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🕊️ We call for post-growth.  ⚰️ They call for post-democracy.

2025, Europe:

Citizens across Europe are being asked to share their views on the future of privacy, security, and surveillance. The European Commission has opened a call for evidence on mandatory data retention — a policy that would radically expand the state’s ability to peer into digital life.

On paper, this looks like democratic process: participatory, consultative, procedural. Until you read the footnotes.

Because the driving force behind this legislative push — the High-Level Group on Access to Data — is entirely anonymous.

Even to elected Members of the European Parliament.

🔐 The Most Transparent Surveillance Plan Ever … With Redacted Authors

When MEP Patrick Breyer asked for the names of the experts behind the Group’s foundational report, the answer came back in black ink: a participant list, fully redacted.

Civil society was not invited to participate. The meetings were closed. Yet the group’s output is now used to justify sweeping, irreversible measures: identity-linked communication, criminalizing private hosting, and embedding hardware backdoors under the euphemism of “lawful interception.”

This isn’t a contradiction. It’s a sign of the times.

This is what governance looks like when democratic form is maintained — but democratic substance is gone.

🪞“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time.”

That’s how Carole Cadwalladr framed the moment in her TED2025 talk. She warns of the broligarchy — a global alliance of tech oligarchs and captured institutions, building an infrastructure of control that is seamless, borderless, and above accountability.

“Authoritarianism doesn’t always announce itself in jackboots. Sometimes it comes wrapped in white papers.”

The EU often brands itself as a guardian of rights, a model of democratic transparency. But here, in the shadow-work of this surveillance framework, we see something else: policy without public authorship, regulation without representation.

🎭 The Great Irony: Everyone Can See It

And yet, citizens haven’t lost their bearings.

The responses in the public consultation show clear-eyed skepticism:

People remember the fall of the EU Data Retention Directive. They remember Snowden. They understand what it means to criminalize anonymity and force data retention by design.

The values are not forgotten — just ignored by those who claim to act in their name.

🎞️ From “Digital Sovereignty” to Digital Surrender

The Commission claims to defend digital sovereignty. But a sovereign digital space cannot:

What is being proposed is not a response to crime. It is the architecture of pre-emption. It is control without consent, designed in secret and deployed as fait accompli.

👁️ Epilogue: The Ghost in the Machine

This is the logic of post-democracy: keep the consultation page, erase the accountable author. Invite comments — redact architects. Preserve the process — hollow out the premise.

The infrastructure being laid down will not just monitor behavior.

It will persist longer than memory.