Posts on Nicolas Kayser-Bril

We toyed with old laptops and inadvertently destroyed any hope of privacy

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the 2026 DataHarvest conference, my friend Pierre and I ran what we imagined to be a playful session called FunForensics. A few weeks before, we bought four laptops costing exactly 30 euros on second-hand marketplaces in Germany, France, Spain and Poland. We presented the computers, still in their shipping boxes, to the session’s participants, about fifteen journalists of all ages with no specific skills in digital forensics. They had 50 minutes to recover as much information as information as possible from the machines. We had a stringent code of conduct stating that absolutely no private information was to leave the room.

Quatre privilèges et un enterrement: Naissance d’une nouvelle société

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

À bien des égards, nous autres Européen·nes vivons la fin d’une ère.

La fin de l’après-guerre, c’est évident. L’ordre géopolitique établi en 1945 a cédé par étapes depuis la disparition de l’Union Soviétique en 1991, mais la crise groenlandaise de 2026, lors de laquelle des troupes européennes de l’OTAN ont du se poser la question « faudra-t-il tirer sur des soldats étasuniens ? » en marque la fin.

La fin du programme des Lumières, qui voulaient organiser le politique par le débat et la réflexion, c’est très probable. Après tout, l’élection d’un tyran comme Trump, « la corruption qui saisit les organes de l’État », pour reprendre les mots de Jefferson en 1785, est précisément ce que les institutions des États-Unis devaient rendre impossible.

Why that poor woman fed stray dogs

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the winter of 2008, I was in Sofia, Bulgaria. One early morning, under the arcades of a Stalin-era building, I saw an old, poor woman feeding canned pet food to stray dogs. I was troubled.

Troubled because stray dogs in Sofia in the 2000s were nothing like pets. They were aggressive, loud, and dangerous. Why would someone actively support them? And why would she spend a non-negligible amount of money to do so?

The conditions of professional curiosity

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1970, the jury of the Pulizer Prize gave the award for international reporting to US journalist Seymour Hersh, who was 33. The year before, he revealed that the US Army had massacred dozens of Vietnamese men, women and children at My Lai.

Ten years later, another young journalist, Robert Ménard (27) launched a free weekly in Bézier, a city of 75,000 at the time. In it, he bitterly covered municipal affairs, among other issues.¹

Schmerzloser Genderaustritt

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Im Januar habe ich mich entschieden, was gegen den Genderwahn zu tun. Man muss die Wut der Sternchengegener*innen ernst nehmen, dachte ich. Die Lage benötige konkrete Lösungen. Ich würde aus meinem Gender austreten. Kein Gender, keine Probleme.

Dank dem Selbstbestimmungsgesetz war es die einfachste bürokratische Erfahrung ever. Einfach das Formular drucken, „Streichung der Geschlechtseingabe“ ankreuzen, abschicken. Dann passiert etwas merkwürdiges: die Berliner Behörde haben mich angerufen, um einen Termin vorzuschlagen. Keine Online-Klickerei um einen Termin in 32 Minuten am anderen Ende der Stadt zu bekommen, nein, sie rufen an. Nur dafür lohnt es sich.

How the war in Ukraine might change the state

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Vladimir Putin repeatedly mentioned that the Ukrainian state should not exist. In his February 21, 2022, address, he explained that Ukraine had no stable statehood, that it stood on shaky foundations and that Russia had built it anyway, and was entitled to taking it all back.¹ The destruction of the Ukrainian state is a long-standing goal for Putin, in part because its very existence demonstrates to Russians that a post-Soviet state need not be a totalitarian dictatorship.

La pâtisserie française est la meilleure du monde!

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai écrit cet article pour le n°56 de Papilles, la revue de l’Association des Bibliothèques Gourmandes.

Il y a une quinzaine d’années, j’ai déménagé à Berlin. Dans les boulangeries de mon nouveau pays, on trouve quantités de pains délicieux, mais au rayon viennoiseries et pâtisseries, les choses se gâtent. On a bien des croissants (prononcés « crôsson ») et des gâteaux, mais on est loin, très loin, des opéras, religieuses et Paris-Brest des boulangeries-pâtisseries françaises.

The colonial roots of French fries

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the second quarter of the 19^th century, as the trade in men and women was waning, European merchants started trading in groundnuts off the coast of West Africa.¹ In the decades that followed, trade boomed in Marseilles, Liverpool and Hamburg for dried coconuts from Pacific islands, for palm kernels from the Dutch East Indies (current Indonesia), British Nigeria or the Belgian Congo, for cottonseed from Texas or from sesame from British India. All of these commodities were crushed and refined into one final product: fat.

Berlin, douze ans après

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pour fêter les dix ans de mon émigration à Berlin, j’ai voulu lister tout ce que la ville avait d’avant-gardiste et d’unique. Ça n’a pas été facile et il m’a fallu deux ans pour trouver le premier item. Mais j’y suis arrivé.

Tout commence en 1990, avec la fin de la guerre froide. Berlin-Ouest apporta à la ville réunifiée ses lois, son système économique, son personnel administratif, sa police et ses chaînes de télé. Berlin-Est apporta Ampelmann, le bonhomme au chapeau que l’on voit sur les feux de circulation. Ça peut paraître peu, mais les Berlinois·es allant à pied poireautent devant plusieurs minutes par jour alors qu’iels ne lisent la constitution de la République Fédérale qu’exceptionnellement.

L'automobile, stade suprême du patriarcat

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Quand je vais faire les courses au Lidl de mon quartier, je suis toujours surpris de voir le nombre de voitures sur le parking. Déplacer 1 500 kilos de ferraille pour transporter un humain de 70 kilos et ses 10 kilos de courses, il faut avouer que c’est complètement con.

Je précise au passage que j’habite en ville et qu’on trouve un Lidl à moins d’un kilomètre dans toutes les directions. Pour transporter 80 kilos sur quelques centaines de mètres, la solution la plus efficace reste, après ses pieds ou son vélo, le tricycle électrique. Pas la Tesla modèle X.

Il est temps d'éteindre les Lumières

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

En juillet dernier, deux milliardaires, l’un britannique, l’autre américain, mirent en scène leur départ dans l’espace à bord de leurs fusées privées (un troisième, sud-africain, nourrit un projet similaire). D’un commun accord, ces trois larrons ont décidé d’aggraver la crise climatique pour leur amusement et leur profit¹.

Certes, tout le monde ne s’esbaudit pas devant leurs vaisseaux. Reste que la couverture médiatique de ces délires spatiaux est restée très positive, et – à ma connaissance – aucune manifestation n’a été organisée pour exiger le démantèlement de ces programmes. On pourrait pourtant, vu les sommes en jeu, financer à la place la vaccination de tous les humains contre le Covid². L’indignation reste faible, comparée par exemple à celle suscitée par la photo d’une tortue avec une paille en plastique dans le nez.

Dans le passé jusqu’au cou

Fri, 21 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

2001. J’y ai repensé hier en écoutant Le vent nous portera, de Bertrand Cantat et Noir Désir. Le single est sorti il y a presque vingt ans, jour pour jour. Vingt ans, c’est l’écart entre 1929 et 1949, entre les années folles et le rideau de fer. C’est l’écart entre 1968 et 1988, entre la révolution sexuelle et la révolution conservatrice. Entre 2001 et 2021, rien de tel.

Bien sûr, il s’en est passé, des choses. 12 millions de Français·es sont mort·es, 16 millions sont né·es. Mais les idées n’ont pas changé. Le Pen est toujours au centre de la vie politique. Le débat public reste obsédé par l’insécurité, surtout ressentie par ceux et celles qui ne la subisse pas. La plupart des intellectuel·les refusent toujours d’admettre que ce thème n’est qu’un appeau à haine, un code qui désigne les Noir·es et les musulman·es comme coupables, de tout. (Dans le même temps, les intellectuel·les étasunien-nes ont développé le concept de dog-whistle pour appréhender ce genre de discours).

Money does not buy status. It's the other way around.

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this essay, I argue that money does not command social status, but that social status brings with it monetary rewards. This could have profound implications for any policy geared towards social justice.

Consider these two situations:

A middle-class person finds a 12-kilo gold bar in her attic. Although it would fetch over 600,000€ on the gold market, there is no way our middle-class person could obtain that much in cash for her discovery. Converting the gold requires access to a buyer, who could easily steal the bar. If an exchange takes place, she would still have to justify the source of the funds to her bank, which might lead to an investigation. She could keep the money in cash, but this would raise security issues.
Conversely, a very rich person who finds a 12-kilo gold bar in an attic would have no problem activating her network to find the goldsmith and tradespersons needed to convert the metal in cash. In other words, a conventional unit of value (gold) is not worth the same amount depending on the social status of the person who has it.
This probably holds true at different locations on the social scale. A middle-class individual would have no problem changing a 500-euro bill for smaller banknotes. The same might not be true for, say, an 18-year-old Person of Color living in a hostile neighborhood.¹
An ambitious entrepreneur with very little capital manages to sneak his way in national politics and ends up sitting on a top-level committee. Using a photo that shows him shaking hands with the country’s president, he asks the bank for a large loan, although the financial situation of his business does not warrant it at all.
This is the true story of a former boss of mine, who built a news start-up from nothing and mingled in France’s highest spheres (for a short while only ; his luck ran out after a few months). It shows that even without money, a man can pretend to be at a certain position on the social scale and leverage it to obtain money. (Gender is important, I’ll come back to that later.)

These two situations show that common units of value (banknotes, gold) are not worth the same depending on an individual’s social status. Conversely, an individual who can convince others that he has a very high social status can access money easily. Therefore, money does not provide status. The opposite is true: Status provides money, and money is just a reflection of status.

Capital, idéologie et matraque

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dans Capital et Idéologie, Thomas Piketty raconte comment diverses sociétés ont géré les inégalités, depuis le 17^e siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. (Si vous ne l’avez pas encore lu, je vous conseille plutôt Prospérité, puissance et pauvreté : Pourquoi certains pays réussissent mieux que d’autres de Daron Acemoğlu et James A. Robinson. Vous aurez les mêmes arguments dans un livre plus court et mieux écrit.)

Piketty, Acemoğlu et Robinson expliquent bien comment les inégalités structurent les sociétés. Ils expliquent comment elles se perpétuent et détaillent par le menu les systèmes éducatifs et fiscaux qui permettent aux riches de payer relativement peu d’impôts et de transmettre leur patrimoine à leurs enfants. L’une des conclusions principales qu’ils tirent de leurs travaux, c’est que les inégalités sont des constructions sociales et qu’elles peuvent être rabotées par l’action politique.

Why Millenials binge on mafia series while Boomers watch law-and-order shows

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Turn on the TV anywhere and chances are you’ll be served a law-and-order drama. Data is scarce about what’s exactly aired, but a review of one German TV channel in 2015 showed that over one-third of the prime time slots were filled with crime shows.¹ CSI and NCIS are worldwide phenomena, while Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 regularly top audience ratings in Germany.

Conversely, one would be hard put finding a law-and-order series on Netflix. The online streaming service, which invests over $10 billion a year in new content, has yet to produce a traditional police drama. On the contrary, Netflix shows tend to feature villains in the main cast. House of Cards, the story of a corrupt US president, Narcos, about drug dealers, Breaking Bad, about another drug dealer, are just a few examples of mafia shows.²

The Thunbergist entrepreneur

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This essay was written for a presentation at SenseCamp in Berlin, delivered on November 16.

Like many of you, I went to university and, like many of you, I chose to study business administration. In my economics classes, I learned, as you probably did, that individual preferences could organize themselves on imaginary or, for fruits and vegetables, physical markets. I even had a class in economics of the environment where I learned that solving environmental disasters was not only possible but straightforward: Natural resources just had to be used in such a way that preservation of the environment would be more valuable to consumers than its destruction, for example by creating nature preserves and bringing in tourists.

Thunbergism is a thing

Sat, 31 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The message and behavior of Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swede that started the Friday school strikes for climate, is such that it is becoming the foundation of an ideology - which I call Thunbergism. I think it is the most positive political development of the last decade. In 2016, I wrote that I took note of the death of Humanism and that I was waiting for a new ideology. This time might have come.

12 German things that have nothing to do with Germanness

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose-free organization

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

An organization’s main purpose is to give its members a certain social status. Whether employees do productive work or bullshit jobs makes no difference in the life of the organization.¹ Other theories, which state that organizations exist to achieve a specific goal, fail to explain how so many of them can still smoothly obtain resources and pay salaries while being totally dysfunctional (the kind of organizations whose own employees tell you “I don’t understand how it can still run!”).²

Cancer Risks

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The emergence of the mafia state

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Institutional collapse, by removing the foundations supporting the rule of law such as an efficient judiciary, opens the way for a new organization of power. By necessity, this power must revolve around personal bonds (when no judiciary can enforce a contract, personal trust is all that remains). Some see in these new relationships a rebirth of feudalism. The analogy is mistaken. We are witnessing the emergence of the mafia state. Several European countries already fit the definition; others might follow.

License to Kill

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cars, speed and cigarettes

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

À Bicyclette

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Un jour je vis Mandy, Trente neuf ans à peine Étalée sur l’asphalte. Le chauffeur, lui, indemne, Parlait aux policiers. Sans doute expliquait-il Qu’elle n’avait pas freiné.¹

Fit-il de la prison Pour cet assassinat? Non car chez nous la mort Automobile n’est pas Autre chose qu’un sport Qu’encourage la loi.

Ils rôdent dans la ville Dans leurs engins de mort Sur la route prêts à Me passer sur le corps.

Foucault au pays des données

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Depuis une dizaine d’années que j’officie comme “datajournaliste”, j’ai donné une centaine de formations à des étudiants, des journalistes et des communicants dans plusieurs pays d’Europe et même un peu au-delà. Même si mon programme se passe en général très bien, les participants achoppent toujours sur le même point, la compréhension des sondages. En réfléchissant à ce qui les empêchait de comprendre ce point particulier et avec l’aide de Michel (Foucault), j’ai déroulé un pelote qui se termine sur l’opposition frontale entre deux manières de travailler avec les données et qui explique beaucoup plus de choses que mon simple problème de formateur.

Pourquoi les femmes sont-elles plus petites que les hommes?

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Dans un documentaire diffusé sur Arte l’année dernière (et disponible sur YouTube), la réalisatrice Véronique Kleiner posait la question Pourquoi les femmes sont-elles plus petites que les hommes? et y répondait en brisant les idées reçues les unes après les autres. Elle a pourtant laissé une question grande ouverte, à laquelle je propose un début de réponse.

Les hommes ne sont pas des canards ou des paons

L’idée la plus répandue pour expliquer le dimorphisme sexuel chez les humains (le fait que les hommes soient plus grands et plus forts, principalement) vient d’une analogie avec certains animaux qui nous entourent, comme les canards ou les paons. Chez eux, les mâles les plus colorés attirent l’attention des femelles et, partant, ont plus de chances de se reproduire et de transmettre leurs gènes. L’évolution fait le reste et les individus moins exubérants, donc moins à-même de féconder et de s’assurer une descendance, s’éteignent peu à peu.

Europe's most dangerous city for cyclists

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Pourquoi j'ai écrit « Bouffes Bluffantes »

Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Après avoir fermé Journalism++, l’agence de journalisme de données que j’ai dirigée pendant six ans (j’en parle ici), j’ai voulu me lancer dans la restauration. J’ai demandé à mon ami Paul Boudier, cuisinier de grand talent, de me prendre en stage dans le restaurant dont il s’occuppait l’été dernier, un petit catoio (une salle creusée dans la roche) perché sur une colline calabraise, au sud de l’Italie. Après quelques semaines à transpirer à grosses gouttes en faisant des pâtes, des caponata et des trouchia¹, ma reconversion s’annonçait difficile.

Froschfresser!

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Vor einer Woche war ich mit - teilweise französischen - Freunden auf dem Rad unterwegs. Plötzlich kam mir ein anderer Radfahrer entgegen, der auf dem Gehweg und in der Falsche Richtung fuhr. Anstatt zu bremsen (oder noch besser: zu dem richtigen Radweg, gegenüber, zu wechseln), schlug er mich ziemlich hart an die Schulter und fuhr weiter. Ich schimpfte laut. Der Typ drehte sich um und fuhr langsam zurück zu uns.

Online, everyone's a media - Online journalism 3/3

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third of three introductory lectures in online journalism I gave at the Akademie Mode & Design in Berlin. Part 1 was The media and the internet: The history of a failure and part 2 was From digital sweatshops to the integrated newsroom.

On July 20, 2012, a man open fire at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In the hours following the shooting, an 18-year-old living nearby gathered all the information available on the massacre and posted it on Reddit, a social network. With the help of other users, he was able to provide the best, most up-to-date summary of events (he also uncovered information the police hadn’t).¹ When asked why he did it, he simply said that “[he felt] like [he was] helping out people who needed to know this stuff."²

From digital sweatshops to the integrated newsroom - Online journalism 2/3

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second of three introductory lectures in online journalism I gave at the Akademie Mode & Design in Berlin. Part 1 was The media and the internet: The history of a failure.

Thanks to the internet, journalism has entered a golden age, some say. Pundits highlighted how smartphones allowed readers to consume quality content on the go,¹ how people had access to more content than ever² and how new technologies allowed for new forms of storytelling.³ These novelties were supposed to let journalism bloom again.

The media and the internet: The history of a failure - Online journalism 1/3

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first of three introductory lectures in online journalism I gave at the Akademie Mode & Design in Berlin. It is a loose translation of a previous essay of mine, Comment une industrie a raté le virage des données et du numérique.

In January 1996, Mark Zuckerberg was 11, Google did not exist and the New York Times launched its website. Almost all major newspapers went online in the second half of the 1990s, years before most of the internet giants were even created.¹

Denial

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Tell a thirty-something male who thinks of himself as a nice guy that, simply by being a male, he contributes to the perpetuation of male hegemony ; you’ll be answered with bewilderment and a vehement denial.

Tell a Green-leaning, nature-loving forty-something who flies regularly to a ski or hiking weekend that she’s among the worst polluters on earth ; you’ll be answered with a guilty shrug.

Tell a Labour-voting sixty-something who was born in the middle class and who acquired a nice loft in a not-yet gentrified neighborhood of London thirty years ago that she is now among the top 1% wealthiest Britons and that when the Tories push tax cuts, they do it for her, too ; you’ll be answered with a confused look, probably followed by a tirade against the rich.¹

Facing evil

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine, Felicity Baker,¹ recently asked me what happened since Trump took office. I mentioned the 200,000 Salvadoreans who lost their right to stay in the United States and now face exile or deportation.² I mentioned the free rein given to other dictators, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who can now keep his campaign of murders going (12,000 kills and counting³). But these events, tragic as they may be, still fall far short of the expected mayhem.

Everything we know about price formation is wrong

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to see that large chunks of economic theory have little to do with reality. However, alternative narratives that could explain price formation are few and far between. I took a shot at one - and already apologize for the preposterous title.

I’m no economist, but…

Much of economics revolves around the idea of markets. Markets are physical or imagined places where buyers and sellers meet. Buyers have preferences and sellers have cost structures ; when a buyer is ready to pay for a good at a price that ensures the seller a profit, the deal is done and the market price is defined.

Global data sources

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the last lecture, I gave you an overview of data sources in Europe, from official portals such as Eurostat or DeStatis in Germany to the industry-specific resources and the open data movement. Most of these trends exist the world over. Today, I will focus on a series of online resources for data-driven journalists, starting by the ones we use most. I will then address single-purpose data collection projects, usually ran by scientists, and finish with databases created by journalists themselves, from the ground up.

European and German data sources

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I gave this lecture to a group of mostly non-European journalists new to data-driven reporting in late 2017.

European administrations, and Germany’s in particular, measure many things. After all, the very word statistic comes from German, where it means “the science of the state” (Staatistik). Across Europe, hundred of statistical agencies compile thousands of measurements, from soil pollution to happiness levels. Learning to navigate this maze is worth it. Many story leads sleep in these data sets, and many other can provide useful context for current or past news items.

La voie de Moscou

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On vit parfois des scènes banales qui provoquent pourtant des déclics profonds. La scène se passe en avril 2015. Elle n’a pas tout a fait changé ma vie, mais elle a fait basculer ma vision de la politique.

J’avais été invité par une amie, une jeune journaliste russe, à une conférence de sciences sociales à Moscou. Après avoir donné notre présentation, elle me proposa d’aller prendre un pot avec quelques unes de ses connaissances dans un bar de Kitaï-gorod, en plein centre ville. Autour de la table, ces journalistes et activistes discutaient de leurs projets - en anglais, par politesse envers moi. Ils parlaient de leurs campagnes en cours, pour le droit des handicapés ou pour la transparence de la vie publique, de leurs contacts avec les députés Untels et Untels, de leurs actions sur les réseaux sociaux pour mobiliser tel groupe dans tel objectif.

Comment une industrie a raté le virage des données et du numérique

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Mai 1995 fut riche en évènements. Jacques Chirac a été élu président le 7 du mois, Mark Zuckerberg a fêté son 11^e anniversaire le 14 et Libération a ouvert son site internet le 26.¹ La plupart des grands noms de la presse quotidienne l’ont rejoint sur le web dans les mois qui suivirent, suivis quelques années plus tard par les radios et les télévisions.

1995, c’est trois ans avant la création de Google, six ans avant Wikipedia, dix ans avant YouTube et Facebook, sans parler d’Instagram ou de Snapchat. Vingt ans plus tard ces médias, arrivés si tôt en ligne, sont devenus les prestataires de ces géants du web,² quand les milliardaires des nouvelles technologies ne les ont pas tout simplement racheté à la manière de Niel (Le Monde) ou Bezos (Washington Post).

Retour à Quick

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

En 1844, Heinrich Heine, en exil depuis treize ans à Paris, voyage en Allemagne pour aller rendre visite à son éditeur. Il en tire une épopée, Allemagne. Un conte d’hiver

En la lisant dans le train qui faisait le trajet en sens inverse, j’ai voulu faire comme lui. C’est sans doute raté, mais j’ai bien rigolé.

A la gare de l’est, terminus de ce train,
Je descends de voiture et les distingue au loin.
Ils marchent lentement, le regard aux aguets
Trois militaires vigipiratent le quai.

The roots of fake news

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It starts with a tale

In the early 1990s, as universities learned of the invention of the Web at CERN by Tim Berner’s Lee, quite a few researchers started to grasp the potential of the new technology. Communicating instantly by e-mail, a novelty at the time, groups of academics began to exchange articles. Soon, they published them on their “homepages” for every internet user to read. Bolstered by the seamlessness of the process, they went to the next logical step and stopped publishing in paper journals edited by for-profit corporations. Instead, they created new venues for peer-reviewed articles, completely bypassing the gatekeepers of academic publishing.

Le journalisme et la post-vérité

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cet essai est une adaptation de la conférence que j’ai donné à Athènes en septembre 2016 intitulée Datajournalism in the post-truth public sphere et d’une présentation donnée le 28 septembre 2017 aux étudiants de l’Ecole Française de Journalisme.

Les “fausses nouvelles”, les fake news, désignaient au départ les informations des sites satiriques, au premier rang desquels on trouve The Onion, le précurseur et ancêtre du Gorafi, ou les émissions de télévision qui imitent le style des infos pour faire de l’humour, comme The Daily Show.¹ Le problème est arrivé en 2016, quand certains producteurs de fausses infos ont arrêté de se revendiquer parodiques et que le partage de leurs articles est devenu massif. Le sujet est devenu brûlant le lendemain de l’élection américaine du 8 novembre 2016, quand Trump a affirmé avoir obtenu plus de suffrages que Clinton malgré les preuves du contraire puis, en janvier 2017, lorsqu’il affirme que CNN produit des fausses nouvelles.²

Transparency does not beget trust - quite the opposite

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

“Nothing builds confidence like transparency and open government.”

“The only way to build trust between citizens and government is to boldly improve accountability and transparency.”

“Trust can only be earned by public institutions if they commit to transparency.”

These sentences are from a report called “Trust: The Fight to Win It Back” by the Open Government Partnership.¹ The assumption that openness begets trust is so deeply ingrained in our minds that very few people take the time to check it. Not only is the relationship, let alone the causation, unproven ; it makes little sense. If your partner cheated on you, he won’t gain your trust back by sharing his calendar. He’ll feel under surveillance and you’ll assume he uses other subterfuges to deceive you.

How I overcame my fear of flying

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When I was 27, I became nervous about flying. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a severe turbulence on a Paris-Berlin flight, when the aircraft entered an unexpected jet (a powerful high-altitude wind) during the cruise, rocking the cabin. Maybe it was the news of a friend of a friend dying in a plane crash. Maybe it was my father’s contracting, and later dying from, a rare cancer that carried a lifetime risk of 1 in 500 (still much higher than the odds of dying in a plane crash, which are about 1 in 5,000 if you take off 30 times per year during 40 years).

Why I'm still doing development aid

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last ten years, I took part in many programs labeled “development aid”. I talked at conferences, I did trainings and wrote reports, I advised on policy. All in all, I swallowed close to 15,000€ in “development aid” in direct gross salary. Factor in what was spent on flights and hotels by the donors and you reach an amount that is several times the lifetime earnings of someone living in Burkina Faso or Malawi, two countries I’m supposed to have helped develop. This piece is a reflection on what I did in media development, and might or might not be relevant to aid in other fields.

Measuring the unmeasured with data

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This essay was written for a chapter of Digital Investigative Journalism: Data-Driven Investigation, New Visual Analytics Tools, and Innovative Methodologies in International Reporting, to be published at Palgrave Macmillan under the coordination of Florian Stalph and Oliver Hahn of the University of Passau.

In 1887, Nellie Bly, an investigative journalist, decided to report on the living conditions in insane asylums in New-York City. She went undercover for ten days in an institution at Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Brooklyn), feigning insanity herself. There, she observed the personnel, talked to inmates and, upon getting out, wrote a book of her experience, Ten Days in a Mad-House.¹ The book and the media campaign organized by Bly’s employer, the New York World, convinced the city of New-York to increase funding for asylum wards. In the words of the introduction to the book’s edition at the Disability History Museum, it “provided charity commissioners with the ammunition needed to convince city bureaucrats to provide more funding”.

Leaving Google: Here's how I did it.

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In January of 2017, I decided to quit Google. There was no specific need for me to do that, only the realization that giving one organization access to (and the right to delete or lock me out of) my whole life was not a smart idea. After the Google Doc Lock Out of 31 October 2017, my experience might be of interest to some.

I left Facebook in 2014, keeping only a string of empty profiles for communication with close friends and to keep the ability to manage pages. (Tip: Create several puppet profiles to manage your pages and write down their birthdates. That’s what Facebook asks for when they lock you out of your account.) I thought leaving Google would be as easy. It isn’t.

The Magic Queendom of Europe

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I am sick of reading or watching dystopias.¹

Why do we keep producing blueprints for the idiots who are taking power? It helps them and we don’t need to be constantly reminded of what’s coming, it just increases our feeling of powerlessness.

We should provide alternatives instead. Here’s an attempt.

Many thanks to Johanna for her ideas and support.

Monday, 10 May 2027

“Welcome to the Museum of Europe!” Smiling widely as a good guide should, I looked at the group of tourists that had gathered in the lobby. There were American pensioners in flip-flops and Chinese businesspeople in polished shoes – this group would be an interesting mix. “You’re here on the first floor of the Berlaymont building, which used to house the headquarters of the European Commission. Four years ago, when the European Union dissolved, it was decided that it would become a residency for artists, with the first two floors reserved for the Museum. I’ll take you through the history of our young state, which is also one of the oldest on Earth. Follow me!”

PPDA et les contradictions du journalisme

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai écrit cet essai pour une intervention devant les étudiants de l’Ecole Française de Journalisme, le 28 septembre 2017 aux Arts-et-Métiers, à Paris.

Jacques Rosselin, le directeur de l’école, m’a demandé de vous parler de journalisme. Je lui ai demandé de quoi, il m’a dit “ce que tu veux” alors j’ai décidé de vous raconter ma relation avec Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. PPDA, pour ceux qui ne l’on pas connu, c’était le présentateur du journal de 20 heures sur TF1 entre 1987 et 2008. Mais pour moi, c’est surtout la marionnette qui a animé les Guignols de l’Info, sur Canal+.

Il ne faut pas 'libérer les données'. Il faut se libérer par les données.

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai écrit cet essai pour mon intervention au Datarama de Nantes, le 20 septembre 2017, sur le thème des données et de l’éthique. C’est une adaptation d’une présentation de 2016 intitulée ‘Free your data’ is over. Now, we need data to be free.

“Libérer les données”, c’est le slogan des activistes de l’open data, les données ouvertes. Pour eux, l’administration devrait mettre à disposition ses données afin que l’on puisse les réutiliser. Mais réutiliser les statistiques de l’administration, c’est se plier à sa vision du monde. Pour pouvoir penser librement, il faut surtout créer ses propres données et mesurer le monde comme on le conçoit. Il faut se libérer par les données.

Meyer revisited

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is the write-up of a talk I gave at the SciCAR conference in Dortmund on September 7, 2017.

The organizers of the conference asked me to prepare a talk called “Meyer Revisited”. Philip Meyer is well-known in datajournalism circles. He was among the first ones to use the methods of social science for journalistic purposes - and it turned out to be a great idea. That was close to fifty years ago, so it might be time to take a modern look at the ground-breaking book Meyer wrote in the late 1960’s and revamped in a new edition in 1991, Precision Journalism.

What could Google do? (If it cared about journalism)

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote this post on June 4th, 2016. I did not publish it at the time, due to conflicting interests. Now that they are gone, the piece is yours to read, in its original version.

In April 2015, Google said it wanted to be a “friend and a partner to the news industry”.¹ On that occasion, Google created a money pot worth €150m for European publishers, the Digital News Initiative (DNI), to be spent over a few years.² The amount represents about 30 hours’ worth of Google’s global revenues.³

Airport controls

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Airports are fascinating places. There, otherwise reasonable people accept to pose for nude photographs in front of total strangers (in the so-called full-body scanners). Of course, they are told that the pictures are destroyed on the spot, but numerous leaks of nudes have surfaced over the years.¹ A film star even claimed he was asked to autograph a nude portrait of himself at Heathrow,² although the airport denied this.³

Besides nude portraits, otherwise reasonable people accept to have their luggage searched - and commented - by “wholly untrained agents”, as a friend who’s a former security entrepreneur put it.⁴ It might not be much of a hassle if you conform to the idea of normality, but agents do not hesitate to humiliate and mock people who carry items they deem laughable.⁵ The list of behaviors otherwise reasonable people submit to when they are in an airport could go on (enhanced pat-down, anyone?) but we accept them in the name of “security”.

Ich bin jetzt Deutscher

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Am 13.7.2017 bin ich Deutscher geworden. Ich erwartete etwas Symbolisches, aber ich bekam nur eine Mappe aus günstigem Karton mit dem Berliner Wappen auf dem Cover. Neue amerikanische Bürger bekommen einen Brief vom US Präsident ; ich habe ein grünes Einbürgerungszertifikat und die Aufforderung, so schnell wie möglich einen Ausweis herstellen zu lassen, bekommen. Das Deutschtum kommt mit seinen Pflichten.

Das einzige Symbolische an meinem Deutschwerden war, dass ich laut deklamieren musste, dass ich das Grundgesetz respektieren würde (es wäre natürlich symbolischer geworden, hätte meine Betreuerin nicht gelacht, als ich es gelesen habe). Natürlich werde ich das Grundgesetz ehren! Sein erster Satz ist eigentlich der Grund, warum ich in Deutschland leben wollte. Das der nur eine leere Floskel war, habe ich inzwischen begriffen. Die Würde des Menschen wird auch in Deutschland angetastet, nicht zuletzt vom Staat. Aber immerhin, ich habe hier mein Geld und mein Herz angelegt, und es gibt nirgendwo auf dieser Erde, wo die Aussichten besser sind.

The Humanist Paradox

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I started to study history, I’ve been obsessed with one question. Everywhere the humanist project traveled, it brought with it racism and massacres, from Congo to Wounded Knee to Tasmania. Sven Lindqvist, a Swedish author, puts it beautifully when he says that “the idea of extermination lies no further from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar”.¹ Is this a coincidence, or is racism a part of humanism? This is what I pompously called the Humanist Paradox.

Cinq nouvelles absurdes de Géorgie

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai été témoin de ces histoires en Géorgie, en juin 2017. Tout y est authentique et si certains évènements ne se sont pas passés exactement comme je le raconte, c’est uniquement parce que la réalité a décidé de s’éloigner de ma version.

Merci à J.Z.F., A.L.B. et B.B. pour leurs conseils et leur relecture.

La sorcière de la maison bleue

Il y avait en Géorgie une vallée bordée d’immenses montagnes. Leurs sommets étaient tellement hauts que les nuages toujours les cachaient ; il était fort rare que les habitants de la vallée puisse les apercevoir. Enserré par ces montagnes se trouvait un village, où depuis des temps immémoriaux les bergers descendaient une fois l’an pour vendre quelques maigres bêtes et acheter qui du savon, qui un vêtement avec les quelques roubles qui leur restaient après leur visite à la taverne. Depuis quelques années, les roubles s’étaient transformés en dollars, les bergers en guides touristiques et leurs troupeaux, grâce à la suppression des droits de douanes et au talent de quelque génie du commerce, en Mitsubishi Delica, des minibus tout-terrains d’occasion importés du Japon.

Les clés pour comprendre

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Un soir de mai dernier, mon ami Gaylord Vermouth¹ m’a reproché de dénoncer les travers du système politique sans donner « les clés pour comprendre ». Il faudrait, m’a-t-il répété, que j’explique ce qui était bien et moins bien dans les programmes des candidats. Je n’ai malheureusement ni le temps ni les compétences pour faire ce travail,² mon cher Gaylord, mais je vais te donner trois clés avec lesquelles tu pourras juger tous les programmes de tous les candidats, pour les élections à venir et même pour les suivantes. C’est du lourd, c’est puissant, fais en bon usage.

Things learned in 5 years of Journalism++

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In early April 2017, together with Pierre Romera and Anne-Lise Bouyer, we decided to shut down Journalism++ Paris/Berlin, the datajournalism agency we created over five years earlier (Journalism++ Porto and Stockholm, our sister companies, are not affected by this change).

We created the company in 2011. It feels like another era. Wikileaks had just shown how large data dumps could change the techniques and processes of investigative journalism. Open data was blossoming everywhere. In politics, Sarkozy and Barroso were on their way out, the Poles had just given a new majority to Civic Platform and the only pressing question was whether the Euro would survive the winter. Good old days, in retrospect. In this environment, we set out to do three things: Build a European company, improve journalism (“Journalism++” literally means “journalism = journalism + 1” in most programming languages) and create a sustainable business. It was crazy ambitious and, back then, I didn’t think we would survive more than three years.

La parole d'un arabe

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai assisté à une audience de correctionnelle (enfin, son équivalent allemand). Voici l’histoire, telle qu’elle s’est déroulée.

Il s’appelle Mohammed, mais il se fait appeler Johnny.¹ Sur sa chaise, il écoute le procureur lire l’acte d’accusation. Coups et blessures, injures et tentative d’extorsion commises contre une femme, Sabine, dans un bar, une nuit de 2016.

Le juge lui demande ce qu’il s’est passé, cette nuit là.

‒ Rien du tout! Je n’ai rien fait! Elle a tout inventé!

The collapse of academia

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

One day of April 2014, I found myself in a conference room, on the top floor of a brand new building, in a top European university. I was speaking to a group of PhDs, doctors and professors from some of Europe’s most prestigious research institutions. I was part of this group because the company I worked at was a (very minor) partner in a research project with all these major scientists. I made my presentation. I explained the hypotheses we made and how we designed an experiment to test them. I explained how the results of the experiment, along with on-the-ground observation, showed that some of the assumptions of the project were probably wrong.

Collaboration in journalism

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This short essay follows a round table organized by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford in December 2016. It is a write-up of my contribution to the panel on Investigating big data: collaboration and best practice at the Journalism Festival of Perugia of April 2017.

The Panama Papers were a worldwide sensation in 2016. If we had Academy Awards for journalism, they’d be Titanic and La La Land rolled into one. Beyond the many records the projects broke, observers were struck by the collaborative nature of the effort. Hundreds of journalists worked together for months to produce groundbreaking reporting on tax evasion. The Panama Papers are not alone. The Russian Laundromat is a recent story coordinated by OCCRP, a non-profit. It brought together 60 journalists.¹ I had the chance to coordinate a group of over 20 journalists in 2014 and 2015 in The Migrants’ Files, an investigation on the number of men and women who died in their attempt to reach Europe.

Pourquoi il faut boycotter les élections françaises

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

J’ai écrit ce post avant la primaire socialiste, pensant que Valls serait candidat. Puis je l’ai retiré, pensant que Hamon ferait campagne en opposition au gouvernement. Finalement, puisqu’il souhaite incarner la continuité du gouvernement actuel, cet essai retrouve tout son intérêt.

Dans les années 1980, en plein état d’urgence, alors que la police matraquait les manifestants en toute impunité, des Français ont appelé au boycott de plusieurs scrutins électoraux. Pour les groupes qui lançaient ces appels, les élections étaient anti-démocratiques car elles ne respectaient pas les principes des Nations Unies¹. Ces Français étaient des Kanaks et voyaient dans les élections une justification des injustices commises par le gouvernement. Les Kanaks sont des Mélanésiens qui habitaient la Nouvelle-Calédonie avant l’arrivée des blancs. Ils se battaient à l’époque contre le colonialisme de Paris. Participer au vote, c’était être d’accord avec les règles du jeu - alors que ces règles étaient écrites pour assurer leur défaite.

Lettre à mes amis

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Chers ami-e-s,

Vous m’avez dit ces derniers temps que j’étais maussade, parano, voire carrément chiant. Je vois tout en noir et en plus je ne propose rien. Laissez moi vous expliquer pourquoi. Je vais parler politique, pouvoir, démocratie, morale et barbituriques et à la fin, j’espère que vous me comprendrez mieux. Peut-être même que vous y verrez un peu plus clair sur ce qui se passe autour de nous. Si vous allez jusqu’au bout, vous aurez droit à des conseils style développement personnel qui vont certainement vous plaire.

Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Upon advice from Nikos S., I read Inventing the Future, Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, by two British academics in their late 30’s, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. It is a very important book for anyone who needs a reason to sensibly hope that values of tolerance, reason and empathy will rise again once the episode of hate we are undergoing is over.¹

In this essay, I will briefly summarize the book and address some of its shortcomings, then turn to why it’s important for you to read it. The second part of the essay assesses how the book can be useful to address the current political situation in Europe and why is might not go far enough.

Waiting for a new Humanism

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve made this argument before but, after the Trump election, it bears repeating. A Clinton presidency might have given us four more years (and an unforeseen event might have turned the tide), but it’s now over.

Humanism, or political Liberalism, is dead and will not resuscitate. An ideology of hate is taking over, and will remain in place for a long time. People who prefer love to hate and reason to instincts face tough choices. This is my roadmap for the rest of my life, which I’m sharing in case someone finds it of interest.

Les espoirs inutiles [nouvelle]

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Pour changer des essais, j’ai écrit une nouvelle. On m’a dit que c’était dystopique ; je réponds que c’est prospectif.

Merci infiniment à Maud, Camille, Clara, Anne-Lise et Snoussi pour leurs conseils. Mes excuses pour toutes les fautes d’orthographe qui restent.

1.

De la moquette. Des murs blancs. Pas de fenêtre. Un seau. Des néons. Surtout des néons. Ils ne s’éteignaient jamais. Thomas était sans doute un immeuble de bureaux. Ou au moins dans ce qui fut, un jour, un immeuble de bureaux. Cela devait faire deux jours qu’il était enfermé dans cette pièce. Trois fois on était venu lui apporter à manger et il n’avait pas l’impression d’avoir trop faim: À peu près deux jours. Peut-être un et demi. Peut-être trois. Il ne savait pas trop.

Celebrating 10 years of datajournalism

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This essay was written for my talk at the MINDS conference in Copenhagen, on 20 October 2016.

Datajournalism is turning 10! The starting point has been set (by me) to September 2006, when Adrian Holovaty published his oft-quoted piece A Fundamental Way Newspapers Websites Need to Change, which serves as a manifesto for many datajournalists.

Datajournalism means doing journalism with structured data. Because working with structured data requires strong computer skills, datajournalism mostly means journalists working together with computer developers. This combination of skills enabled all the datajournalism projects you heard of, from the Wikileaks Cablegate to the Panama Papers.

Data-driven journalism in the post-truth public sphere

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This essay was written for the Retreat Conference 2016 organized at Athens, Greece, on September 24^th, 2016.

Once limited to the fringes of society, lying blatantly has become a fixture of the public discourse. In this post-truth public sphere, datajournalism could spearhead the effort to reimpose truth as a positive value. Or it might just be a technique to serve this small segment of readers who care about the truth. This essay argues that what datajournalism can or cannot do is not that important, because the root cause of the current epidemic of lies is to be found in academia, not journalism.

The road to authoritarianism

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Many people see the current political atmosphere in Europe as a storm to weather away. Populists might reach power, the thinking goes, but they will be removed from office at the next election. France is not Russia and Germany is not Turkey: We surely have democratic traditions that have survived worse situations. Plus, international organizations would not let a country drift toward authoritarianism.

Such thinking is wrong. Authoritarianism can creep in any healthy democracy, in a slow and irreversible process. This essay argues that democratic history offers no protection against authoritarianism and goes on to show how authoritarian regimes feel perfectly at home in the institutions of the democracies they take control of.

Eastern Europe

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of “Eastern Europe” was born after the second world war, when the Allied powers agreed on spheres of influence on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Soviet half received that name, as opposed to “Western Europe”. When the Soviet (then Russian) armies left the region, in the early 1990’s, the name stuck. Eleven countries of the European Union are still grouped together under a single name, for no reason other than habit.

The Offshore Journalism Toolkit

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

With Mario Tedeschini Lalli, we wrote an application for funding to Google’s Digital News Initiative, based on Mario’s vision for an offshore journalism. I republish an adapted version here.

The Offshore Journalism Toolkit is a series of components comprising legal advice, software and how-tos for publishers who want to create an offshore publication vehicle. It enables media outlets to pursue their efforts to seek, publish and remember facts and opinions in challenging legal environments.

The power of open data

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This essay was written for the Transparency Camp of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was, together with Anne-Lise Bouyer, invited to give a lecture on “the power of open data”.

Open Data represent information collected by an administration and offered for free to anyone in a machine-readable format. The concept gained popularity in the late 2000’s and is now hailed as the best path towards a “more efficient and transparent government”¹.

The new legitimacy of power

Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first part of a series on the evolution of power dynamics in Europe. Events in the last 6 months have shown that the rationale for political power in Europe has changed, though very few observers have noticed. This essay shows how it has changed. The next ones will focus on the reasons and, finally, on the role of journalism in this new normality.

During the French Civil War of 1793, when troops of the republic fought troops of the monarchy, they went into battle for “the Law”¹. They fought so that power would not be used arbitrarily, but would find its source in rational rules that ensured the welfare of all.

Informer avec des données structurées

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Cet essai est la base de ma présentation à l’école d’été de l’INRIA qui se tient à Marseille du 18 au 22 septembre 2016.

Depuis la fin des années 2000, le terme de datajournalisme a émergé. Certains médias ont mis en place des équipes de datajournalisme. Des agences spécialisées se sont créées, comme celle que j’ai cofondé en 2011, Journalism++. De nombreuses écoles de journalisme offrent des cours de datajournalisme. Des conférences spécialisées ont lieu tous les ans. Si le concept a montré qu’il était plus qu’un buzzword ou qu’une mode, il reste mal défini. Certains y voient une “mythologie du chiffre”¹. D’autres affirment que le datajournalisme consiste à “s’adresser à l’intelligence visuelle” de son audience². Ces raccourcis passent à côté de l’essentiel. Faire du datajournalisme, c’est informer avec des données structurées. C’est l’utilisation de techniques statistiques, de visualisations et d’interactivité pour analyser et communiquer des données³.

Free your data' is over. Now, we need data to be free.

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My keynote at the Nordics Datajournalism Conference in Helsinki: Why it’s important for datajournalists to be more careful with government data and should collect more data independently.

You probably know that Finland has one of the best population data in the world. Finland was part of Sweden in the 18th century, at the time when the Kingdom decided to start counting its subjects regularly. This was the first modern population census and gave birth to the first modern public statistics office, the Tabular Bureau.

When to engage with adversarial organizations

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently invited to the DiploHack, a hackathon on the topic of transparency for civic tech activists and diplomats of the European Union, hosted by the Council of the EU.

First, a few words about the Council. This institution is what people mean when they describe the EU as an opaque bureaucracy led by unelected officials detached from the people. On most European legislation (and all legislation before 2009), the Council has the last word. It brings together ministers from all 28 member states. In most member states, ministers are unelected and accountable only to their prime minister - they are professional politicians above all. The Council takes decisions behind close doors, so that no one knows how it finds compromises. Most of the time, the Council refuses to communicate documents under the European freedom of information legislation. To oversimplify, the Council is what’s wrong about the EU.

Why the European Union failed

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The European Union, as a political project, has failed^[1]. From a supranational project, it has become a secretariat for the member states. Before we can imagine new ways of preventing war in Europe - the EU’s main mission - we must examine the reasons of this failure.

The wrong reasons

Some argue that EU institutions suffer from a “democratic deficit”. Their power and effectiveness is constrained by their lack of responsibility towards EU citizens, the argument goes. This implies that citizens show more respect towards authorities they have direct control over. This implies that citizens are well-informed and care enough about institutions to show them a level of respect dependent on theirs having the control to repeal (or refuse re-election to) people in power. This argument is false for two reasons. The first one is that citizen control over EU institutions improved dramatically in 2014 with the Spitzenkandidat process, which gives the directly-elected Parliament the power to choose the head of the Commission. The democratic deficit should have been at least slightly reduced in the process. It is hard to see any signs pointing in this direction. The second reason is that citizens show great levels of respect to institutions they have absolutely no control over, such as the préfet of France (who has control about most of the local life and answers to the ministry of interior), the Chamber of Lords or the Queen in the United Kingdom^[2].

Caricatures racistes

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Le 13 janvier 2016, j’ai publié un tweet dénonçant le caractère raciste d’un dessin d’un membre de Charlie Hebdo. Cela a provoqué de violentes réactions en défense de ce dessin. Je suis effondré d’avoir à expliquer pourquoi ce dessin est effectivement raciste et pourquoi c’est un problème.

Le dessin en question est reproduit ci-dessous pour étayer l’analyse^[1].

Pourquoi est-ce raciste ?

Un acte raciste, c’est attribuer un trait de caractère à une personne exclusivement à partir de son apparence (réelle ou imaginaire) à une communauté. Sur ce dessin, le lecteur doit comprendre qu’Aylan, qui est mort sur une plage de Turquie lorsque ses parents essayaient d’échapper à la guerre civile en Syrie, est un arabe^[2]. Les violeurs et agresseurs de Cologne sont considérés comme étant des arabes. Aylan est un arabe, les violeurs sont des arabes, donc Aylan est un violeur. C’est un raisonnement typiquement raciste, un peu comme “il y a des noirs qui dansent bien, puisque tu es noir tu dois savoir bien danser.”

Racist cartoons

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On 13 January 2016, I published a tweet denouncing the racist character of a drawing by a Charlie Hebdo staffer. It provoked outraged reactions from people defending the cartoon. It saddens me immensely that I have to explain them why the cartoon is, indeed, racist, and why it matters.

The drawing is reproduced below for the purpose of this analysis^[1]. It says “What if Aylan had lived? He would have become an ass-groper in Germany.”

Don't ask too much from data literacy

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This essay is written for a special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics on data literacy^[1]. In the call for submissions, the journal points out that some argue that more data literacy will foster greater transparency, thanks to better use of open data, and let citizens better engage with science. With regards to journalism, I argue here that this view is mistaken.

“Datajournalism is social science on a deadline”, once said Steven Doig, a Pulitzer-prize winner^[2]. Indeed, doing journalism with structured data requires that journalists use the social scientist’s toolbox, from data collection to data analysis. Data literacy is needed at every step of the process: To know what data to collect, understand biases in a data set, perform sensible analyses and visualize the results properly.

Confronting authoritarianism

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since November 13, 2015, the French state has become authoritarian. Since November 13, 2015, the police rampaged through several houses without judicial oversight and without any justification. This happened not once, but thousands of times. Hundreds of people have been put under house arrest. Some for political reasons (environment activists), most for religious ones (Muslims)^[1]. None were linked to terrorism^[2]. The government officially suspended human rights^[3]. Websites have been censored by the police. Politicians who dissented have been told by the government that their political career was over^[4]. And the government prepares the legal basis for a perpetual state of emergency^[5].

La logique de l'autoritarisme

Sat, 28 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Les attentats du 13 novembre 2015 ont été menés par un groupe communiquant sans chiffrement après que leur coordinateur a annoncé l’attaque en février dans un magazine de Daesh^[1]. L’organisation de l’attaque n’avait rien d’exceptionnelle. Qu’elle ait pu avoir lieu révèle surtout l’incompétence des services de renseignement.

Après les attentats, la seule chose à faire pour le gouvernement était d’exiger la démission des personnes responsables de ce “naufrage historique”^[2] des services de renseignement. Il ne l’a pas fait.

Living without the European Union

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the past decade, the European Union has failed every test it was put to. It failed at providing citizens with freedom of movement, it failed at gaining popular legitimacy, it failed at ensuring the future of the euro and it might fail at keeping peace. More broadly, the foundations of the European project designed by Jean Monnet in the first half of the 20^th century have gone. The EU failed at providing Europeans what it promised, but this failure should not be seen as a failure for Europe.

The value chain of data in the news industry

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

From acquisition to actual use, the value chain of data is often compared to mining. Raw data are the ores, to be extracted from mountains of documents or painstakingly collected from streams of information. Data is then refined, repackaged in big data smelters. At the very end of the chain, data is beautified in visualizations that can be consumed by the end-users.

This metaphor does work for certain uses of structured data. Vehicle registration data, for instance, is collected by the administration. It is then sold, in bulk, to companies that repackage it and sell it forward to statisticians within insurance companies or car manufacturers. They, in turn, use it to run the analyses that hopefully will raise the bottom line of their employers.

Individual responsibility and climate change

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just who is responsible for climate change? Big Oil? SUV drivers? Everyone? Are some people more responsible than others? I try here to imagine what could the legal reasoning be if a special tribunal were ever set up to judge those responsible for climate change.

Most of the intellectual debate on the issue assigns responsibility to entire groups, rather than individuals. In his Laudato Si encyclical ^[1], Pope Francis blames governments, corporation and humans in general for climate change (even if he makes clear references to richer countries, especially the United States). Others tried to compute responsibility at the country level. In a widely cited paper ^[2], Prof. Dale Jamieson uses car ownership as a proxy to rank countries, for instance. Greenpeace went further still and assigned a measurable amount of responsibility to different energy companies ^[3], but not to consumers. Chancel and Piketty go farthest and estimate gas emissions at the individual level, but take revenue as a proxy, not actual actions.^[4]

Datajournalism

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since the term entered the European media space in 2009, students or fellow journalists regularly ask me to define datajournalism. Let me try to do that here.

Datajournalism ^[1] means doing journalism with data. Data, in turn, is simply a piece of information from which to derive facts (in latin, datum is what is given, in opposition to factum, the knowledge one obtains from data) ^[2]. A fact cannot be wrong or it ceases to be a fact. A piece of data, on the other hand, can be true or false, it remains data.

String of rulings bodes ill for the future of journalism in Europe

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

During the summer of 2015, European governments hit hard against journalists. In Germany, Netzpolitik was almost charged with high treason. In Turkey, censorship of Twitter was stepped up, while Russia banned (and quickly unbanned) Wikipedia. The French Patriot Act entered into force.

While branches of power 1 and 2 (executive and legislative) have a long history of attacking free speech, branch number 3 (judiciary) has long been Europeans’ best defense. Things are changing, and fast. Judges are taking the wrong view on what information is in the digital age. New rulings threaten to set European journalism back by a decade.

Why there is no European journalism

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is an extended version of a short talk I gave at Newsgeist (video below), a Google-organized gathering of media executives at Helsinki in May 2015.

A story of horses

On January 16, 2013, British newspapers lead with a shocking discovery: There’s horse meat in Tesco burgers! Two weeks later (Feb. 8), the French media, who had so far mocked the British horse-eating aversion, announce that traces of horse meat were found in Findus lasagna. Horreur! One month after the British started it (Feb. 22), Germans see in the Tagesschau that Aldi’s Rindergulasch contains horse meat, too. Ungläublich!

Dani Rodrik's Globalization Paradox

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Upon a recommendation by the always well-inspired Caroline, I recently read Dani Rodrik’s 2012 The Globalization Paradox. In it, Rodrik makes the case for a pragmatic trade policy. Governments should not accept free trade as an end in itself, he writes. Instead, they should use tariffs as a means to develop their country and renounce free trade when needed. This argument is exactly the one made by Friedrich List, a German-American economist of the first half of the 19^th century, whose National System of Political Economy is a great critique of Adam Smith’s theses ^[1].

ECHR ruling might have a chilling effect on data journalism

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As I was doing research on the definition of journalism by the European Court of Human Rights, I found a ruling from 21 July 2015 which has tremendous implications for the future of journalism in Europe.

Out-law.com, the only media outlet that covered the ruling, summarizes the case as follows ^[1] (emphasis mine):

[A Finnish company] has been publishing Veropörssi magazine since 1994, giving information about Finnish people’s taxable income and assets – information that is publicly available under Finnish law.

Speed and the slowdown of History

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Technology increases the pace of change. This assertion is said so often that I have yet to find someone challenge it seriously. However, I argue that increases in speed, whether transport or communication, actually decreases the pace of political change. Take these three six-year sequences as examples.

The three examples above, for all their flaws, show that the current European crisis unfolds at a dramatically slow pace. Despite the major changes (the banking union, the change in the ECB’s behavior in 2012 etc.), life for European citizens has not changed dramatically since 2009. Being unemployed is not the same as having a family member killed in the army or undergoing the change from communism to breakneck free-market economics.

Why start a blog in 2015

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Starting a blog in 2004 was cool. Starting one in 2015 is anachronistic. But I found no other place to write more than 140 characters, use a versioning system and retain full ownership and control over form and content.

I intend to use this space to write down the contents of some of my talks, but mostly to expand on conversations I have with friends. In writing, one quickly finds the gaps in reasoning – and one must fill them or admit the weakness of an argument.

Singularity

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One day, some say, computers will be able to build other computers without human intervention. They will build machines that are better than they are and, in a snowball effect, become more intelligent than humans. This day, to some, is known as Singularity. If you ever watched The Matrix, this should be familiar.

However, this vision of the future is wrong. Computers do not think. Computers are not capable of intelligence comparable to humans. Computers add numbers. They do it very, very fast. In this sense, computers have been more intelligent than humans ever since Alan Turing built his first machine in 1942.

Journalism schools must become information management schools

Sun, 10 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the 20^th century, journalists were people who worked in a newsroom, i.e who had access to the means of mass publishing or broadcasting. Now that everyone can publish to a potentially wide audience, the meaning of journalism has evolved. Journalism is now the act of adding value to an information in the public interest.

This change profoundly impacts journalism education. In all European countries, most journalists are trained in journalism schools, whether public or private. These institutions teach above all technical elements (writing a story, video and audio recording, online editing, fact-checking etc.) What distinguishes them from communication or multimedia schools is that they see themselves as the hatching nest for the representatives of the fourth estate. Even in Russia, a European country that has never had a full decade of free speech, journalism schools celebrate their exiled alumni who managed to become investigative journalists.