Dispossession of thought
Delegating to the machine what we should think ourselves is letting ourselves be thought by proxy.
There is a scene that has become banal in schools. A student receives an assignment. They open ChatGPT. They copy and paste the answer. In a few minutes, the assignment is done, or rather: produced.
Bernard Stiegler spoke of the pharmakon of tools: every tool is at once remedy and poison. Generative AI produces text, but it can short-circuit the very process that makes a text a thought: confrontation with one's own ignorance, the effort of formulation, the resistance of the material.
It is not AI that should frighten us. It is the way it can exempt us from effort. Effort is precisely what creates competence, memory and intellectual identity.
Editorial note: Nicholas Carr (2011), The Shallows, remains a reference on neural plasticity and the internet, but it predates generative AI. His observations about superficial reading have been considerably amplified by the tools of today.
"To think is to search. No longer to search is no longer to think."
In the same spirit: Dialogic Exploration · Thinking Against the Algorithm
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Fragmented digital identity
On LinkedIn one is serious, on Instagram one is beautiful, on TikTok one is funny. But who are we really?
Myriam is 34. She is the director of a small company. On LinkedIn, she publishes pieces about leadership. On Instagram, she shares her trips. In her neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, she complains about roadworks. These presences have almost nothing in common. And yet they belong to the same person.
The digital world did not invent the management of social impressions; Goffman described it in 1959. But it multiplied and accelerated it. For adolescents whose identity development is still under way, this fragmentation presents specific risks.
Oxford research (2022) showed that the intensity of identity management on social media is correlated with increased social anxiety and a reduced sense of authenticity.
Editorial note: The data of Twenge (2017), prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, underestimate the online identity transformations that have accelerated considerably since then.
"The more one manages one's presence, the less present one feels."
In the same spirit: Personal branding and loss of authenticity · Permanent social comparison
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Permanent social comparison
Self-esteem has never been built so quickly and destroyed so easily.
Mirrors have always existed. What is new is a mirror that shows only the best of others, twenty-four hours a day.
The internal study carried out by Facebook in 2021, revealed by Frances Haugen, was unambiguous: Instagram knows that appearance comparisons are particularly toxic for young girls, and that intensive use worsens body-image troubles in 32% of teenage girls who already feel bad about their bodies.
The ANSES report (2025) confirms the link between exposure to idealised visual content and body dissatisfaction. A student who understands this can begin to distance themselves from it.
"The problem is not comparing oneself. It is comparing oneself twenty-four hours a day to carefully edited and false fictions."
In the same spirit: Fragmented digital identity · Rediscovering Empathy
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Digital disinhibition
What one would never dare say face to face, the screen authorises. But the victim is very real.
In 2004, John Suler gave the phenomenon a name: the online disinhibition effect. Behind a screen, physical distance and partial anonymity create a feeling of depersonalisation that lifts the usual social inhibitions.
In Reinventing School: "The mediation of screens seems to anaesthetise natural empathy: protected by digital distance, some adolescents inflict sufferings they would never dare cause in the physical presence of their victim."
Digital disinhibition is not a problem of individual morality. It is a problem of social architecture. It calls for an education in empathy that explicitly takes technological mediation into account.
"The screen does not absolve. It makes invisible."
In the same spirit: Cyberbullying · Rediscovering Empathy
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Personal branding and loss of authenticity
When selling oneself becomes a second nature, one ends up no longer knowing what one is truly selling.
The term appeared in an article by Tom Peters in 1997: "You are the CEO of Me, Inc." Twenty-five years later, this metaphor has become a pervasive social injunction.
Personal branding is not, in itself, the problem. What raises questions is the slide that occurs when this market logic invades every space of existence, affects authenticity and increases anxiety.
For adolescents, this logic is particularly devastating. Adolescence is the time of identity construction through error and trial. An adolescent under permanent pressure to practise personal branding is no longer granted the right to public imperfection.
"Taking oneself for a brand is an error of identity."
In the same spirit: Fragmented digital identity · Dispossession of thought
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Yes-man attitude
Confirmation bias in the algorithmic age: why chatbots validate our statements rather than nuance them.
→ Read the full article on La machinerie
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The Eliza Effect
We spontaneously attribute intentions and empathy to programs. Platforms exploit that disposition at industrial scale.
→ Read the full article on La machinerie
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From Attention to Intention
The business model is no longer only to capture our attention. It is to anticipate our intentions before we formulate them.
→ Read the full article on La machinerie
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To situate the approach: A Digital Ethic.