Essay by **Asma Mhalla**, political scientist, published on **September 20, 2026** on her Substack newsletter *Dangerous Ideas* (~2,300 words, five parts titled in English), written on returning from a European tour — Madrid, Milan, Brussels — where within the same hour she was discussing AI, Meloni, the AfD, and sovereignty. She argues that September's AI sequence and the rise of nationalist parties are **two faces of the same anxiety**: the fear of becoming superfluous. **(A)** The cross-cutting observation: the viral resignation of **Jacob Coxon** (ex-OpenAI/Anthropic) on September 9, **Hinton** estimating that there is *"maybe a year"* left to put guardrails in place, divided executives (Amodei, Altman, Huang) — and, at the ballot box, **AfD at 43.8%** in Saxony-Anhalt, Vannacci's **Futuro Nazionale** around **7.5%**, Le Pen at **34-36%** in the first round. She withholds judgment on the probability of extinction and defers to the rapport international de sécurité de l'IA. **(B)** The mechanism: the word *replacement*, which first denotes a sensation — *"something could carry on without me"* —, and **retrofuturism**, read through **Jeffrey Herf**'s *Reactionary Modernism* (1984): the authoritarian right never fought technology, it detached it from the market and handed it to the nation. *"Technology is never the enemy. It is spoils."* When AI's producers say they no longer know how to govern it, they supply the vocabulary (control, frontier, sovereignty) to those who promise restoration. The thesis is not an electoral causality but a **narrative compatibility**. On the European side, extends [[wallace-wells-nyt-magazine-ai-populism-altman-backlash-no-one-ready-2026-05-08]].
#fear of becoming superfluous#replacement#narrative compatibility
Long-form article published on **X** on **August 11, 2026** by **Jesse Zhang**, CEO of **Decagon** (customer-service AI agents), under a dilemma-shaped title — *« To FDE, or not to FDE? »* — devoted to the **Forward Deployed Engineer**, which has become *« the answer to almost every hard question in AI go-to-market »*. Starting observation: Anthropic and OpenAI have built enterprise deployment arms explicitly modeled on Palantir, *« every seed-stage company »* advertises an FDE offering, and job postings for the title are said to be up several hundred percent in a year. **(A) The Palantir genealogy** supplies the framework: **Shyam Sankar**'s (CTO) formula, *« FDEs eat pain and excrete product »*, and **Joe Lonsdale**'s reminder that Palantir spent nearly two decades being called a *« glorified consultancy »* on the basis of an accurate observation. **Gotham**'s bespoke deployments (CIA, NSA, military intelligence) were encoded into platform primitives — ontology, object models, permissions, workflow engines, provenance tracing — which became **Foundry**, then Apollo and AIP; standardization pushed gross margin into the 80% range and Palantir moved from an FDE motion to account-based selling, with many FDEs migrating into core engineering. *« The pain was the input to the product, not a cost of sale. »* **(B) The criterion proposed** is not to give up on FDEs but to know when to stop: go early, then ask whether one is still **discovering** — *« The trap is not starting. It's not stopping. »* **(C) A distinction few make: FDE ≠ implementation.** *« Building that integration into their ticketing system »* is real work, but it is execution against a known spec, not discovery of an unknown one; conflating the two *« is how a company convinces itself that a growing services org is a product investment »*. Closing line: *« If your FDEs are eating pain and excreting more pain, you don't have an FDE team. You have a services business. »* Two figures are put forward about Decagon — *« two-thirds of deployment work is now done autonomously via Duet »* and *« a few days on average to launch the first AOP, even for large banks, airlines, telcos »* — without the "deployment work" denominator being defined or the AOP acronym spelled out.
#Forward Deployed Engineer#FDE#engineer embedded with the client
**Jesse Zhang** — cofondateur et **CEO de Decagon** (agents IA de service client, San Francisco) · 85 000 abonnés sur X · site personnel `jessezhang.org`. Il cite son cofondateur **Ashwin Sreenivas** · **ex-Palantir** · d'où la profondeur du récit Palantir. Publié le **11 août 2026**.