Author, Not Product
This morning, I deleted my LinkedIn, my MALT, and my APEC accounts. Not deactivated. Deleted. The kind of click you make once and don’t undo.
For years I told myself those platforms were a tax. The price of being findable. The cost of doing business in 2026. I kept feeding the feed. I kept polishing the headline. I kept performing a version of myself I didn’t quite recognize, hoping it would convert into something: a client, a conversation, a sense of being read.
It never did. Not really.
The accounts are gone. What I lose, on paper: a profile. What I keep, in fact: my voice, my time, my attention.
The Internet I knew
I remember an Internet that felt like a town with strange neighborhoods, hand-built homes, and odd signs in the window. You followed a hyperlink and ended up somewhere a real person had made: a list, a rant, a piece of code, a recipe for a router. That Internet had friction. You had to type a URL. You had to remember a name. Nothing was optimized to keep you scrolling.
The Internet we got is something else. It’s a corridor of glass walls behind which algorithms try to read our pupils. The “social” platforms have become content abattoirs: human beings feeding lifelong material into a slot, in exchange for the chance to be seen for half a second by another human being who is also feeding the slot.
And lately, increasingly, the corridor isn’t even full of humans anymore. It’s full of AIs writing to AIs about what humans might want to read, while humans drift through the smoke wondering why nothing means anything.
I’m tired of being the raw material.
Digital Jugaad
There’s a word I love: jugaad. It comes from Hindi, and it names a way of solving problems with whatever is at hand: not less than what’s needed, but exactly what’s needed. The opposite of bloat. The opposite of “let’s commission a platform”. A scooter rigged into a delivery van. A water tank that doubles as a pump. A shop sign cut from a tin can.
I’ve been practicing digital jugaad for thirty years without naming it. Building small tools. Picking the lightest stack. Refusing the fashionable abstraction. Choosing the boring database. Closing the tab on the SaaS that wants to “transform” my workflow with a €300-a-month subscription and a friendly chatbot named Astrid.
This site is my latest piece of jugaad. A static Astro build. No JavaScript shipped to your browser unless strictly needed. No tracker. No cookie banner: there’s nothing to consent to. No analytics dashboard for me to refresh anxiously at 11pm. No engagement metric. No newsletter modal trying to capture your email before you’ve even read a sentence. Markdown files, one stylesheet, an RSS feed. That’s it.
If you want to read it, read it. If you want to subscribe, the RSS link is in the footer and your reader knows what to do with it. If you want to talk to me, you’ll find me. The Internet still has email.
Author, not product
The platforms I left this morning had one thing in common: on each of them, I was a product dressed up as a profile. My headline was a SKU. My experience was a search facet. My posts were unpaid content marketing for an algorithm that decided, in real time, whether my words would reach anyone at all.
The reason I leave matters more than the act of leaving. I leave because I want to write again, not “post”. Because I want the form to fit the thought, not the thought to fit the form. Because a 1,300-character box is not a constraint, it’s a leash.
A friend put it cleanly the other day: in walking away from the platforms that loot, I’m answering the only real question (who am I?) by demonstrating, in the choice itself, that I am no longer a product. I am an author with a publishing house of one.
What this site is
Three things. No more.
A CV: the one I want to show, not the one a recruiter database wants to extract. Lean, in English, current.
A blog: written when I have something to say, not when an algorithm needs to be fed. In English mostly, so the readers can be wherever readers are.
A feed: RSS only. The slowest, calmest, most respectful protocol the web ever produced. Plug it into your reader and forget about it. I won’t email you. I won’t tag you. I won’t notify you. I’ll just put words on this page and let the feed carry them out.
That’s the entire surface. No comments box. No like button. No share-this widget. If a piece is worth sharing, you’ll know how to do it. You always did.
The cost
I’m not pretending this is free of consequence. Closing LinkedIn means I lose a passive funnel for fractional-CIO mandates. MALT means I lose a marketplace where my profile was indexed against keywords I sometimes forgot I’d checked. APEC means I quietly disappear from a French database recruiters scrape on Monday mornings.
I traded those for sovereignty. I’ll find clients the way I always found the good ones: through people, through trust, through showing the work. The platforms never sent me my best clients anyway. The best ones came from a five-minute conversation with someone who had read something I’d written and recognized a tone they could work with.
That tone is what I’m going to look after now. On this site. At my pace.
Where you come in
If you’re reading this, you found this page somehow: a link, a serendipity, a friend. Thank you. Stay if you want. The RSS feed is in the footer.
And if any of this resonates (if you’ve also noticed that the platforms stopped elevating you, that the “engagement” looks more like a slow leak), I’d be curious to hear how you’re navigating it. Not in a comments thread. Just write to me. Email is fine. Letters are fine. Anything handmade is fine.
The web is not dead. It’s just been rented to people who don’t love it.
We can still build small.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. — Steve Jobs, Stanford, 2005