Nuits sonores Lab 2025

The year 2025 opened with an image: Elon Musk, the head of one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, as well as Tesla and SpaceX, making two Nazi salutes at the inauguration of the new President of the United States of America. It was a gesture that crystallises the alliance between reactionary nationalism and techno-capitalism, one further reinforced by the funding given to Donald Trump by Meta and Spotify. But what consequences will the concentration of power in the hands of the broligarchy have for the rest of the world? How can we fight back against the spread of racist and sexist ideologies that impose the law of the strongest on a global scale? And, how can the independent culture sector continue to exist and equip itself to contend with these platforms, upon which it still relies for visibility?

The rise of MAGMA (Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon) is symptomatic of the profound recalibration of the global economy in favour of Big Tech. According to economists Cédric Durand and Yánis Varoufákis, we are now witnessing the advent of techno-feudalism, in which digital giants are progressively supplanting the traditional mechanisms of capitalism. Their domination is built around cloud capital; the platforms are fuelled by the income generated from the free contributions of internet users.

With 90% of online searches controlled by Google, and YouTube and Instagram reaching more than 2.5 billion users in 2023, the concentration of global data in the possession of a handful of companies poses an immense threat to democracy. Enjoying a virtual monopoly on new information and communication technologies, the MAGMA giants are exerting a worrying influence over the public debate via their complex algorithms.

This hyper-control over information has also given rise to techno-political meddling in conflicts, which could have dramatic consequences in times of geopolitical crisis. In December 2023, a Human Rights Watch report accused Meta of systematically censoring Palestinian voices around the world on Instagram and Facebook, thereby obstructing the dissemination of information on Israeli war crimes and limiting the mobilisation of international support.

Furthermore, since 7 October 2023, investigations by the independent media outlets +972 and Local Call have revealed the Israeli army’s considerable reliance on technologies developed by Google, Microsoft and Amazon – which, according to one of its spokespersons, provide it with greater “operational effectiveness” in carrying out its ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

In Europe, the European Commission has opened an investigation into TikTok following suspicions of Russian interference in the Romanian presidential elections. The Romanian authorities have accused the Chinese application of facilitating the manipulation of the 2024 elections in favour of Calin Georgescu, the pro-Russian far-right candidate who surprised everyone by winning the first round on 24 November. Despite Meta and TikTok having taken measures to ban Russian state media in order to combat foreign interference since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the platforms remain powerful tools for Russian propaganda. On the internet, various European countries have fallen victim to disinformation attacks, such as those carried out by the APT28 hacker group or the Russian network Portal Kombat, aimed at weakening Western support for Ukraine.

In 2025, it has become more essential than ever to deconstruct the fictions shaped by engineers of chaos, and to decolonise the narratives of the past in order to strengthen our understanding of the present and build for the future. In addition to international tension, economic crises and geopolitical conflicts, structural challenges are having an impact on our cultures, our democracies and our collective imagination. In the face of this urgent situation, Nuits Sonores Lab is opening up a space for debate, reflection and resourcefulness at the heart of the festival, so that we can collectively claim the upper hand on this new techno-political frontline.