Translation's note: this piece responds to the release of France's 2025 PISA results, the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, which measures 15-year-olds' performance across participating countries every three years. The French Ministry of Education's statistics office (DEPP) published its national report on the 2025 results, which is the \"rapport 2025\" referenced below.
\nIt's the usual story: the latest PISA results are out and everyone's worked up about it. Let me say upfront, I haven't gone through the 2025 report in detail, so I'm not going to hand you an armchair analysis or throw out proposals as spectacular as they are dumb. But what I'm seeing on my timeline is a lot of people getting indignant about any link drawn between \"screens,\" \"social media,\" and declining academic performance.
\nOf course the situation is complex, multi-causal, and deserves nuance. Of course schools have been under strain for years. Reforms keep piling up with no coherent vision, exhausting teachers who are underpaid and undervalued. Human and financial resources are lacking. And the \"digital revolution\" has swallowed up far too much of the Ministry of National Education's intelligence and energy, crowding out reflection on pedagogy, the very form school takes, school buildings, and education's place in society.
\nBut saying, or letting it be implied, that digital technology (meaning here the dominant social media platforms) has nothing to do with it is what I call technorassurisme: tech-reassurance-ism, the mirror image of \"moral panic,\" an equally unexamined reflex that insists technology is always fine, actually. I've been writing about this since 2024: Educating for the digital world on the ridge between \"moral panics\" and tech-reassurance-ism (article in French).
\nI think we need to recognize, especially those of us who advocate for an \"alternative,\" more ethical digital culture (what I call alternumérisme, roughly: digital-alternativism), that for most non-geeks, \"digital\" boils down to alienating, toxic platforms. That's not a value judgment, it's an observation. There was never a popular, emancipatory democratization of horizontal sharing and knowledge-based digital tools. What happened instead was the mass adoption of smartphones and a handful of social platforms, which have grown increasingly toxic through what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. And the bill is coming due, not just for young people, but for society as a whole, for the quality of our democratic debate. Let's stop defending these platforms out of fear that we'll throw out \"digital\" along with the bathwater. If you want my opinion, I think the bathwater is filthy, and maybe it's time to consider dumping it and putting in clean water instead (a metaphor I came up with on the spot, take it for what it's worth).
\nIn his book Pris dans la toile. De l'utopie d'internet au capitalisme numérique (Caught in the Web: From Internet Utopia to Digital Capitalism - in French only, no English edition at time of writing), Sébastien Broca examines the ties that have existed from the start between Big Tech and various organizations defending digital rights and civil liberties. He shows that the main digital \"alternatives\" developed in symbiosis with these companies and actually helped them grow, even as they appeared to be fighting them. In the same way, many social movements, free-software advocates, digital-rights activists, also got \"caught in Big Tech's web,\" as these companies managed to co-opt much of the discourse and many of the practices that once threatened them. Which makes sense, since these worlds overlap and share a lot of the same worldview: libertarianism, or at least a libertarian-leaning, maximalist and meritocratic view of free speech; distrust of the state more than of private companies; and a sociology that skews WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and upper-middle-class professionals. I strongly recommend reading this bracing book for anyone in our ecosystem.
\nLet's stop being Big Tech's useful idiots in defense of some fantasized version of \"digital technologies\", or \"the Internet\". Let's take stock of the actual balance of power, and let's adjust our strategies accordingly.
", "image": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/media/posts/545/ondrej-supitar-9GxwYyyfD-c-unsplash22.jpg", "author": { "name": "Louis Derrac" }, "tags": [ "digital" ], "date_published": "2026-09-09T16:51:40+02:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-09T18:27:08+02:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/surprise-and-shine-en/", "url": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/surprise-and-shine-en/", "title": "Surprise and shine", "summary": "What if I told you there was a product that would make all of your life much worse, but me a lot richer? That's roughly…", "content_html": "\n\nWhat if I told you there was a product that would make all of your life much worse, but me a lot richer?
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That's roughly how I feel watching this summer's endless string of keynotes and Google I/O style events roll by, through one heatwave after another. The Google Pixel 11 is out. The iPhone 18 is coming. So what?
\nIs this the kind of technology that's going to shrink humanity's footprint on the living world? Cut our carbon impact? Stop the paving-over of land? Reduce the space given to the private car? No, not at all. What we're being offered is a few more megapixels on the camera, a bit more AI bolted on. Which means a more powerful chip, more RAM. The denial just keeps going. For how much longer?
\nBecause here's the worst part: these devices don't even make us happier with each new release. If anything, it's getting worse. Honestly, I have zero interest left in following this kind of tech news, even though I was a techno-enthusiast from my teenage years, and an Apple fanboy from 2006 onward. Until recently I kept following it, out of curiosity, out of fascination. Now it just disgusts me.
\nOn Alternatives numériques, the french alternumériste outlet I've decided to fully relaunch this year, I want to shine a light on \"a different kind of digital.\" Not the kind that ships a new product every year to fill shareholders' pockets. A digital technology that's genuinely useful and emancipatory, one that seriously reckons with planetary limits, one that also rethinks the entrepreneurial and capitalist model (looking at you, cooperatives!). Plenty of articles are already waiting for you on the site.
\nStay tuned for what's next. And in the meantime, don't cave and buy the new iPhone or the new Pixel. Be alternuméristes: get a Fairphone running /e/OS, or a refurbished Pixel running GrapheneOS. Even better, rent one from Commown!
", "image": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/media/posts/543/e575514c8efa3487.jpeg", "author": { "name": "Louis Derrac" }, "tags": [ "digital" ], "date_published": "2026-09-09T15:54:13+02:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-09T18:27:14+02:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/technical-tools-are-neutral-take-this-knife-for-example/", "url": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/technical-tools-are-neutral-take-this-knife-for-example/", "title": ""Technical tools are neutral, take this knife for example"", "summary": "🇫🇷 French version Technologies, as such, are neutral - that is, neither good nor bad: it all depends on how we use them. Can't a…", "content_html": "\n\n\nTechnologies, as such, are neutral - that is, neither good nor bad: it all depends on how we use them. Can't a knife be used just as well to butter a slice of bread as to kill a person?
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We hear or read this sentence almost systematically whenever the impact of technologies on our lives is discussed. The underlying assumption is that it makes no sense to criticize technologies, since they would be neutral and their effects would depend exclusively on our uses and practices. For example, Facebook or TikTok are neither good nor bad; it depends on what we do with them. The same goes for generative AI systems or video surveillance systems.
\nMuch has been written on this subject, and it is sad that even today we still have to challenge this supposed \"neutrality of technology\" (which is omnipresent in debates about AI, for example). But allow me a little demonstration aimed at the general public, using the illustration below, which you are obviously free to reuse (download its editable version for Gimp).
\nDo you see where I'm going with this? Do you see the difference between these two knives? One was designed - with \"design\" in the true sense of the word - to kill, the other was not. One is pretty, colorful; the other is dark, even camouflaged. They are both knives, but conceived for two totally different practices and uses.
\nKnives, like any technical object (however simple or complex), are absolutely not neutral. They are designed with an intention, for a specific purpose, with systems of biases and beliefs. This design predisposes certain practices and uses (we then speak of affordance). Keep this in mind every time you read or hear that such an algorithm or such an AI is neutral...
\nTo go further, I'd like to share an excerpt from Damasio's recent essay, Silicon Valley, which I find both clear and powerful:
\n\n", "image": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/media/posts/541/technical-neutrality-en.png", "author": { "name": "Louis Derrac" }, "tags": [ "digital" ], "date_published": "2026-09-09T11:39:06+02:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-09T18:27:21+02:00" }, { "id": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/hello-world/", "url": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/hello-world/", "title": "Hello world", "summary": "I think I want to broaden my horizons. And to do that, I want to read more blogs in English, and write some posts in…", "content_html": "To these techno-critical approaches, Silicon Valley often opposes this cliché, which should be shot down without warning and at point-blank range. It goes like this: technology is neutral; its impact ultimately depends only on whether we make good or bad use of it.
\nThis is a short idea, and even a stupid one - quadruply stupid. It is never useless to restate why:
\n1° Because technology carries within it a latent value: efficiency. In other words: the possibility of acting strongly on our environments. Every machine predisposes the user to make efficiency the value of their action, before any choice on their part. This value has contaminated all domains to the point that a startup founder today must be high-performing in professional, economic, athletic, and even sexual spheres.
\nMore profoundly, technology is a way of revealing reality as that which must be harnessed, as Heidegger already pointed out - that is, brought to reason, mobilized, exploited, and compelled to deliver energy that can be extracted and accumulated. This, obviously, is anything but neutral. Other relationships to reality were and remain possible: the search for harmony, listening, contemplation, symbiosis...
\n2° Because upstream, technological innovation depends on Research, which itself depends on research funding or venture capital invested, and therefore already on a strong preselection of discoveries, products, and services deemed a priori \"useful\" to develop because they are profitable. The machine thus always remains \"social before being technical\" (Deleuze), meaning that within a capitalist universe, to be ultimately manufactured, it presupposes a market expectation and profitability. Millions of innovations that would improve our common condition will never cross the threshold of production. There is therefore no neutrality, even in the very possibility of existing.
\nLet's take two examples. An RFID chip predisposes, from its very conception, that we will seek to identify shoes, comfort objects, birds, lynxes, trees, motorcycles, and even our own children to ensure the traceability of these targets: nothing can exist or move anymore without being kindly tracked. \"Give me your coordinates.\" Generative AI: its technological developments will always be subject to the biases and imperatives (financial, governmental, even personal) of those who control them and profit from them, and not aligned with a search for the common good or the enlightened education of all.
\n3° Because downstream, a technology induces a multitude of effects, often difficult to anticipate: it reinvents practices and reformats behaviors, it sometimes gives birth to an entire culture (massively multiplayer games, internet dances, animatics) simply through the new interactions it offers. Using it already means transforming one's relationship to oneself and one's relations with others, creating new grips and consenting to future controls by outsourcing old capacities to the app. The digital constantly delivers unexpected options that we never imagined would enter into usage. Mobile geolocation was not originally intended, nor was the explosion of autocompleted SMS or the generalization of a social norm: being reachable at all times. Generative AI was not designed to humiliate women with elaborate pornographic deepfakes created from ordinary videos. Your emails were not meant to be read and datamined.
\n4° Finally, because every technology carries within it a new relationship to the world. We think we are using a refrigerator when it is our way of feeding ourselves that is revolutionized by the storage of fresh food. The machine situates our freedom, and our freedom is exercised facing it, within it. We are free in our uses of the machine, even free not to use it, sometimes. But this is a situated freedom, a free will exercised within a world transformed and re-potentialized by the machine, where it becomes impossible to behave as if it did not exist. The car literally \"invented\" roads, parking lots, and sidewalks; it called for oil extraction and entirely re-founded land-use planning. Social networks invented community without presence, self-exposure, the selfie, possible exclusion, harassment, and digital stoning. AI is currently inventing self-conversation and the digital twin, among hundreds of reinventions of our ways of working.
\nBy this fourfold measure, to still believe in the neutrality of the technologies offered to us is no longer even naivety. It is a political fault.
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I think I want to broaden my horizons. And to do that, I want to read more blogs in English, and write some posts in English myself.
\nSo, hello English world.
", "image": "https://blog.louisderrac.com/en/media/posts/546/alexander-shatov-DHl49oyrn7Y-unsplash1.png", "author": { "name": "Louis Derrac" }, "tags": [ "now" ], "date_published": "2026-09-08T18:37:00+02:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-09T18:41:44+02:00" } ] }