Focus of the letter 40

So this is the fortieth letter. 40 weeks that we meet again and 40 weeks that I write a focus. This week I wanted the previous 39 letters to be what triggers this 40th focus, I wanted to go to the retrospective and look in the rearview mirror. So I immersed myself on the page grouping the focuses on the site and I leafed through the focus of the past 39 letters again.

Over the course of our meetings, you must have gradually understood how I write these focuses. There has been no editorial plan since September, no guiding thread between everyone, no theme decided in advance. You, who have been here for a while and even since the first letter for some, now know it: each focus arrives with the inspiration of the week, from a tool that raised a question, a reaction during a test or when something didn’t go as I had imagined. It’s the same starting point every weekend: what first attracted me or even struck me during the week, to, by pulling a few threads, arrive at what it makes me think about or what it seems to me to say beyond this trigger.

So no wire. And yet…

Going back to focus, there are still a lot of things that appear that I hadn’t consciously put there. Not a recurring subject, more like a territory. The map of questions that come up in different forms, letter after letter, tool after tool. Questions that are mine, born from my tests and my daily observations. But which are perhaps also more universal and potentially yours. The ones that you certainly ask yourself in front of the same tools, in the same moments of hesitation or enthusiasm, alone behind a screen or in a team around a use that is still being researched, in experimentation.

As I reread, I gradually saw common lexical fields emerge. I dug deeper by injecting all the focuses into a generative AI and I arrived at 5 fields that were woven into these 39 focuses. And all this without having planned it.

The first says that something moves without us really having decided it. Delegation  (letter 3), trivialization (letter 5), normality (letter 25), flow (letter 34), reflex (letter 35), evolution (letter 13), slippage (letter 30). These words appeared in very different letters, on unrelated tools. You have read them, some may have resonated differently depending on your use of the moment or your context. They all say the same thing: the framework is set up, the simulation becomes sufficiently plausible, the reflex replaces the choice, and we didn’t really have to decide to let it happen. This first field is perhaps the one that raises the most questions, precisely because it describes something that happens without us noticing it.

The second says that we are trying to hold on to something. Discernment  (letter 4), verification (letter 8), control (letter 20), understanding (letter 27), meaning (letter 29), limit (letter 33), friction (letter 26), frugality (letter 21), process (letter 36). All words of effort. These are words that you may also experience in your daily uses. These are words that describe a gesture that we must choose to make, because nothing in the framework imposes it. No one sets the limit for us. Understanding requires that we force ourselves to do so, even when the result is there and it seems right. Nine words against seven in the first field: perhaps resistance is even stronger than slippage.

These first two fields are in permanent tension. And this tension is perhaps the real subject of the 39 focuses and our 40 weeks together.

I think that the following three fields say what is at stake in this tension.

The machine, first of all, with what it really is: a simulation (letter 10), a plausible object (letter 31), a reasoning (letter 12), a perception (letter 16), a performance (letter 7), an architecture (letter 37), a frame (letter 38). These words describe its nature and what it produces. This is why it is sometimes confused with something else. Discovery week after week, tool after tool, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with defiance. This field is almost entirely descriptive: the words that carry the load, the worry, the question, are elsewhere.

We then move on to the user’s side: autonomy (letter 1), agency (letter 14), creativity (letter 18), intimacy (letter 24), wonder (letter 28), serendipity (letter 39), mediation (letter 11). This is the field of what we lose when we let go without accounting it. Serendipity is that moment when you come across something you weren’t looking for, and that some of you have told me you find in these letters themselves. Wonder is what you feel when you understand how something works, not just when it works. Mediation is the space between thought and its production, this space where we really decide, this space that the fluidity of tools tends to reduce.

Finally, on the side of all of us: sovereignty (letter 2), sharing  (letter 9), the commons (letter 22), citizenship (letter 23), accessibility (letter 19), literacy (letter 32), responsibility (letter 15), curation (letter 6), evaluation (letter 17). These words we have been collectively using for forty weeks. When individual agency crumbles, I believe that something collective also crumbles. Literacy does not recede just for one person, it recedes in an entire collective. Sovereignty is at stake in every gesture of delegation or resistance, not just in institutions. And we have experienced this together, every week, since this letter.

What I realize in writing this letter is that these five fields are not only mine. They certainly belong to whoever uses these tools today, to whoever deploys them, to whoever decides what place they take or don’t take in their daily lives and in ours. I hadn’t planned to write these 39 focuses like this. They came to inspiration, week after week, from very different entries. And yet, put side by side, they say today something that 40 weeks of common meetings have built without knowing it.

The tension between what slips and what we hold is not resolved. It will not be resolved at letter 40, nor at letter 56 or 78. And if it was this tension, which we maintain together, that is the answer?

Echoing

 → the letters of… 1 to 39 !