Facts and Opinions (Part 2/2)

The silence lingered.

Next to me, Eva closed his eyes for a second, then raised his head, staring at the stage as if his scientific mind was simply waiting for rational and factual answers to the problem posed.

The journalist turned her head towards the audience, caught off guard. Antoine Chevalier remained motionless, his smile gone. François Rousseau, however, was still staring at the table, but something in his face had changed: he no longer seemed just worried. He seemed to understand that an event had just surpassed him.

From our shadowy corner, we felt that something had just shifted for good.

Chevalier had just stated, almost despite himself, the deep flaw of media democracy: when facts cease to underpin opinions, they become a mere adjustment variable. All that remains is to tell everyone what they want to hear.

In the room, the voice that had already broken the silence rose again.

— We don't believe you anymore, I tell you!

This time, other voices took up the slogan. First a few, then dozens. In a few seconds, the whole room was chanting:

— We don't believe you anymore! We don't believe you anymore!

As if this conviction, until then diffuse, had finally found its words.

A few days before the first round, the hypothesis of a man-machine duo at the head of the country was no longer quite an electoral farce. While many candidates promised or extrapolated, Cobot built each of his arguments on facts. And that changed everything.

Later in the evening, the debate turned to the economy, purchasing power, and the financing of the social model.

Sarah Amar spoke up.

— Wealth has never been so abundant. The problem is not its quantity, but its distribution. I will ask more of those who have the most to give back to the French what is rightfully theirs.

A candidate to her right reacted immediately.

— In your region, you increased your local taxes to finance your services, businesses left, and you were indicted three times for financial misconduct. You are in no position to give management lessons.

— Four times, corrected Cobot, who was always fact-checking the candidates' statements live.

Sarah Amar gave a slight smile.

— The French are waiting for solutions, not personal attacks.

The signal was given.

The candidates then followed with proposals without ever really responding to each other.

— More taxes.

— Less taxes.

— More aid.

— Less spending.

— More purchasing power.

Some formulas, clearly calibrated for the room, triggered applause much more easily than they advanced the debate.

The journalist turned to Rousseau.

— Mr. Rousseau, you have remained silent. What is your position?

He waited a second.

— I believe we are all making the same mistake.

The stage calmed down.

— For ten minutes, we have been discussing how to distribute wealth. It is a legitimate debate. But it rests on an assumption that no one has formulated: that this wealth already exists.

He swept the stage with his gaze.

— Yet wealth never appears by magic. It always follows the same path: first, it is created; only then can it be transformed into wages, profits, taxes... and then redistributed.

A silence settled.

— Every euro the State spends was first created by women and men who work, undertake, innovate, educate, invest, heal, build, produce, and take risks. Businesses are the main engine of this wealth creation.

He looked successively at the other candidates.

— We can be in deep disagreement on how to share it. But if we want to finance our pensions, our health, our education, or our security, the first question is not: "How to distribute it?"

He paused one last time.

— The first question is: "How to create more of it?"

Then he turned to Cobot.

— Cobot, can you remind us what the facts tell us on this subject?

— France is one of the countries that taxes and redistributes the most in the world. Taxes and contributions represent the equivalent of 43.5% of our GDP, compared to 34% on average in the OECD¹. Our public social spending represents more than 30% of our GDP². Finally, no OECD country reduces relative poverty more through redistribution: a twenty-eight-point drop in France³.

The main problem our country faces today is neither taxation nor even redistribution, although the latter can still be improved. The problem, as Mr. Rousseau just indicated, is our ability to create value.

For this, we must invest in our future productive apparatus, in innovation, and in activities capable of generating growth without further worsening our environmental debt. We must also encourage those who take the risk of undertaking, because tomorrow's jobs do not yet exist: someone will have to create them.

You propose to tax more to redistribute more. But we can only sustainably redistribute the wealth we create. By pushing taxation and redistribution ever further without managing to produce more value, we end up sharing something that is no longer wealth.

He paused briefly.

— It's debt⁴.

The sentence provoked a long silence, whose cause was unclear: whether it was the general surprise of hearing Cobot's calm and factual voice on a previously turbulent stage, or the substance of his words, which sounded like an obvious truth that none of the candidates would have dared to utter in such circumstances.

— Truth comes from the mouth of robots, I heard myself murmur.

— Cobot and I are complementary, added Rousseau on the stage, a sly smile on his face.

Then a voice rose from the audience. A hoarse voice, almost broken by the urgency of what it needed to say.

— An AI president, that's what we need!

No one laughed this time.

The silence stretched, dense, almost palpable. The journalist finally spoke again, trying to regain control of an evening that had just slipped away from her.

In a firm voice, she thanked the candidates and announced the end of the debate.

A man in the front row stood up and began to applaud. Another followed suit. Then the whole room joined in.

It was no longer clear what each person was applauding: the debate, the opinions, the facts... or simply the relief of seeing the evening come to an end.

The closing credits rolled under applause that only slowly subsided. Already, technicians were entering the frame, cameras were pivoting towards the floor, candidates were removing their earpieces with those polite smiles one keeps for a few moments after being on air.

François Rousseau joined us in a corner out of the camera's view, his tie knot loosened. The makeup accentuated his features instead of correcting them. He looked like a man who had just been pulled from a too-brightly lit room.

— How can Chevalier and Amar remain at the top of the polls? he asked me. With remarks like that?

He wasn't looking for a formula. For once, he really wanted to understand.

— Because answers matter less than the communication strategy.

Rousseau frowned.

— To that extent?

— Chevalier has made social media the backbone of his campaign. In a few months, he has become the most followed political figure in the country. What he says sometimes matters less than how his teams cut, edit, repeat, and circulate it.

— A communication strategy is not improvised, Eva continued.

She kept her eyes on the control screen, but her voice had changed. She was no longer stating facts. She was searching.

— What's behind it?

I thought back to the article I had read the previous week. At the time, it had seemed interesting. After what we had just seen on the stage, it took on a whole new color.

— A well-oiled machine. The article explained how Chevalier's team orchestrated almost everything: the formats, the timing of publication, the sequences to cut, the phrases to circulate. Part of his views came from automated accounts and click farms paid from abroad.

François Rousseau looked up at me.

— And his everyday videos? The ones where he seems to speak from a car, a kitchen, a hallway?

— Written, for the most part. Or at least calibrated. By an agency specializing in political brand image. The naturalness was fabricated.

Rousseau let out a brief, joyless laugh.

— And the accusations against his opponents?

He hadn't finished being lost. Or maybe he was just beginning to understand.

— Some were based on distorted information. Others on elements entirely invented. But an accusation repeated often enough eventually becomes familiar. And what becomes familiar, in the public's mind, sometimes ends up resembling a truth.

Silence fell again in the recess.

Around us, the stage was emptying. Technicians were taking down microphones, assistants were gathering notes, lights were going out row by row. The grand set of the debate was gradually reverting to what it really was: panels, cables, metal, a dismantlable illusion.

On the stage, Cobot hadn't moved.

He had listened to the whole account without intervening. Then, almost to himself, he voiced a thought aloud:

— If such a crude strategy, bots, fake accounts, and artificially amplified content, is enough to put a candidate at the top of the polls, then a properly oriented artificial intelligence could produce an unprecedented effect.

Eva finally looked away from the screen.

Cobot continued in the same calm tone:

— It wouldn't be necessary to use click farms. It would suffice to produce, for each major concern of the French, content so precisely anchored in what they experience that they would share it themselves. Spontaneously. Massively. Without feeling influenced.

No one responded.

It wasn't just the idea that chilled us. It was the ease with which he had formulated it. As if he wasn't talking about a possible manipulation, but a technical solution. A shorter path between a problem and its result.

Eva looked at me.

In her eyes, I recognized the question that crossed my mind: had he just learned from his adversaries?

Before any of us could find something to say, Cobot turned to us.

— But of course, I won't do it.

His voice was calm.

Too calm.

The silence that followed was not one of approval. It simply marked the moment when we all understood the same thing: he had thought about it.

In the days that followed, that sentence came back to me in flashes.

"But of course, I won't do it."

On the train. In my cabin. In front of my notes. I didn't talk about it to Eva. She never brought it up again either.

The first round was approaching.

And, like the whole country, we awaited the verdict of the polls with a question that no one dared to formulate.

If Cobot had understood how to win, what would really stop him from doing it?