The industrialisation of lies

We like to believe that truth has weight on its own. That good arguments win. That quality eventually rises to the top.

Raphaël Liogier argues the opposite. In his new book Success: l’industrialisation du mensonge, he describes a world in which value is increasingly manufactured, not discovered. A world where visibility produces legitimacy, and where the sheer size of a number (views, likes, citations, followers, “impact”) creates the impression of importance, regardless of substance.

This shift is not limited to social media. Liogier shows how the same logic now shapes politics, art, morality and even science: what matters is not what is true, but what travels. Not what is solid, but what scales.

In this conversation, we explore the deeper question behind the noise: if our institutions are organised around attention and measurement, how do we protect meaning, responsibility and shared reality?