AI on Félix Tréguer

Averting the Digital Sovereignty Trap

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The following text is based on my “keynote provocation” during a panel discussion on “What Digital Sovereignty Means for Civil Society”, organized by the Swiss chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC) in Zurich on March 27th, 2026.

Today’s debate on digital sovereignty feels like an intense case of déjà vu: For the better part of the past thirty years, Europe’s key policy-makers have kept playing a familiar song to convey a sense of urgency and impose their latest stripe of industrial policy. That song goes something like this:

“Thinking About AI” (edited volume)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The edited volume Penser l’intelligence artificielle – Enjeux philosophiques, politiques et culturels de l’automatisation numérique (Thinking About Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical, Political, and Cultural Issues in Digital Automation) is out in French. It is edited by Anne Alombert, Alban Leveau-Vallier, and Baptiste Loreaux, published by Presses du réel. I had the pleasure of contributing to the book through a short chapter, alongside those of Grégory Chatonsky, Yves Citton, Judith Deschamps, Matthieu Garling, Pablo Jensen, Frédéric Kaplan, Jean Lassegue, Sofia Taipa, Pierre Cassou-Noguès and Gwenola Wagon, among others.

AI and the Lessons of Past Labor Struggles

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 13:25:04 +0000

In a new article for Le Monde diplomatique, with researchers Maud Barret Bertelloni and Pauline Gourlet, we look back at the relevance of 1970’s French trade union critiques of computerization to inform contemporary struggles against AI.

The issues were more or less the same as today (loss of skills, worker isolation, amplification of managerial surveillance, etc.), but the analysis and solutions outlined at the time were far more offensive. Food for thought for upcoming mobilizations? Here is an excerpt:

AI Action Summit: Accelerating, Whatever The Cost

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 13:05:00 +0000

This Op-Ed was first published in the newspaper La Croix.

The Paris summit on artificial intelligence (AI) organized by France was held on February 10 and 11, 2025. It will go down in history as a great moment of acceleration. While French civil society is organizing, particularly through the Hiatus coalition launched on the initiative of La Quadrature du Net, to resist the surge of artificial intelligence, Europe is engaging in a headlong rush which, in the current context, could precipitate us towards a kind of techno-fascism.

AI and Government Reform: Towards Humanless Bureaucracies?

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 08:04:00 +0000

Text originally published in French in November 2021 on AOC media.

In recent years, with extensive use of vocabulary borrowed from the “start-up” world, we have witnessed the consolidation of a new iteration of neoliberal state reform. Through concepts such as “platform state” or “state start-up”¹, new reformers have been counting on “corporate hackers” and disruptive innovation to transform public bureaucracies from within, unleash creativity, restore transparency, deploy “agile” methods, and adapt to a constantly changing environment—all at lower cost. The “digital state”—a concept praised in June 2017 by Emmanuel Macron during his famous ode to the “startup nation”—is also and above all a state undergoing automation: to accompany the objective of not replacing nearly 50,000 civil servants by 2022, the Public Action 2022 plan launched in October 2018 relied on “technologies such as artificial intelligence and RPA (’robotic process automation’),” in order to “automate repetitive and low value-added tasks”².