A company that once pitched itself as extraterritorial now measures success by how deeply it is wired into national jurisdictions. That’s a notable political shift from seeing itself as literally above the law to trying to become the law.

Many years ago I was invited into a high security meeting enclave on the Facebook campus. After multiple physical security checks and pat-downs, and being escorted into the room, I found myself among ex-military advisors plotting “Aquila” drones. It was 100% clear that Facebook delivering “Internet” over contested ground from a neighboring country was privatized military intelligence. I couldn’t get out of there and take a shower fast enough.

I called it intelligence collection by elevated platform in 2018, three months after Facebook shut the program.

As those Air Force mercenaries soon discovered the drones were never above the law, and Facebook in 2016 had failed politically before Aquila ever finished a test flight.

I’m not a lawyer but sovereign airspace has no altitude ceiling. The U-2-reminiscent platform plan for 90K ft still needs the same national spectrum license as a tower on the ground. The ITU identified spectrum for high-altitude platforms, and every country licenses that spectrum on its own terms. India’s regulator proved the point in February 2016 by banning Free Basics on zero-rating grounds. Nothing physical had to be blocked when Facebook lost at the licensing layer. Four months later Aquila’s first full-scale flight ended in a structural failure on final approach near Yuma, flying without an airworthiness certificate, and the second flight in 2017 did not solve the underlying problem, which also stalled Zephyr: a solar airframe cannot carry a useful payload and survive the night at anything but equatorial latitudes. Loon, the balloon program, closed in January 2021 when Alphabet could find no commercial case for it.

Inside the high walls of the Facebook campus it was like humanity didn’t matter, money-fueled madness made anything possible (e.g. Musk’s “occupy Mars” is a campaign to abolish laws and replace with an Emperor). Outside, the laws broke every power-hungry fantasy. That’s why Facebook shut the airframe program in June 2018 and said Airbus would build the aircraft instead (e.g. Tesla initially had Lotus build its cars to avoid itself having to operate within the law); and that partnership faded quietly.

Fast forward to today and Meta has announced an engineering nothing-burger.

We’re announcing Petal, the first subsea cable with petabit capacity to be deployed across an ocean. Petal will connect the US and France, spanning 7,000 km (over 4,300 miles) and doubling the capacity of today’s most advanced transoceanic cables.

The doubling comes from two-core fiber rather than more strands, which is why the announcement leans on “without proportional power or infrastructure.” That is also a concentration-of-risk claim: same number of cables, same landing points, same Baltic and Red Sea failure modes, now carrying twice as much per cut.

The real constraint was voltage, not glass. The repeaters split each 2-core fiber into two single-core paths with a fan-in/fan-out interface, amplify, then recombine, which keeps the system under the existing 18 kV power-feed rating and avoids requalifying the whole subsea ecosystem. Meta doubled capacity by staying inside the old certification envelope. Meh. Or should I say Meh-ta?

It is a cable for moving Meta’s own traffic between its US and EU data centers, increasingly AI training and inference that seeks EU exposure and dependence on American compute.

Read between the lines and it is a political science post, without technical significance, dressed up as something engineers did. Meta stopped trying to route around states and started embedding in them instead. It plans to land in France with Orange as landing party, which puts Meta inside French critical-infrastructure policy, inside French lawful-intercept obligations, and at the table when governments talk about cable protection. That is a far more politically durable position than hoping nobody touches an aircraft too fragile to survive its landing.

Colonization by cable is probably the right way to read the news, if you consider history. Paris learned what happened in the Fashoda Crisis of 1898 from a British telegram routed through Cairo, and when Britain censored the cables during the Boer War the next year, France started building a state-owned network to Africa.

The two major colonial powers sought to link their colonies via a vast railway network: Britain from Cairo to Cape Town, and France from Dakar to Djibouti. The town of Fashoda, situated at the intersection of these two planned lines, became a critical focal point for both armies. On September 18, 1898, Marchand’s French mission and Kitchener’s British expedition came face to face on the Upper Nile. Ordered to withdraw, France yielded and was forced to acknowledge British authority over the entire Nile basin. This defeat led to a redivision of African colonies between the British and the French.

Ask yourself what will Meta censor for Trump when the EU goes to war?

On the current cable at Le Porge Meta holds more than 80%, Orange gets two of sixteen fiber pairs for landing it, and the ownership split is not public.

Guess why it’s not public. On the US side the FCC landing license for Amitié went to Microsoft, and since 2020 the FCC refers cable landing applications with foreign ownership to a Justice Department-led committee that can condition the license on a national security agreement. Whatever the licensee agreed to in Washington is part of the deal France landed.

Petal goes to NEC and Sumitomo, two years after the French state bought 80% of Alcatel Submarine Networks to keep cable building sovereign, and seven years after the Senate warned in 2019 that these infrastructures must not be held exclusively by foreign entities.

France keeps one thing. Le Monde reported in 2014 from the Snowden files that Orange’s landing stations give the DGSE access to everything transiting the country, sorted by origin.

Meta owns the cable. France owns the landing and reads it. That is the same arrangement France rejected in 1898, with the tap as consolation, and good luck to France when it remembers why.

The Academie Goncourt struck a novel from its longlist on Friday, four days after an anonymous account with 92 followers declared it the work of a machine. The evidence was a single commercial detector. AFP ran the same passages through its own tool and got “very likely written by a human.” Seven other detectors disagreed with each other.

The book stayed struck. The Goncourt cited the plagiarism findings alongside the detector, but the claim by an anonymous account with a contested tool was clearly targeting the author.

The author is Thelyson Orelien, 38, born in Gonaives, Haiti, resident in Montreal since 2010. His first novel, C’etait ca ou mourir, follows a teacher fleeing gang violence to Canada. It won the Prix du Roman Fnac on Monday 21 September. The accusation from “Balance ton Claude” landed the same day. By Thursday his Quebec publisher had suspended promotion, a book fair had withdrawn his guest of honour title, and two newspapers had found borrowed passages in columns and a short story he wrote in 2012 and 2014. By Friday the Goncourt had acted “to preserve the integrity of the prize” and its mission of crowning “literature written by women and men.”

On Thursday Le Figaro identified the attack account’s operator as one of its own columnists, Samuel Fitoussi, author of Woke Fiction. He had denied involvement to AFP several times that week. He had also been among the first to repost the anonymous accusation from his own named account, boosting himself. On Friday he confirmed a “collective project” whose other members remain unnamed. Asked about the racial dimension, he called the question conspiracist. The president of the Academie Goncourt had already told franceinfo why he thought the timing mattered: a Haitian, Canadian, Black, francophone foreigner, in a season when passions run high.

Fitoussi’s stated motive is fear, that AI will end human writing. Yet he is an associate member of Frst, a Paris fund that finances AI startups and that began life as Otium Ventures under the Catholic billionaire Pierre-Edouard Sterin. The detector he relied on, Pangram, raised $9 million in July in a round led by Menlo Ventures, an investor in Anthropic, whose assistant gave the account its name.

Black authors in the French and English worlds have been asked to prove they wrote their own books for 250 years.

Phillis Wheatley was examined by eighteen Boston men in 1772, Governor Thomas Hutchinson among them, before a London publisher would print her poems. Their signed certificate that she had written them opens the 1773 edition. Bakary Diallo, a Senegalese rifleman, published Force-Bonte in Paris in 1926 and was assumed for decades to have had it written by his French patrons. Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi (1954) was attributed in 2002 by the scholar Adele King to two Belgians in Paris, his landlord and a reader at his publisher. Yambo Ouologuem won the Renaudot in 1968 for Le Devoir de violence, faced plagiarism charges from 1971, and published nothing after 1972.

A white author gets the opposite treatment. Michel Houellebecq copied Wikipedia passages into La Carte et le Territoire, admitted it, called it collage, and won the 2010 Goncourt anyway.

Orelien is compiling a dossier with his editor to prove he wrote his own book, like Wheatley stood before eighteen examiners in Boston over 250 years ago.

The information warfare against Black authors hasn’t changed much.