At the end of April, during the AgroParisTech school graduation evening, eight students delivered a “happening speech” from the podium, calling on students to give up their future careers as engineers so as not to become complicit in the ecological crisis. Agri-food industry, green energies, construction: “These jobs are destructive, expresses one of these ‘deserters’ at the podium, and to choose them is to harm by serving the interests of a few.” Relayed since by the Twitter account of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the leaders of the ecological and decreasing movement, the video has been viewed more than 800,000 times. The discourse it conveys is far from being limited to an isolated buzz.
The collective Pour un awakening ecological, made up of young graduates from the same educational spheres, launched for its part from May 16 to 23 a poster campaign devoted to the latest report of the Giec, inviting Parisians who take the metro to flash a QR code to obtain a synthesis of his teachings on the pretext that the media had not sufficiently highlighted them. Finally, a column published on May 11, the day after the AgroParisTech video was put online by a group of students from the Écoles normales supérieure, EffiSciences, advocates bringing together the scientific disciplines and the most important social and climatic issues. urgent.
The extension of the domain of bullshit jobs
This accumulation of non-concerted communication actions testifies that a rebellious atmosphere is rising among the young cultural elites from the Grandes Ecoles, particularly in the scientific and engineering disciplines. A few years ago, the figure of the rebel-deserter was rather that of the business school graduate in search of meaning, stuck in a open space de la Défense between endless project meetings and e-mails to deal with in cascade, who dropped everything to become a restorer, cheesemaker or cabinetmaker. In the midst of the digital transition, the senior executives who resigned were essentially seeking to rediscover the materiality of the world, hence the fetishism of manual trades which then dominated; without having disappeared, this romantic and perhaps more individualistic aspiration has been joined by a growing concern vis-à-vis climate change, the famous eco-anxiety, which is expressed by this new salvo of rebellious graduates.
Another noteworthy development is the perimeter of what the anthropologist David Graeber called the bullshit jobs in a memorable op-ed published in 2013 has only grown since then. The engineers were precisely relatively spared from the crisis of meaning. After all, their usefulness in the value chain was more easily identifiable than that of consultants, project managers and other digital communication managers. More concrete and material, their training seemed to protect them against the impression of being useless. The start-up nation for its part recruited developers who, far from their reputation as asocial geeks, became the new cool kids of the contemporary economy.
However, now, because they are moving towards the sectors of industry, living, construction, energy or mobility, engineers logically feel at the forefront of ecological and climatic challenges, as evidenced for example by the echo encountered by the work of Jean-Marc Jancovici within this population, or their presence in climate marches, regularly organized by collectives and associations.
A generational downgrade
In this galaxy of rebels, the young people of the AgroParisTech happening nevertheless belong to a more radical movement, that of the Uprisings of the Earth association, a small group with techno-critical positions which carries out actions on lands threatened by agro-industrial or real estate projects and which until then had barely accumulated a few hundred views per video. “We believe neither in sustainable development, nor in green growth, nor in ecological transition”, underlines one of its members, while another concluded the call by recommending involvement in the struggles and ZAD, the remoteness of cities and the installation in peasant agriculture, firmly rejecting the hope of “a salary which allows to take the plane, a loan over thirty years for a pavilion” and to buy an “electric SUV “.
Behind this political radicalism and this rejection of the consumer society, which cannot be generalized to their entire generation, we will point to the question of social downgrading which does indeed affect all cohorts of young graduates. As if, as the prospect of entering the skilled labor market in comfortable conditions receded, the deserters turned their backs on a less and less enviable situation…