Petite Poucette 2.0

What if, far from atrophying our minds, social networks were the new printing press? A revolution of thought that the powers that be are trying to demonize for their own survival.

The digital witch trial: a sense of déjà vu

I read and hear everywhere the same virulent criticisms about social networks: we are told of frenzied scrolling that anesthetizes the will, of confrontation with a flow of information that drowns thought, of a disappearance of our capacity for attention. Our brains, we are told, have become handicapped, incapable of autonomous reflection, prisoners of an addiction to incessant stimulation. This vision, so widespread that it becomes self-evident, nevertheless rests on a bias that it never questions: the persistent myth of “things were better before.”

This discourse postulates, without ever demonstrating it, that an anterior world, less technological, would have been by nature more lenient toward the human spirit. It presents new technologies not as an evolution, but as a risk, a failure, a loss of our humanity. However, this rhetoric of fear is not new. It is word for word the one that the holders of symbolic, political and religious power brandished in the 15^th century faced with the appearance of the printing press. They too claimed that it damaged thought, that it perverted it through the uncontrollable diffusion of ideas, and that people, no longer having to exercise their memory in the same way, would let their brains atrophy.

The real anguish of the powerful of the time, however, was not the mental health of the people. What they feared above all was seeing individuals emancipate themselves from their tutelage, losing the monopoly on information that they skillfully distilled to establish their authority. The suddenly easy diffusion of diversified works left the door open to contestation, to comparison, to the emergence of “other” ideas. To preserve their power, they therefore had to demonize the tool of this emancipation, by claiming that it could only give birth to evil.

The new guardians of the temple and the factory of mistrust

The parallel with our era is striking. Today, priests and princes have been replaced by another form of magistracy: that of media intellectuals, established journalists, teachers and experts of all kinds. When they claim to do “media education,” I observe that their approach consists less in sharpening critical thinking than in discrediting on principle any speech emanating from sources not endorsed by them. It is about maintaining a hierarchy where their word, certified “professional,” would have an ontologically superior value to that of the ordinary citizen who, thanks to social networks, now has their own channel of expression and diffusion.

This panic of the elite was not born with TikTok. Already, at the end of the 90s, the emergence of blogs had sown terror in newsrooms. Journalists, seeing their monopoly on public expression crack, immediately sought to delegitimize these “non-professionals” who dared to speak without their permission. As journalist Aude Lancelin, who herself experienced the violence of this system, points out, dominant journalism often functions as the “guardian of an order it is supposed to criticize,” where the plurality of ideas is all the less tolerated as the media are concentrated in the hands of a handful of owners with convergent interests.

In his essay Propagande, la manipulation de masse dans le monde contemporain (2019), historian and researcher David Colon precisely analyzes these modern mechanisms of thought control. The most effective propaganda is not the crudest; it consists in defining the very framework of acceptable debate, in rendering dissident voices inaudible or ridiculous, not through crude censorship, but through constant work of denigration and disqualification. This is exactly what we are experiencing: we are not forbidden to speak, we are explained that our word, if it is not validated by an “expert” or a “journalist,” is worthless, even dangerous.

Propaganda is the daughter of democracy. The totalitarian experience of propaganda pushed to its paroxysm, by conferring a pejorative connotation to this word, has long masked this reality: it is in Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic that the first form of propaganda appeared – as an “organized effort to propagate a particular belief or doctrine” –, it is the French Revolution that laid the foundations of modern political propaganda, and it is the democracies at war between 1914 and 1918 that invented mass propaganda, later taken up by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

Propaganda is therefore not the prerogative of authoritarian regimes, and even less the reverse of democracy. Not only was propaganda born in democratic regimes, but it was long perceived there in a positive way. The word “propaganda” has no pejorative connotation in liberal democracies before the 1970s, when it gradually disappears from political and union organizational charts in favor of more neutral appellations, starting with “communication.”

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According to a last received idea, propaganda would primarily affect the least educated and least informed individuals, education appearing as the best rampart to oppose to propagandists. However, everything indicates on the contrary that propaganda primarily affects the most cultivated circles and those most able to access information. As Jacques Ellul writes, “it is only towards a man who is no longer totally obsessed by misery that evolved propaganda can play” and “for man to be propagandized, he must have reached a minimum of culture.” Far from protecting the masses against propaganda, the elevation of the standard of living and education and access to ever more vast information exposes them to it on the contrary. This does not mean, of course, that peasant masses are not subject to propaganda and are not sensitive to it, but they are, at first glance, less exposed to it than urban masses. It is on the latter that integration propaganda, which aims to conform attitudes and stabilize the social body, is best exercised. For, against all expectations, propaganda responds to a fundamental need: the more the educated and informed individual realizes the complexity of the world around him, the more he accesses rich and varied information, and the more he needs a simple explanatory framework. Now this is precisely what propaganda brings him: “The great strength of propaganda, writes Ellul, is precisely to give modern man these global, simple explanations, these massive and doctrinal causes without which he cannot live in the midst of information.” Propaganda brings less a doctrine than a vision of the world: it brings to the individual in the mass a reading grid of the complexity of the world, at the same time as it offers him the opportunity to come out of his solitude by joining a collective movement and, in fine, to find himself valorized by the sole fact that he understands the world around him. Ultimately, propaganda responds to a double need: that of the individual to access the understanding of issues that most often escape him or exceed him, and that of the rulers to supervise the masses. This need for propaganda grows as education and modern media progress: it is the foundation of the importance that mass manipulation assumes today in our technical societies.

Propagande, la manipulation de masse dans le monde contemporain, David Colon (2019).

The Covid affair: the democratic simulacrum laid bare

The progressive withdrawal of certain forms of censorship on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook is often presented as a victory for the extreme right and disinformation. I believe, on the contrary, that it is excellent news for democracy. The fact is that, under the previous censorship regime, entire subjects had become taboo, and any questioning of official discourse was immediately stifled. Is this democracy? Certainly not. It is a simulacrum of democracy, an empty shell that bears the name but no longer possesses the spirit.

The management of the Covid period was the most flagrant illustration of this. In Western democracies, the slightest criticism, the most minimal nuance brought to authoritarian health policies, was systematically censored on major platforms and in real life. Why? I see this as a sign of economic and political powers panicked at the idea of losing their ascendancy. Behind the grand speeches about public health were hidden, in my opinion, purely mercantile reasons, notably the necessity of maintaining an anxiety-inducing climate to justify what resembled the forced sale of a pharmaceutical product, made mandatory for all even though its benefit/risk ratio was at least questionable for a large part of the population.

The violence with which the few dissident voices were stigmatized and sometimes criminalized is moreover very revealing. If their arguments had been as devoid of value as claimed, why deploy so much energy to silence them? It is precisely because power knew that these discourses, like heretical texts at the time of the printing press, carried a subversive value and a capacity for conviction that they had to be buried at all costs under contempt, discredit and economic and social exclusion. One only attacks what one fears. This fury betrayed the fear that the truth of these alternative voices might be recognized.

The birth of augmented humans: towards a democratic singularity

Faced with this reality, I refuse to yield to the ambient discourse that depicts us as passive beings, locked in algorithmic “filter bubbles.” This vision is not only condescending, but factually false. TikTok’s algorithm, for example, is acclaimed precisely because it excels at making us discover unexpected content, at getting us out of our thematic comfort zones. It reintroduces serendipity, randomness, into our consumption of information. Let’s not take people for fools: we love diversity, and it’s precisely when discourse becomes too monolithic that we go looking elsewhere.

This is where Michel Serres’ luminous thinking in Petite Poucette (2012) takes on its full meaning. He describes a major anthropological mutation: knowledge being now externalized, available at our fingertips, our intelligence no longer has the function of storing, but of connecting, inventing, creating links. Serres writes: “She no longer needs her head to furnish it, as before, with knowledge that she finds everywhere. Her head is available for invention.” The brain, bombarded with multiple and heterogeneous information during the day, is not overloaded; it works. At night, it sorts, it organizes, it gives meaning, and weaves a vision of the world that is absolutely our own.

Here are young people to whom we claim to dispense education, within frameworks dating from an age they no longer recognize: buildings, playgrounds, classrooms, amphitheaters, campuses, libraries, laboratories, even knowledge..., frameworks dating, I say, from an age and adapted to an era when men and the world were what they are no longer.

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Above all, do not say that the student lacks the cognitive functions that allow them to assimilate knowledge thus distributed, since, precisely, these functions are transformed with the support and by it. Through writing and printing, memory, for example, mutated to the point that Montaigne wanted a well-made head rather than a well-filled head. This head has just mutated once again.

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This so decisive change in education — a change that gradually reverberates throughout the entire space of global society and all of its obsolete institutions, a change that does not touch, by far, education only, but also work, businesses, health, law and politics, in short, all of our institutions —, we feel an urgent need for it, but we are still far from it.

Probably because those who lag in the transition between the last states have not yet retired while they are directing the reforms, according to models long since erased.

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Why is Petite Poucette less and less interested in what the spokesperson says? Because, faced with the growing offer of knowledge in an immense sheet, everywhere and always accessible, a punctual and singular offer becomes derisory. The question arose cruelly when one had to move to discover rare and secret knowledge. Now accessible, it superabounds, close, including in small volumes, that Petite Poucette carries in her pocket, under the handkerchief.

Petite poucette, Michel Serres (2012).

Thus, far from standardizing us, algorithms, through their capacity to personalize content while injecting diversity into it, manufacture radically singular individuals. The neural connections we create are unique, the fruit of an informational journey that cannot be replicated in anyone else. We are witnessing the birth of new humans, endowed with minds structured differently from those of the past. It is neither better nor worse than before; it is something else. A mutation that, despite the prophets of doom and experts paid by the powers that be, is perhaps the promise of a more open, more critical and, ultimately, infinitely more democratic future.