Digital Sabotage

We are not the junkies of digital platforms. We are their drug. The algorithm craves order. Let’s give it chaos.

Tuesday night on Earth. Feeling the urge to hack everything before the summer truce begins. Feel free to share and recommend.

Who are the real junkies: users or platforms?

The literature is obsessed with FOMO - fear of missing out - as if users were unable to function without platforms. But the truth is quite different: it’s Meta, TikTok, Amazon and the rest who need us. Our data, our time, our seconds spent on their apps.

It’s time to sabotage them, to reclaim control over our digital liveness: the quality or state of being alive. And to do everything we’re told not to do.

Unpredictability as a weapon

Fashion designer and artist Amélie Pichard has flipped the finger to digital strategy gurus. Her e-shop is closed 300 days a year. Her posting rhythm is erratic, mostly shaped by deep conversations she has with podcasters, far from the noisy spectacle of social media.

“The brand is an ever-shifting presence, impossible to grasp and always unexpected. Personally, I no longer want to be confined to a box.” — Amélie Pichard

Source: Amélie Pichard’s website

And it works. A reminder that communities do know how to detect what holds real value. They’ve learned to read through algorithmic noise and to search for what truly resonates with them.

In short: sabotage the old motto “one for me, one for the Gram” and return to what matters. Post less. Post better. Be available only when you feel like it — not to perform, but to reconnect with yourself more honestly.

Sabotaging control over our memories

Like all major generative AI players, OpenAI positions itself as an absolute hypomnemata. It means becoming an external support for memory that extends our minds. It gradually absorbs all forms of self-documentation, inserting itself as a tollbooth between our private reflections and their expression within collective memory.

So the question arises: how much control are we willing to give up, as our drafts, doubts, and personal archives slowly slip out of our hands?

Protein recently published a simple diagram showing where our memories are stored, shared, and reshaped. With social platforms and conversational agents, we increasingly delegate our private memory work to intermediaries.

Source: Protein

The result is a subtle shift: the eerie feeling of experiencing memories that are no longer truly our own.
Prosthetic memories that feed not our lives, but our paracommunities.

Coordinated false behaviors

Another path of sabotage: subverting engagement mechanics.

Start by disengaging. Platforms rely on increasingly sophisticated AI layers. They study our habits, impulses, vulnerabilities. They model our desires to monetize them. But that modeling can be sabotaged from within.

Watch videos unrelated to your interests. Scroll without liking. React at random. Generate statistical noise. Create weak and contradictory signals.
In short, feed the algorithm a stream of contaminated data.

But false behaviors can also be coordinated.

Groups can deliberately push absurd content. Like the same meaningless post. Flood comments with emptiness. Boost a ridiculous meme. Repeat the same emoji across a thousand stories.
A form of engagement with no purpose. A mobilization with nothing to sell.
It’s not spam, it’s friction. Sand in the gears.

Ultimately, it’s about reversing the engagement-farm logic that poisons our democracies. By embracing the absurd.

Sabotage isn’t destruction

To sabotage is not to destroy. It’s not about disappearing, fleeing, or deleting your accounts. It’s about planting doubt inside the machine. Injecting slowness, absurdity, and strangeness into a system obsessed with optimization.

It’s about refusing total transparency, endless engagement, and affective productivity.
It’s about reclaiming your gestures, your posts, your silences.

It’s not an act of desertion but of reinvention. A way to say: I’m here, but on my own terms.

So, who’s the dealer, and who’s the junkie?
Let’s be clear: we’re not addicted. We are the substance.

Signal of the week: Courrèges

After the Getty aesthetic trend, it seems that Parisian street mirrors are now inspiring fashion. Courrèges asked 18 friends of the brand to take their own mirror selfies — as if street reflections were the new runway.

As if social media themselves had become sources of vintage inspiration.
This campaign feels like a 2009 throwback. Think Burberry’s Art of the Trench.

Friendster or Hi5 next?

Amazing links

• An obituary for reading the Internet (Culture Study)

• Faut-il nous exorciser de la technologie ? (ARTE)

Happy summer! This newsletter will (most likely) be back at the end of August.

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