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.

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

“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.

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).

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.

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”.

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.

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!”

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+.

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.