The recent skirmishes between the French authorities and X have all the hallmarks of a classic Gallic drama. On one side, we have the French state, wielding the digital equivalent of a Napoleonic decree; on the other, a tech behemoth that views national borders with the same disregard a teenager has for a "Keep Off the Grass" sign.

But beneath the headlines about fines and blockades lies a much deeper sociological shift. We are witnessing the slow-motion collision of two incompatible operating systems: the Westphalian nation-state and the borderless digital platform.

France’s move to curb certain types of speech on X - often under the banner of preventing hate or disinformation, is an attempt to reassert sovereignty over a space that has, for the last decade or two, felt like a lawless frontier. Now authorities are trying to take a chaotic, open forum and redesign it so you only see what’s deemed safe or orderly.

The irony, of course, is that speech is remarkably like water. When you dam it up in one place, it simply finds a new crack to seep through. By turning X into a legal battleground, we aren't necessarily "fixing" discourse; we are just professionalising the friction.

In the 18th century, if you wanted to subvert the French state, you printed pamphlets in the Netherlands and smuggled them across the border in carts of hay. Today, the hay is a VPN and the pamphlet is a 280-character post. The technology has changed, but the human impulse to circumvent the gatekeeper remains identical. What we’re really seeing is the end of the "Global Village" myth. We are moving toward a Splinternet, where your browsing experience depends entirely on which GPS coordinates your phone is broadcasting.

Perhaps the real insight here isn't about X at all, but about our own expectations. We wanted the internet to be like a hippy commune; instead, it’s becoming a series of gated communities, each with its own increasingly irritable HOA. As the French might say: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more technology changes, the more we find ourselves arguing about the same old boundaries.

"I demand to have some insights here! I demand to have some insights, and I demand them now!"

In 1969, Withnail and Marwood fled the damp squalor of Camden for a rejuvenating holiday in the Lake District, only to find themselves trapped in a freezing cottage with nothing but a savoy cabbage and the terrifying realisation that they were entirely unequipped for the environment.

Fifty-five years later, we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We packed our bags for a comfortable digital upgrade - slicker spreadsheets, perhaps a Siri that can do more than set an alarm to remind us when to take the dinner out of the oven - and have instead arrived at a bleak, howling moor where the local flora (Large Language Models) is trying to eat us, and the tech-bro residents speak a language we don’t quite understand.

We have, quite inadvertently, gone on holiday to the future by mistake.

The great Rory Sutherland often reminds us that the "logical" solution is rarely the "human" one. In our rush to outsource cognitive function, we’ve forgotten that the value of a thing often lies in its friction. Withnail’s tragedy was his refusal to adapt to a world that didn’t care about his acting credentials; our tragedy is the assumption that a world run by generative algorithms will still care about our authenticity.

We are currently in the "Camberwell Carrot" phase of AI. We’ve rolled something so large, so potent, and so all-encompassing that we aren’t quite sure if it’s going to expand our consciousness or simply make us forget how to walk. We use AI to write emails we don't want to send, to people who will use AI to summarise them. Can this circularity be described as "productivity"? I’m not so sure.

Technology is a superb servant but a terrible destination. We are currently wandering around the hills, shivering in our city coats, shouting at the sky because the AI is hallucinating and won’t instruct us how to correctly skin a rabbit.

We must realise that the future isn't a place we visit to escape the mundane - it’s just the mundane with higher stakes. If we don’t want to end up like Withnail, standing alone in the rain performing soliloquies to a fence, we need to stop treating AI as a savior and start treating it as a very eccentric, slightly drunk uncle: occasionally brilliant, often hallucinatory, and never to be left in charge of the car keys.

"I’m a human being! I’m a human being! I have a soul! I have a soul!"

Yes, dear boy. Now try to prove it to the CAPTCHA.

So, the rumour mill has churned out another date: Apple’s folding iPhone is apparently slated for 2026.

If you read the tech press, you’ll see endless fretting about "engineering hurdles" and "supply chain yield." This is the arithmocracy talking - the people who think spreadsheets explain human desire. They assume Apple is late because they can’t figure out how to bend glass.

Rubbish. Apple is late because they understand Social Friction better than anyone else.

The First Mover Disadvantage In Silicon Valley, being first is everything. In the luxury goods market (which is what Apple actually sells), being first is often a signal of desperation. Samsung launched the Fold early to prove they could. It was an engineering marvel, but a sociological disaster. Using one in public didn't say "I am wealthy and sophisticated"; it said "I am a beta tester for a Korean conglomerate."

Apple doesn’t sell technology; they sell the absence of anxiety.Rory Sutherland often points out that we don't value things for what they are, but for how they make us feel.

The Engineer sees a folding screen as a way to double pixel count.

The Human sees a folding screen as a potential point of failure.

A visible crease in a screen isn't just a refraction error; it is a constant, nagging reminder of fragility. It creates cognitive load. Every time you scroll over the bump, your brain whispers, "Is this the day it snaps?"

Apple waits until 2026 not to perfect the hinge, but to perfect the feeling of the hinge. They are waiting until the fold is boring. Only when the technology is invisible will they charge you £2,000 for it.

The Return of "The Snap" There is a deeper, tactile reason we crave this device, though. We have lost the ability to punctuate our digital lives.

Ending a call on a glass slab is an unsatisfying, friction-free slide of a thumb. It lacks finality. It lacks drama. You cannot angrily slide a thumb.

But slamming a phone shut? That is a statement. It is the digital equivalent of slamming a door. It signals to the room (and to your own brain) that the interaction is over.

We don't need a folding iPhone for the screen real estate. We need it for the emotional regulation.

Roll on 2026.

Apple's 'Liquid Glass' design is facing criticism, but I think it's actually a strong signal for where Apple are heading. Liquid Glass may not make total sense on a smartphone, and that's because it's going to be Apple's design language for the AR (Augmented Reality) era.

Apple realise that the next paradigm shift in tech is going to be AR . They are shepherding users into this new paradigm with Liquid Glass, the same way they shepherded users to the iPhone paradigm with skeuomorphic design.

Liquid Glass makes total sense if you imagine it floating in 3D space in front on you. This is where we're heading (once we get the hardware size down to a pair of glasses), and Apple's designers are making the coming shift in tech feel like second nature before it's even arrived.