How far is docility? We had already agreed not to bury our dead, not to hug those we love. Accepted to receive, as villains, lessons on «good manners» 2020: how to say hello, how to put on a facemask, how to wash hands. Will we accept the next step? On 27 May, French Parliament voted in favour of the Stopcovid application, a digital tracing and social control tool worthy of the Black Mirror series. Some epidemiologists publicly doubt the hypothesis of a second wave, and the immunity threshold seems much broader than expected? Alas ! We should now accept to be « chipped », hunted, tracked… Like animals in a paddock? The app captures any encounter “less than three feet and for more than fifteen minutes”: “The time of a kiss”, Mélenchon quickly calculated, we did not know him as a poet!

Do you want anyone to know with whom you had a glass of white wine last night, if not more so affinities? According to the polls, half of the French, who have no more desire than the others to be ill or contaminants, would refuse to download the spy app. Digital Secretary of State Cédric O (like Orwell?) warns: “To refuse it is to accept additional deaths.” The infantilizing blackmail too. Philosopher Comte-Sponville has more composure: «I prefer to catch the Covid in a free country than to avoid it in a totalitarian state.»

Dorothée Werner – ELLE magazine (French)