Draining the Digital Bathwater (to Start Over with Cleaner Water)

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.

It'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.

Of 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.

But 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).

I 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).

In 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.

Let'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.