🔴 Innovation Without Creation: The French Trap

I listened to Micode's interview with Macron and was struck by what technology is reduced to. Not only is tech as technology absent, it is simplified to prop up a form of political storytelling.

Macron explains how an AI startup gets created thanks to data scientists, without ever acknowledging that it is first and foremost the work of a developer. It is the very understanding of the act of creation that has been lost.

In the rediscovered interviews, Steve Jobs had expressed this paradox of new creation with great clarity:

"If you understand how everything is made, then you can change it."

The act of creation has always been the most important act in the freedom of a person or of a technical team. Creating requires nobody's permission, and it forces you to think from a blank page.

Imagining an architecture, features, code, design: that is where everything begins.

This dimension is now absent from the discourse on innovation. There are three possible stances toward tech: use, regulate and create. In the French approach, only the first two are put forward.

Use

The question of use is at the heart of every discussion in France, because it allows non-technical people to turn computing into storytelling.

"We must use data to create value."

This empty sentence makes it possible to project the illusion of understanding a revolution one does not master.

The technical narrative disappears in favor of a narrative of use, in which the creators and their original vision fade behind the users and the "algorithms," a catch-all word that erases those who built the logic into a product.

Even in free software, the author disappears to become part of the "Commons," an intellectual mass grave from which many draw without ever mentioning the work of those who write the programs.

Regulate

After use comes regulation. We all know the adage that Europe no longer creates, it regulates. But to regulate, you have to understand.

Rules, regulation and compliance are presented as the answer to everything. Yet they solve neither the problem of use, nor that of security, nor that of sovereignty.

In the old days, a good system administrator had a sixth sense. Today, that mission is replaced by a regulatory to-do list, with no way of knowing whether technicians have actually validated these standards.

Regulation becomes storytelling: "If you follow the cybersecurity regulations, then you are protected." "If you have a SecNumCloud certification (the security label issued by ANSSI, France's national cybersecurity agency), then you are sovereign." It is false, but in a world where following the rules matters more than common sense, many capitulate.

Create

The royal road in tech is to build products, which has become almost impossible in France. Today, people with no skills are often the ones who have to judge the creators.

To create, you now have to explain what you want to do to non-technical people, and therefore waste an enormous amount of time. On top of that, you have to pitch a clone of an American strategy or show your diplomas.

In the end, every deviation has to be justified through storytelling rather than code: "You don't have the right story? You don't get funding."

No sovereignty without builders or platforms

Builders have become invisible, confused with integrators, absorbed by layers of abstraction.

Yet there is no sovereignty without a platform.

No platform without a technical strategy.

And no technical strategy without the political will to get down into the hard stuff.

The act of technical creation is no longer part of the narrative of building our future. It is the act itself, the act of computing, of programming, of building, that is completely sidestepped.

And so it is the ability to invent the future from a blank page that is being put at risk.

The main enemy of the France of 2035 is the rationality of today's decision-makers, and the absence of alternative projects to Mistral, which today seems to be the only choice: an interesting project, but one that does not represent the only possible direction.

What future? (for subscribers)