The story begins with a bang with a fierce criticism of the Apple company in its Californian HQ, in Cupertino. Haro on its culture of secrecy and its proprietary logic – “an iPhone doesn’t own itself, it owns you”… The lively tone, humor and verbal discoveries have everything to make it a bestseller. Invited by the Villa Albertine (a residency program for French writers in the United States) to hang out in Silicon Valley, the popular SF novelist
(the Backwind Horde, the Stealths) went to meet the big minds who shape our digital daily lives and use the same raw material as him – the future.
From reporting to socio-economic and anthropological analysis, his book meanders between criticism and fascination, vigilance and keen observation, in the wake of Baudrillard. To end in style with a spectacular fiction: a short, spine-chilling dystopian story, which embodies the excesses of tech behind closed doors – with a peaceful ending despite everything…
What was the point of going to California?
For 25 years, the relationship with technology has been central to my work as a novelist. And I had the chance to approach those who make our world without asking the question of what they do with it. We, the users, receive, endure, and endorse the technologies that Gafam (acronym of the five largest international digital firms, editor’s note) send us. I wanted to enter the craftsmen’s workshop. Silicon Valley is the center of the world, in the sense that it has made the smartphone a universal object. Compared to Apple, I feel like a faithful betrayed, the initial promise of emancipation and sharing not having been kept.
I really got into digital technology thanks to a Macintosh during my business studies at Essec, with the ease, fluidity and excellence of the products that made
