Christophe Wiest, the author of this dystopia, is an expert in telecommunications and connected systems, with more than 20 years of experience on high-stakes projects — product launches, industrialization, deployment, and support — within major players in the sector, including Bouygues Telecom, Alcatel, and TCL.

It was somewhat by chance that he stumbled upon the works of Asma Mhalla — a discovery that led him to see the digital world from a radically different angle. The concepts she develops around the Dileviathan — that fusion of Big State and Big Tech — resonated with his hands-on experience and planted the seeds of this novel.

This novel is a work of fiction. The mechanisms it describes are not: cognitive saturation, the merging of the State with technology giants, the dissolution of public debate into the algorithmic stream.

The idea of the Dileviathan comes from the work of Asma Mhalla, political scientist and author of Cyberpunk: Le nouveau système totalitaire (Seuil, 2026). She coined this portmanteau by contracting digital and Léviathan. It designates the alliance of Big State and Big Tech: a hybrid power that no longer operates through law but through the architecture of systems that capture our attention, shape our perceptions, and short-circuit our capacity to think for ourselves.

The Dileviathan is the moment when politics becomes an app feature. When every citizen is simultaneously voter, product, and soldier in a continuous cognitive war. When democracy retains its form — ballot boxes, campaigns, debates — but loses its substance, replaced by a simulacrum administered from data centers.

This novel transposes these ideas into a French presidential race in 2027. Gabriel Moreau is a candidate who discovers that the game has been rigged from the start. He is not a hero. He is a man who refuses to consent.

The concepts belong to Asma Mhalla, who invites us to look at what is already here.
May this book remain a work of fiction.