From Belfort to Nendaz

I was born in Porrentruy, in the Swiss Jura, and grew up on the other side of the border, in Belfort, in the 1970s. A middling city in eastern France: just under fifty thousand people, Alstom and Peugeot playing the part of the great employers, a crossing point between Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté. And, as in every middling French city of that era, a horizon that went without saying: Paris. The Jacobin model left no room for nuance. Demanding studies, careers that mattered, the century being made, all of it happened in the capital. You left Belfort the way you board a train, without asking whether another direction existed.

I followed the marked path. Strasbourg, Lille, Bordeaux, and finally Paris, each stop denser and better connected than the last, until Parisian concentration came to seem like the natural condition for whatever came next. There I founded a digital company that I grew to a hundred and twenty employees across three countries, and which today belongs to a Swiss group. Paris gave me an education, prestigious employers, an international career. And then, over the years, the awareness of a gap. I wouldn't go so far as to call it uprootedness: I loved what I did, and I loved the cities where I did it. But the place where I lived and the place where I located something that belonged to me were not the same.

That place was Haute-Nendaz. My uncle owned a house there, where he would invite us as children for the ski holidays. It was there that I first looked seriously at the Valais peaks, and made myself the kind of childhood promise whose weight you don't yet grasp: that I would buy here one day. Buying, in my mind at the time, meant a second home; that was the highest projection one could reasonably form. Settling for good in an alpine village at nearly 1,400 metres, several hours from any European capital, simply made no sense within the economics of skilled services as I went on to practise them. To reassure a client, run a team, take part in the conversations that mattered, you had to be in the city. No one thought of it as a constraint. It was the air one breathed.

Two technological shifts changed that. First remote work, whose use spread after 2020. It loosened the constraint without lifting it: you could work from a distance, but the idea that distance would come at no cost remained suspect, in the eyes of employers and clients alike. Then generative artificial intelligence, more recent and, I believe, more profound. It does not merely make distance possible; it erases part of the reasons distance was held against you in the first place. A skilled, well-equipped team can now produce, from anywhere, work that no longer differs meaningfully from what it would produce in a major economic capital. The shift is not complete, but it is already visible. And the tax framework that makes such paths workable, whether for a Swiss resident relocating between cantons or for an internationally qualified professional taking up residence, has stabilised enough in recent years to be relied upon; I return to this in chapter 13.

It's this change that allowed me to keep the promise, though not in the way I'd imagined. I didn't come to buy shutters that stay closed eleven months out of twelve. I settled here, with my wife and our two youngest children, to take part in the life of a village and a canton, not merely to observe it from afar. Our three eldest stayed in Paris. My consulting practice in artificial intelligence is based in Valais and serves Swiss and international clients. The full trajectory reads like this: Porrentruy, Belfort, Strasbourg, Lille, Bordeaux, Paris, a return to Switzerland, and finally the mountain. In terms of city size, it's a descent. I experience it as the exact opposite.

If I open this essay with this journey, it isn't because I find it exemplary. It isn't, and everyone has their own, shaped by their own constraints and freedoms. But it raises the question that occupies me throughout this book: why does a path that would have been almost incomprehensible twenty years ago become a realistic option for a growing number of people? And what does that change for the places capable of receiving them?

What the Valaisans have always known

Through the commune where I live runs an irrigation channel known as the bisse Vieux, one of the traditional Valais watercourses that carry water down from the heights to the fields below. Its first written mention predates 1658¹. It draws its water much higher up, on the Printze, and carries it by gravity, along a patient course of several kilometres, down to the meadows, orchards and pastures of Haute-Nendaz and Basse-Nendaz. Without it, this land would yield almost nothing: at this altitude, rainfall alone isn't enough to grow what's cultivated there. With it, these channels have fed families for four centuries.

We're inclined to file the bisses away as folklore. That misses what they actually are: a technology of redistribution. A bisse fetches water where it is abundant, at the glacier, at the high mountain torrent, and carries it to where it is scarce but the land is fertile. It produces nothing itself; it moves things. And that movement, modest as it looks, carried the whole of the traditional alpine economy: vines on the slope, hay meadows, villages that lived off both.

This intelligence is old. The earliest attested bisses date to the Middle Ages, and the rules that keep them running were sometimes set down in writing as early as the fifteenth century. In Törbel, in the Upper Valais, the 1483 communal pact governing the use of water, forests and alpine pastures held for five centuries. It was this case, among others, that Elinor Ostrom came to study, and it fed the theory of the commons that earned her the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009². For the generations who dug and then maintained them, the bisses were never poetic objects. They were devices at once technical, economic and institutional, infrastructure for survival in the strictest sense.

If I place this channel at the threshold of the essay, it's because it helps us see what is happening right now, on an entirely different scale.

A different kind of water, flowing back down

For a century, the world's economic intelligence behaved like water at altitude. It accumulated in a handful of urban hubs that drew in talent, capital, schools, head offices, peer networks. These places functioned as reservoirs with no outlet: what was produced in Geneva, London or San Francisco stayed there, unless you came in person to fetch it. That's what the generations who left did. That's what I went to Paris to do.

Generative artificial intelligence is changing this mechanism, and we barely grasp the scale of the change. It takes the intelligence accumulated in the great urban reservoirs, the corpora, the proven methods, the sedimented expertise, and makes it available, at collapsed marginal cost, wherever it was lacking: in the valleys, in four-person firms, in businesses too small to afford the big names of consulting. It does not manufacture expertise. The metropolises will keep producing it in bulk, and their cognitive capital will remain denser than elsewhere for a long time yet. What it does is redistribute what, until now, was never redistributed.

In practical terms, a consultant based in the mountains today produces what a small team produced five years ago. A four-person accounting firm handles files that until yesterday were the preserve of international practices. A doctor in a valley clinic has document-analysis capabilities that no hospital library ever possessed. And, symmetrically, competition that rested purely on cost differentials or on the genericness of standardised solutions, offshore development, the one-size-fits-all SaaS platform, the low-cost agency, stops being the trump card it had become; the advantage persists, but it is once again open to challenge. A skilled Swiss team, well augmented, recovers economic conditions it hadn't enjoyed since the industrialisation of services.

Generative AI is the cognitive bisse of our time. And Valais, by virtue of what its history has bequeathed it, is arguably the best-placed territory in Western Europe to understand what it can do, and to make something of it.

Why now

The window is open; it isn't guaranteed. You can already read it in the figures: hundreds of people from Vaud and Geneva settle in the canton each year, several thousand cumulatively over the decade³. You can read it in individual trajectories like mine, and in a shift that has no name yet in public debate but is already visible, case after case, across every skilled profession. The places that position themselves now will capture this movement; those that wait will inherit whatever is left.

The window depends on a conjunction of factors, and conjunctions don't last. The technology is mature, usable now by non-specialists: that's the most visible condition. At the same time, more quietly, the major metropolises are losing their grip on talent, caught between property costs, declining quality of life, and the back-and-forth between remote work and office life, with no one quite sure how long that will last. And politics still takes an interest in territorial questions, an attention that other emergencies will eventually claim. These conditions won't realign on command. It is now, at the midpoint of the decade, that the choices get made, or fail to get made, that will shape the Valais trajectory for the next fifteen or twenty years.

The trap of the false dilemma

Faced with an opening like this, the immediate reflex is to pour it into the old debate that has structured discussion in Valais for far too long: tradition or modernity, defend the bisses or lay the fibre, keep the bourgeoisies or modernise governance, preserve the folklore or fall in line with international standards.

I hold this opposition to be false, and not out of intellectual comfort, but from knowing what Valais tradition actually consists of. A bourgeoisie, a consortage, an alpine cooperative are not museum pieces. They are governance institutions that have been solving, for centuries, problems that urban modernity has barely learned to formulate: deciding collectively on the use of a finite resource, sustaining a collective investment across several generations without selling it off or nationalising it, reconciling each person's rights with the good of all.

And these are exactly the questions the digital transition raises today, with an urgency that has no precedent. Who owns the data, and the models? Who decides how they are used, and who answers for that over time? If we take Valais tradition for what it is, a proven experiment in governance rather than heritage kept under glass, then our relationship to modernity changes in kind. It is no longer a matter of preserving, but of activating.

I want to press this point: the image of the bisse is not decorative. The stone bisse and the cognitive bisse obey the same mechanics. Capture a resource where it is abundant, carry it to where it is scarce, distribute it according to rules everyone knows, maintain it, pass on the responsibility for it. What the Valaisans did for seven centuries with water, they can do again with intelligence. They even have a rare advantage: they don't have to invent this logic. It is already written into their living institutions.

A thesis

This is the intuition the following pages unfold. Here it is, as plainly as I know how to state it:

Valais doesn't have to choose between tradition and modernity. It has a historic opportunity to make its tradition the very infrastructure of its modernity. Artificial intelligence redistributes, at a cognitive scale, what the urban hubs concentrated over the course of a century, and it does so according to a logic that Valais institutions have practised for seven hundred years in another domain. The opportunity rests on an alignment specific to the canton: a rare institutional regime, abundant decarbonised energy, an alpine geography that is becoming an asset again in the age of climate and computation, a still-living relationship to the commons, languages and know-how that digital tools can document and pass on rather than erode. This alignment coincides, by a happenstance history owed us nothing, with the industrial and political moment we are living through. Seizing it demands explicit choices. Missing it would be an inexcusable failure, because the ingredients were there.

I make this case before a specific reader: whoever decides, or carries weight in the deciding. In the Conseil d'État and the Grand Conseil, in the departments of the cantonal administration, in the bourgeoisies and their federation, at the Chambre valaisanne de commerce et d'industrie, in the agricultural trade associations, at the Hôpital du Valais, at the HES-SO Valais-Wallis and at Idiap, in the communes and their umbrella bodies, among the social partners, and in the businesses that make up the economic fabric of the canton. I am writing neither for an academic panel nor for a metropolitan reader whom the Alps might distract for a season. I am writing for those engaged in the life of this territory who want to understand what is happening, and what can be made of it. If the wider French-speaking Swiss public finds something here too, so much the better, and it won't be by chance: what is at stake here concerns all of French-speaking Switzerland, and more broadly the alpine territories of Europe that watch Valais the way one watches something that might just be worth attempting.

A stance, and a method

I begin with where I live, and with how I came to live there. This is a stance, deliberately taken. It is, above all, a method: questions of territory are not well handled from Geneva, nor from Bern. They are handled on the versants where they arise, those mountainsides and slopes that in Valais are as much a way of life as a landscape, because that is where institution, memory and decision are found together.

And it is on these very versants, incidentally, that the bisses run. Above my house, the fibre-optic cable runs a few metres from the bisse Vieux. Two parallel channels, the old and the new, running down the same slope without anyone thinking to look at them side by side. This essay grew out of that inattention, and out of the wish to correct it.