iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 13/09/2026

Picture taken on a beautiful trek this week. In the foreground, the Clarée Valley; in the background, the Écrins massif.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 07/08/2026

Manufacturing added 47k jobs since 2022; information lost 204k. Where is Big Tech's broad job creation? Is construction—the fourth-largest gain—itself being boosted by the AI frenzy and the building of data centres?

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 07/08/2026

US job growth is stalling. The three-month average has fallen from almost 280k jobs a month in early 2023 to around 20k; payrolls fell by 23k in July. The composition is no less worrying.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 06/08/2026

While optimism about AI companies continues to lift stock markets, public attitudes towards the technology reflect more anxiety than excitement in the US, the UK and France.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 27/07/2026

Counting down to the midterms: containment or doubling down on tyranny?

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 27/06/2026

1/3 John Adams thought democracy never lasts long. The last 250 years proved him wrong. Why has US democracy endured? Has human nature changed? Have vanity, pride, avarice and ambition given way to political virtue? I doubt it.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 09/06/2026

4/5 In this context, authoritarian temptation rarely appears as “I want less freedom”. It enters as efficiency, order, anti-corruption, revenge against elites, or national restoration — a shortcut to a more “real” popular rule, while putting a veil over liberty when needed.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 09/06/2026

1/5 AP-NORC: only about two-thirds of US adults now say democratically elected government is central to US identity, down from 80% in 2021. Only about one-third say the American Dream still holds true; 51% say it once did but no longer does. apnews.com/article/ap-p...

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 08/06/2026

The excerpt from "The Radicalism of the American Revolution"

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 25/05/2026

“Only rarely do attempts to capture the meaning of the #Constitution begin in the actual text of the compact. This is a missed opportunity, because the key to the document’s interpretation is present in plain sight already in the preamble.”

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 15/05/2026

We often reduce the #state to one dominant dimension: contractual consent, the “monopoly of legitimate violence” (Weber), or a revenue-extracting entity that provides protection in return, in a Northian perspective. This framework helps combine these approaches instead of opposing them.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 14/04/2026

In the 6th century BCE, Solon offered the Athenians a response to a political crisis driven by inequality: good order grounded in law. Today, that ancient wisdom is worth recalling. Could we, as Solon did, place politics and justice above the economy?

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 14/02/2026

Could virtue nowadays be a remedy for the economy’s centrality, the authoritarian drift, or rising inequalities? #Montesquieu

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 27/01/2026

R. Whatmore offers a timely intellectual and political history of the late 18th c., centred on Britain and France: mercantilism & empires vs liberalism, fanaticism vs moderation, luxury & corruption vs political principles. Do we need a new #Enlightenment?

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 20/01/2026

From the start, US #equality was Janus-faced: universal in language, exclusionary in practice. Middlekauf shows how ‘created equal’ coexisted with slavery and the denial of rights to free Blacks. Today’s politics still echoes that unresolved contradiction.

Robert Middlekauf, "The Glorious Cause". Jefferson and the US meaning of equality.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 12/10/2025

The Chartreuse, adorned in its autumn colours.

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Damien Gimenez @damiengimenez.fr · 04/02/2025

GDP and productivity at the expense of democracy, equality, environment, mental health, trust... The cost of being economically great nowadays. stateofnation.org

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