Carte blanche to Olivier Niquet | What world do you live in?

This week, we give carte blanche to Olivier Niquet, who is interested in the gap between our digital lives and what fills our daily routine.

When I was a teenager, I lived on the internet. It was a prehistoric internet, needless to say, since I’m 45 years old. On videos captured with a VHS camcorder that I digitized to keep a memory of the good old days, you can see me hypnotized by a monochrome screen while a friend cavorts around me. Despite everything, my soft mustache remains imperturbable. I’ve been online addicted much longer than you.

Far from being gregarious in “real” life, I easily formed virtual friendships before the term “virtual friendship” existed. I lived on the South Shore and these friends I spoke to almost every day lived in places as exotic as Lachine. This didn’t stop us from meeting in person regularly to do activities like eating pizza in front of a computer or watching a computer in front of pizza.

Still, I understood well at that time that the two worlds were inseparable, a bit like Cyberpresse and The Press were a few years ago. The information superhighway had changed my life and, for me, it was only good. I figured it would soon have the same effect on the rest of the world. I’m no longer sure I can make this extrapolation.

It has become impossible to separate what happens in our digital lives and what fills our daily routine. The social media business model banks on our anxiety to make us part of an infinite scrolling loop.

This is why you may stress about the future of our young people while you bowl with friends, or worry about inflation while you read a romance novel. The internet will have succeeded in putting you in “ta”.

According to a Stanford University study published in the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (which I read every leap year), only 3% of active social media accounts can be classified as toxic, but these produce 33 % of all content^⁠1. They are almost as productive as Cole Caufield. And both cause a red light to come on. When we casually loosen our knuckles on our phones, we are constantly challenged by these aggressive opinions. Between the video of someone unwrapping a pack of hockey cards and that of someone performing the latest fashionable choreography, you will come across someone in sacrafasse.

I think the majority of our problems come from losing our sense of proportion. Only a few people with disproportionate influence succeed in turning us against each other. Today, in the hope of making a few thousand dollars, nihilistic influencers are ready to play the game of algorithms that plutocrats have tampered with in the hope of making a few billion dollars (yes, that’s the part of the text where I took out my dictionary). After me the flood, they no doubt say to themselves, a bit like my teenagers when they left the empty pint of milk in my fridge.

As with many other things such as bureaucracy, climate change and the disappearance of physical buttons in cars, I have a deep feeling of helplessness looking at this barely caricatured portrait of the world.

These people who pull the strings of algorithms and artificial intelligence now dominate the planet. In any case, while waiting for artificial intelligence to pull its own strings.

User engagement is the lifeblood of these companies and it’s excess that drives engagement on the internet. However, it is the opposite that propels commitment in our daily lives. These are the empathetic gestures of generous and friendly humans who are involved in their community. The people from all walks of life that I meet in the street, at the arena, at the supermarket hook me with a more optimistic vision of the world (except perhaps those who drive on the left in the aisles with their grocery basket). When I was glued to my computer with my limp mustache, it was these friends who were cavorting alongside me, my family, these virtual correspondents whom I went to visit in Lachine who most aroused my “engagement”.

So, what world do you live in? The one where someone tells you that “everything is bad” or the one where someone opens the convenience store door for you with a smile? The answer is that it’s the same world, within 3%. Let’s try not to let ourselves be contaminated.

1. Read the Stanford University study

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