Safe Space
What I learned from a three-week dialogue with a self-proclaimed fascist
In the previous post, 61% of readers chose “Option 1: Why I stayed in a three-week dialogue with a self-proclaimed fascist” which brings us here.
One day, I went to a travel agency called Thyself Agency which proposes life-exchange service. The idea? Trade your life with a stranger for a week. Flat, clothes, job, phone, routine; you live the entire life of someone else. While logistically too wild with a small child at home to subscribe, the desire to literally inhabit another logic, however uncomfortable, has always been there. Perhaps that impulse traces back to childhood. Every day, at home, I had the chance to access newspapers from across the entire political spectrum and from different countries.
Yet today, we live in an era of mirrored conversation. One-third of UK teens now prefer speaking to an AI companion rather than a human friend. Meanwhile, the MIT Media Lab lets you talk to a future version of yourself. Both simulate the form of dialogue, but strip it of its power: no friction, no unpredictability, no enlightenment through encounter. We’re no longer trained to respond to what doesn’t resemble us since we’ve outsourced difference to the algorithm.
So when I had the opportunity to speak to someone radically different, I didn’t look away. Here is how it started. I sometimes DJ (my sets live here), and it was on SoundCloud that I started chatting music with an artist. Then, out of nowhere, he dropped a political statement:
He later clarified his position:
This was 2024. The French legislative elections were raging. The word fascism was everywhere. And yet, around me, no one seemed able (or willing to?) understand what would drive someone to adopt it as an identity. So I kept talking to him. Not to convert. Not out of masochism. But to test the tensile strength of my own worldview. How far could it stretch before it snapped?
The conversation lasted three weeks. Back and forth. My truths and sources versus his. I enlisted Skeptic Reader, a browser plug-in from Domestic Data Dreamers, that flags bias and flawed logic, to help me decode some of his arguments. But what emerged was stranger than any debate: a safe space. An improvised space for friction. A container for staying.
I wrote:
He accepted, but the conversation that followed was it was very tense:
I said I wasn’t there to convince him. And yet, every time he conceded something, I felt a quiet satisfaction:
But slowly, things shifted. He began sending compliments. Flattery crept in.
Then the so-called safe space became too safe. He began sharing unsolicited confessions, details about his mental health, his ex. It spiralled. Until, finally, he asked for help with something that sounded like a conspiracy involving a child that convinced me to shut down the conversation. Was it a scam? Was he real? I’ll never know. But I got my answer.
My worldview didn’t snap, yet it warped. It stretched to the point where disagreement stopped being intellectual and started feeling like a trap. When facts no longer mattered, when logic dissolved into flattery, and ideological provocation morphed into emotional manipulation. I walked in thinking I was experimenting with dissonance; I walked out unsure whether I had protected my integrity or blurred its edges in the name of openness. So, how far could it stretch? Far enough to make me question the conditions under which I practice my values. The role rewrote the player.
Because at some point, I started wondering if I wasn’t the one manipulating him by staying, by listening, by holding the frame while he unravelled. The overflow wasn’t just his, it was shaped by the very space I held open to let him in. To make it safe.
Yet, some spaces are better suited for dialogue. If you ever want to try this kind of experiment in a more protected setting, I would rather recommend My Country Talks, a one-hour exchange between people with opposing political views. When I did it, I was matched with Samuel, a 56 years old conservative. We disagreed on almost everything until we landed on immigration. There, a strange fact-based overlap: one shard of shared ground. And maybe that was enough. As philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes puts it, "a society that gives up on the idea of shared facts is a sick society."
And if shared facts are the lifeblood of society, then perhaps the only commons left are the ones, where we just learn to breathe the same air.
You stayed until the final act, as facts warped under the lights. The spotlight fades, What’s your next cue?
🗳 Pick your detour for next episode:
→ Option 1: 🌬️ The case for sensorial truth
Can you feel proof? From wind analysis to decode history to dream-recording AIs and voice-sculpture archives, step into a world where facts are sensed.
→ Option 2: 📡 Synthetic truths running on real data Fake offices you pay for. Fake tweets from real data. Fake podcasts synced to your real footsteps. Welcome to the age where fiction runs on real data.
👇 Vote here, or reply 1 or 2 in the comments. I’ll follow the most voted path :)