Novelist Gaspard Koenig during the 25th “Les Correspondances” literary festival in Manosque, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, September 21, 2023 (AFP/Archives/JOEL SAGET)
The search for innovation at all costs is not an end in itself, believes novelist Gaspard Koenig, winner of the 2023 Interallié prize for his novel “Humus”, which describes with fierce humor the flaws of the world of start-ups .
In his fiction released in August – which also won the Giono prize and was among the finalists for Goncourt and Renaudot – the young forty-year-old depicts an era lured by technology, wrongly considered innovative in essence.
From now on, innovation has even become “a sacred goal whose pursuit should be above all other principles, political and economic”, he lamented during an interview with AFP on Monday.
For the writer, who notably published an essay on artificial intelligence a few years ago, “Humus” is an opportunity to make visible a world little known to the general public. A universe where investment funds set the “the mark”, judging the relevance of start-ups according to contemporary mantras and fashionable concepts, at the forefront of which is artificial intelligence.
However, behind the virtuous ambitions displayed by the young shoots, “the driving forces remain the lure of gain, the ambition: they have not changed since the dawn of time”, underlines the author, who was once the pen of the Minister of the Economy, Christine Lagarde, under the Sarkozy presidency.
The problem, judges Gaspard Koenig, is that few start-ups have a truly revolutionary message. The author points out the weight of the public investment bank, BpiFrance, which provides financial support to a number of young French companies.
“It is an obligatory interlocutor, which puts it in a monopoly position. The entrepreneurs are all in the same economic and political system, and there is a contrast between the herdism of this ecosystem and its desire to disrupt,” he analyzes. -he.
– “Bankruptcy of politics” –
One of the characters in “Humus”, a young agronomist, develops Veritas, a company which wants to create vermicomposting factories. Overtaken by the technical reality (the earthworms do not manage to swallow up all the waste), the co-founder will end up sending the waste to incineration, far from the initial environmental objective.
President Emmanuel Macron during a conference organized by the investment bank Bpifrance in Paris, October 6, 2022 (POOL/AFP/Archives/Christophe PETIT TESSON)
In these structures, “+we are going to change the world+, so then we need enormous volumes of capital (…) We could imagine a more artisanal tech, where people do not have such disproportionate objectives, and where they manage to maintain a level of balance”, dreams Gaspard Koenig.
As COP28 begins Thursday in Dubai, the writer – who had wanted to run for the presidential election in 2022 – wants to be cautious about the concepts of CSR (corporate social responsibility), a subject widely addressed by his novel.
“I have always thought that these CSR stories are the recognition of a failure of politics. Social and environmental matters can mean everything. But the company is not the City,” regrets he.
“The real discussions are on the carbon tax or the universal income, but since we don’t have the courage to have them, we tell companies: ‘You are going to create your own system of values’.”
Gaspard Koenig recognizes that he stands apart in contemporary French literature, which deals relatively little with corporate life. “In the palette of realistic writing, there are not many of us. This is the literature that I want to continue to write: no one is outside the economy. We just have to highlight the networks of which we are part “, pleads the author.
© 2023 AFP
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