From Belfort to Nendaz

The essay opens with a personal trajectory: Porrentruy, Belfort, Strasbourg, Lille, Bordeaux, Paris, then back to Haute-Nendaz. A descent, if measured by city size. An ascent, if measured otherwise. Two technological shifts, remote work and then generative AI, made this trajectory plausible where it would have been inconceivable twenty years ago. Alongside this trajectory stands the bisse Vieux: an irrigation channel predating 1658, which draws water where it is abundant and carries it to where it is scarce. This alpine redistribution technology serves as the essay's founding image. Generative AI acts, in the cognitive realm, the way this bisse would act on a continental scale: it takes the intelligence accumulated in urban hubs and makes it available, at a collapsed marginal cost, in valleys, villages, and isolated practices. Valais, by its history, is unusually well placed to grasp this shift and to make something of it. Above the author's home, the fibre-optic cable runs a few metres from the bisse Vieux: two channels running down the same slope that no one ever thought to look at together. The essay was born of that oversight.