By the shade of George Orwell
Looking back at writing 1984, I now realize I was just a starry-eyed optimist back in those days. Indeed, in 1948 I could not have possibly foreseen any of the ways in which Big Brother is now controlling us, our thoughs, our opinions, and our behavior. I predicted that there would be a camera in every home; I could never have foreseen that we would all buy those devices of our own free will.
Allow me to elaborate…
In the year 2026, the European Parliament performed a quiet miracle. One morning in June, its staff (lawmakers, assistants, bureaucrats) opened their computers to discover that Google had vanished. In its place reigned Qwant, a French search-engine of impeccable privacy credentials: no tracking, no data harvesting, no submission to American jurisdiction.
Days later, a consortium of European firms unleashed Euro Office, a sovereign twin to Microsoft 365, complete with familiar interfaces, real-time collaboration features, and full compatibility with all the old files of the ancien régime… And ALL 100% governed by European law, hosted on European soil, under the ‘safe, watchful eye‘ of Brussels.
The official pronouncement was one of liberation. Digital sovereignty at last. Finally! Freedom from foreign spying. Freedom from Big Tech and from the American Surveillance State! Independent civic tools for a united Europe!
But as is the case with 1984, the positive words, the proud narratives, belie a deeper, darker agenda of control and of the depression of dissent.
- It’s Newspeak
- The Doublethink at the Core of the EU
- Implications in Privacy
- Governed by Big Brother
- Practical Measures to Retain Privacy
I Recognize this Language. It Is Newspeak, Polished for the 21st Century.
In my semi-prophetic novel the Party called Perpetual War “Peace,” Slavery “Freedom,” and Big Brother’s All-Seeing Overwatch “Protection.”
Today, the European Union has simply upgraded the hardware and couched its “Big Brother” surveillance/control architecture in a different form of Newspeak.
The facts of currently implemented EU legislation and directives lay bare this architecture with chilling clarity for those able to see it. Contrary to the official media narrative, the proudly proclaimed “Software Exodus from America” is not simply a reactive spasm against American tech giants. It is the visible capstone of years of coordinated infrastructure; a rolling sequence of decisions building toward regional “tech stacks” where governance, finance, identity, and information converge on a single, convenient government-auditable layer.
At the heart of this divorce from American tech sits European Digital ID: the master key that determines who can access what, when, and for how long in the European Union. “Tech Stack Control,” they call it; the power to know who accessed which file, to measure project cost and duration, work and leisure hours, to shape the permissible and the non-permissable, and to strip or rewrite inconvenient data sources and histories.
This is not privacy. This is the Ministry of Truth with better uptime.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
~ Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) | 1984
The Doublethink at the Core of EU Legislation
The EU narrative insists this digital exodus shields citizens from U.S. Big Tech and government surveillance behemoths.
After all, Qwant collects nothing and Euro Office obeys European privacy law. How utterly noble.
Yet the same system so proudly proclaiming its independence and privacy demands digital ID as the universal access layer for civic services, banking, communications, and soon, the promised “free internet for everybody” enshrined in the European constitution from 2028.
EVERY search, EVERY document, EVERY collaboration now leaves an indelible government-auditable trail.
Soft censorship, already demonstrated by stripping Google sources from public online life at the official European level, now hardens into structural enforcement. Dissenting voices critical of migration policy, green mandates, monetary resets, or the sovereignty project itself will no longer be crudely banned as before. They will now simply encounter friction: deprioritized results, collaborations flagged for ‘review’ by authorities, narrowed access to vital services, and visits by law enforcement due to “hate speech.“
This is the very perfection of totalitarianism: citizens believe they have escaped one surveillance/control panopticon only to enter another, more intimate and jurisdictionally pure prison.
The Linux Foundation1 and institutional backers (global capital dressed in open-source robes) ensure continuity of the underlying control layer already long established. Forks of existing tools (Euro Office’s roots in OnlyOffice) are rebranded as European privacy triumph, because the overt and indiscriminate Microsoft data handovers of European data to U.S. government entities provided a convenient external enemy (classic Two Minutes Hate) to unify the bloc while consolidating internal power and control mechanisms under the ever-watchful gaze of Brussels.
Implications for Human Privacy and Sovereignty
For Europeans, this marks the final enclosure.
Everyday citizens, professionals, retirees, families, unemployed, and literally everyone now live inside auditable platforms where privacy from Washington becomes TOTAL visibility to Brussels. Financial transactions, health records, political inquiries, personal writings, critiques of policy: ALL are tied to digital ID.
The K-shaped economy accelerates; the compliant thrive within the system, while skeptics face exclusion from seamless digital life.
Learned helplessness, already cultivated through propaganda and managed crises, deepens. Resistance feels futile when your very tools report on you every second of every day…
Globally, the ramifications are catastrophic. The “software exodus” accelerates digital balkanization, with ‘Splinternet’ regional tech stacks mirroring geopolitical fragmentation (U.S. Google/Microsoft, China’s mature ecosystem, Russia’s isolation, nascent Mercosur experiments.) Each bloc claims global sovereignty while simultaneously installing its own Ministry of Truth locally.
Tokenization and RWAs, stablecoins and digital identities, tools hyped as liberation in other contexts, become the perfect instruments for revocable ownership and programmable control, dependent on “good,” compliant behavior.
Your assets, your data, your movements: conditional, auditable, governed by the layer’s owners… Big Brother
This is technocratic feudalism. The Dark Enlightenment’s CEO-dictators now meet bureaucratic EU efficiency.
And privacy dies not with a bang but with seamless “security and convenience.”
The agenda is laid out: reconfiguration amid global war and chaos, while the long-planned infrastructure for perpetual control and management rolls forward unrelentingly.
The promise of “civic tools” is the ultimate betrayal.
What the Inner Party requires is substituted for what the people actually want. Dissent is reframed as a critical threat to the collective good. In this world, “freedom” is the limited ability to choose between compliant platforms.
True privacy and sovereignty… unmonitored thought, untraceable association, unconditional ownership… become publicly accursed relics of the analog past.
The boot, refined and digitized, stamps upon the human face with “European values and open-source licensing.”
Those are the sad, sorry facts of what is happening this very moment… But meanwhile…
Practical Measures to Retain or Regain Privacy and Sovereignty
For those of you unwilling to simply surrender to 1984 in 2026, action is still possible, but it demands discipline, technical awareness, and the use of parallel systems. The following recommendations draw from established privacy strategies, decentralized technologies, and sovereignty-focused initiatives.
For Europeans:
- Minimize EU Tech-Stack Dependency: Use Euro Office/Qwant only when mandated (e.g. government interactions.) Maintain air-gapped or separate devices for sensitive work. Route traffic through privacy-focused VPNs or Tor, preferring non-EU providers where feasible.
- Digital ID Resistance: Delay enrollment in centralized biometric/ID systems. Use pseudonymous or decentralized identity tools (e.g. self-sovereign identity protocols on blockchain) for non-mandatory services. Support and fund legal challenges to mandatory digital ID expansion.
- Open-Source Scrutiny and Alternatives: Audit forks like Euro Office. Prefer hardened Linux distributions with verifiable builds. Deploy Nextcloud or similar self-hosted solutions on personal servers/VPS outside EU jurisdiction when possible.
- Parallel Economies: Engage tokenized assets and stablecoins on decentralized ledgers (e.g. XRP Ledger for payments/settlement, Stellar for cross-border) via non-custodial wallets. Build or join privacy networks (We are working on this…)
- Narrative and Community: Form or join local groups focused on device hardening, data poisoning, and reputation protection. Document and publicize overreach via anonymous channels.
For Non-Europeans and Global Citizens:
- Adopt Multi-Stack Resilience: Treat regional fragmentation as reality. Maintain separate identities/workflows for different jurisdictions. Use privacy coins, mixers (where legal,) and zero-knowledge tools.
- Infrastructure Sovereignty: Self-host critical services (email, notes, calendars) on hardened hardware. Migrate to decentralized storage/compute (e.g. Bittensor subnets for AI, IPFS/Filecoin for data.)
- Financial Independence: Prioritize fully reserved, auditable-yet-private instruments (RLUSD parallels, non-yield stablecoins for utility.) Explore Lightning Network, RWAs on permissionless chains, and private banking alternatives. Avoid K-shaped traps by building real-world skills and offline assets.
- Surveillance Countermeasures: Practice data minimalism and poisoning (false trails.) Use Faraday bags, audited devices, and open-source firmware. For high-risk individuals, consider secure backups and reputation management services.
- Broader Resistance: Study primary sources on technocracy and learned helplessness. Support projects building parallel systems. Educate networks on auditable layers. Follow the actual tech infrastructure, not the government/media rhetoric. In multipolar chaos, personal sovereignty demands micro-actions: own your keys, verify your tech-stack, reject revocable digital serfdom.
The battle is not lost, but it has moved underground… into code, into parallel economies, into unmonitored minds.
As I wrote so long ago: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
Today, it lies in those who refuse the proffered convenience and security entirely.
Act decisively. The Ministry watches.
1Even using Linux you can no longer be 100% sure you’re not being watched by “someone.”
No one, not even the most skilled security researcher, can be absolutely certain that their activities on any Linux distribution (or any other general-purpose operating system) are completely free from potential mass surveillance or hidden backdoors. This is a structural reality of modern computing, not unique to Linux.
Want to know why? Find out here…
