👓 Looking Back (to 2024) to Look Forward (to 2025)

Bonjour ☕

As 2025 starts, La tech est politique reaches its nine-month milestone. What a journey we've shared ♥ I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this foundational year and discuss our plans for 2025.

🤓 You'll have a mini-questionnaire to complete (just three questions, quite manageable) to help me refine the publication.

💌 And, of course, you can always write to me here: hello@tech-est-politique​

Reading time: 8 min (1,646 words)

2024: A Foundational (and Educational) Year

This project began taking shape in my mind in 2021. At the time, I was the VP of Governance and Public Affairs at a European scale-up, and I'd grown weary of simplistic, sugar-coated tech discourse. To master the future, we must understand how the digital ecosystem interacts with European legislators. I wanted a tool that could help us track developments and decode power dynamics over time.

In early 2022, I joined the first cohort of the Horizons programme at the Créatis Residence. While there, thanks mainly to my mentor, this publication took its current form. Above all, I embraced my stance: focusing on analysis. After all, I'm not a journalist; I don't want a passive observatory that chronicles news and sprinkles witty phrases here and there for style. My added value lies in operational and regulatory expertise and a keen interest in (geo)political behind-the-scenes machinations. Well, and I have a rather peculiar sense of humour.

🎯 A conviction: We need a space, especially for the French-speaking, to decode European techno-political issues without compromising analytical quality. La tech est politique is this space. It's a tool for intellectual emancipation that favours embracing complexity to simplistic discourse.

🌿 Cultivating layered understandings. Since the Créatis incubation and reflecting my agency's approach, La tech est politique is structured around three axes:

• providing regular analysis to understand and anticipate (the newsletters);

• exploring complex subjects in an accessible way (the guides and dossiers);

• protecting value creation (the Resilience Briefs), with participation from Cyberzen.

🔥 Organic growth. Close to 400 free subscribers and a thousand premium 💎 subscribers from diverse backgrounds hail from different places, proving a pressing need for in-depth analysis. Since April 2024, our community spans France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, the US, and Asian countries, including India. This geographical diversity matters deeply. It shows the transnational nature of our issues and proves we can discuss regulation without sending people to sleep.

🔧 Understanding the EU machine: the introductory sequence. Most professionals don't understand 'Brussels' - I've learned this through countless conversations. So, I created a mini-course that demystifies the EU machine, reaching subscribers right after registration. You've received it and seem to appreciate it: the open rate is approximately 87% in French and 77% in English. (I feel quite like an Eastern European dictator giving these plebiscite figures.)

🚀 Political transition as a catalyst. Summer 2024 was a pivotal moment, far more than an editorial pause. The end of one European legislature and the rise of a new political landscape proved again why we need rigorous analysis. We must deconstruct events and biases to grasp their origins and system-wide effects. With von der Leyen remaining a political figure, reading between the lines matters - without turning to gossip.

🤓 Analytical highlights. It's been a prosperous period for news... In part, through your questions (thank you 🙏), I've been tracking the transposition of NIS2 to compare French and European perspectives. Alongside this work, the arrival of the new mandate provided an opportunity to analyse personalities, portfolios, and upcoming challenges. Additionally, I continue to provide in-depth analysis of texts, both prominent and obscure, that are shaping the European digital landscape.

❓ Q&A is brilliant. The Q&A section offers premium 💎 subscribers the opportunity to ask me about European digital matters. I respond by providing comprehensive follow-up (such as with NIS2) or addressing current hot topics (for example, Meta's fact-checking in Europe). I particularly enjoy this interactive format: you, my readers, become stakeholders in the analysis.

🌏 Yes, we speak English. The November shift to bilingual content expanded our reach while maintaining rigour. La tech est politique met both technical and editorial challenges successfully. The EU operations mini-courses are available in both French and English introductory sequences. The same applies to La tech est politique's knowledge hub - whose homepage I redesigned in early January - ensuring newsletters, dossiers, and Resilience Briefs from November onwards are available in both languages.

In short, 2024 has been busy. And I plan to continue this momentum in 2025 👇

2025: Consolidating to Better Innovate

2024 taught me clear lessons: editorial independence comes at a real (and rather unforgiving) cost; bilingualism needs proper tools that don't come along easily; and people stay curious despite common beliefs. So, whilst writing this edition, I viewed the initial roadmap in a somewhat different light (roadmap update coming in February).

Here are the 'big rocks' for 2025 👇

💪 Consolidating infrastructure to improve your experience. I began with Kit (formerly ConvertKit): it enabled readable content, automated introduction emails, and rather simple subscription management (all for €29/month plus a percentage of each subscription, mind you 😉). The platform's limitations became clear as the publication grew and added bilingual content:

• difficulties in creating Legal Notices, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy pages;

• the platform's inability to provide proper invoices: this devoted editor must handcraft each invoice;

• friction in accessing newsletter archives (premium 💎 subscribers must authenticate with the platform to view content, etc.);

• impossible to handle bilingual content 'properly': if I published content in English, the site would become a jumble of content in two languages;

• impossible to classify by content types: I'm left with a hodgepodge of mailings that I recognise only because I've added tags (cobbled together one Sunday when I would have preferred to do nothing with great intensity);

• and so forth.

📌 After several weeks of testing, I've planned a 10-week migration to unify our infrastructure. This migration will enable a more seamless experience, particularly for accessing bilingual archives. Thus:

• Notion will remain the 💎 knowledge hub (where I've nearly finished importing all published content). Q&A archives will also be available there for more straightforward consultation.

• 💎 subscriptions will be managed straight through Stripe, which I've configured to collect necessary information for invoice generation at the point of subscription;

• on bilingualism: each language will have its own identified page with appropriate legal notices.

💬 Enhanced interactivity to create more opportunities for direct exchange. As indicated in the initial roadmap, I'll make a WhatsApp channel (one in French and another in English) among the new features. I'm still refining the types of content I'll share there. I want to experiment with audio or video formats and mini-alerts to make specific complex topics more digestible. And there will be plenty to discuss in 2025 as we see the emergence of structural issues affecting the digital economy.

I'd also like to host a webinar in June for 💎 subscribers to recap the first six months of this new mandate and the actions of the Polish Presidency. I'll get back to you on this at a later point.

🔥 A new US-focused edition: enter LTEP US. Another milestone from the initial roadmap: the launch of La tech est politique US, a French-language edition dedicated to American techno-political issues. Staying true to its editorial line, this edition will focus on American digital public policies. Whilst broad deregulation is expected, Trump will maintain continuity with Biden on specific structural issues. La tech est politique US will track these developments beyond the controversies. Premium 💎 subscribers will receive a special starting offer; I'm still working on the pricing structure.

🧠 Enhanced content. La tech est politique is a publication committed to educating and deepening our collective understanding of digital issues and regulatory efforts. I'll, thus, create an extra edition for everyone (both free and 💎 subscribers) to enrich the existing offering with varied formats, such as think tank report analyses and thematic data visualisations.

🤝 An economic model serving independence. To preserve La tech est politique's editorial independence and continue producing uncompromising analyses, including free access content, a new 'Supporter' subscription tier at €300/year will be introduced in 2025. This formula will enable me to maintain analytical freedom whilst avoiding external funding that might compromise or tarnish our image.

This approach addresses a dual challenge: ensuring rigorous and independent analysis whilst maintaining content accessibility for our target audience - consultants, decision-makers, SMBs and startups. By comparison, specialised media outlets offer at least ten times more expensive subscriptions, often without the operational and regulatory expertise La tech est politique provides.

This deliberate pricing policy, combined with the rejection of sponsorships, represents a conscious choice: I wish to preserve both my independence and these audiences' access to quality analysis. It's also a stance against the devaluation of intellectual work and acts as a lever for creating 'shared intellectual property'.

🤓 Three Questions for My Champions

(You are the champions.)

Your feedback is invaluable and helps this publication to serve you better.