There was a time when “progress” meant better lives, smarter systems, more humanity. That time is dead. We now live in the age of merdification — a slow-motion shitslide into glitchy apps, rigged algorithms, and digital snake oil sold by billionaires in hoodies.
The architects ? Oh, they’re right in front of you. Google. Apple. Facebook. Amazon. Microsoft. The GAFAM cartel, jerking each other off in their Silicon Valley glass temples while the world burns in buffering errors. And yes, throw OpenAI into the compost pile too — they’ve earned their seat at the table of techno-clowns.
Their hustle ? Peddle techno-magic. Save the world by making it stupider, more fragile, more addicted. Social media poisons attention spans. AI spits out automated nonsense dressed up as genius. Apps break more things than they solve. It’s not about quality. Never was. It’s about trapping you in a loop of dependency, feeding the ad machine, sucking your data dry.
And guess what — you get to pay for it. Either directly, or by being sliced up and sold to the highest bidder. Think you’re the customer ? Nope. You’re the inventory. Free users get strip-mined for data. Paying users get a nicer leash. Twenty bucks a month buys you a slightly shinier turd. Two hundred buys you… less disappointment. Maybe. But real quality ? That’s not on the menu. The game’s rigged, and the house always wins.
Meanwhile, government bureaucrats — especially in France — try to mimic this mess like it’s some Silicon Valley gospel. They digitize everything, outsource it to cut-rate contractors in god-knows-where, and act shocked when it collapses. Citizens get dumped into Kafka-by-Click : broken sites, dead-end bots, faceless interfaces. Need help ? Open a “ticket.” Good luck getting a human being.
This is merdification : when tech replaces solutions with systems, replaces meaning with metrics, replaces people with profiles. It’s the gospel of “good enough,” delivered by soulless UX designers and rubber-stamped by ministers who’ve never used their own services.
Customer service ? Forget it. You’re lucky if a robot gives you the finger before it crashes. You might scream into the void and get an email in 10 days saying, “Have you tried turning it off and on again ?” Meanwhile, the real support — the white-glove service — is for VIP clients and data resellers who bankroll the circus.
And us ? We rage a little. But then we scroll, we tap, we click “I agree” on digital contracts designed to screw us blind. Merdification doesn’t descend like a virus. We let it in. We un dit. We normalize it. And then we call it “the future.”
