Measuring Design Infection

Some fictions invent another world. Design Infection (in French) does something else. It takes ours, cuts it into pieces, gathers its hardest fragments (contracts, scores, narratives, surveillance, dependencies), then glues them back together until it produces a slightly displaced image, but close enough to hurt.
That is precisely why, or so I hope, the novella is unsettling: not because it heralds an extravagant future, but because it shows the present once it stops telling itself stories about itself.

This is where the Reality Rating Level (RRL) and the Scalability Rating Level (SRL) become useful.
The first measures how firmly a fictional mechanism is anchored in reality.
The second measures its structural capacity to spread. Together, they make it possible to read Design Infection not as a uniform dystopia, but as a multi-speed map: some things are still limit-images, others are already here, and others still, more discreet, are already spreading with formidable efficiency. You can find:
• the full documentation of the sacrificial draft
• the calculations behind the results below

The value of score ranges is central. The point is not to give a fiction fake scientific figures, but to place a mechanism in a zone: still speculative, already emerging, locally real, or nearly systemic. Saying a mechanism sits between RRL 6 and 8 is not meant to mimic accounting precision; it makes visible its degree of reality, the margins of interpretation, and the tension between what already exists and what could change scale.

The mobile city: an image stronger than its likelihood of spreading

RRL 3-5/10 - SRL 2-4/10
The private mobile city is no doubt one of the most spectacular motifs in the novella. It moves forward like a fortress on the march, as if the whole of urban planning had converted to the logic of the convoy, the bunker and extraction. It marks the imagination because it condenses everything: climate crisis, the secession of elites, the privatisation of territory, total logistics.

But the RRL/SRL forces you to look more coldly. On RRL, the mobile city can be placed between 3 and 5 out of 10. Fragments exist: private enclaves, cruise ships as infrastructure, corporate urbanism, self-sufficient architectures. Yet the complete object remains largely extrapolated. On SRL, the range falls rather between 2 and 4 out of 10. Too heavy, too costly, not modular enough, too dependent on massive infrastructure to become a fluid standard.

In other words, the mobile city is not the heart of the infection. It is its monumental image. It serves to make visible a regime of the world (privatised, secured, dissociated), but it is not, in itself, the most contagious form.

The total contract: where the infection becomes credible

RRL 6-8/10 - SRL 8-10/10

The contract that ties together debt, housing, work and services is of another nature. It strikes the imagination less than a mobile city, but it tightens the throat more, because it already looks like something we know without always naming it. This is where Design Infection hits home: the most effective future is not necessarily architectural or spectacular; it can take the form of a clause, a built-in dependency, a packaging of existence.

On RRL, this mechanism plausibly sits between 6 and 8 out of 10. Debt as a disciplinary tool is old. Couplings between employment, access to services, insurance, housing or creditworthiness already exist in scattered forms. The fiction does not bring out a new principle; it lines up and intensifies pieces already present. On SRL, the range climbs to between 8 and 10 out of 10. The contract is modular, cheap to duplicate, easily plugged into banking, insurance, HR and digital systems, and perfectly compatible with legal standardisation.

It is probably the most infectious mechanism in the novella. Not because it is the most visible, but because it takes the contemporary form of spreading: contract, aggregate, automate, make it convenient, make it normal.

The AI school: when the future has already taken its place on the dashboard

RRL 7-9/10 - SRL 8-10/10

The AI school with behavioural scoring belongs to an even more disturbing category, because it hardly needs fiction to exist any more. Educational platforms, analytics, personalisation, performance tracking, measuring attention and compliance: all this already makes up the necessary technical and institutional setting.

On RRL, the score sits between 7 and 9 out of 10. The real-world base is strong, the closeness to the fiction is high, and the tipping conditions are favourable in systems that value optimisation, prediction and individualised pathways.

On SRL, the range sits between 8 and 10 out of 10. Software copies quickly. Dashboards plug into infrastructure already in place. Educational standards can absorb further layers of scoring and sorting with no growing difficulty.

What Design Infection shows here is that the school of the future does not need to be fully militarised or openly authoritarian to become a space of algorithmic government. It is enough for the score to become ordinary, for measurement to pass as pedagogy, for personalised adaptation to serve as the language of acceptance.

Implants: the threat is real, but it does not flow the same way

RRL 4-6/10 - SRL 2-5/10

Implants for emotional regulation, stabilisation or compliance belong to the most immediately worrying zone of the story. They awaken a long memory: lobotomies, coercive psychiatry, chemical treatments, experiments on bodies and brains, and today some regimes’ renewed interest in neural technologies.

Yet the RRL/SRL grid forces a distinction between technical maturity and social spread.
On RRL, the most plausible range goes from 4 to 6 out of 10. The technical base exists: implants, neuromodulation, neural interfaces, clinical trials. But the closeness to a use for workplace compliance or social discipline remains partly extrapolated.
On SRL, the range falls between 2 and 5 out of 10. High costs, an invasive device, contested acceptability, legal and ethical locks: all this holds back spreading.

This does not mean the risk is minor. It means something more precise: the threat is real, but its trajectory is not linear. A mechanism can have an advanced TRL, a solid technical base, and still see its SRL stay limited or fall under the effect of scandals, professional resistance, court rulings or counter-mobilisations. The framework says so explicitly: the SRL is not monotonic; it can rise, stall, oscillate or fall back depending on regimes, territories and historical shocks.

This is where the extreme examples hinted at come in: private prisons, state violence, deaths in custody, legalised chemical treatments, the memory of lobotomies, authoritarian interest in the neural. All of them show that history protects us from nothing, but also that a mature technology never, on its own, implies stable normalisation.

Influence, newsrooms, talking points: the fiction is already almost behind reality

RRL 8-10/10 - SRL 8-10/10

The most contemporary block in Design Infection is no doubt that of influence agencies, newsrooms responding to alerts, fake accounts, triggers, the culture of monitored figures, and talking points as a technology of control.
Here the story hardly anticipates any more: it reorganises what already exists to bring out its overall logic.

On RRL, the range sits between 8 and 10 out of 10. The real-world base is massive, the closeness between fiction and reality is very strong, and the tipping conditions are already built into the ordinary workings of digital media, politics and organisations.
On SRL, we also get 8 to 10 out of 10. These set-ups are modular, cheap, standardisable, plugged into global infrastructure and often invisible to those subjected to them.

This is perhaps the hardest point of the reading. Implants shock more. The mobile city fascinates more. But what spreads fastest is often duller: reputation dashboards, language scripts, coordinated responses, monitoring formats, protocols for adjusting discourse. The infection also travels through administrative prose, communication routines and perception metrics.

What the novella is really saying

As you compare the ranges, a hierarchy takes shape.

• The mobile city is a strong but not very fluid extrapolation: RRL 3-5 / SRL 2-4.
• The total contract already belongs to a zone of advanced contamination: RRL 6-8 / SRL 8-10.
• The AI school with scoring is almost a lasting sector reality: RRL 7-9 / SRL 8-10.
• Implants remain technically credible but socially less widespread: RRL 4-6 / SRL 2-5.
• Influence apparatuses, for their part, are already brushing against systemic reality: RRL 8-10 / SRL 8-10.

This table says something important about Design Infection. The novella does not only tell of extremes. Above all, it tells the difference between what impresses and what settles in, between what shocks and what becomes automated, between what seems violent and what becomes normal precisely because it takes the form of a contract, a score, a compliance policy or a talking point.

The RRL/SRL then lets us read fiction as a machine for un-ranking the obvious. The spectacular is not always the most advanced. The most dangerous is not always the most visible. And reality does not need to reach a fiction’s final form to have already absorbed its logic.

A tool to read, discuss and shift fiction

That is also why the framework is not only for commenting on a text. It can become a tool for collective reading, a basis for a conversational agent that assists analysis, or a workshop format using physical or digital cards. A card can bring out a mechanism, its RRL range, its SRL range, its brakes, its counter-forces, its likely trajectory. An agent can help document, compare, rephrase and test contextual variations.

Fiction then stops being only an object to interpret. It becomes a critical operator. It lets us handle forms of reality, discuss how fast they spread, test their locks and their points of reversal.

That is perhaps the singular strength of Design Infection. The world it shows does not need to have fully come about to be already active. It only needs to have found its most discreet supports: a scoring system, a contractual dependency, a steered narrative, a promise of fluidity.

That is where the infection begins. Not at the moment everything tips over, but at the moment something becomes normal enough that it no longer needs to hide.