For an internet-free future! ESSAY by Paul Cudenec.

2025-10-08

“Our human condition and our physical strength are wasting away and being replaced by the voluntary and happy submission of a ‘connected’ slave, now unaware of even the possibility of a simple and autonomous life, bonded with others and involving a relationship to soil and place… “Unlike those of the past, he is not even conscious of his slave status”. [1] So writes the French musician and essayist Hervé Krief in his book Internet ou le retour à la bougie, ‘Internet or going back to the candle’.

“Our human condition and our physical strength are wasting away and being replaced by the voluntary and happy submission of a ‘connected’ slave, now unaware of even the possibility of a simple and autonomous life, bonded with others and involving a relationship to soil and place…

“Unlike those of the past, he is not even conscious of his slave status”. [1]

So writes the French musician and essayist Hervé Krief in his book Internet ou le retour à la bougie, ‘Internet or going back to the candle’.

The dangers of AI and the digitalisation of our lives are today becoming increasingly obvious to an increasing number of people.

Not only are machines and computers replacing us in our trades and professions, but they are deployed to constantly monitor and measure us. They also commodify our lives by using the resulting data to fuel the financial machineries of 21st century “impact capitalism”. [2]

Krief describes the nefarious role of smartphones in what he calls an “atomisation” of modern people’s brains, which had already got underway with televisions.

source : https://substack.com/home/post/p-167707376?source=queue

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