Allen Damasio.

Madame Figaro. – Why did you choose to study Silicon Valley? ?
Allen Damasio. – Silicon Valley presents itself and feels itself, with a certain confidence, as the center of the world. We must realize that with the ubiquity of smartphones, tablets and laptops, platforms, services and applications created by Gafam, we are actually living in Silicon Valley, living under its empire and its logic. Going there for me was a little like approaching the epicenter, trying to feel what was coming, to understand a little better this world that they are creating for us, which is already perceptible on the ground; everything is born and developed in San Francisco Bay.

Our time lacks the “art of living with technology”, you say…
Education, as is often the case, is the key and the royal road, in my opinion, to learning to be liberated by technology while avoiding the alienation, tool-dependence, and even self-dependence that digital has brought about. . Let’s never forget that this addiction to platforms was deliberately built by Gafam to maximize our time there, and therefore their profits. Armies of behaviorists, psychologists, sociologists, and behaviorists were mobilized for this, and they collaborated with designers to optimize fidelity. For my part, I believe that, alongside French and mathematics, digital education, like civic education, should be a central subject in national education today.

Digital education, like civic education, should be a central subject of National Education today.

Allen Damasio

This new theme will teach our children to understand, code, use and disrupt the digital tools that are offered to us in an avalanche: countless apps, search engines, AI, video games, social networks, creative programs and more. Teach them to be free and active in front of them. To increase their personal and collective power to think, to create, to memorize, to open up. So learn to organize this very dense technosphere around them, regaining control over these digital technologies, and sometimes building their own relationships with the world and others beyond or beyond the digital, knowing how to disengage and let go of tricky and alienating tools. The art of living is here. A video game, for example, can open up a wonderful imagination just as it can lock the player into harmfully addictive loops. A GPS app can destroy our spatial and orientation capabilities if we simply hand that power over to the car.

Compared to the generative AI that will become dominant in our daily lives, learning to live with it will be important and will require relative intelligence (it’s paradoxical), and there also the art of creating, living, dialoging, which is not given all at once. , which should be learned. And not only in the classroom. parents will have their part to play, and so will friendships, associations, popular education, etc., among themselves. Interdisciplinary, not just vertical. AI doesn’t have to become our master at writing, drawing or thinking. Rather than treating it as our slave, it will help us reap the enormous benefits it can bring to our freedoms. Our creations have become our creatures. They respond to us, they teach us a lot and very quickly, and they learn from us. This is very new in human history. We created plasma golems.

What is the role of writers in this world? ?
It is our role to think about this world through our art and experience it in its future, its secret quests, its crazy tendencies through the connected characters and ways of perception that open their gaze. The science fiction writer exists to make reality possible. To remind that this society, which is sold to us as invincible, as a natural destiny, can be completely different. An SF novel has the power to bring to life what can only be a conjecture and affect every reader, every reader’s planet, through this kind of meteor shower that is the emotions, sensations, feelings, and thoughts of the characters. Narration functions as a rhythm, an architecture of intensities that ends up forming a memory in the best novels.