In front of the Béziers post office (Hérault), Marine Molinier, social mediator, parks her "office" transported on an electric scooter.

Like an origami, she deploys a table, a computer, a printer, two stools.

Very quickly, a young woman, supporting documents in hand, approaches with the hope of making her health pass work.

After an afternoon spent on the phone, the mediator managed to open an account on the social security site for the mother, who left "relieved".

In turn, Yveline Dequéker, 74, who stumbles over a multiple-choice voice record, gets annoyed: “There is a magneto that tells you + type one, type two, type three +. It’s absolutely stress! ".

"I can't do it, I don't have a smartphone and there's no office where you can go see civil servants, employees," laments the retiree, far from being the only one in this case.

According to government figures, 13 million French people remain "away from digital technology: they use the internet little or not at all and feel in difficulty with its uses".

The "excluded" that the anthropologist specializing in digital uses Pascal Plantard divides into three groups: the inhabitants of low-speed territories and "white areas" (not covered by a mobile network), people in a situation of poverty-precariousness, who do not have the means to pay for the necessary equipment and subscriptions, and finally those who suffer involuntary disconnections, for lack of mastery of the tools, or choose voluntary disconnection.

Marine Molinier on her scooter to help people who do not have internet access, in Béziers, February 8, 2022 Pascal GUYOT AFP

"There is a big digital divide", notes behind her scooter Marine Molinier.

“We tell them where to look for information and it is only as a last resort that we do it for them, but, unfortunately, this is quite often the case”.

Forced walk

Thanks to its "guitounes", as it baptized them, the "Luoga" association travels in the public space, in the squares and in the streets.

And it is spreading to around thirty cities in France: "We reach people for whom it's a bit of a last chance", comments its founding director, Thérèse Bérard.

Driver's license, car registration, request for social housing, taxes, pensions... It is now almost impossible to assert your rights without having to create an online account with a convoluted password, then scan and attach attachments.

If the Head of State Emmanuel Macron has promised to make 250 administrative procedures "essential to the daily life of the French" accessible online by the end of his five-year term, on the ground, we deplore the sometimes dramatic effects of this progress. by forced march.

From young applicants for the Active Solidarity Income (RSA) to farmers wishing to assert their right to retirement, France Services, based in a social center in Carpentras (Vaucluse) which has been providing IT support for many years, has since seen 2017 its audience "broaden" with the generalization of all digital.

Social workers come to the aid of inhabitants deprived of the internet, in Béziers, on February 8, 2022 Pascal GUYOT AFP

"We have all the profiles, lost people who no longer know who to contact with the disappearance of physical reception in the administrations", observes its director, Isabelle Faure.

With serious consequences: some find themselves without any resources for lack of having succeeded in carrying out the procedures online.

"As soon as you do not fit into the boxes, which represents a majority of cases, dematerialization complicates the procedures", underlines Thierry Petrone, mediator of France Services in Carpentras.

"Digitalization is not a problem in itself if the objective is to improve the quality of the service provided. But, unfortunately, this is not the objective, which in reality is to save civil servants and on land", denounces Prune Helfer-Noah, member of the collective of civil servants "Our public services".

Frustration, bewilderment, revolt

In 2021, the Defender of Rights responsible for protecting the rights of users of public services recorded a 15% increase in referrals, "strongly linked to dematerialization".

"We have people in tears, angry, who have a feeling of inequality and a distrust of our democracy and our society", tells AFP the leader of this independent administrative authority, Claire Hédon.

“It is because we have access to public services that we feel like citizens”, insists Ms. Hédon, who considers “essential” the maintenance of a physical reception in the administrations.

"There are such discrepancies between daily reality and the discourse of the State that we are in a situation where we can only increase frustrations", also analyzes the anthropologist Pascal Plantard.

"We are in the fantasy of a techno-solutionism whose watchword would be + There's only, we have to +", denounces the researcher.

This dependence on the internet is even more detrimental for the most precarious, who have 40 times more online administrative procedures to carry out (restoring heating following a cut, requests for allowances and other aid, etc.) than a well-to-do family. , observes the professor of the largest French research center on the subject.

"This causes a process of stigmatization and social disqualification which manifests itself in two ways, warns Mr. Plantard: administrative amazement, with the abandonment of his rights, or a revolt, as shown by the movement of + yellow vests + which brought together people sharing common galleys".

© 2022 AFP