Theatre and Tyranny

“We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”E. O. Wilson

1A freely surveilled world

Six years ago I stood on a TEDx stage and said that we live in a freely surveilled world. I meant it as a warning. I did not expect to see it written into statute quite so quickly.

The occasion for revisiting that thought is almost unreal. The United Kingdom is exploring a ban on VPNs inside its age-verification regime, so that the tool you would reach for to stop a website harvesting your identity now asks you to surrender your identity. The absurdity deserves a moment. Since July 2025 the Online Safety Act has required “highly effective” age checks — a passport upload or a face scan — to reach large parts of the internet. Within days, VPN sign-ups in Britain rose by something like fourteen hundred per cent. So in January the House of Lords voted, 207 to 159, to close that exit too, and age-gate the VPNs. The instrument exists to keep you from being identified. Funny how now, you must identify yourself to use it.

2One canvas, three strokes of paint

We are encouraged to read these as separate stories: an online-safety story here, an immigration story there, a child-protection regulation in Brussels. They are one canvas. Age verification, digital identity, facial age estimation and on-device message scanning are all mechanisms for the same purpose, which is to make every person default into revealing oneself at the point of doing anything at all, and to retire, quietly and by degrees, the ordinary freedom of being no one in particular. This goes strongly against the Cypherpunk’s Manifesto: “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

In Britain, the strokes of paint are these. The age checks under the Online Safety Act, now extending from adult sites toward a ban on under-16s holding social-media accounts at all, announced this month and due to take effect in spring 2027, enforced by the same demand that everyone prove their age to keep the accounts they already hold. The VPN amendment, to seal the minimal protection a non-technical consumer can have. And a national digital identity, branded BritCard, announced for every resident, designed to live in a wallet on your phone, and intended to become the gateway to working legally.

In Brussels the stroke of paint is Chat Control, the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, which in its most ambitious form would oblige your messaging app to inspect your private messages on your own device, before they are encrypted, and report whatever an algorithm dislikes. Encryption that is inspected before it encrypts is not encryption at all.

Encryption that is inspected before it encrypts is not encryption at all.

Three strokes, one canvas. Each piece arrives on its own modest terms: protect children, control borders, verify an age. Together, they paint a bleak surveillance map, of something none of us was asked to approve.

3Saved by the gridlock

Here is the part that does not make the headlines. The machine keeps jamming.

Chat Control is the clearest case. The old voluntary-scanning regime expired in April, after the European Parliament refused to renew it. The permanent, mandatory version has spent years stuck in the Council, because adopting it requires a qualified majority — fifteen of twenty-seven states representing sixty-five per cent of the population — and that majority will not assemble. Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Austria have all balked at indiscriminate scanning. The Danish presidency could not bring a vote to the floor. Cyprus holds the chair now. The fifth and supposedly final round of negotiations falls next Monday, on 29 June, with formal adoption pencilled in for July, if a deal lands. As I write, we do not know that it will. That is more or less the whole condition of European digital policy: we will know more by the beginning of July, and then we will not, and then we will know more by the beginning of something else.

The British fronts are stuck in their own machinery. The VPN amendment cleared the Lords but is now marooned between the two chambers in the ritual known as ping-pong, while the government, plainly embarrassed, insists it has “no plans to ban VPNs” even as its own consultation asks whether to age-check them. The digital ID, announced to a party conference with great confidence, met a petition that gathered nearly three million signatures, one of the largest in the history of Parliament. Its mandatory element collapsed within months. A cross-party committee called the rollout a fiasco. The scheme has since been quietly redescribed as a convenience you will surely want, rather than a duty you cannot avoid.

I keep coming back to one word for all of this: theatre. And theatre has an underrated virtue. It slows down progress, but it also slows down tyranny.

Theatre slows down progress. But it also slows down tyranny.

There is nothing new in the theatre itself, only in our surprise at it. Writers have been pointing at the performance of politics for as long as there has been politics to perform; Juvenal diagnosed bread and circuses two thousand years ago. The striking thing is not that the political class still stages the same show, but that we keep expecting a different one. We watch twenty-seven governments fail to agree on a single clause, and a parliament arguing with itself across two chambers, and we read it as malfunction. It is not. It is a grand performance working exactly as it always has.

The dysfunction we are forever lamenting — the twenty-seven governments who cannot reach a majority, the two chambers who cannot agree on a clause — is, just now, the main thing standing between us and a finished machine. We are protected at present not by our rights or votes, which are being renegotiated in committee, but by friction. By the sheer institutional incapacity to coordinate quickly enough to finish the job.

4A seventeenth-century answer

It is worth asking why these states grind. The answer is old. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War and, in settling it, made the sovereign nation state the permanent unit of European order. The bargain was simple: what a state does within its own borders is its own business. In Farewell to Westphalia, Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow argue that the nation state was always a technology — a human invention for organising people and adjudicating their differences — and that, like any technology approaching its fourth century, it may simply be the wrong tool for the problems in front of us. An obsolete governance technology.

The government as a technology is so outdated that it needs to borrow power from Big Tech to achieve its grand visions.

E. O. Wilson’s line at the head of this piece is the same observation from another angle. We have built godlike technology — real-time scanning, biometric age estimation, population-scale databases — and handed it to medieval institutions running on Paleolithic instinct. The ambition is enabled by the godlike part. The execution still has to pass through the medieval part: parliaments, councils, qualified-majority votes, judicial review. And the medieval part, mercifully, is bad at coordination. Pascal saw the deeper version of this long ago, when he observed that the laws we write to correct our faults are themselves faulty. The rule of law is forever both the stabiliser and the brake. When the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2024 that weakening end-to-end encryption “cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society”, that was the old machinery applying the brake to a very new demand.

Notice what the gridlock actually tells us. After three centuries of relentless centralisation, the structures we built to govern at scale cannot align even with themselves. The United Kingdom cannot get its own two chambers to agree. The European Union, which has the word union in its name, cannot get its members to a majority. This is not a temporary embarrassment to be reformed away. It is what centralisation produces at the level of decision-making: a body so large, and so distant from reality, that coherence becomes structurally impossible. The supposedly unified state is, in practice, a committee that has lost the thread.

5I have seen this film before

“We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak.”Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

In the first weeks of the pandemic I wrote a piece asking whether privacy would survive. I described what I called the land of auto opt-ins and no opt-outs, a place where, as I put it then, “tech companies provide the infrastructure, while governments provide the users”. Democracies and autocracies alike were standing up surveillance overnight and swearing it was temporary. Norway was already extending its emergency powers into the following year. I worried about laws that punish you after a breach instead of preventing one, and I asked a question I cannot improve on now: how does the law act when the government itself is the one not following the rules?

Read it back today and it is less a warning than a blueprint. The infrastructure I described is finished. Age verification runs through private vendors who hold your face and your documents. Your identity is to live in a wallet, on the state’s terms. And when the EU’s voluntary-scanning regime lapsed in April, the largest platforms simply announced they would keep scanning anyway, law or no law, because the apparatus is privately owned and already switched on. The infrastructure does not need the legislation — it was only ever there to make the infrastructure compulsory.

What I underrated in 2020 was the timeline of fear. I knew that nothing generates more engagement than fear. What I did not weigh heavily enough was how reliably a crisis dissolves the very gridlock we are now relying on. Coordination problems that look intractable for years can be solved in a single frightened afternoon. The friction holds, until the next pandemic, the next atrocity, or the next war supplies the reason to suspend it.

Coordination problems that look intractable for years can be solved in a single frightened afternoon.

6Build what does not need a switch

So I will not celebrate the dysfunction, however grateful we should feel. Relying on your captor’s incompetence is not a long-term strategy, although it works for now. On current trajectories the planet crosses near-total connectivity before this decade is out. As of April 2026, 6.12 billion people — 73.8 per cent of the world’s population — are already online, a number that has grown by more than 52 per cent since 2018, with 2.1 billion gaining access in the past eight years alone. By 2030 that share approaches 99 per cent. Most of those recent arrivals came straight onto gatekept platforms and have never known an internet without intermediaries. Once everyone is permanently connected, the architecture set now is the architecture a generation inherits. We are writing a covenant for people who cannot yet vote on it.

There is a larger crisis underneath the surveillance one, and it is the reason all of this matters. What is dying is collective alignment. Surveillance, debt, censorship, the centralisation of everything: these are the symptoms of a body politic whose members no longer see one another as part of the same moral community, and whose institutions no longer speak the same language as the people they govern. Our global freedoms have gone backwards by roughly a fifth in twenty years. The result is not only a political crisis but a crisis of meaning, most visible in the young. Fixing the money would help. It would not be enough.

Earlier I called the surveillance apparatus plumbing. The answer, as it happens, is also plumbing. Picture an old Victorian house. When the pipes fail in a building that age, you can patch them for a while, but you cannot truly replace them; it costs too much, or the regulations will not allow it. So you do the sensible thing. You run a new pipe alongside the old one, connect it to the house, and the water flows again. You do not spend the rest of your life trying to fix a system that was never going to be fixed. You build the parallel, and you plug in.

That is the whole strategy, and it is already under way. Cryptocurrencies were the first new pipe, a monetary system laid alongside the state’s and connected to the same lives, owing nothing to anyone’s permission. Crypto states are the next: supra-jurisdictions running in parallel to the nation state instead of petitioning it. Not one sovereign over everyone, but many overlapping ones, chosen rather than inherited. Parallels, against the pure nation-state play.

The Exit has two keys. The first is individual sovereignty, the shift that The Sovereign Individual described three decades ago, from an industrial age dominated by the nation state to an information age that empowers the person. The second is collective sovereignty, the capacity of value-aligned groups to form, coordinate and govern themselves across borders, with or without territory, and with or without the blessing of any government. Where the old order was built on compulsory taxation, welfare entitlement and coercive authority, the emerging one has to be built as a parallel stack, grounded in decentralisation, voluntary alignment and radical individual empowerment.

This is the work, and at Logos it is the thing we are actually building: open-source, peer-to-peer infrastructure for communities to talk, coordinate and govern themselves without routing through a centre that can be captured or switched off, because there is no centre, and no switch. It is also where I reached, six years ago, the only conclusion that has held up. I wrote then that if we demand privacy tools, developers and cryptographers will build them, and I called for systems in which data and communication protect themselves at the level of the protocol. That is no longer a hope. It exists.

A word of precision, because this is where the debate usually goes wrong. The fashionable answer to the verification state is “decentralised identity”: a friendlier ID, a zero-knowledge age token, a privacy-preserving credential. But a decentralised system that still hangs everything on a shared identifier behaves, in the end, like a centralised one. A chokepoint you have made more elegant is still a chokepoint. The move that actually holds is to remove the identity chokepoint from the system altogether, so there is nothing at the centre to seize, to subpoena, or to switch off in the next emergency.

A chokepoint you have made more elegant is still a chokepoint.

And the oldest objection — who decides the rules — has an answer too. Not a platform, and not a parliament. Communities set their own values, and the infrastructure holds only the meta-values, the thin shared commitments that let very different communities coexist without a sovereign over them all. Collectives form and dissolve like living organisms, held together by alignment and not by force. The nation state becomes one option among many, rather than the only one, once we upgrade the substrate beneath it. This is the post-Westphalian proposition that Hope and Ludlow describe. Not a better nation state. Governance that does not need one.

Which returns me to where I began, and to the sentence I cannot shake. For now, in this narrow and fragile window, the only thing protecting us from the machine is the machine’s own inefficiency. The lack of coordination between the players, the inability of even a United Kingdom or a European Union to agree with itself at policy and governance level, is the single weakness buying us time. Three centuries of centralisation built a machine that cannot align, and in that incoherence we are, for the moment, somewhat free.

This is not the end. It is the next beginning. If you would like to build it, the London Circle is open.