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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.