“The digital revolution has not only changed the way of producing, it has also changed our expectations”

2023-08-29 12:00:13

On March 15, 1968, in The worldPierre Viansson-Ponté summed up the general feeling: “France is bored. » If we carried out the same exercise in 2023, this time we would translate the general feeling as follows: “It is cracking everywhere. “Hospital, school, police, public services, France’s presence in the world… The list of dysfunctional institutions on the verge of collapse seems endless. Why do we have this feeling, regardless of our place on the social scale?

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Difficult to answer as the debate is trapped by two bad answers. The first is located very to the right, it is the idea of ​​“France which is falling” and which is exhibited under the renewed term of “wildness” or “decivilization”. Inscribed in the long theme of collapse, this current deploys a morbid patriotism which only enjoys the supposed collapse of this “poor France” and produced both the anti-parliamentarianism of the 1930s and the refusal of decolonization in the 1960s.

The other wrong answer comes from the left. She explains the difficulty of the present in an atavistic way by the “lack of means”… The subject is real, but this is a response to not thinking: an “automatic mode” which leaves under the carpet the inadequacy public services with people’s needs, the fragility of agents’ skills or the disorganization of institutions. Not everything can be bought, and not everything comes down to supplementary budget. It is cowardice as much as complacency.

Historical break

The question therefore remains. Is it then the fact of men and women? Probably not, even if the senior civil service is often characterized by a panic fear of looking up to understand what is at stake in our time. Also, when we do not know where we are going, we fall back on our perimeter to “do what we can”, generating expert and siled responses – that is to say, autonomous from each other. to others and blind to general functioning. The example of the strategy in the Sahel shows that the military approach, certainly irreproachable in this regard, has understood nothing of the Sahelian societies… Which makes it obsolete. Individuals did not become incompetent, but societies changed while they continued as before, pretending to innovate.

In reality, what “cracks everywhere” is an industrial approach to our systems, organized to process in silos and in large series. The industrial imagination is everywhere. At the hospital, in the emergency waiting room, patients are cared for in a chain and in a disembodied way; at school, all children of the same age are put together in the same classes, following the same lessons. In the judicial or police system, we deal in a row in a jumble of procedures.

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