Séminaire Soutenabilités - Digital: new uses, new questions

Beyond the immediate management of the crisis, which has legitimately been the subject of attention to date, the challenge is now to design a new model of sustainable society, economically, socially, ecologically and also democratically, in particular with regard to the various vulnerabilities that the epidemic has revealed. This is the frame of reference framework for our public policies, which must therefore be overhauled to enable it to take all these dimensions into account.

Thus, the France Strategy team in charge of the seminar Sustainability launched, during the first period of lockdown in France (March 17 to May 11, 2020), a public participation platform to collect information and proposals to prepare the way out of the crisis. The platform was open on the France Strategy website from April 1 to May 31. The call focused on 7 issues: what expectations towards public authorities in the face of risks? - What social model to “face” our vulnerabilities? - What human-nature interaction in the context of globalization and pandemic? - What kind of relationships between knowledge, power and opinions? - Digital technologies: new uses, new questions - What interdependencies and what forms of autonomy at different territorial scales? - What path for a sustainable economy?

To illustrate the Webinar The Covid-19 Crisis and Digital Dependence - Crossroads between the Netherlands and France, we present here a summary of the elements devoted to digital, extracted from the platform with a presentation of the main issues identified by France Stratégie and a summary of the contributions and proposals resulting from the consultation.

Practically from one day to another, millions of employees or self-employed people switched to teleworking, millions of people went into distance learning or teleconsultation: never such a transformation would have occurred so quickly and on such an extend without the lockdown. In a very short period of time, a multitude of forms of online sociability has also developed. All this, not without inequalities: in terms of digital skills, equipment and access to networks. What will remain from all this?

These major changes in social life could only happen because the infrastructure has generally held up. However, this situation also makes it necessary to re-examine its robustness, its ability to support extremely increased business volumes, and to resist technical risks and deliberate attacks. It is indeed a question of creating the conditions for a true digital sovereignty and of reassessing our uses of the large globalized platforms.

Since then, a new question has acutely arisen: the adoption of techniques for monitoring contaminated or fragile people through applications on their mobile phones. The stakes in terms of civil liberties are considerable.