves, feeding the desires of others. The place becomes a mere analog backdrop in service of a digital staging, drained of its substance through the repetition of a fictional image. This is the paradox of Valensole in France and its lavender fields: its “Instagrammability” is an economic windfall, but a curse for the reality of the territory, reduced to a simple 1080x1350 pixel vignette, creating a rift between locals and tourists.

Grain as a signal of humanity

This is where “poor” objects like the Charmera reintroduce the real. They are, first of all, incredibly temperamental: startup is slow, focusing requires genuine intention, and the screen is so small that it forces you to defer the discovery of your image.

This return to a pre-digital temporality imposes a necessary letting go: the image will be what it will be. This deliberate friction creates strong emotional value, what psychologists Norton, Mochon and Ariely called the IKEA Effect in 2011. By proving that we value what we helped build up to 63% more, even imperfectly, they explain why the effortless “click” of the iPhone leaves us empty.

Adding friction means reinjecting pride into the act of creation. It opens the door not to ready-made captions for social networks, but to giving context, to forcing oneself into a form of genuine sincerity. It also means assuming the right to share an image because we love it, not because it feeds a trend.

The Japanese concepts of Tatemae and Honne: the urgency of a new reading contract with audiences

A massive online backlash is rising against content labeled “authentic” that is in reality purely performative, optimized for algorithms. This is the Timothée Chalamet syndrome: by endlessly polishing his public persona, he ends up generating widespread distrust. The moment a behavioral gap appears, the entire edifice of the persona collapses, because the audience no longer knows where the mask ends, as in the case of his remark about opera and ballet.

The Japanese distinction between social facade (Tatemae, “what one builds in front”) and inner feelings (Honne) offers a way out. The problem today is not staging itself, it is the hypocrisy of passing it off as raw truth. Tatemae is a tacit agreement: everyone knows the Instagram photo is posed, and we all accept to play along. Honne is what vibrates underneath, the unfiltered imperfection.

The tragedy of social media is having transformed Tatemae into a permanent obligation, making Honne suspect or invisible. Where performative creators seek to maintain the illusion against their audience, Tatemae was originally a transparent social contract.

The Charmera, through its technical limitations, produces Honne by default. It is incapable of lying, incapable of smoothing, incapable of performing Tatemae. By using it, we sign a new reading contract with our audience: here is my world, unfiltered and uncalculated.

It is by accepting this grain, this digital noise and this low resolution, that we finally recover a form of truth in a world saturated with simulacra.

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Stat of the week: +134%

According to Vogue Business, hipster aesthetics interest is booming on TikTok. There might be a connection with my Kodak Charmera obsession…

Amazing links

• The Business of Street Style (Vogue Business)

• The Story AI Told About Tempestt ( in Talking Too Many)

• omg what’s going on ( in Letters from a girl)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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The viral rumor about an alleged look-alike - if not a clone - of Jim Carrey who supposedly attended and delivered a speech at this year’s César Awards in France is a sign of our times. Beyond tech paranoia, it reveals a deeper anxiety: no longer owning the exclusivity of one’s own story. Having to prove you’re an authentic human, and not an AI or a deepfake, becomes almost existential. Our biographies are increasingly battered by our relationship with technology. It is within this tension that the notion of biotechronicity takes root: the gradual resynchronization of our lives to digital time regimes.

Biotechronicity: A Human Reassembled by Technology

Biotechronicity is what happens when our lives stop being paced by the living (seasons, bodies, social milestones…) and instead resynchronize to platform clocks (streaks, trends, notifications, memories…).

Stories (24 hours), trends (TikTok), streaks (Snapchat), memories (Google), notifications: these become life markers as structuring as seasons, birthdays, or major social rites of passage. This artificial synchronization with digital services destroys the logic of organic chronology; our memories are not only outsourced to servers, they become raw material to feed algorithms that have no intrinsic interest in the construction of our lives. The consequences are numerous and often invisible.

The past is suddenly reprogrammed by a kind of algorithmic exhibition police: automatic albums, “On this day,” the resurfacing of faces or episodes we didn’t necessarily choose to revisit. Sure, the machine looks like it’s learning. But it dispossesses us of our role as author: it arbitrarily decides when the past returns, and in what form.

Attention, too, is strained by engagement cycles: platforms push us to respond, publish, perform according to parameters (frequency, retention, notifications, sometimes even gamified systems) that do not match our biological rhythms.

And it only takes a few months away from Instagram to feel the call to order: emails, notifications - the machine tries to plug us back in at all costs. Beyond subjective experience, attention research has already documented the cognitive effects of a phone’s presence or salience on attentional control among 18–25-year-olds.

On a more macro level, biotechronicity reinforces pseudo-realities as a shared social almanac disappears in favor of hyper-personalized time.

We could sum it up like this: the user isn’t simply on a platform; they live inside the calendars it imposes.

The Little Voice in Your Head Disappears

Biotechronicity doesn’t just reshuffle our memories: it colonizes our inner life, turning it into a waiting room where we scan for the next notification as proof of existence. To the point that, according to OA Creative Intelligence, 58% of Gen Z find it difficult to sit in silence with their own thoughts. Silence is no longer a space for reflection or generative boredom, but an “error signal”: a void that must be filled urgently.

Without the feed to dictate the tempo of our thinking, we experience an existential lag, simply because turning to a shared societal reference point outside platforms is no longer so obvious. Our information ecosystem structurally discourages this human “collective almanac,” replacing it with a hyper-personalization of time that isolates us inside solitary temporal loops.

Resisting Through Friction

Against the total fluidity of algorithms, the best form of resistance is learning friction. First, by taking breaks at the right moment. Gloria Mark (University of California, Irvine) reminds us that a break is only effective if it enables cognitive closure: in writing, for instance, a task should be properly finished (say, at the end of a paragraph) in order to reclaim natural, human cycles. By taking back control over the beginning and end of an activity, people in a sense disable the autopilot of algorithms which benefit from keeping us lost.

The chronology of our lives also depends on recognizing that the digital world is far from capturing the full extent of our traces, stories, and experiences. The internet suffers from digital decay: data erodes, like any material, to the point that more than 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 have already disappeared. No wonder notebooks, film photography, and paper media are back in vogue: faced with the programmed obsolescence of our digital biographies, we seek to “engrave in the durable” what gives meaning to our digital liveness (the quality or state of being alive).

In Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, the hero Charlie Gordon sees his intellectual abilities multiplied through a scientific experiment. But soon the mouse Algernon declines physically and mentally. Charlie realizes his own fate will be the same.

The analogy is striking: like Charlie, we have accepted an extension of our capacities at the price of a forced synchronization to a clock that is not ours. But an intelligence or a life that no longer follows its own biological rhythm eventually crashes into a wall of fatigue or alienation. When Charlie lays flowers on Algernon’s grave, he isn’t only grieving a mouse; he’s grieving the loss of control over his own trajectory. He’s grieving that Biotechronicity that made him brilliant for a moment, but severed him from his deeper humanity. We still have a choice: to be the authors of our lives, or merely the hosts of a calendar that outlives us without understanding us.

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Stat of the week: 338,400

On TikTok, more than 338,400 videos tagged #freshflowers show how flowers affect users’ mood. To feel better, the vibe can start with a vase, not a Story.

Amazing links

• They Are in Love but Don’t Speak the Same Language (New York Times)

• The volunteer Wikipedia army protecting against AI slop (Rest of World)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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Since the arrival of front-facing cameras and Instagram’s launch in 2010, the selfie has become embedded in everyday practice. It has turned into both a format, and, more importantly, a routine gesture. Political figures seized on it as a tool of closeness: a promise of authenticity, a promise of connection, a promise of politics “on a human scale.” But in an era of industrial-grade video and algofluence, is the selfie becoming obsolete or, on the contrary, regaining a certain kind of value?

A proof of life (and a way of documenting the self) that still holds

On Instagram Stories in particular, the selfie works as a minimal reminder: I exist, I’m here, I share the same present as you. No wonder that for a birthday, to celebrate a friend, we’ll post a Story of a good moment together: “co-staging” ourselves. For politicians, the goal is clear: enter people’s everyday lives, accept an image less polished than the official portrait, and install a low-intensity sense of complicity.

But online, not all politicians are equal. Some naturally deploy a digital expression, almost like a second skin. But that ease is not evenly distributed. It’s what sets apart, for example, someone like former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in France: posture, tempo, posting reflexes, an ability to truly “inhabit” the camera.

There is also another, more decisive kind of selfie: the one taken with the general public (rallies, festivities, walkabouts). Here, the selfie is no longer just an image: it’s a shared memory. It enters people’s phones, is saved, revisited, and reshared over the years. It guarantees neither a vote nor adhesion to a platform, but it installs a presence inside people’s social albums. The selfie is a contemporary extension of the handshake.

Yesterday: “make a new friend a day.” Today: leave a trace, a shared fragment, proof of an encounter.

An infrastructure of visibility… and connection

In the age of algofluence, the selfie has a paradoxical advantage: it brings us back to the concrete. It requires little technical setup, little editing, little scenario, unlike the near-cinematic videos dominating TikTok. In an ocean of optimized images, the selfie keeps a simple grammar: a face, a frame, a moment.

It offers a legible, almost reassuring universe within the endless stream of recommended content. And it can produce an affective rereading of politics: just as audiences develop feelings toward celebrities through parasocial relationships, citizens can also develop, online, a diffuse attachment to political figures; not through their ideas, but through the regularity of their presence and their emotional readability.

From a platform perspective, the selfie is an extremely optimized form: framing, face, recognition, instant legibility. And it’s all the more “rewarded” when it activates native Instagram or TikTok features (geolocation, music, filters, stickers, and so on). In other words: the selfie isn’t only content: it’s an interface.

But this requires having built a symbolic universe - essentially, a brand world - with real propositions, real “products,” beyond the iconographic toolkit. In well-designed digital social systems, the selfie functions as a reaction “hook,” especially on Instagram. Zohran Mamdani has fully exploited Instagram’s different social layers: each reaction to a selfie or a Story then becomes an opportunity to automate donation prompts, notably via the ManyChat tool. A fine-grained understanding of usage patterns that few people in France translate into political action. It’s true that many French politicians still use social networks merely to “broadcast” content like television rather than to create connection and relational ties.

The citizen as media

In its most advanced forms, the selfie turns the citizen into media. When an elected official takes a selfie with a young person, they aren’t speaking only to that person. They’re using that person’s network to propagate their image. It’s an outsourcing of propaganda: it’s no longer the candidate saying “I’m close to you,” it’s the citizen proving it by posting. The selfie becomes remixable material.

New selfie forms prove the point: on TikTok, or via Instagram’s “photo dump” format, the selfie is no longer an end in itself but one element in a broader narrative. The goal is no longer the perfect portrait, but the vibe shift: an aesthetic of blur, of the candid, which paradoxically reinforces the feeling of political truthfulness against AI-generated content.

Political figures have adopted this strategy from influencers, turning their mandate into a continuous and coherent story. In that framework, the selfie becomes a visual “jingle” of proximity: a recurring signal that punctuates the more austere institutional agenda with touches of humanity.

The accompanying texts - often written in the first person, with a falsely spontaneous tone - play the role of “action chronicles,” while behind-the-scenes moments (coffee backstage at a TV set, a train ride, a file opened late at night) function as interludes of dedication.

We’re no longer looking at a simple candid shot. What we’re observing is a genuine media programming of embodiment. Each selfie is another brick in the construction of an “augmented political identity,” where the boundary between the person and the office is deliberately blurred to create emotional loyalty stronger than partisan adhesion.

The risk of a sidereal void

But this effectiveness has a downside. The selfie can become the zero degree of politics: politics reduced to presence; a selfie without substance is almost dangerous if it only serves to seduce broad audiences, replacing ideas with images, real-world conflict with performed closeness. The political selfie risks leading to an “influencer-ization” of representatives. That may also help explain why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pulled back from social media. Beyond the fatigue inherent in intensive online presence, she sensed the risk of depoliticization: the selfie can create a parasocial relationship so strong that the voter becomes attached to the person rather than the cause. By stepping away, she tries to restore space for long legislative time against the tyranny of the face’s instantaneity.

This is where the notion of pictolect is useful. Kristen Joy Watts, Instagram’s first Head of Fashion & Culture, describes in her thesis this hybrid language between image and text: a dynamic system reshaping how we communicate. A selfie, in practice, is almost never “only” an image: it’s embedded in a context (caption, tone, references), then enriched by platforms (music, filters, geolocation, narrative features).

In short, the selfie is rarely empty by nature. It becomes empty when it’s disconnected from any pictolect: reduced to proof of presence without meaning: a politics of trace, with no trace of an idea.

Preparing the next frontier of the selfie in the age of AI

Virtual avatars (AI companions that mimic a political figure) will provide 24/7 presence to accelerate conquest. We move from a logic of selfie to a logic of deepfie. Where the selfie was proof of presence, the deepfie becomes a promise of omnipresence. In the era of the mirror-oracle, politicians no longer merely document their passage through reality; they outsource their image to language models and avatars capable of simulating low-intensity complicity at industrial scale.

A true selfie-verse: an ecosystem where the face is no longer a testimony but an infrastructure: where embodiment is programmed, versioned, and personalized like a service. Proximity is no longer measured in encounters, but in availability; presence is no longer proven, it is optimized. And the risk shifts: it’s no longer just the image replacing the idea: it’s the idea itself becoming a simple setting, tuned in real time to maximize adhesion, until politics turns into an on-demand product: perfectly “compassionate,” perfectly smooth… and potentially hollow.

We could feed a real disembodiment through an excess of embodiment. If the selfie was a digital handshake, the deepfie is a virtual hand extended to millions of citizens at once, able to personalize its speech depending on who is watching. In this distorted mirror, politics no longer reflects action; it becomes the oracle whispering to each voter what they need to hear. The trace of ideas, already threatened by the image, risks dissolving entirely into a flow of generated presence, without intermediaries, where authenticity is no longer a fact, but an algorithmic parameter tuned to maximize engagement.

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Stat of the week: 2.4 billion

On TikTok, #analoglife content has racked up more than 2.4 billion views in 2026.

Amazing links

• Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts (HAI Stanford University)

• How Max Richter stays up overnight for his eight-and-a-half-hour Sleep concerts (GQ)

• Computer Love (Comment by )

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

TikTok has radically transformed how political ideas spread. They no longer win through the quality of debate, but through their ability to circulate via emotional friction points. Even in the French National Assembly, “TikTok-style interventions” are said to lead to a shrinking vocabulary and a rise in emotional rhetoric, according to a CEPREMAP note.

The platform even has a name for this: “Stay & Play.” Behind the jargon lies a handbook already mastered by the most aggressive actors in the culture war.

Stay & Play: the new handbook for political communicators

TikTok insists on existing inside people’s real conversations, continuously, rather than initiating them (“always in”). In other words, we no longer enter politics through programs, but through social media users’ habits, through the texture of everyday life.

The platform thus distinguishes two broad kinds of communities.

Stay communities first: these are ideologically closest to a party or political figure. They are convinced, coherent, and naturally follow debates, talking points, and messaging. They can be led by politicians or clearly identified activists, who both aggregate divisions and provide explanations and commentary. In France, Facebook Live is still a key feature for politicians while at grassroot level, using Instagram Stories to feature local activists make total sense.

On the other side are Play communities: this is where the attention battle is won. They refer to the most surprising communities, creators, and associations, where creativity and offbeat energy generate fame. They function as circulation corridors toward very large audiences. Political content becomes a vibe, a meme, wrapped in the aesthetics of friends messing around, a prank, or even a sporting feat.

The victory of posture, of “core,” over content

Politics in Play mode is a politics of signs, and an obsession with virality. On the side of Jordan Bardella (the president of the National Rally (RN) party since 2022, far right in France) and his allies, the “Sigma face” offers a telling example.

This superiority smirk was born from Christian Bale’s facial expressions in American Psycho. It was later popularized through pop culture and internet humor, and elevated into a totem among masculinist communities: it embodies the figure who never negotiates, never apologizes, and dominates through silence or a “surgical” punchline, without needing a pack. In politics, the Sigma is not there to debate, but to assert a natural superiority over the system.

Bardella’s “Sigma face” clips get served to multiple audience cores: people who like crude humor, others who enjoy movie sequences, and of course those already sympathetic to RN ideas.

Under the guise of second-degree, almost anecdotal content, this Play approach reaches enormous publics who do not necessarily have much in common. These signs are also understood by activists, who perceive their double reading. A way to both expand reach and reinforce positions, without ever having to state an explicit argument.

Play content as a staging ground for astroturfing

Play content often becomes an anchor point for orchestrating conversation under posts. Well-trained, coordinated activists move fast to flood and steer comments, to create a first impression and a first interpretation of the content: this is what we call astroturfing. You see it in crime-news videos from major media outlets, where reactions quickly turn into barely disguised racism. But you also see it more insidiously under “light” videos, precisely because the Play atmosphere lowers vigilance, and because content creators do not necessarily have trained newsroom teams to moderate and correct misinformation.

This double dynamic, algofluence (creating content to influence Play communities) plus astroturfing, can be intensified when a political actor also controls a media group, by pushing highly controversial figures into visibility.

sums up the strategy of far-right influencers and the French mogul Bolloré ecosystem: giving a major platform to an extremist fits into a dynamic of normalizing the radicalization of her statements. Again, it is a way to polarize the most politicized communities while hooking Play communities.

What matters, then, is occupying available mental territory rather than “running a campaign.” You see it with former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal: by adopting vlog codes (coffee in hand, behind the scenes, confessional tone), he turns political action into a Netflix series whose next episode we await, short-circuiting critical analysis through simulated proximity. This serial presence gradually accelerates familiarity with ideas and characters, independently of social or economic reality. We get attached to a fiction.

A risk of impoverishing ideas

TikTok-format politics is judged like content: can it meet a core audience? Can that audience remix it for its own ends? Truth sometimes becomes secondary to performance and the expected reaction: making people laugh, provoking outrage, enabling identification, prompting shares. These are far more precise, and therefore more restrictive, objectives than the work of deconstructing an amendment or a legislative proposal.

On TikTok, airtime is not earned through relevance, but through the completion rate. If a complex explanation of public debt triggers a swipe after two seconds, the algorithm kills it. It is censorship by boredom. Complexity has become the new parasitic noise. Now, content can reach millions of people every day without radiating across an entire nation. Cultures increasingly pass each other online like ships in the night. As a result, public debate atomizes into impermeable niches. Politics no longer seeks national consensus, but the domination of a specific algorithm.

The propagandist’s handbook now follows four main steps

1. Compression & framing: a position becomes a sign (a phrase, an image, a sound).

2. Disembedding: the sign leaves politics and enters Play territory (humor, lifestyle, sport, beauty, food).

3. Re-embedding: the sign returns loaded, attached to an identity, an emotion, a camp.

4. Normalization: what was once a position becomes “obvious,” because it is familiar.

A video game soundtrack (disembedding) paired with footage of a national border (re-embedding) turns a complex geopolitical issue into a simple territory-defense game (normalization).

Making meaning again

Faced with this emotional war machine, the risk is that politics empties out and becomes a fashionable digital accessory. To make meaning again, the point is not to leave TikTok, but to reinvent semantic resistance.

• Education in signs: teaching citizens to spot when emotion is being instrumentalized to hide a programmatic void.

• Stepping out of the feed: building slow-media spaces that force signs to be re-embedded in material reality.

• Radical authenticity: choosing vulnerability and complexity over hyper-edited, epileptic cuts.

The question is not “How do we win on TikTok?” The question is: how do we prevent TikTok from defining what it means to win in politics? Making meaning again means accepting, once more, to be boring, complex, and above all, real.

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Stat of the week: /2

Between 2007 and 2024, the average length of MPs’ speeches in France, measured in number of words and broken down by parliamentary group, was cut in half, according to Yann Algan (HEC–CEPREMAP), Thomas Renault (Paris 1–CEPREMAP), and Hugo Subtil (University of Zurich).

Amazing links

• Something big is happening (Matt Schumer)

• Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI Use on Children (The Alan Turing Institute)

• Corruption Tends To Be Higher Where Democracy Is Weak (statista)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

“This is a lifestyle choice.” We hear it everywhere. Faced with the vertigo of being chronically online, salvation is said to lie in going fully “offline.” A posture that has become the new luxury of elites: a way to regain aura by becoming inaccessible, by creating friction.

But taking back control of our digital lives should not be a private-club privilege. It is simpler than we think, because a clean break is an illusion: we are never entirely online or offline.

We evolve along a continuum. The challenge is not to disappear, but to understand where we stand on that line.

Neither always online nor offline: the different states we move through

To understand our “digital self,” we need to stop seeing it as an ON/OFF switch. It is a half-line: a line that begins with the first click and extends infinitely.

Past self
All the traces we leave, consciously or not, in digital environments. These archives form a residual presence of who we were: echoes that others can reactivate at any moment, allowing us to continue existing online even in our absence—especially since platforms no longer distribute content in a truly chronological way.

Waiting self
Online interactions are largely asynchronous. A comment left on a forum awaiting a possible reply, or scheduled content, are examples of a self that acts and then waits. Present, but deferred.

Hidden self
We let our self operate invisibly, sometimes without realizing it—when we walk down the street while our smartphone captures and sends data—or more consciously, when we deliberately camouflage ourselves, for instance by reading a message and quickly marking it “unread.”

Algorithmic self
Because of algofluence, part of our self is captured and handled by machines. Our profiles are suggested, our images reused, our behaviours integrated into advertising or predictive logics, often without us knowing exactly where or how.

Present self
The engaged, conscious, real-time self. It appears in synchronous collaboration, online gaming, intense messaging, live formats. A rare, demanding, and paradoxically fragile state.

We constantly move between all these states, often at the same time.

Choosing to regain control without disappearing

Regaining control does not mean withdrawing from the digital world. Being half-line is neither fleeing nor surrendering. It is refusing heroic postures as well as silent dependencies. It is reclaiming an ordinary form of sovereignty over one’s presence.

Five simple ideas to make conscious choices:

1. Do not open accounts on every “new” platform. Take time to see what actually happens there.

2. Close accounts on networks you no longer use or whose values you do not share. It is a way to slow the circulation of your self.

3. Prioritise what truly does you good and gives you real pleasure. To share children’s photos, it may be wiser to use a service like BackThen with access limited to close family rather than posting your whole life on Instagram.

4. Do a cost–benefit analysis. As the saying goes, if a platform is free, you are the product. Investing a few euros in more secure systems or networks with more credible governance can be worthwhile—like a library card or a media subscription.

5. Practise “selective visibility.” Stop turning disconnection into a militant act or a secret luxury; make it a normal habit. Say “I don’t have my phone on me” without it being a performance. By normalising these shadow zones around us, we help others allow themselves not to be “active” 24/7. This is how digital sovereignty stops being a private club and becomes a shared culture.

Not a luxury reserved for a few, but a collective skill to relearn. Everything can be learned, with time.

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Stat of the week: 1/3

In the UK, according to Ofcom’s Online Nation report, Reddit has become the fourth most visited social media platform (ahead of TikTok) largely thanks to Gen Z women, who now make up one third of its users. The reasons are multiple, according to Dazed: the need for crowdsourced information, particularly on important topics such as endometriosis, and the desire to feel heard.

Amazing links

• The Reality Filter: when Future Meet People (Curiosity Infrastructure)

• 2025: My First Year On The Internet (Mozilla)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

Discussions around AI are often caricatured. On one side, techno-solutionists who see technology as the answer to all of humanity’s challenges; on the other, absolute critics who view it as a new enemy to be fought. Yet these debates are already lagging behind. They focus on LLMs (large language models), overlooking the real revolution ahead: physical artificial intelligences.

As Yann LeCun reminds us, “Unfortunately, the real world is messy. Sensory data is high-dimensional, continuous, noisy, and generative architectures do not work with this kind of data. So the type of architecture that we use for LLMs and generative AI does not apply to the real world.”

In this forthcoming borderless universe, where AI leaves chat boxes to inhabit our physical space, it becomes urgent to find countermeasures. In her latest book (only available in French for now), develops a potentially salvific notion: selfpressionism, a delicate art that equips us against ready-made ways of thinking.

Selfpressionism: a welcome neologism for “feeling” the machine

Marie Dollé defines selfpressionism as a posture of perception and creation. It is no longer about faithfully reproducing reality, nor about pure emotional expression, but about exploring what circulates within a triangle: the self, the machine, and the invisible zones of the world. The challenge is no longer to produce, but to capture. It is an invitation to attune ourselves to weak signals, to intuition, to moments of dissonance; a kind of science of the manifestations of the living.

From this rich definition, several key lessons emerge.

A literacy of feeling
It is no longer just about knowing how to “prompt,” but about being able to almost feel the AI. Through repeated use, we develop a form of embodied knowledge of the tool, allowing us to instantly detect what is grotesque versus what is relevant.

In praise of the infra-ordinary
Selfpressionism also invites us to look more closely at our everyday navigations and uses. Marie Dollé references writer Georges Perec and his notion of the infra-ordinary: “what happens when nothing seems to happen.” Online, we tend not to pay close attention to the myriad small details, features, and links imposed by platforms. And yet we know it well: online, there is little room for idleness. Frameworks are constrained, content is published according to clear, rigid rules.

Voluntary de-optimization
This is perhaps the most subversive aspect. Where everything pushes us toward speed and measurable performance, this approach rehabilitates uncertainty, ambiguity, and floating attention. The goal is not to “use AI well” according to productivist standards, but to reclaim perceptual sovereignty.

In this sense, selfpressionism is neither an aesthetic, nor a method, nor an anti-AI manifesto. It is an ethics of navigation in technical worlds without beginnings or ends, where the true skill is no longer optimization, but knowing when to resist, slow down, deviate, and sometimes simply observe what usually remains out of frame. Skills not so far removed from those found in other living-centered domains like agriculture, for instance.

Selfpressionism for a more harmonious digital aliveness

Digital liveness - the quality of being alive within synthetic environments - transforms as AI infiltrates our perceptions, gestures, and decisions. It is measured neither in performance nor in engagement, but in the ability to remain present and affected without being absorbed.

To better inhabit it, selfpressionism proposes rebalancing the essential triptych of aliveness (yes, my obsession^^): representation and power, presence, and activities.

Representation and power
In the age of generative AI, our identities and narratives are increasingly co-produced by invisible systems. Selfpressionism invites us to reclaim agency over these mediations, to cultivate a sensitive vigilance toward what is amplified, smoothed over, or projected. Not to reject the machine, but to avoid fully delegating our gaze; especially where AI power often operates through chains of self-evidence.

Presence
Aliveness does not reside in hyperconnection, but in the quality of attention. Selfpressionism values a non-performative presence, capable of welcoming drift, withdrawal, and incompletion. Faced with interfaces designed to capture and accelerate, it proposes inhabiting the interstices: discerning when the tool extends experience, and when it dissolves it.

Activities
Finally, selfpressionism reframes action. Creating, searching, writing with AI ceases to be mere optimization and becomes a relationship. A way of working with without dissolving into automation or retreating into rejection. Aliveness then plays out through more situated, more responsible digital gestures, where humans remain engaged in what they produce.

In short, selfpressionism urges us to focus on the off-screen, on what fundamentally binds us together. It is the sine qua non condition for not becoming algorithms ourselves.

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Stat of the week: 69%

According to Similarweb, “zero-click” searches increased from 56% (May 2024) to 69% (July 2025). Zero-click searches include all queries where users do not click through to an external website, but instead find their answer directly on the page where they made the search.

Amazing links

• Welcome to Desocialized Media (The New Yorker)

• Doing for AI what we did for the Web (Mozilla)

• The Mythology Of Conscious AI (Noema)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

Posting images from 2016 is not just another viral trend steeped in algorithmic nostalgia. When Dua Lipa writes on Instagram, “these 2016 memories are making me wanna unarchive everything,” she gives words to a far deeper gesture: reclaiming control over the almanac of our lives.
This surge of personal archives is not a simple look back; it is the tangible expression of a rebellion against the temporality imposed by dominant platforms.

Reinjecting memory to challenge the algorithm

Archiving content on social networks was originally designed as a profile-optimization feature. Archiving is part of a performative logic: removing an image that no longer aligns with our current aesthetic, smoothing out a trajectory, producing a more coherent, desirable, and “readable” narrative. Our profiles become entry points to who we are supposed to be—designed to convert new followers—rather than raw repositories of lived experience. One could even speak of the influencerization of our online lives.

Among the thousands of photos stored on our phones or in the cloud, and with few exceptions, most remain abandoned. The memories periodically “returned” to us by apps are less about fostering introspection than about triggering a new cycle of sharing. Platforms thus maintain a state of perpetual present, stripped of depth.

An estimated 61,000 photos are taken every second worldwide. Yet what proportion of this overdocumentation do we ever truly revisit? We have become amnesiac collectors. Simply knowing that an image is stored somewhere relieves us of the cognitive effort required to remember it.

If archiving means removing content from the flow, then unarchiving becomes the opposite gesture: reinjecting the past into the present, disrupting a memory optimized for the algorithm, and reclaiming control over our narratives.

Unarchiving in order not to disappear

captured the contradictory forces of social media in his phrase “Everything is TV and nothing is TV”
On one hand, we consume the digital world as an infinite, ultra-personalized television (Everything is TV). On the other, we hope that AI will make the real world (healthcare, education, labor…) as cheap and optimized as the production of a flat-screen (Nothing is TV).

Caught between these two imaginaries, our digital identities are compressed into a functional present, stripped of narrative depth. This is precisely where unarchiving becomes an intimate political gesture.

Unarchiving our digital content begins with at least three tasks.

First, an introspective one: revisiting old albums, rediscovering forgotten faces, reactivating past bifurcations. The goal is less to romanticize the past than to reclaim control over our trajectories, privileging personal truths over visual perfection.

Second, a work of coherence. Like a biographer, we search for bridges and continuities. We move from the passive consumption of memories to the active narration of the self.

Finally - and above all - unarchiving is an act of resistance against the programmed obsolescence of our identities. In the attention economy, only the “now” holds value. The algorithm prefers us without a past: a blank page is easier to retarget.
By bringing our 2016 selves back to the surface with saturated filters, imperfect framing, and naïve flashes, we refuse to let our lives be sliced into disposable marketing sequences.

Reposting these archives is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an assertion that we are the sum of our stages, not a simple software update.
By unarchiving everything, we do more than fill a feed: we restore the continuity of our digital existence. We finally accept that to know where we are going, we sometimes need to leave visible traces of where we have been.

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Resource of the week: the glossary

I created a glossary based on the 144 newsletters sent since the launch of this Substack. From algofluence to paracommunities, the glossary is now available.

Amazing links

• Museum Opens Portals to the Past with Minecraft (Right Click Save)

• Fandom Psychosis: Stranger Things’ Conformity Gate (Fan Behavior)

• Mandarin Jackets are trending (Style Analytics)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

The platform Patreon has partnered with the new social network Perfectly Imperfect to release a joint list of “Rising Stars”: content creators and connected humans who are reinventing the logics of influence and community.

Running beneath this initiative is the emergence of a new kind of influencer, one who cultivates mystery rather than total transparency. To endure, it is no longer about pleasing the feed, but about distributing one’s reputation through cult-like dynamics and using gatekeeping to generate intrigue, encouraging audiences to seek out a person rather than simply follow them.

Gatekeeping as a driver of intrigue, and therefore of search

Some creators have grasped this intuitively: platforms like Meta now treat them as raw material in service of their own feeds. In December 2025, TechCrunch noted that follower counts have never mattered less; the algorithm no longer rewards profiles, but instead evaluates each piece of content across thousands of criteria before distributing it to highly specific audiences. So how can creators reclaim control over their community and generate a form of audience retention?

Part of the answer lies in a subtle objective: creating a presence mysterious enough to prompt audiences to actively search for information about you, thus becoming a desirable and meaningful figure. In its latest What’s Next report, TikTok reminds us that one in four users begins searching within 30 seconds of opening the app. You have to exist within that behaviour. Paradoxically, being “searchable” has become the most effective way to be suggested by platforms. Mystery generates a cognitive debt the user feels compelled to repay by digging deeper.

To build this mythos, some influencers are beginning to apply rules of anti-engagement on social media: erratic posting rhythms, refusal to use dominant formats, aesthetics reminiscent of the 2010s, or the deliberate absence of daily-life documentation. In short, breaking the classic rules of social media engagement.

Sotce (pronounced “sought-see”) is a fascinating example. After one of her videos went viral on TikTok in 2021, filmed from a Buddhist monastery in India, she managed to rally a community of tens of thousands of subscribers on Patreon, monetising access to a spiritual and introspective method. A cult? A simple commodification of our desire for answers? Perhaps. Still, her distinctive tone, her protection of anonymity (only her first name is known), and a narrative style close to free or automatic writing reveal something of the future of influence. By locking down her identity and creating carefully controlled access points to her universe, she generates a powerful fascination, particularly among young women. They send her thousands of secrets via DM, much as one once consulted the Pythia. Sotce reads them and uses them as fuel for her influence system, in a candid and straightforward way that ultimately surpasses the usual pseudo-authenticity.

Along the same lines, we are seeing the rise of collectives and creators who never show their faces: so-called faceless influencers. This is the paradox of visibility: the less they show, the more people zoom in on details (a pair of shoes, a book in the background). This “microscopic” attention is infinitely more intense than the “macroscopic” attention of a user scrolling through 500 videos a day.

Gatekeeping also functions as a form of defence against AI. As it becomes easier for machines to copy abstract memetic genres and exaggerate them (cottagecore comes to mind), adding barriers and chaos starts to resemble a trap for artificial intelligences, forced to give up when faced with closed doors.

Distributed influence: aura rather than engagement

The advantage of becoming an aura, of offering a worldview, is the ability to break free from the constraints of reality and counteract social media fatigue. These new influencers are not followed for what they wear or consume, but for their architectures of thought. They do not expose a daily life; they circulate a presence. While lifestyle influencers perform a desirable, immediately legible reality, these new digital philosophers offer a way of being in the world. They provide a lens through which to understand what surrounds us, and certainly do not embody someone we would want to resemble.

Around them form paracommunities, bound not by identification with a lifestyle, but by resonance with ideas and deep aspirations. Their abstract images and elliptical texts require time to interpret. What one seeks there is not inspiration, but a form of digital vivacity.

Influence thus becomes far more distributed: by subscribing to a worldview, each member can absorb it, talk about it, and actively bring it to life. Every follower becomes both sponge and actor, allowing the influence to partially free itself from platforms by existing independently of them. The influencer becomes a centre of interest, an object of exploration, while imposing their own temporality.

In 2020, Aaron Z. Lewis published an important text explaining how our relationship to time online is distorted and reinvented. Because time is fragmented, the influencer becomes a “curator of chronology.” They do not live in the present of the news cycle or the trending topic, but instead draw from the past to create an atemporal aesthetic.

In an era where everyone can be seen, measured, and analysed, influence no longer lies in exposure, but in resistance to exposure. What captures attention is no longer what is shown, but what escapes, especially in the interstices. Influence is no longer built through the accumulation of content, but through the ability to open shadow zones dense enough to be explored. To become a quest. It is no longer the algorithm that leads the dance, but absence itself. A beautiful challenge.

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Stat of the week: +40%

According to internal TikTok data, the number of searches performed on the platform has increased by 40%.

Amazing links

• I suggest meeting yourself (pretend this is a newsletter by )

• TikTok Next Trends 2026 (TikTok)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.

My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

Our computers and smartphones are the entities that look at us the most, in the most literal sense of the term. This can happen consciously, when taking a selfie, or more implicitly, during a meeting on Teams or Zoom. But as the distance between machine cameras and the intimate self continues to shrink - with smart glasses among other devices - we can speak of a deeper concept: no longer entirely a selfie, not quite fake either, the deepfie emerges.

Machine-Mirror

The traditional mirror did not remember; it was an antechamber where one could first take care of oneself, and perhaps get ready. The selfie functions of smartphone cameras overturned this paradigm: they introduced a filtered perception by default, along with the strange sensation of knowing oneself to be seen, even when alone. This, incidentally, explains the popularity of webcam covers, whether as placebo or as small acts of rebellion against our anxiety about being watched.

But now, the machine-mirror records, archives, calculates, analyzes, and influences. It is no longer about taking an image to publish it, but about capturing our intimate essences.

The machine looks before anyone else does. This is evident in the field of health, where OpenAI has just announced ChatGPT Health, responding to emerging behaviors around diagnostic selfies. The face becomes biomedical data before it is a portrait.

This is even more true when it comes to our thoughts or mental wanderings. On our iPhones, selfies form a default collection that functions like a kind of digital palm reading: memories of sad or happy days, moments when we were sick or intensely alive- unclassifiable images that nonetheless express who we are at our deepest level. The deepfie is not a dead image; it is a malleable material. Where the selfie sought immediate social validation, the deepfie seeks algorithmic persistence.

The Third Gaze

These deepfies give rise to a third gaze: abstract, yet very much alive. A gaze in vivance. That of the algorithm scrutinizing us, of the community we might one day reach if we dare to publish, of our future self, or of the machine itself as witness.

By “depositing” ourselves into the machine, we entrust AI with sorting our emotions, detecting fatigue before we are even aware of it, or generating automatic “memories.” The mirror has become an oracle, telling us our own story through our features.

The artist who explores questions of identity describes this strange presence that accompanies us with striking clarity in byline:

The images we take are above all acts of inscription, more than acts of representation. We place ourselves into the machine, hoping to find—or rediscover—ourselves there. Selfies taken via apps like Instagram or Snapchat are, in fact, less intended for public dissemination than for storage on the smartphone: only a tiny fraction will ever reach the public sphere.

Pictolects: The Pixel as Language

Kristen Joy Watts introduced the notion of pictolects in her undergraduate thesis: a hybrid compression of text and image that anticipates how we emotionally process content on social media.

In short, image pixels carry far more meaning and vitality than we assume. They are subjective witnesses of identities in the making, while also being designed to be remixable, shareable, and commentable by others. In 2024, 3.2 billion images taken on Snapchat used an artistic blur filter, a clear evidence that behind every shot lies an intention of transformation, even concealment.

At CES 2026, as Meta-Médias noted, “the augmented human looks less like a superhero than a beta version of the machine they are meant to train.”
The deepfie is precisely that: a beta-image, a sketch of the self handed over to machinic learning.

As Vogue Business recently analyzed, the logic of the outfit of the day is running out of steam. The body is no longer staged merely to be seen, but captured in order to be interpreted, indexed, and anticipated.

The shift from selfie to deepfie marks the end of the boundary between observer and observed. If the selfie was a shout on social media, the deepfie is a whisper. In this permanent face-to-face with our digital doubles, the issue is no longer just surveillance, but the persistence of our intimate self in an ocean of data.

We no longer look at ourselves in a mirror.
We look at ourselves through the eyes of an intelligence that sometimes precedes us.

As Simone Weil aptly reminded us in Gravity and Grace:
“Our real life is more than three-quarters composed of imagination and fiction.”

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Stat of the week: +175%

According to Vogue Business, the #poetcore aesthetic is surging across social media platforms, starting with Pinterest.
Analysts highlight the growing influence of womenswear on menswear, particularly in garment shapes and silhouettes.

Amazing links

• Macro Trends 2026 (What’s Anu by )

• Who decides what’s real in the age of AI? (OM)

• The Potential Paradox of the “Investment Bag” (The Fashion Law)

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

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My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.

In these times of war and brutalised exchanges, we often forget that violence does not unfold solely in the physical world.
It also takes place online. Digital signals like ironic messages, silences, comments, screenshots, can damage, weaken, sometimes even destroy individuals in their most intimate selves. They leave marks that are invisible, yet lasting.

And yet.

The internet and social networks are also capable of healing, mending, even constructing who we are. Because we are incomplete.

We Are Incomplete

We are incomplete. Incomplete in our ideas—blurred, uncertain. Incomplete in our emotions, which can take a lifetime to name. Incomplete in our narratives, fractured by contradictions and life paths.

There is a constant in online conversations: in obscure forums, in the depths of YouTube, there are often people who appear like beacons in the night. The reason these users are more active online can be explained by a certain quest for meaning. As Adrienne Massanari’s work on Reddit’s participatory culture showed in 2015, we seek in these micro-niches a validation that the physical world (too vast or too smooth) can no longer offer. Unlike Instagram, anonymity allows one to reveal their incomplete side without risking their real social image. On YouTube, searches related to “vulnerability sharing” clearly show that we are looking for reference points, or mentors who can guide us. In short, an intensive search for the self through others, a search for a digital prosthesis.

Online conversation can temporarily fill these gaps. Certainly, risks exist: manipulation, illusion, domination. But they do not cancel out everything else.

A thread quickly becomes an exchange of affects. It extends into private messages. It veers off.

Spending hours online is often an ontological investigation: searching for the word, the experience, or the diagnosis missing from our own puzzle. And often, it is the other who finds and speaks the right word, who opens a new horizon. Conversation does not make us whole. It opens up a more habitable world—like a temple, in a way.

From Performative Authenticity to Relational Authenticity

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, recently explained that the greatest risk for the platform was that authenticity might become infinitely replicable, notably under the influence of artificial intelligence, turning the prosthesis into nothing more than a wooden leg.

The reality is that this is a rather reductive view of what social networks are. It rests on a vision centred on the performing self, on the creator-king. Yet the magic of social networks operates rather in the replies between users; this is where the self unfolds and reveals its nuances. It is less scalable than a TikTok video, but it is precisely here that the web’s most precious treasure is created: the weak tie - the one that does not capture, but invites return. Not through dopamine, but through habit, recognition, and digital liveness - the quality or state of being alive online.

AI is a character, whereas a human is a person. When a human drops the mask, a teeming chaos erupts. AI, for its part, has no face beneath the mask; only calculation. Once the camera is off, there exists a myriad of micro-interactions, micro-gestures, sensitive contexts that influence one’s performance or even bring one back to their deeper self. AI cannot yet deeply live an emotion felt through a conversation between two strangers; it cannot yet play with the tempo of exchanges, or allow itself the invention of a new code without being prompted.

Prostheses in the Interstices

It is no coincidence that, in processes of individual construction, true relational prostheses always appear in the interstices. Not in the feed. But between two messages, in semi-public spaces, in places neither fully private nor fully exposed. Extimate spaces.

These intermediate zones (fourth places, forums, peripheral communities) allow what matters most: being together without having to freeze. Social networks do not heal through performance. They sometimes heal through their margins.

I love, in this regard, this paragraph from the book I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki:

Ultimately, the digital prosthesis is not meant to help us run faster than others. It is meant to help us stand upright when the weight of our incompleteness becomes too heavy. It allows us to keep desiring tteokbokki, even when everything else is collapsing.

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Stat of the week: +30 minutes

Various studies show that populations (starting with the youngest) are spending more time at home than they did during the peaks of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the United Kingdom, it amounts to as much as 30 additional minutes.

Amazing links

• We’re living through the Great Detachment (New York Times)

• Trends reports 25-26 (Wayfinder)

• Everything I Learned the Hard Way About Strategy (Thinking Out Loud - )

• The infrastructure of Belief (Probably something by )

Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.

Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.

My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.