Foreword

This article takes a critical look at a recent work, a critical look considered necessary for good intellectual discipline. That said, we can also allow ourselves to interpret this book as the meeting between the dreams of the heroine, Alice Recoque, and the dreams of the author, Marion Carré.

Attached is a reminder of the links between Alice Recoque and the author of the article, and a summary of the latter's opinion on the question of the presence of women in IT.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A BOOK

It was announced in June 2024 that the future European exaflop supercomputer (capable of executing a billion billion instructions per second) will be named "Alice Recoque", in line with other large systems installed in France called "Curie" or "Jean Zay". Well known for a long time in professional IT circles for having been one of the first female engineers to work on the design and construction of French computers in the mid-1950s, then for having led the Mitra 15 mini-computer project in the very early 1970s, Alice Recoque, born in 1929 and deceased in 2021, then also frequented research circles as a scientific delegate of the CII (Compagnie Internationale de l'Informatique), the industrial component of the "Plan Calcul" around the 1970s, then of Bull. She was decorated with the National Order of Merit, with the title of knight in 1978 then officer in 1985. 

How did the person who, along with thousands of other anonymous players in the technical and industrial development of France during the thirty glorious years, find herself so eminently distinguished in 2024, and elevated to the rank of France's greatest glories? How did a person who - according to some critics on Wikipedia - "simply did her job honorably" today receive the compliment of "we all have something of her in our smartphones", from the pen of high-ranking figures?

This whole process took place in a few months, and was triggered by the publication at the end of February 2024 by Editions Fayard of Marion Carré's book "Who wanted to erase Alice Recoque?", prefaced by the historian Michelle Perrot, one of the very first French intellectual figures, and subtitled "In the footsteps of a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence".

The author of the book, who heads a company specializing in the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in culture, particularly museums and monuments, is interested in the history of this AI, is intrigued by the absence of mention of women among the great names in this discipline, and is convinced that such women have existed. During her research, she randomly comes across a document mentioning Alice Recoque and her Wikipedia page. Reading this page, -which contains an extravagant assertion about Alice Recoque's role in artificial intelligence-, but also the discovery that the very existence of this page had been questioned by Wikipedia contributors -according to the usual critical review procedures- convinced her that Alice Recoque was a very great scholarly figure of Artificial Intelligence, unjustly forgotten, and forgotten because she was a woman. It is driven by this conviction that she writes her book with fervor, which is carried by a triple act of faith: 1) there were women pioneers and founders of Artificial Intelligence, 2) her heroine was one of them, a great visionary scientist and 3) there is a systemic male conspiracy to both exclude women from digital technology and erase the merits of the few who could have slipped into it.

In just a few months, we went from the book's two hundred and forty pages to the simple sentence "The most powerful supercomputer in Europe will be named Alice Recoque". The aim of this article is to study how the book will succeed in provoking in such a short time and with such efficiency a media and political momentum that will create and amplify a storytelling, to horizons that still seem limitless. We will identify the principles of book construction, which could in themselves be applied to other publishing enterprises. We will focus less on the subject of the book than on the literary genre that it represents, and the communication approach that it embodies. A general method emerges which is useful to any "advocacy officer" of a particular cause.

THE MISSION: FORCES PRESENT AND IDEA OF MANEUVER

This vocabulary borrowed from military strategy reflects the militant and complex side of the process, which involves different actors, different narrative and linguistic processes, and takes place in several phases, until an objective is achieved. Let us list the components of this process:

• • A subject, a character, as in the case of the book, but also a work, a monument, an event, a school of thought, etc.

• • Exceptional merits attributed to the subject, totally in line with major current issues

• • A theory: the existence of a systemic conspiracy led by a group of actors who have made the subject invisible, and possibly continue to do so.

• • A book, the centerpiece of the system, which is interested in the subject, believes in the theory, and wants to make the subject invisible, to do it justice in the eyes of all.

• • Opinion relays, various actors with a certain authority: authors, associations, media, politicians, who will adhere to the message of the book and then amplify it through successive chain repetitions.

• • A desired final effect: the book is a means of provoking the conditions for significant cultural or social change, in particular by establishing the subject in role model

Two scenarios may arise:

• • Or, in the process of de-invisibility, remarkable and previously hidden proven facts come to light, and they speak for themselves to support the cause defended by the book, the invoice of which then takes second place.

• • Or the revelations, the discoveries exhibited are rather tenuous or unconvincing. The book must then demonstrate a certain virtuosity to remain effective. This is the case that interests us, and it is to this case that we will focus, since it will exacerbate the features of the literary genre in question, traits necessary to not fall back on the initial objective.

START WITH A BOMB 

 It is a question of writing two hundred and forty pages on a subject on which there is little to say at the beginning, and not much more at the end. It will therefore be necessary to talk about something else, without losing sight of the initial objective. How to "hold" two hundred and forty pages? The solution is to strike very hard from the title, from the first and fourth covers, from the preface entrusted to a prestigious scientific and moral authority, from the first chapter which will take the form of the denunciation of a revolting aggression against the memory of the hero. In twenty-five pages, the essential is said.

 Better still, from the first sentence of the preface we learn explosive news, which makes us wonder how we could have been unaware of until now: none of our mobile phones would exist without the heroine's work. The book could stop there, and it would be enough to consider as obvious the decision to have named the future supercomputer after her. The other strong element of the preface is to affirm that the heroine accomplished these exploits, which today enchant our connected daily lives, while having to fight against the eternal conspiracy of men against women, particularly in the field of science and technology. A conspiracy, which, dejected at having failed to block her path to excellence, still strives in the 21st century to erase all traces of her exploits.

Equipped with such a viaticum, such a chivalrous framework, the reader will then be able to begin a long journey of more peaceful chapters, a little monotonous, but traveled with ardor for the good cause. The momentum acquired at the start will be enough to bring him to a concluding paragraph energized by the selling subject of the moment, artificial intelligence. This new territory from which women are dramatically excluded, but which they will soon dare to invest, carried by the example of the one who, according to the opening sentence, is already so present in our digital lives.

It would be quite different if it were a question of telling the overflowing and multifaceted life of a John Von Neumann, described for example in the biography devoted to him by Ananyo Bhattacharya, to remain in the field of computer architecture. In this case, the succession of chapters will keep the reader in suspense, who will be able to form his own opinion as the pages turn, or even pick out episodes at random, without having been burdened at the start with a heavy reality virtualization helmet. 

START A CHAIN ​​REACTION

Here is a key element in the construction of the effectiveness of the book: the text submitted to the preface writer must arouse in him such an impression that his first sentence will say more than all the rest of the book. And this initial impression will be so strong that, in recursive return, it will energize the reading of the whole. The preface writer influences the reading of the text that influenced him, as Edgar Morin might say.

The principle of the preface is to read first what was written last. This looping gives solidity to the whole, a bit like in boilermaking where a long, very flexible metal plate becomes a very rigid pipe by welding the opposite long edges together.

A chain reaction will take place. To understand it, we must generalize the notion of preface, which becomes the initial way – and material – with which the book is introduced to an opinion relay. It is the preface at the moment T which causes the decision to read the book, which influences the way in which it will be read, and which, ultimately, influences the creation of a new preface at time T+1, and so on. 

If we progress from reading to reading via increasingly imposing opinion relays in terms of authority, it is likely that the reading itself will be done more and more diagonally – these relays have little time – and that the passage from preface T to preface T+1 will be determined as much, if not more, by the objectives pursued by the relay than by the attentive reading of the book. 

Many of the prefaces to T +1 will simplify, amplify, or even exaggerate the preface to T. Why? Because these relays have voluntarily chosen to seize this subject among others to support their own objectives, to bring water to their own mill. For example, an association will want to motivate its members, a journalist will look for a subject that is sufficiently pleasant for his audience and to make an audience, a politician will want to prove his attachment to the defense of a cause.

This is how a kind of game of Chinese telephone begins from preface to preface. Of course, we won't win every time, some prefaces will fall flat, will not be taken up, or will be downright negative and will break the dynamic. But on the contrary, a natural selection mechanism will be put in place, with some prefaces proving more likely to be taken up and to generate other successful prefaces. We can also compare the passage from one preface to another to a genetic - and semantic? - mutation.

On the other hand, the text of the book itself, even if it is read in dotted lines, remains available and unchanged, duplicated, from mutation to mutation. It must feed the process that will result in the preface at T +1. As we will see later, the vade-mecum that it constitutes provides not only concrete elements to cite as examples, but also reasoning schemes, which will exploit a maximum of cognitive biases to guide the reader in the desired direction.

THEORY OF A GENRE: THE NOVEL OF DISINVISIBILIZATION 

An essential element of the construction of the book is that the subject has been made invisible. What we know about him does not correspond to the truth. A work of un-invisibility is then necessary. The lack of information, the lack of sources, a priori a handicap, will be transformed into a strength from the moment we believe in the existence of a plot, a conspiracy, a general atmosphere systemic, to silence, forget, erase everything positive that could be said on the subject. A conspiracy which, in an even more radical way, would have prevented him from expressing himself, from revealing himself, from accomplishing memorable deeds. 

Belief in a conspiracy against the truth requires a particular logic to be applied: if something is presented to us as false, it may be true; if a certain attribute of the subject is missing, it may be because it has been removed; if a reviewer – for example on Wikipedia – disputes a merit of the subject, it is very likely that this merit is proven, and that the reviewer is a member of the conspiracy. We take the pages of Wikipedia as gospel, while denying any credence to the devil's advocates.

A pseudo-paraconsistent modal logic  is established, in which it is the absence of information that is a presumption of information, the absence of proof that is a proof. This gives a great degree of dialectical freedom, since, in such a system, any statement can be demonstrated as true, just as, if we add to classical arithmetic the fact that 1+1 =3, it becomes easy to demonstrate that 746 = 2347.

Therefore, in addition to the known merits of the subject, there are necessarily many other positive things that are ignored since they have been erased. The little that we know, it is legitimate to touch it up, to embellish it, it is only a well thought-out restoration, a healthy response to the low works of the conspirators. Finally, by generalizing, it is more than probable that there are other subjects as worthy of interest as ours, which have never come to our knowledge for the same reasons, and whose abductive existence can only reinforce each of our demonstrations. What we know is confirmed and amplified by all that we ignore.

In this case, the un-invisibility is not the discovery of a hidden treasure, of a lost manuscript, it is not only the patient work of the archaeologist, historian or restorer who repairs the ravages of time, it is first of all the conviction that we are passing after an intentional wave of iconoclastic vandalism, and that we must think and act accordingly. With the known risk of passing imperceptibly from the role of restorer to that of forger.

These dispositions of mind when writing the book lead to a literary genre that one could call novel of disinvisibility, as appeared in the post-war period membership novels, which Pierre Daix talks about for example in “I believed in the morning”.

THE TWO EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES: AMALGAM AND DISCRIMINATION

Far from their pejorative connotation in common usage, amalgamation and discrimination play a fundamental role in science; together, they are synonymous with lucidity and rigor.

Amalgamation is saying what, to whom our subject must be assimilated, it is assigning it to categories, nomenclatures, classifications that exist or are created for the occasion. Discrimination, on the contrary, is saying what it must be differentiated from, how it is not like the others. The two notions are dual, the discriminating traits allowing us to categorize, but also to create new categories. 

In a process of de-invisibility, amalgamation and discrimination will be used intensely but in different roles.

Let us recall our scenario: the information we initially have on our subject is tenuous, and the research to increase it is not very fruitful. But we sincerely believe that this information exists, it has just been made invisible. 

On the one hand, it is necessary to restore the qualities and merits that assimilate our subject to the most prestigious categories, since these qualities and merits have been hidden or destroyed, or even hindered before they could be expressed. The amalgamation allows the subject to be assigned to these categories, and to be assimilated to their most brilliant representatives.

On the other hand, to justify the ardor of spending so much energy to make our subject shine, we must show how he is unique, exceptional, incomparable. Hence the discrimination: he is not like his peers.

The amalgamation will work in two ways. On the one hand, it will assimilate the subject to the highest representatives of the field concerned. Let's call this the ascending amalgam. The ascending amalgam consists of interpreting the smallest facts as traces left by this hidden information, and, on the basis of these traces, of reconstructing a path establishing a direct connection, an equal sign, between the subject and the most famous specimen of his species. Thus, in the case studied, a Nobel Prize winner made great discoveries on a physical phenomenon used fifty years later in the machine on which the heroine is carrying out tests. Further on, we discover that they have worn out the benches of the same school. The name of "Curie" will be cited thus a dozen times, and dozens of times other names among the greatest in science will be cited. 

Over the course of these long repeated journeys between point A and point B, the meaning of the relationship fades away – there is a loss of line as they say in the networks – and we end up “confusing” A and B. Sometimes the only common point between A and B will simply be to be cited on the same page, a bit like the name dropping practiced in cocktail conversations. The repetition of illustrious names creates an atmosphere of euphoria, even drunkenness.

On the other hand, starting from the markers of the subject's existence (his works in the case of a person, his style in the case of a work of art, etc.), we will go from one thing to another, from one consequence to another, until we reach notable facts on the scale of humanity. This is the descending amalgam. For example, in the case of a castle, it will be explained that the mechanism of its drawbridge allowed the rapid deployment of a troop which then won a battle, at the end of which... etc, etc... a famous peace treaty was signed.

So in the book that interested us, the heroine is responsible for the team of a computer project, the Mitra 15, which, like any good computer - this is the very principle of universality of the Turing Machine - will be used in multiple fields of application: space, medicine, education, energy, telecommunications, computer networks, which in turn will allow ... etc. This list, detailed and repeated ad nauseam, weaves the web that will connect our heroine to all the great scientific advances of her time and ours. And, via a set of well-known biases, the reader will quickly credit these benefits to the main character. This is what leads to the opening sentence of the preface: there is a real presence of Alice in all our phones.

While operating the ascending and descending amalgams, it is necessary to set up discrimination, which states the singular, unique, exceptional character of the subject. Done seriously, this could be a Roman task: it is no longer a question of assimilating to a few rare celebrities, but of differentiating, and potentially differentiating, very many other subjects: the entourage of a character, the castles in the surroundings, contemporary works. There is a radical way to spare oneself this work: it is to pass over in silence the very existence of an entourage. Let us never cite his colleagues, his immediate superiors, his collaborators. Since the subject is incomparable, let us not compare him. Let us make the entourage of the invisible one invisible in order to better contemplate him alone. Blindness in the service of de-invisibilization. 

In all scientific or historical rigor, it would be necessary to list the representative constituents of this entourage, to proceed on each one with the same exercise of ascending and descending amalgamation, and finally to compare all these extended portraits with each other.

We will therefore not know whether the machine developed by our subject - regardless of its qualities attested by its strong sales - is ahead of its time or similar to dozens of others, whether it set a precedent or was one of the last representatives of its kind, whether or not there existed in France itself other machines of the same type which would have had an even greater commercial success.

The final portrait thus drawn up with amalgams and discriminations is reminiscent of a religious painting by Rubens, with the character alone in the center, at the top the higher celestial powers, and at the bottom his earthly works, with rays of light descending towards the character, or springing up symmetrically towards the bottom of the painting.

THE NOVEL OF DISINVISIBILIZATION AS A HAGIOGRAPHY

Hagiography, or the life of a saint, a literary genre practiced since the beginning of the Christian era and intensively studied as such in modern times, has also given rise to the adjective "hagiographic" which in everyday language designates an excessively laudatory biography. The levers of the hagiographic genre are found in the work that interests us, in particular its three basic elements: life, passion and miracle

La passion  relates the suffering that the subject undergoes, inflicted in our case by the invisibility plot.

There are several degrees in this way of the cross:

–The subject’s accomplishments are minimized, denied or erased.

 –He is deprived of means of action: no budget, no power

–He is diverted from studies or sectors where he could be fulfilled, and comes to disrupt the established order.

        –In the worst case, we interrupt his birth

Martyrdom is the ultimate stage of passion, when the subject goes of his own accord to sacrifice. Is this imaginable in a professional life context? Yes, and a specific example is given to us: out of devotion to the all-consuming work he has been tasked with accomplishing, the subject declines international invitations to publish his scientific discoveries, and thus renounces making his genius known to the whole world, all the while knowing, an additional torture, that unscrupulous male characters will not deprive themselves of taking the place he thus leaves empty in journals and conferences. 

The miraculous, it is the ascending amalgam, the direct link, the communion with the higher authorities, comparable to apparitions. It is above all the descending amalgam of the subject with all the benefits dispensed via the wonders of his science in the case that interests us. Thanks to the Mitra 15, rockets take off, high school students learn, the sick are healed, the waves are tamed and the airs pacified.

La life, finally, it is everything else outside of these highlights. It is the chronicle of the daily life of the subject and the world around him. In the event that there is ultimately little to say about the miraculous accomplished and the passion  suffered, we must talk about something else.

 We will first expand on the presentation of the theory underlying the passion –here the theory of invisibility- by quoting at length its great authors and its great texts, without direct relation to the abuse inflicted on the subject, which will however be made credible by this illumination.

La life, it is also the story of the subject's youth, everything that happens before the start of his professional and scientific life. As in any hagiography, the story must be edifying, choose a clear line, a tone without too many nuances in the opinions and actions of the subject; we choose a camp and we stick to it. We devote a good third of the work to it, before the start of working life. We take the risk of being a little boring and banal, every family has a history with its picturesqueness, its anecdotes, its dramas and its tragedies, if not its heroes. This is not in principle the theme of the book, but on the other hand, the reader can say to himself that if we devote so many pages to it, it is indeed proof that we are dealing with someone important.

La life, it is also the general environment in which the adult life of the subject takes place, in this case the scientific, technical and especially industrial history of French computing. It is a subject very widely described by historians and essayists: the history of the Plan Calcul, the "French Ordinateurs", the "Mémoires Volées". According to the classic novelistic process, our hero goes through the great upheavals of history and, by another use of the ascending amalgamation exposed above, will appear, if not as an actor, at least as directly concerned by the events. These documentary reminders will be put to the service of the general atmosphere of the book: our subject is a victim, not only of an invisibility, but of a systematic adversity. To make it short, he will always be in the camp of the losers, a notion of loser which is articulated with a polarization between the good guys and the bad guys, good and evil. And in the end, it is the bad guys who win. Research is better than innovation, which is better than commerce. One big boss is a deserving autodidact, compared to another who is a big bourgeois never satisfied with conquests. French companies are preferable to American companies, small machines are more likeable than big ones… Chaotic events occur but they are always analyzed with a pure gaze that discerns scales of value everywhere. The virtues of our subject who survives in this hostile environment will emerge strengthened.

Finally, between the exposition of the conspiracy theory, the story of the youth, and the reminder of the major economic events of the time, there will be barely ten percent of the pages left to talk specifically about the works of the subject, which may seem quite weak for a scientific and technical personality that we want to put back on the front of the stage. A second involuntary erasure? But visibly, this does not harm the achievement of the objective. We think in reverse of the formula attributed to Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find there enough to have him hanged."

CONCLUSION 

We have outlined the elements of a hermeneutics of disinvisibilization, from the point of view not only of the study of texts, but also of the social process that the text aims to trigger. 

Ultimately, the book's entire effectiveness consists, page after page, in creating in the reader - and even more so in opinion leaders - an atmosphere, a music, a stereotype of interpretation that leads him to embrace the author's thesis. This process is done step by step. The youthful years are perceived quite naturally as factual and not very contestable, then the instruments of amalgamation and discrimination lead the reader to forge his own truth on the subject, finally, once this view is adopted, we can propose to him  a truth submitted, it, by the author, which it will then be unlikely for him not to consider as true. This change occurs gradually, the reader is accustomed to believing more and more information that is less and less credible, in a symmetrical manner to an informant who provides his spymaster with more and more valuable and compromising information. The story that is told to us thus begins with an incontestable date of birth, and ends with a chapter that seems extremely far removed from reality, and which nevertheless will give its subtitle to the work, current events oblige. The circle is complete. One can always wonder to what extent, during the writing of the book, the author is not within reach of the same effects.

***

I thank Philippe Capet for his encouragement, his inspiration for the title, and his careful rereading.

Annexe 1

I was in close professional contact with Alice Recoque from 1980 until her retirement around 1987, within the company CII Honeywell Bull, which became Groupe Bull. I later met her at the Fredrik Bull Institute, which she attended assiduously, and of which I am now president. It is in this latter capacity that I took the initiative to organize, on November 30, 2022, in cooperation with the Musée des Arts et Métiers and the Société Informatique de France, a day of tribute to four personalities: Alain Colmerauer, François Anceau, Alice Recoque and Michel Hugon. One of Alice Recoque's characteristics at work was her great devotion to the missions entrusted to her. She was keen to carry them out with discipline, ignoring any consideration of baronies, cliques or personal questions, and without playing an individual game. We appreciated each other. She had entrusted me with the continuation of her computer architecture course at ISEP, and her succession in the expert committee of the European machine translation project EUROTRA.

Annexe 1

On the issue of the low proportion of women in the IT world, I believe that, nowadays, young girls and women do not like IT very much simply because they find it not very "friendly", a feeling that I share. IT is constantly evolving in a rather disorderly manner, according to advances in hardware and colossal investments, with players for whom only speed counts, aiming to be the first on the market. This sacrifices, in particular with regard to current programming practices, many requirements of elegance, rigor and consistency, and necessarily induces among programmers a risk of sloppy work, "quickly done, badly done". This attitude is even glorified and claimed in this quote from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin, and famous venture capitalist : " If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late ". Perhaps some women prefer to leave this type of behavior to men, mirroring the early days of computer science, when men left programming, considered less than noble, to women. I also have a good experience of teaching computer science. I have almost always found that, in mixed pairs in practical work, it is the female element that designs, pilots, and supervises the actual coding, left to the other party. If employers want to attract more women, they should first consider encouraging them to access well-paid project manager positions. Finally, since computer science is not a law of nature but a series of human choices, and since it is in our eyes profoundly improvable, why not explore the idea of ​​finding a way - which is not easy - to encourage the emergence of new concepts and new tools, within a predominantly female environment.