A Year of Fear and Hope, Choosing Hope
Charles-Edouard Bouée
Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Adagia Partners | LinkedIn Top Voice | former Roland Berger CEO | Investor | Author |
Coming out of a dramatic and peculiar year shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic, many of our reference points and certainties have been shaken up. The coming year is thus very difficult to decipher: will it mark a turning point? On the contrary, will it see the tendencies that predate the epidemic deepen? What can we hope for, and what should we worry about?
There is no simple answer to these questions yet. During this particular year that has just ended, I have continued to reflect on the increasingly close relationship that we humans have with technology, and how it is reconfiguring our lives. The retrospective of my columns and opinion pieces published in 2020 in Les Echos (the first daily French financial newspaper) provides an opportunity to measure just how far the pandemic has crystallized our ambivalence towards technology: when at the beginning of the year, with a mix of hope and concern, we watched China deploy its surveillance technologies to control the spread of the virus; our gratitude and anger directed towards the digital services that have enabled us to continue to work and exchange with our loved ones, while locking ourselves into isolation bubbles; our wish for technology to enable us to defeat the epidemic, and our fear that it may destroy what remains of our private lives.
Object of fantasies, desires and fear, technology is, first of all, what we make of it. It is by renewing this conviction that I approach the coming year, being both lucid about the economic, social, and geopolitical challenges it presents us with, and confident in its ability to solve many of the world's problems.
Continuing this ridge path is my wish for 2021. I am also addin my best wishes to all of you, for your personal and professional lives, for all the projects that are dear to your hearts.
Such as my latest writing project, "L'ère des nouveaux Titans : Le capitalisme en apesanteur", co-written with Fran?ois Roche and published by Grasset in October 2020, which recounts these interrogations.
Charles-Edouard Bouée
“A lot of writing is an attempt to figure why people do what they do.” Margaret Atwood
(Extract from Margaret Atwood’s acceptance speech on the 15th of October 2017 in Frankfurt, during the ceremony awarding her the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade)
15 December 2020
My bi-monthly tech column in Les Echos. As we are reaching the end of 2020, I wanted to reflect on the past year. What struck me most was how our #realworld was impacted & how many of us (if not, all of us) look for illusory escapes to #virtualworlds. As revealed by the astronomical numbers of subscribers, we are seeking refuge in artificial paradises created by the #tech #titans… the likes of Netflix, Fortnite, Minecraft, TikTok or Douyou. Taking the example of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, not only has it reached more than 62 million viewers worldwide, but it has also had a tremendous impact on online chess gaming & on the sales of “real” chess boards. Is this a sign that virtual worlds now have the power to reconfigure #reality?
20 October
Campaigning on Animal Crossing?
Hot off the press, my latest column in Les Echos! I tell the tale of how the virtual world is meeting the real world through Joe Biden’s campaign on Animal Crossing. Team Joe represented by Kamala Harris in a sharp suit with cool sneakers and Joe Biden wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, are taking door-to-door campaigning online. Will he become the President of the United States of America or of Animal Crossing United? And, is this a sign that tech titans such as Nintendo are not only acquiring ever growing financial gains but also political ones?
31 July 2020
Opinion piece - Using AI on a daily basis
#Wortharead my latest opinion column in Les Echos pressing for an #AI used #daily through its multiple #algorithmic #approaches. Stepping away from its usual enigmatic and mysterious presentation.
7 July 2020
Purity Spiral: the other Virus threatening us
In my bi-monthly tech column for Les Echos, I shed light on #purityspiral a concept pinned down by Gavin Haynes to describe an #instagram frenzy over #diversknitty, or how the knitting community should purify itself to be more diverse and aware of inherent racism. This concept can be applied to many more purity outbids where extreme positions become the norm and #moderation is suspicious. However, as purity is unattainable and, eventually, it reduces freedoms, shouldn’t we focus on improving ourselves instead?
25 May 2020
In my bi-monthly tech column for Les Echos I am stressing the fact that despite their strong market performance, #GAFAs were mute on social, health and human challenges during the #covid19. Even though they rationally served us and rightly benefited from #pandemic, they did not propose any answer to the challenges we are and will be facing as humans. Is that what we want from leading companies in the future?
21 March 2020
In my bi-monthly tech column for Les Echos I am looking at #covid19 as a “human accident” – because two weeks of #coronavirus have, in many areas, accelerated technological progress for as many as 20 years (e.g. all teaching has moved to online within days). This only reinforces the questions around human augmented intelligence and the relation between men and the machines, and makes them more pressing.
10 February 2020
Opinion piece - Fighting Coronavirus: How far can technology go?
I was asked by Les Echos to contribute an article about the fight against the #coronaravirus by technology in #China. Impressive to see what is possible, and hopefully efficient, in the fight against the disease - even though this "full use of technology" also raises a few questions.