Welcome to the first newsletter of 2025.
I am taking the occasion of the new year to send you my best wishes, along with a few thoughts on the year and the decade ahead.
At the end of every year, rather than thinking about new trends, I prefer to focus on the dynamics the media tend to ignore, and on their possible impact.
We are entering a new cycle of the Web
Since the beginnings of the commercial web, we have lived through Microsoft's attempt to monopolize the Web, followed by a brief utopian period (Web 2.0), which was replaced, with the arrival of the iPhone and the Cloud, by the monopolistic Internet of the big platforms.
Web 2.0, decentralized in the way it worked, let anyone offer services; then the big platforms started buying up those services en masse to build a monopoly on usage. That monopoly includes control of the interface (iOS, Android, Chrome, macOS, Windows), in other words what the user actually uses. With the Cloud, those same platforms shifted a large share of the value of computing into their giant data centers. By making every other industry dependent on them, most of the Western world now runs on one, if not all, of their technological building blocks.
It was this monopoly I fought against with my startup Jolicloud, but I discovered that there was a consensus in Europe to let the US players prosper, because they allowed governments, startups and large companies to have a digital strategy without having many engineers. The official term for this strategy is "digital transformation," which one might also call the googlization, amazonification or microsoftization of corporate IT.
Our political elites did not fight this state of affairs; on the contrary, they accelerated and celebrated it, because it gave them a veneer of modernity.
This is one of the reasons I stepped back from the entrepreneurial world, waiting for the next cycle in which it would be possible to build again. I had the feeling that this monopolistic Internet could never be dethroned, until the day the unthinkable happened.
Geopolitics is pulling us out of the monopolistic Internet.
The cycle of platform domination, Big Tech's cycle, could only exist in a frictionless globalized world where everyone accepts the same product. In a way, Google is no different from McDonald's. The Big Mac is the same in every country; the only difference is that in France, the potatoes are grown in Matougues, in Champagne-Ardenne.
"Google is the McDonald's of thought," Slow Web manifesto.
But fortunately for humanity, building an algorithmically standardized and falsely globalized world could not stand the test of time.
The platforms' inability to understand this had major political consequences. The Brexit and American election campaigns introduced us to the illiberal potential of social networks and their porousness to foreign interference operations.
Above all, they showed, and this should both reassure and frighten us, that the creators of these technologies, focused on monetization, had no idea how their cybernetic monsters would behave once the will for a global village no longer exists.
Has the destruction of the Internet already begun?
As early as 2020, in the middle of Covid, while Big Tech seemed untouchable and traffic was climbing, governments everywhere ordered them to silence the anti-vaxxers, a nebulous crowd that included conspiracy theorists, opponents of governments, but also foreign interference operations that seized the opportunity to sow division and anger.
Except that "fighting disinformation" is expensive, unless you agree to include tools for censoring or "moderating" political debate.
Oceane Duboust
This strategy, exposed through the Twitter Files, was a godsend for Elon Musk, who says it is what motivated him to buy Twitter.
The same strategy also pushed part of that audience toward TikTok, a network controlled by China, which found itself in the position of arbiter of taste for American health policy.
Social networks, which are hugely profitable businesses, face a dilemma: not moderating drives advertisers away, and moderating makes the opposition scream.
Reuters
But this is only the beginning:
The idea of destroying the global Internet began to germinate at the heart of Russia and China with the first acts of sabotage against the Internet's physical infrastructure, such as undersea cables, or its logical infrastructure, such as SolarWinds, which nobody in France really talked about. This two-pronged offensive is what is known, in the jargon, as hybrid warfare.
- hacking networks and infrastructure on one side
- hacking brains via social media on the other
In a way, that is what Elon Musk and his entourage are trying to do: create a new digital network impervious to the traditional players, and even to governments, namely Starlink, and impose an alternative reality with X.
In fact, Elon Musk is merely imitating the strategy of Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin's former political adviser, in staging a theatrical politics. Surkov drew on concepts from experimental theater, particularly those related to postmodernism and narrative manipulation, to influence Russian politics and maintain the Putin elite's control over society.
Because the traditional social networks no longer want to be the engine of this theatrical politics after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it matters to Musk to own his own network and to create a Splintranet, a balkanization of the networks at the very heart of the United States.
The goal of this successful offensive is to seize power over tech by convincing part of the population to change its tools and its habits.
That is what motivated me to create this newsletter. In 2020, at a conference, I predicted in a few slides that the Internet's physical infrastructure, namely the undersea cables, would become a target. At the time, my audience seemed skeptical, but a few days after the start of the war in Ukraine, I got a call from the Élysée, which wanted to use those very slides for a Defense Council meeting. There had been sabotage attempts in the North Sea.
Five years later, not only has the threat been confirmed, it has spread to power cables. Today, it is no longer just France watching over the cables, but NATO, which is patrolling the Baltic after several acts of sabotage. A worrying game of hide-and-seek between Russia's shadow fleet and NATO's, reinforced by the arrival of Sweden.
Welcome to the post-Internet era.
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