A drink to lost naivety as the clouds crowd over our democracies

~efeu

Hello bartender, I'd like a pint of whatever is nearest please.

This is a long one with depressing stuff but also hope at the end.

Chat Control went through after all, after a lot of, shall we say, creative negotiation tactics. Trilogue is pending, so not all is lost yet. But it is not looking good at the moment. The text in effect allows for all the bad parts:

- European tax payer money will go fund whatever Kutcher et al. have ready, leeching of the system for the foreseeable future

- Client side scanning will be "voluntarily" enforced, but "all appropriate risk mitigation measures" need to be taken to ensure safety which is dubious at best

- All chat applications or software with chat will have to enforce rigorous age verification methods

And somehow, it does not make the first page news. Nobody appears to care.

We've been fighting this since 2022. This year, the approach has been appallingly undemocratic, granting complete anonymisation of the people involved with the proposal while pushing for surveillance at the same time, which is comically sad. It's not over, it is not law yet. But it is looking pretty bad.

I grew up reading about the Stasi and their ilk, heard my grandparents talking about fearing and hiding from the authorities as their country was occupied. The present situation scares me. This is an important piece of the democratic puzzle that disappears under the table. In effect, this installs a scaffold that allows for complete communication oversight. Sure, we are not there yet. But we will now pay for a system allowing it to be installed. And once it is there, one amendment during a crisis and it will be oh so easy to tighten the screw. There are already surveillance scandals of journalists and political opponents in the current framework that was so much safer in comparison.

But it did something positive to me. It opened my eyes. I grew up dedicating an significant part of my life to be congruent with the European project. I cared about it much more than local and national issues, as I believe that by solving the general case, you would solve all the local cases too. I guess I also saw in it the promise of no more petty wars between neighbours, safeguards against tyranny, a united front against a world that is honestly getting scarier.

It was extremely egoistic on my part, randomly born on this continent. It's just Nationalism 2, Continent Bugaloo. And it's the same stuff that happened in 1871 just larger and with more friction. It was always going to be the big players imposing their will on the smaller ones. Prussia yesterday, Germany and France today. And if the big players are swayed, all the eggs in the basket get crushed. Not everything is bad in the European ideal. But all it took is one problematic commission president to really start to really sour things. What if the straight up fascists, which are gaining support everywhere, were actually in charge?

My loyalty should never have been the European Institutions and their strengthening, which sometimes helped advance things I believe are positive, such as saner regulations and,in theory, robustness against tyranny. My loyalty should have been to the causes themselves, with the European Project as one of many tools to bring it forward. It opens the door to much more solidarity with the local causes as well as the ones beyond European borders. A saner focus I guess.

So cheers to my naivety, to becoming a smidge wiser. I'll see how much money I can give to noyb, the EFF and co this year to help fight the big fight. But first and foremost, I'll see where I can push and what I can build here at a smaller scale.

Thanks for giving me this space today, bartender. Have a good one.