The QR Code of exclusion

 Posted on 03/07/2021 at 05:07, updated at 05:12

 

The mid-term Elyos project is no big secret: to create a system of QR-codes to be scanned before entering public places to identify and track the person. The political calculation is simple: the few recalcitrant, estimated at 20% by the presidency, will have to capitulate out of weariness in the war of attrition, under penalty of being deprived of restaurants, cultural life, social life itself. Through Skinner-style self-rehabilitation, they will then be on a positive trajectory that will not fail to be expressed in 2022.

Intellectually, the reasoning holds. It is, however, based on a serious error of premise, due to the endogamous nature of decision-makers: the measures being taken in a Parisian inter-self of senior officials more or less breathless, whose common point is precisely high and guaranteed incomes, the even evidence has escaped them: a substantial part of the real French population, virus or not, never or almost never goes to an official restaurant, never or almost never to so-called cultural places, and many more people than we do. thinks they are not going on vacation - or to stay with a family member in a nearby department. Financial problems, and I am thinking in particular of the discreet rural poverty which we hardly speak about, as well as quite simply the absence of so-called cultural places worthy of the name. As for the sports halls, how to react if not by a yellow laugh in front of these Parisian worries.

For these forgotten people, nothing will change, one might think. Fault. While before the tracing QR-codes these French people were simply neglected, now they will be officially sidelined by the French state, by a strong symbolic gesture

Besides the legitimate feeling of rejection, other consequences are to be expected. Starting with the acceleration of the building of a counter-society, already strongly present in many places, urban but above all rural. Unofficial restaurants, discreet clubs often linked to the extreme left or right, undeclared cultural and sporting activities, informal places of worship, a whole world is being structured, at best indifferent to the state Parisian, but most often hostile. The QR-code project was the decisive boost that was lacking, the formalization of the rupture. With a predictable reversal of the stigma: people vaccinated and provided with a QR code could in turn be excluded - outside the big cities, everyone knows each other, and everyone will know which side is the other.

What is most striking, however, is Macron's second mistake, even deeper than the first: that of believing that inclusion in the "mainstream" is an irrepressible need, the pinnacle of what human existence can achieve. It is not so. Just think of what a deplorable spectacle will be given in the official cultural halls, between the multiplication of security and health measures, the increasingly stifling corset of the limitations of the freedom of expression of artists under penalty of elimination, without even evoke the influence of local and central public authorities, without which since 2020 nothing has been possible and whose creativity is well known.

At a time when the boycott of so-called dominant social networks is gaining momentum, the growing counter-society may well become much more fulfilling and humanely much richer. Our QR code could cut us off for good.

Saisi