Sovereign Digital, a Micropolitical Choice

Our daily choices of digital tools lock us into a capitalist imaginary. Moving from Microsoft to Free Software is not just a technical issue: it is a political act. Why and how.

The Unconsciousness of Our Dependency

We are prisoners of a capitalist imaginary, even in the very use of our everyday tools. We use Word, Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 as if they were normal, objective, standard, and neutral tools. We write with them, create our presentations, and organize our video conferences without questioning their political nature.

What we ignore—as individual users and as collective decision-makers, municipalities, administrations, ministries, and universities organizing data management with these tools—is that our documents are subject to American law rather than French law. Since Microsoft is an American company, a U.S. court can decide to cut off our access to our own documents, whether we are an individual considered “dangerous” or an entire administration deemed to be in violation of current U.S. ethics. This possibility is a legal reality.

Upon reading these facts, the primary reaction is often incredulity. It seems completely incongruous, crazy, impossible. Precisely because we have internalized the imaginary of these tools’ “normality.” When another tool is placed in our hands—for example, LibreOffice or other free software to accomplish the same tasks—they seem bizarre, abnormal, incoherent, or poorly put together. The documents we produce may appear slightly modified to our partners who all use Microsoft tools. We are simply not in the same imaginary.

The Matrix of Proprietary Ergonomics

The interface, formats, and ergonomics of free software seem strange, even suspicious to us, marked by a perceived lack of sustainability, standards, or exchange capacity. The jargon isn’t exactly the same. The buttons aren’t in the same place. And we tell ourselves that we must be efficient, pragmatic, and follow established standards.

We can persuade ourselves that, in any case, there are industrial giants everywhere, and that the principles of free software and net neutrality remain unattainable utopias. That we shouldn’t be afraid. That we must “live with the times” and exist in a social space that simplifies our exchanges, because our goal is to produce together. This reveals that there is a hegemonic imaginary and that to function with others, one must share the same imaginary. Otherwise, we find ourselves on the margins, slowed down in our exchanges—whether oral, written, or the exchange of documents accessed via these tools. All of this is part of the construction of human interaction.

And yet, some local authorities like the city of Lyon, and certain ministries like the Ministry of Defense, are choosing to switch everything to free software. The National Gendarmerie has done the same. Conversely, other administrations like the Ministry of Culture or the city of Nantes, which were largely operated with free software for a long time, have switched back to “all-Microsoft.” Denmark has just adopted a courageous decision that has been progressively implemented since July 2025: Caroline Stage Olsen, the Danish Minister of Digitalization, announced that her ministry, gradually followed by others, will stop using Microsoft tools.

The History of a Strategy of Stranglehold

Microsoft’s history is very well documented. It reveals a strategy of forced sales, false competition, and the theft of free software that was then patented to be sold—constant attempts to establish financial power by making people prisoners of the system. Microsoft saw great success, notably at the beginning of the Web with Internet Explorer, which did not respect common standards at all but which everyone had to adapt to because it was hegemonic. They lost almost every lawsuit for the abuses perpetrated over the years.

The company then lost ground to free software. Microsoft then realized that it was the service—what we call “the cloud”—that needed to be sold, and that this was the way to make people prisoners of its imaginary in order to sell, in defiance of freedom and sovereignty. Today, Microsoft is completely tied to the stakes of the Trump government, as this type of company “turns its coat” depending on the powers in place.

As Ophélie Coelho analyzes in Géopolitique du numérique, l’impérialisme à pas de géant (2023), the network was progressively built by private rather than public actors. This evolution has profound consequences: States themselves now depend on these industrial giants to communicate with each other and construct international policy.

A Surprising Analogy with Domestic Violence

We must realize the extent to which signing with this type of actor puts us in a situation with extremely serious political consequences, of which we are unaware at the time because it seems “normal.” In the same way that beating one’s wife was considered normal and even healthy for a very long time by men and by society. Little by little, imaginaries changed. But even today, there are men who think it is perfectly normal to beat their wives or children in certain situations—that it is even a sign of natural masculine authority—believing in their imaginary that animals do the same. However, today, in the eyes of the law, a man who does this is severely punished (we hope), and the woman is supported in escaping that grip. Unfortunately, this is still far too rare, and even rarer for children.

It is exactly the same type of logic of grip, imaginary, and normality at work with digital tools. How do we get out? Because it is obviously easy to state grand principles. One can pose as a “white knight” who knows what to do. But precisely, we are in a collective, social space, with an imaginary shared with the majority of people who are “in the matrix.” They are not aware of the constructed normality of what they are experiencing. They think it is reality as it is. They do not understand that it is a construct of shared imaginaries.

Public Funding Diverted from the Commons

In my opinion, the great problem is that the collaborative development of free tools, of common goods, and of sovereignty via digital tools is currently carried out largely by individuals and associations, and far too little by collective organizations funded by public money.

Take the example of an average provincial university which, like all universities, pays a subscription to Microsoft 365 for its teaching, administrative, and technical staff. They have the impression that it is a normal, “free” tool that is common sense. No one questions this tool. Everyone organizes their meetings with Outlook and their documents with Word. A small provincial university I worked with pays Microsoft 350,000 euros per year to provide this service to its staff.

If the university had to manage its own servers, set up its own software, and have staff to take care of all that, indeed, it would very quickly cost much more than 350,000 euros. This sum seems quite low. But if this same university engaged in a collective effort to support free software associations, or distributed, collaborative, ethical, and ecological hosting solutions—if sums were allocated to the development and improvement of tools—this amount could support people very committed to free software. This community would see itself supported and encouraged. It is already alive, but it would be even more so. And the tools for the staff would be much more virtuous, sovereign, sustainable, shared, and democratic.

The Multiplier Effect of Micropolitical Choice

In a very short time, we would see wonderful tools being born—tools much better in terms of ergonomics and practice than Microsoft tools. They would work carefully on issues of interoperability—that is, fluid interconnections between different systems—so that, since the majority is obviously still on Microsoft, the transition between the two would be as fluid as possible.

I am only speaking at the level of a small provincial university. But if all the universities in France took the same approach, in less than a year we would see an unprecedented evolution of free software, a quality of ergonomics that would skyrocket, and sovereignty regained both for university staff and for everyone around them. No more money would be spent. That money would go, for the same usage, to the common good, to build digital commons. The possibility of emancipation is within reach, and the money to finance it is already there, available every year.

In the wake of this, it is obvious that many other citizens would be encouraged to use these new tools that are so practical, so much easier, so much more secure, so much more reassuring, and so much more sustainable. Caroline Stage Olsen expresses it accurately: “We will never move toward our goal if we don’t start somewhere.”

The Genealogy of the Concept of Micropolitics

This is what I call a micropolitical choice. The concept of micropolitics was developed notably by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980). For them, micropolitics is opposed to the macropolitics of large State organizations: it concerns molecular arrangements, lines of flight, and minority becomings. It involves actions that may seem marginal but which, as soon as they are carried out by a collective that receives funding and must spend that money anyway, can have an extremely large multiplier effect.

A university, a priori, does not feel empowered to change things. it tells itself it must adapt to the world as it is. I think precisely the opposite. We should look at what is happening in the Lyon metropolis, in Finland, and how these choices have effects around them. The experience of Framasoft, a French association for popular education in digital technology, illustrates this potential. In 2024, approximately 95% of their income came from donations, allowing them to continue developing alternative video-sharing tools and to support nearly 2,500 collectives in organizing outside of GAFAM. If they received public money, their impact could be multiplied exponentially.

An Ecology of Collective Action

What I want to say here is that a micropolitical act—an act that may seem marginal—once carried by a collective (and here it is not the case of an individual; the individual has a different approach), can have an extremely large multiplier effect. As shown in the dossier “From the Continent to the Archipelago: The Challenges of Popular Education in Digital Technology” (Cairn.info, 2025), it is about exploring possible paths for popular education in digital technology that combines digital ethics, inclusion, and social justice.

The development of digital sovereignty involves the creation of spaces of digital autonomy. Interoperability is not just a technical issue: it can be seen as a philosophy allowing different systems to communicate without losing their specificity. Wikipedia does not have a single style but millions of voices that converge through shared protocols—a path to explore for the public sector.

Let’s reflect: wishing that the storage of our digital data requires no effort and be entirely delegated to others reveals our acceptance of dependency. Consider the analogy with a physical library: we buy or build shelves, we install them, we carry our books in boxes, we arrange them. We concretely assume this responsibility; we live it, we see it, we implement it with effort. Why should the digital exempt us from all effort? This absence of effort signals our state of dependency: someone else assumes this effort in our place, making us dependent on their decisions, on their power over us, and on our own abdication.