🔴 Preparing for the Age of the Unthought

This sequence does not just reshuffle the deck; it introduces a complete inversion of everything our leaders have believed and said publicly since the postwar era. It reveals a cruel lack of anticipation and imagination.

Digital sovereignty by regulation that ignored strategic risks

Since Sarkozy, and especially since Macron, France has been expected to rely on the big American platforms to improve its productivity, build the digital transformation of the state and speed up the growth of startups.

On paper, this strategy had two advantages:

• It lets non-engineers sit at the center of the game. In particular, it allowed influencers or the Conseil national du numérique (the National Digital Council), or both, to "preach the gospel" of France's digital transformation alongside Big Tech.
• It makes it possible to set limits through regulation (rather than through code), allowing a full-fledged compliance industry to develop.

For Europe, the choice of digital sovereignty by regulation was made without imagining for a single second that it would only work as long as the dominant player, namely the United States, agreed to keep playing the game.

Because there are two risks:

• Using platforms you do not control raises serious questions about the extraterritorial reach of the law.
• Beyond the question of security, there is also a risk of price dependence on cloud and AI which, in the event of an unplanned increase, would hit not only our productivity hard but also our trade deficit.

We are now living through an unanticipated shift in technological geopolitics

This vision no longer holds! (continued for subscribers)