Junk Tech (édition anglaise)

Silicon Valley companies have convinced the world that they are successful
because of their technological superiority and creative genius. But this is an
illusion. To keep consumers and investors hooked, they use a highly addictive
substance —junk tech, which subtly combines the ability to tap into the
zeitgeist, an understanding of people’s aspirations, the talent to transform
these two things into a highly coherent product or service and the power to
craft myths that resonate with individual and collective desires. In the
digital civilization, dream peddlers and mirage merchants have taken over from
engineers, developing a vision of the world that enables them to attract
capital, talent, and public attention. In France and Europe, we are trying to
reproduce this formula but without the right ingredients. By neglecting the
art of storytelling and remaining captive to a technocentric approach, we are
adopting the wrong recipe: product hypertrophy, the cult of intellect, a
rejection of simplicity, a dependency on rational approaches and a weak
cooperative culture. Convinced that we must break with the cult of disruption,
this essay argues in favor of the renewal of innovation mechanisms and a
stronger focus on the fundamentals of marketing. The stakes are high: building
new credible alternatives to compete with Silicon Valley and laying the
foundations for sustainable and virtuous business models and innovations that
meet the aspirations of today’s citizen-consumers to have a positive impact on
the future and the planet.