Give the internet to the machines. It is their habitat. Then go outside, because the planet is ours.
That is Hugues de Thoisy, fifth-year student, on a licence to dream, twenty-eight minutes into the first conversation of a new series. i had asked him what a truly good world would look like. He asked whether fantasy was allowed. i said go.
INFINITIVE Safari is a series of conversations with the next generation of people who will move this planet somewhere good. Hugues and i met in Norway a couple of months ago, during the one-week INFINITIVE retreat for students of ESCP. On the last evening everyone said what lights them up. Hugues lit up over music. So he goes first.
Born in New Zealand to French parents. Guam, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Padua, then Bordeaux at twelve, where he stayed seven years and which he still names as his favourite city, because for once the friends lasted longer than two years. Then London, Madrid and Berlin for the bachelor, now ESCP and a master in impact entrepreneurship. Home is where he is. He says it without drama.
His reading of the two school systems, after a rappel à l’ordre in his first French term that he did not understand: the Anglo-Saxon one runs on rewards, the French one on sanctions.
i asked what he sees when he boots up the future. Pessimism, he said, and apologised for it. The climate, the political climate, AI he cannot file as good or bad, French students who feel left alone. And under all of it his biggest fear: we are addicted, and we are not taking it seriously.
He is addicted. Instagram, mostly, and he cannot delete it, because it is the only channel his friends and family use, so the exit is also the room. His mind is blurred. He watches so much that he stops doing. He is a musician, and the feed shows him, every day, ten people better than he is. Before the feed you could be the best guitarist in your town and never find out otherwise, so you kept playing. Now you know, and you subscribe to them, and the hours go there instead of into your hands.
Meta’s own researchers wrote it on a slide, published by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021: we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. The company said the Journal mischaracterised the research. The slide is about body image. The machinery underneath is social comparison, and it does not check your gender or your age. The feed is, pardon my French in front of a Frenchman, a molochian shitshow with excellent UX.
i wrote once that we broke music when we gave it to the machines. Hugues is describing the next step: we gave them the audience too.
Then the dream. Social media gets so loud and AI gets so good that nobody can tell any more whether the thing on the other side of the screen is a person. We get tired of checking. And at that point, he said, we leave the internet to the AI and go back to the real world. Cash and DVDs, he said, and laughed.
He is not proposing something. He is noticing something. Imperva, which sells bot defences and therefore counts generously, puts automated traffic at fifty-one percent of all web traffic in 2024, the first human minority in the decade it has been counting. The internet is already more machine than human. We built the place, filled it, and now stand around in it like the last humans in a server farm, wondering why nobody answers.
So leave it to them. Let the agents talk to the agents, let the models train on the models, let the ads sell to the bots. It is their ecology. A land swap: they keep the one we built in thirty years, we keep the one that took four billion. Our heuristics were tuned over three hundred thousand years in a place with faces, weather and food. That place is still there.
On the other side, every city gets its own thing back. Berlin stops drifting toward any random European city, which is what Berliners tell him about the nightlife. Culture comes from between people who stand in the same place, and it shows up as sound and food and clothes, where you can touch it. Relief, he said, when i asked how that world would feel. A better place to raise his children.
A plan for humanity he does not have, and he said so twice. He wants to find the one problem he knows how to solve and solve it. Until then: spread love, positivity, some music. i wrote about his generation once: a radius of concern the size of the polycrisis and no radius of power. He is working the overlap by hand.
i asked what he would ask the generations before him, who fixed none of this and built most of it. He picked the industrial revolution. Did you think this would make us live better? Then he handed me back a question from Norway: are we sure the people before agriculture were worse off? Marshall Sahlins asked that in 1966 and answered no. Three or four hours of work a day, nothing missing.
Hugues sits inside a technological revolution right now, the one that eats his attention. So do i. So do you. His question was aimed at them.
Our turn.
