A carnival is a popular and spontaneous celebration. It is an opportunity to have fun with family or friends, sharing a good time. But if laughter is liberating, it is also because it is transgressive. Caricatures are corrosive and mocking; we do things we are not usually allowed to do, and we are overwhelmed by a delightful feeling of freedom.
The city of Nice began by imposing a selection for access to the carnival based on money, preventing the carnival from remaining popular.
Then they fortified the event by enclosing the carnival area with hideous black barricades, literally cutting the city in two.
To enter this bunker, you must go through all the security gateways. While countering the terrorist threat is essential, and making the security system visible can be reassuring, too many uniforms, weapons, and searches kill the spirit of the celebration and one of its essential components: freedom.
Inside the bunker, the people of Nice who paid have the right to have fun. But the event is regimented, organized down to the last detail. The carnival madness is fake since it is prearranged by the organizers.
The parade of floats, despite the talent of the carnival participants, is the climax. Mocking Trump, Merkel, or Macron is so easy! Being subversive would mean caricaturing Christian Estrosi and Eric Ciotti arguing, aggressive and ridiculous, in diapers in a sandbox…
Finally, Christian Estrosi just announced that the 2019 edition of the Nice carnival would be the occasion to test facial recognition. The people of Nice, inside the carnival bunker, become the lab rats of Estrosi’s security laboratory.
Does the city of Nice really want to know who threw confetti at whom? No, it is testing a security system never before installed in France, the land of human rights: controlling at every moment who is doing what, where, and with whom. Real-time, permanent control of the population. It’s bad science fiction, an extreme form of biopolitics. More than a security system, it’s a model of a society with a totalitarian tendency that we only see in China, in Donald Trump’s dreams, and those of any aspiring dictator, and now, in Nice.
The city of Nice has reduced the carnival celebration to an event. Then it excluded the poor who it doesn’t want to see at its celebration. Then it locked it, padlocked it, bunkerized it, to better control it. In this security laboratory that no longer amuses at all, Christian Estrosi tests a miniature society under total, permanent control through facial recognition. The Nice carnival turns into a nightmare. It was supposed to make us laugh. It scares us.
David Nakache, President of the association “All Citizens!”
