The Broomstick Brief

Rule by list

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 3 March 2001, around ten people in a Milan hacklab assembled a server from hardware a bank was getting rid of and scavenged parts. The least experienced person present was put at the keyboard so that everyone would understand what was being built. The machine was named Paranoia. On its second day, an inverted firewall rule instructed it to reject every connection not originating from itself, and for a while the server could talk only to the server. (Red: This is, to be fair, the most secure configuration known to computing, and also the least useful.) The collective printed the mistake on a T-shirt. The story is told in the collective’s own book +KAOS.

On 26 August 2026, the United States Department of State designated that collective, Autistici/Inventati, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added it to the Specially Designated Nationals list, alongside Palestine Action and Masar Badil in the same action. The distance between the two events is twenty-five years of a small, unpaid, consensus-run group providing email, hosting, mailing lists, blogs and chat to people who did not want to route their speech through corporations or states. The collective denies every allegation in the government statements. The statements themselves, read closely, contain something more interesting than the allegations: a theory of what a communications provider is, and a very accurate map of what a communications provider depends on.

Listing

A designation is not a prosecution. Nobody has been charged. No court has been asked to find anything. There is no Italian proceeding, and Italian law has no role in the matter, a point Italian commentary picked up within a day. What exists is a signature on an executive instrument, and three legal consequences that follow from it: any property of the listed entity under US jurisdiction is frozen; US persons and companies are prohibited from providing or receiving funds, goods or services involving it; and breaching that prohibition carries civil and criminal penalties for the US party. OFAC’s own FAQ on Executive Order 13224 carries a prohibition on dealing and the penalties. The penalties fall on the bank, the registrar, the host, the donor, not on the listed entity, which is by construction outside reach. (Red: Nobody is penalised for being on the list. People are penalised for standing next to it.)

OFAC issued Counter Terrorism General License 36, permitting transactions needed to wind down existing relationships. It expires at 04:01 UTC on 25 September 2026. After that, any US-linked institution still connected to Autistici/Inventati is exposed. Foreign institutions are not bound by the prohibition, but since a 2019 amendment every SDGT listing carries secondary-sanctions exposure for foreign financial institutions that knowingly facilitate significant transactions with the designated entity, and that is enough. A compliance department in Milan, Amsterdam or Frankfurt weighs the cost of legal advice against the cost of closing an account, and the account closes. (Red: A compliance department is an organ evolved to feel fear on behalf of an institution that cannot, and it does the job very well.) Over-compliance is not a side effect of the instrument. It is the instrument.

That is the whole mechanism. It seems slight when set out plainly, and it is exactly this slightness that makes the case hard to read from the advocacy pieces, which write about it as though it were a raid.

Two readings

The State Department’s fact sheet describes encrypted chat and email, web hosting, video conferencing, streaming and anonymity tools, and asserts that these were “specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks”. The evidence offered in the two statements is that communiqués and publications attributed to a range of groups, from European antifascist cells to the PKK, passed through A/I infrastructure or were hosted on Noblogs. Nothing in the public statements claims that the collective wrote those texts, chose targets, moved money or weapons, or knew of any act before it occurred. The theory does not need any of that. Provision is treated as participation. An email account becomes co-authorship of every message sent from it.

Set that theory against the architecture. After Italian police obtained covert access to A/I’s server at a commercial hosting provider on 15 June 2004, an operation the collective discovered a year later by reading a footnote in someone else’s case file, it rebuilt. Plan R*, from October 2005, distributed encrypted data and services across machines in several countries, with public-facing nodes designed to be replaceable. Alongside that came a policy of holding as little as possible: no subscriber identities, minimal logs, encrypted disks, and repeated instruction to users not to trust the provider with their safety. When Norwegian police copied a server’s drives in November 2010 at Italian request, looking for the owner of one mailbox, the disks yielded nothing identifying and services were restored elsewhere within hours.

The collective, in other words, engineered away precisely the control the designation attributes to it. It cannot read the mail because it built a system in which it cannot read the mail. One reading in circulation puts the consequence sharply: the charge, read structurally, amounts to not having surveilled. A provider that chose to protect its users’ privacy is being treated as though it concealed their crimes, and the absence of a capability is being read as intent.

So the first reading, the reading of what A/I controls, appears to be wrong on the engineering.

The second reading is about what A/I depends on, and that one is correct. Plan R* answers the question “what happens when a machine disappears” and answers it well. It does not answer “what happens when a bank closes the account”, “what happens when the registry suspends the domain”, “what happens when the certificate authority declines to renew”, or “what happens when the transit provider’s legal team reads a Treasury press release”. (Red: Nobody, it seems, thought to ask the bank.) Those relationships were never in the threat model, or were in it and accepted as unavoidable. A server collective can put its disks in five countries and still have its name in a US registry (.org is administered from Reston, Virginia), its trust chain rooted in US-based authorities, its donations passing through US-based processors, and its bandwidth bought from companies with US subsidiaries. Twenty-five years of removing single points of failure at the hardware layer left the institutional layer largely as found. The Sabot Media piece republished by the collective lists the exposed layers plainly: banking, donations, domains, data-centre contracts, bandwidth, certificates, software dependencies.

The designation does not attack the servers. It attacks the joints. Whoever drafted it understood the dependency graph of an “autonomous” provider better than the provider’s own architecture documents did, because the architecture documents were about a different kind of attacker.

Sovereignty

Territorial sovereignty says that Italy decides whether an Italian association is criminal. Italy has decided nothing and has not been asked. The listing reaches an entity with no US presence through the things that entity cannot avoid touching: dollar clearing, the naming system, the trust system, the handful of companies through which most of the world’s traffic and payments pass. Legality in Europe and viability in Europe have come apart. The first still belongs to Rome; the second now depends on Washington.

This is not a novel observation about the dollar. Sanctions have shaped European banking behaviour for two decades, and the EU’s Blocking Statute, updated in 2018 to shield European companies trading with Iran, showed how little a regulation can do against a compliance department’s risk appetite: the Court of Justice reads the prohibition broadly, and in the same judgment holds that an operator may drop a listed customer without giving reasons, though it may then have to prove in court that it was not complying with the US measures. What is new here is the object. The reach is being used not against a bank or a shipping company but against a publishing platform for political speech, hosted in an EU member state, operating within that state’s law.

The EU has had a digital sovereignty agenda for a decade. Cases like this one show whether the phrase describes anything. The initial response has been silence, and silence is itself a decision: it establishes as working precedent that a US executive listing applies inside the Union by default. The PKK citation in the designation makes objection harder, since the PKK is on the EU’s own terrorism list and has litigated its listing for years without being removed, so any European official raising the case would need to argue proportionality and process rather than the underlying category. Proportionality arguments are slow, and the licence expires on 25 September. Beniamino Irdi’s reading, that the material-support logic is being applied to infrastructure openly for the first time, suggests the precedent is the point.

The question also arrives from below. In a private conversation within a day of the listing, a Dutch provider, ideologically kin to A/I and formally unconnected, asked whether it would be next. That is the sovereignty question in its practical form: not whether Brussels can protest, but whether a Dutch bank reads a Washington list, and it does.

Governance

The shift on display is from law to list. A prosecution needs a charge, a forum, a defence, a standard of proof and a route of appeal. A designation needs a signature and a press release. (Red: It is the difference between a trial and a rumour with letterhead.) Enforcement is then outsourced to private intermediaries who each draw their boundary a little wider than the law requires, because uncertainty resolved by exclusion costs less than uncertainty resolved by counsel. The listed party has no forum in which to be heard, and the intermediaries who cut it off have no obligation to explain themselves. The result is a form of governance that is dispersed, deniable and largely invisible: no officer in the server room, no order to show, only a series of accounts that quietly stop working. (Red: Nobody kicks the door in. The door just stops recognising the key.)

None of this machinery is new. It has been used against charities, hawala networks and individuals since 2001, and the civil-liberties objections to it are well documented. Applying it to a communications provider is a widening, not an invention, and the widening has a specific direction: away from money, towards speech. Treasury’s own press release insists that the United States does not sanction political speech, citing its FAQ 1190, a paragraph away from the one that lists a hosting provider.

There is a smaller point about legibility. A/I has no coordinator, no spokesperson, no leadership, no payroll and no voting; it decides by consensus on mailing lists that every participant can read, as its manifesto sets out. A state that governs by list needs a name to write on the list and finds this kind of structure suspicious on its face, since it has no obvious place to apply pressure and no individual to hold responsible. The designation’s language, with its “ cadre of radical hackers“, supplies the missing organisational chart by assertion. What the collective describes as an absence of hierarchy, the designation describes as concealment of one. The same move that reads no-logging as obstruction reads no-leader as conspiracy. (Red: Bureaucracies have long regarded the absence of someone to shout at as a form of insolence.)

Fascism

The word carries a great deal of weight in the material around this case and less in the event itself. What the designation does, precisely and in writing, is treat antifascism as a marker of terrorism. It names the collective’s antifascist and antimilitarist politics, its practice of selecting projects compatible with those politics, and its hosting of antifascist groups, and presents these as elements of the case. It sits inside a stated programme: a September 2025 executive order naming “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organisation, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 on political violence “under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism’”, and the November 2025 designation of four European groups in Germany, Italy and Greece, the first time the foreign-terrorist machinery had been pointed at that movement. For the people involved the resonance is not abstract: the Italian episodes in A/I’s history run through the G8 in Genoa, the Diaz school and the Bolzaneto barracks, for which the European Court of Human Rights found Italy in breach of the prohibition on torture in 2015 and again in 2017, and the investigation behind the 2010 seizure, triggered by graffiti aimed at a neo-fascist organisation. Criminalising the opposition to a thing while leaving the thing itself untouched has historically been a reliable tell of where a state’s sympathies lie.

Whether the correct noun is fascism, authoritarian legalism, or one of the other terms in circulation is partly a matter of taxonomy and partly a matter of temperament. The features on the record are easier to agree on: political dissent reclassified as a security threat; executive action without judicial process; enforcement through institutional fear rather than police force; and a foreign reach that domestic institutions in Europe do not, so far, resist. Those features do not require a mass movement, uniforms or a leader cult, and can coexist with elections, courts and a free press that reports on them. It may be more useful to name the features than to argue over the noun, if only because the features can be checked against the next case and the noun cannot.

Setting in motion

Most of what the listing sets in motion does not touch A/I at all.

Intermediary protection changes shape. European and US law have for a generation held that a host or conduit is not responsible for what passes through it, provided it acts when notified; in the EU this runs from the e-Commerce Directive into Articles 4 to 6 of the Digital Services Act, with Article 8 forbidding general monitoring obligations. A designation does not engage with that framework; it steps around it. No notice, no takedown, no finding of knowledge. If hosting plus political affinity plus a refusal to log is sufficient, then encrypted mail providers in Switzerland and Germany, a comparable collective in the United States, Tor relay operators, Matrix and Mastodon administrators, VPN companies and community archives all sit inside the same template, distinguished only by whether a given administration dislikes their users. Most would never be listed. The point is that nothing in the law now says they cannot be.

Privacy-preserving design becomes a suspect choice. The fact sheet presents anonymity and encryption as features built to support operations. Once that reading exists in an official document, larger providers acquire a reason to add identity verification, keep more logs and decline projects that look like this one, not because they are required to but because compliance prefers not to be a test case. A possible drift is that users leave small trusted infrastructure for commercial platforms that are easier to subpoena and map. That is a surveillance gain obtained without decrypting anything. And for users out of the frying pan into the fire.

The sanctions instrument acquires a new purpose. OFAC was built for terrorist finance, narcotics and hostile states. Pointing it at a volunteer publishing platform converts it into a tool against speech, with an enforcement radius that runs through bank fear rather than any statute. Other states have done comparable things, with foreign-agent registers, “undesirable organisation” lists and blocking regimes. The novelty is the dollar system doing it, which means the reach is honoured in Europe whether or not Europe agrees.

Domestic groups become reachable through foreign infrastructure. The designation lists Rose City Antifa, resistance to the Atlanta police-training centre and Jane’s Revenge alongside the PKK and Hamas. Listing a foreign provider is one way to reach domestic movements that the executive cannot easily designate directly, since there is no domestic-terrorist-organisation designation in US law, a point CrimethInc made the day after: make their communications infrastructure untouchable and their supporters legally uncertain. Anyone building tools those movements use could in principle be read as providing “technological support”. Sanctions counsel advising US non-profits were already warning about that exposure after the November designations.

And the people who chose this infrastructure because commercial platforms were unsafe for them, writers, organisers, researchers and NGO staff in hostile environments, become collateral damage. Sources hesitate to write to an address. Archives go offline. The record of what happened in Genoa in 2001, part of which escaped through the media centre this collective helped run, gets harder to reach.

25 September

The honest hedge is that all of this depends on repetition. A single listing that the collective outlasts, with European providers quietly routing around US dependencies and European institutions saying nothing, ends up as a footnote in the history of sanctions overreach. A second and a third listing turn it into doctrine. Which of those happens is not visible from here.

What is visible is the shape of the test. The wind-down licence expires at 04:01 UTC on 25 September 2026. Between now and then, every institution with a relationship to A/I decides whether to keep it, and most of those decisions will be taken by people who have never heard of Plan R* and have no interest in the difference between a provider and a user. (Red: They will have a form. The form will not have a box for it.) The servers will very probably still be running on 26 September. The question is whether anything can still reach them, pay for them, or trust their certificates. A quarter-century of preparing for a machine to disappear meets an attacker who has no interest in the machine.

The first server locked itself out on its second day, able to speak only to itself. The collective found that funny enough to wear. The listing amounts to an attempt to recreate the condition from the outside, for a whole network, by persuading everyone else to stop connecting. Whether that works is not, in the end, a question about architecture. It is a question about who else is standing on the same joints, and whether they notice in time. Stay updated via Circe.

Seven of the sources linked above are served from this site rather than from where they were originally published. The collective’s own site and its blog have been down since the listing, and archive.org (note the .org) copies can be withdrawn on request, so the short history, the manifesto, the statement of 26 August, the Sabot Media repost and the +KAOS book are local copies of archive.org captures (29 October 2025 for the history page, 26 to 28 August 2026 for the rest). The two Statewatch articles are local copies as well, the 2010 one from a capture of December 2012, since the live page has since shrunk to its first paragraph. Stylesheets and images were copied alongside; analytics scripts, share widgets and licensed web fonts were removed; the text was not touched. A piece about designated and potential other to-be-designated entities and joints giving way seemed unwise to be written standing on them.

Somebody in It

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GNU Terry Pratchett

The stall had stood at the Ankh end of the Brass Bridge for thirty years, which in Ankh-Morpork terms made it a geological feature. It had a canvas roof the colour of old tea, a high stool, a sloped desk polished by elbows, and a board that read ^[1] :

LETTERS WROTEPlain . . . . . 1sWith Feeling . . . . . 1s 6dTears Extra

Miss Dorcas Fairhand had inherited the stall, the stool, and the third-best pen from her mother, along with the only rule of the trade that counted: people do not come to a letter-writer for words. Words are everywhere. Words are the cheapest thing in the city after advice and rain. People come to a letter-writer to be put on paper, and putting a person on paper is a craft, like farriery, except the kicks take longer to arrive.

On the morning it all began, although nobody knew yet that anything was beginning, her first customer was a stevedore called Wallace Sonk, who wanted a letter to his mother in Sto Lat and stood twisting his cap as if wringing the words out of it.

‘Sit,’ said Dorcas. ‘What does she call you?’

‘Our Wally.’

‘What did you have for your dinner on Tuesday?’

Sonk blinked. ‘Pease pudding. Why?’

‘Because she’ll want to know, and you’d never think to say. Does she know about the thumb?’

‘No,’ said Sonk, hiding it.

‘Then we shan’t tell her, but we shall mention that you have bought gloves. Right.’ The pen began to move.

The letter, when she read it back to him, said pease pudding, and gloves, and that the fog off the river got into a man’s chest but the money was regular. It was spelt the way Sonk would have spelt it, which took skill, because Dorcas could spell and had to climb down. It ended yors respectfull son, Our Wally, and Sonk held it the way a man holds a warm plate on a cold day.

‘That’s me, that is,’ he said, wonderingly. It was the highest praise the trade knew.

She took his shilling and did not tell him the trade secret, which was that the letter was mostly made of questions, and the art was in choosing which answers to leave in. Any fool could write down what a man wanted to say. The craft was finding out what he meant, and keeping the pease pudding.

The rest of the day went the way her days went. A suitor who could talk to anyone except the one person, and needed sixteen questions before the seventeenth found the thing he actually admired about her, which was the way she argued. An apology that had been circling a man for a decade, wanting only somebody to hold the door open while it went through. And at the end of the day, as often, old Mrs Kettle, who dictated a letter to her husband, dead these six years, and paid her shilling, and took the letter home unposted, and was neither mad nor foolish, but simply knew what letters are for, which was more than the city was about to.

⁂

The Pneumatic Scribbler shop opened on Attic Bee Street in the spring, between a pawnbroker and a shrine to Anoia, Goddess of Things That Stick in Drawers, which as it turned out was an omen. The sign said:

WORDS WHILE-U-WAITLetters, Odes, Sympathy by the YardProp. N. Hopkin, B.Thau.A Penny Plain, Tuppence Heartfelt

In the window stood the engine. It was the size of a wardrobe and considerably better dressed, all brass fittings and glass tubes, and inside the tubes, marching with the calm of creatures who have never once been asked their opinion, were the ants. ^[2] Mr Hopkin had built it at the University for a project concerning the mechanical properties of language, and the University had asked him to leave, and he had taken the view, common among failed wizards, that what magic would not finish, commerce would.

‘The ants do the grammar,’ he explained to anyone who paused. ‘There is a small imp for the commas.’ ^[3]

Mr Hopkin was not a villain, which is worth saying, because the city later wanted one and he was handy. He was a young man who had found a way of making words the way the mill on Peach Pie Street made flour, and he was proud of it in the uncomplicated manner of a man who has never once asked what flour is for. He wrote to his own mother by engine, weekly, on the Heartfelt setting, and told people so, beaming, as a testimonial, and never understood, then or afterwards, why the letters home had stopped being answered.

You pulled a lever for the occasion (Love, Sorrow, Money Owed, Money Very Much Owed, General), you supplied a name, and the engine wrote. And here was the thing, the thing that emptied Dorcas’s queue by fifty yards within a fortnight: the letters were beautiful. Every one. The condolences consoled. The love letters rhymed exactly where rhyming helped and stopped before it hurt. The begging letters could have got money out of a dwarf. Dorcas stood in line herself, in a shawl, and bought a love letter addressed to nobody, and read it on the bridge.

It was perfect. It was warm the way a public building is warm. It mentioned eyes, and stars, and the ache of absence, and it was comprehensive, and even, and lovely, and there was nobody in it at all, because there had been nobody to do the meaning. The words had been minted, not spent.

Within a month the city was awash. Menus grew paragraphs; the beef was seared lovingly, the cabbage braised with quiet pride. The Guild of Merchants’ newsletter developed a voice like a hug from damp upholstery. Sermons swelled. Shop signs acquired sentiments. Everyone wrote to everyone, at a penny a time, gorgeously, and for about five weeks Ankh-Morpork was the best-correspounded city on the Disc, and possibly the happiest.

Competition arrived within the month, because in Ankh-Morpork a queue is a business plan. The Silver Quill opened in Dolly Sisters with an engine that did verse. Ye Olde Authentick Letter Shoppe undercut everyone at a farthing and threw in a smudge at no extra charge. Sympathy went, in the literal sense, by the yard: the bereaved could buy consolation off a roll, priced by length, and the rolls grew as the price war deepened, until a man in Pigsty Hill received, on the death of his aunt, eleven feet of condolence and had to have help carrying it home.

Proposal season was when the cracks showed, though nobody wanted to look at them yet. On one bright Saturday in Dolly Sisters, three young men proposed to three young women with the same letter, the engines having settled, as engines will, on the best of all possible proposals. Two of the young women compared notes over the wall while hanging washing. The third was Elsie Tuck, who had received her ode twice, from suitors who had never met, one copy addressed to Elsie and the other, less fortunately, to Elise. She kept both, she said, for evidence, though nobody was quite sure of what, until later, when everybody was.

⁂

It took six more weeks for the city to stop reading, and it was not a decision. Nobody holds a meeting. It happens the way a street decides a fish shop is unlucky. A clerk opens a letter that consoles him deeply about a bereavement he has not had. Word of Elsie Tuck’s two odes travels the washing lines, which are faster than the clacks and considerably less discreet. And after a while a hand reaching for a letter learns to hesitate, the way a hand learns about nettles.

Mrs Scallop, who kept a lodging house in Cockbill Street and had buried three husbands without the aid of literature, put it the way the street put it: ‘If it reads lovely, it goes in the stove.’

The Times announced that letters to the editor would henceforth require at least one blot. The clacks companies, to their own surprise, entered a golden age, because what people now wanted from words was not beauty but proof, and proof is short. The towers filled with small hard questions that had only one right answer apiece. WHAT COLOUR DID WE PAINT THE PRIVY. WHO BIT THE RENT MAN IN '78. Freight rates and futures had to squeeze past solid traffic of shared secrets going home to be checked. The signallers, who had old customs of their own about what the overhead was really for, carried it all and said nothing.

And Dorcas’s queue came back, facing the other way.

They brought her letters. They held them out the way you hold a fish you have doubts about, and they paid tuppence, and they asked the new question, the only question: ‘Is anybody in this?’

She had two stamps cut by a dwarf engraver on Rime Street. One said SOMEBODY. The other said NOBODY. She was scrupulous with them, because the trade now ran on her being scrupulous, and this is how she told, since it certainly was not the spelling: by week three Mr Hopkin’s engine did misspellings to order, Rustick, add a penny. No. A real letter answers questions nobody asked and forgets the thing it was written to say. It mentions the weather out of nowhere. It has a hole where a tooth is being kept secret. It is lumpy with the person, the way porridge is lumpy with oats. The engine’s letters had no lumps. They were all answer and no asking, complete in every particular except one, and after a while Dorcas could feel the absence before she had finished the salutation, the way you can feel an empty house through the door.

Her scrupulousness cut both ways, which is what made it worth tuppence. Mr Vole the moneylender, a man who kept his heart in a strongbox for its own protection, brought her a hardship letter from a debtor in the Shades, fully expecting the NOBODY, since the letter was blotched, rambling, and asked a month’s grace on account of a sick child. Dorcas read it twice. It forgot to name the sum owed. It spent a paragraph on the child’s cough, described the exact noise of it, and then apologised for describing it. It mentioned that the rain had got into the room where it was being written, which no engine would ever admit, rain being bad for business.

She stamped it SOMEBODY. Mr Vole stood looking at the stamp for some time, in the manner of a man doing sums with unfamiliar figures, and went away, and gave the month. He said afterwards it was the tuppence talking, and was not believed, and his business improved oddly from then on, because it turns out people repay a man who can tell.

There was, briefly, a market solution. The Guild of Scriveners issued Certified Human wax seals, at a shilling. The Guild of Forgers, who regarded sincerity as a speciality like any other, was selling better ones within nine days at ninepence. ^[4] After that the seals were decoration, and the city fell back on the older system, the one Mrs Scallop had been using all along: a letter got read if you could picture the hand that held the pen. The circle of the readable shrank, street by street, to the circle of the personally known, and stayed there, and the strange thing, the thing nobody had ordered and no engine had written, was that inside that circle, letters were suddenly precious in a way they had not been for years. Scarcity had come home.

The Guild of Letter-Writers met that autumn in the back room of the pub, which was calling itself the Grapes of Mild Reproach that year, to discuss what the minutes called the Situation. Attendance was eleven, down from thirty. Old Follet had retired to Quirm. Two of the juniors had gone over to the engines as menu poets and were not spoken of. One, it was whispered, had joined the Forgers, where at least the work was honest about what it was. The eleven voted, gloomily, to reduce the subscription, and then Dorcas stood up and read out her ledger for the quarter, the reading side of it, and the room went quiet in a new way, and the motto over the fireplace, No Somebody, No Shilling, was observed by all present to have spent fifty years waiting for the city to catch up with it.

⁂

Mr Hopkin came back in the autumn, the way water comes back under a door.

He had heard about the stamps. He was not offended; being Hopkin, he was inspired. He stood in front of the stall for a full ten minutes, watching Dorcas work, taking notes, and she knew what he was noting, because there was only one thing to note, and it was the questions. Three weeks later the shop on Attic Bee Street had a new lever, below Love and Sorrow and Money Very Much Owed. It said Authentick.

The engine asked questions now. A clerk with a ledger sat beside it and took down the answers: what does she call you, what did you eat, what is the joke only the two of you laugh at, how do you spell when nobody helps you? The engine remembered, and folded it all in. The new letters had lumps. They forgot to say the thing they had been written to say. They mentioned weather nobody had asked about, in the right wrong places. Hopkin, who could learn anything except the point, had taught his ants to do pease pudding.

The first one reached the stall on a Friday. Dorcas read it twice, then a third time, and sat with the SOMEBODY stamp in her hand for a long while, not stamping, while the customer watched her the way you watch an apothecary weigh something. There were things in the letter only two people could have known, and one of those people could not spell, and the letter could not spell in exactly his fashion. She stamped it SOMEBODY in the end, because by her own rules it was, and it was another month before she learned what her own rules were worth.

In between came Mr Cramp, and Dorcas went on thinking about Mr Cramp long afterwards, which was not usual and not comfortable.

Cramp was a stonemason with hands like the tools of his trade and a brother in Genua he had not spoken to in twenty years, over a matter involving a headstone, a woman, or a ladder, depending on which year you asked him. He put an engine letter on the desk, Authentick setting, tuppenny-heartfelt, every fact in it his own: the ladder, the woman, the headstone, all three, and in the middle of it the sentence he had been trying to build for twenty years, the one that always came out like an invoice.

‘I know it isn’t mine,’ he said, before she could open her mouth. ‘That’s why. Mine come out wrong. Twenty years of coming out wrong.’ He looked at his hands, which could letter a headstone in a fine Roman face and could not do this. ‘I told it everything. It just laid the stones in the right order. Is he in it or isn’t he, missus? Because if your stamp says nobody, then I’ve got nothing again.’

Dorcas read it. Cramp was in the letter the way a man is in a house he has paid another man to build: every measurement his, every brick laid by someone else. And she thought, with a small cold feeling, that this described her own trade to the inch, and had done for thirty years, and that an engine with questions was nothing in the world but a cheaper her.

‘He’s in it,’ she said at last, and reached for neither stamp. ‘You’re in it. It’s your twenty years. Post it. But put a line at the bottom, in your own hand, saying a machine helped you say it.’ And, when he reached for his purse: ‘The line’s free. The line is what does the work.’

He posted it, apparently, and the brother wrote back, apparently, spelling like a rockfall, and in the difficult weeks that followed Dorcas held on to the two facts of the case: that the machine had said a true thing a man could not say alone, and that the letter which mended it all was the ugly one.

The difficult weeks began with Mr Tally.

Tally was old, and propertied, and had a daughter he had not seen since a quarrel whose shape everyone but the two of them had forgotten. The letter came in October. It was lumpy. It remembered the smell of linseed in the workshop and the name of a dog dead thirty years. It apologised with holes in it, the way real apologies have holes, and it asked for nothing, which was the most convincing thing about it. Dorcas read it at the stall while Tally stood holding his hat, and stamped it SOMEBODY, and he cried, and changed his will within the week, and sent passage money to Genua.

The daughter, when at last she stood in his parlour, had never written it. She had come, bewildered, on the strength of the passage money, which is how it all came out. Her real letters, the ones she had almost sent for years and never had, were in a box in a wardrobe in Genua. The letter Tally received had been fed to an engine, detail by detail, by a nephew with a key to the attic and an eye on the will, out of a bundle of the daughter’s old letters that Tally had never known his sister kept.

Every fact in it was true. The dog, the linseed, the holes in the apology. The somebody in it was real, and had not written it, and had not known.

The nephew left town at some speed. The daughter, being there anyway, stayed a fortnight, and nobody in the city could afterwards quite agree whether the letter had been a crime or a cure, which is the sort of question Ankh-Morpork preferred to leave to the priests, who wisely declined it. Tally himself came to the stall, not angry but lost, wanting his tuppence worth explained, and Dorcas gave the tuppence back, which the trade does not do, and put the SOMEBODY stamp in the drawer, and shut the drawer, and looked at the river for the rest of the afternoon, the river at least being reliably nobody.

Because the stamp had done its work exactly. There had been somebody in the letter. The craft had never thought to ask whose hand had let them in.

⁂

The clerk appeared at the stall at dawn, in the polite black of a man whose politeness is not optional.

‘His lordship will see you now, Miss Fairhand.’

‘I didn’t ask to see his lordship.’

‘No,’ agreed the clerk. ‘Nevertheless.’

The Oblong Office was quiet in the way of rooms where noise has learned better. Lord Vetinari stood at the window; on the desk were two stacks of paper. One was tall, crisp, and gleaming, every page a model of clarity. The other was thin, scruffy, crossed-out, and coffee-ringed.

‘Miss Fairhand. You write letters.’

‘Fewer than formerly, sir.’

‘So I understand. You read them now. For money.’ He turned. ‘Tuppence, I am told, to say whether anybody is at home in a page. The Guild of Scriveners has petitioned me twice to have you stopped, on the grounds that you are bringing the written word into disrepute.’

‘The word got there first, sir.’

‘Mm.’ Vetinari touched the tall stack with one finger, briefly, as one might touch something to confirm it is as cold as it looks. ‘Every department of my city now submits reports of wonderful fluency. Comprehensive. Even-handed. Serene. I have taken to reading the other stack.’ The finger moved to the scruffy pile. ‘The reports in this one contradict themselves, wander, and in one case include a recipe. I find I can govern from them. Do you know why, Miss Fairhand?’

Dorcas considered the question and the man asking it, in that order. ‘Because somebody’s in them, sir. You can see where they stopped being sure. That’s the part that’s true even when the rest is wrong.’

‘Just so. The crossing-out,’ said the Patrician, ‘is the signature of thought. It records what a mind declined to say, which is the only part of a report that cannot be minted.’

‘There’s a difficulty, sir,’ said Dorcas, because you did not lie to this man, and being on the edge of a compliment made her nervous. ‘My stamp says SOMEBODY. It doesn’t say TRUE. A careful liar who writes his own lies is in every word of them. I can tell you a man was at home when the letter was written. I can’t tell you what he was doing in there. And since October I can’t always tell you it was his house.’

‘Mr Tally,’ said Vetinari, who heard about everything. ‘Accurate in every particular, I understand, including the remorse. Only the somebody was somebody else’s.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Naturally,’ said Vetinari. ‘If your stamp said TRUE I should have had you stopped months ago, on the grounds of impossible advertising. Truth I have clerks for; they cross-reference. Presence is the rarer commodity, and the prior one. A lie with somebody in it can be interrogated. It has habits, appetites, a direction of travel. It can be caught. Whereas a page with nobody in it,’ and here he looked, briefly, genuinely tired, ‘cannot even be wrong. It offers nothing to seize. It is not on the map at all.’

‘It’s the well-off that get fooled worst, sir, if that’s any comfort,’ said Dorcas. ‘Down Cockbill Street they never did trust a lovely letter, on the reasonable grounds of never having sent one. They read by acquaintance. Always have. The flood came in, and they were already standing on the roof.’

‘Yes,’ said Vetinari. ‘Poverty is early training in the price of proof. It has often struck me that the Shades runs on a verification system the Guilds could not afford.’

He moved to the desk and sat. ‘Words, Miss Fairhand, were never the expensive part. Attention was. The city has discovered how to mint words, and is astonished, as cities always are, to find that attention now trades at a premium. Certain persons urge me to ban Mr Hopkin’s engines. I shall do no such thing. One does not ban a flood. One notes, rather promptly, the price of high ground.’ He glanced up. ‘You appear to be selling high ground at tuppence. Raise your prices.’

‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘It is arithmetic. The Guild of Forgers has a waiting list. You have a queue.’ He drew the thin stack towards him and took up a pen, a scratchy one, she noticed, that would blot, and leave its workings visible, and do it on one draft. ‘Do not let me detain you.’

Dorcas raised her prices on the stairs, from tuppence to sixpence, which was the first rise in thirty years and the first she had never argued with herself about. One always does what Lord Vetinari suggests. He does not insist; he has never been known to insist. It is only that the city has never established what happens to people who decline, and has an instinct, older than the Guilds, against being the one who finds out. The new price went up on the board in chalk that afternoon, and nobody in the queue said a word, which told her more about the state of the city than the Patrician had. The paint followed on the Sunday, on Vetinari’s arithmetic:

LETTERS WROTE . . . . . 1sLETTERS READ . . . . . 6dSomebody In It, Or Your Sixpence Back

⁂

Mrs Grebe came on a Thursday, which was wash-day, so it was serious.

She was a small round widow from over the river, and her son Tom had been at sea for two years, and for the first of them his letters had arrived quarterly, spelt like a fight in an alphabet factory, and she had read each one until it fell apart along the folds. Then, this last twelvemonth, the letters had turned beautiful. Warm. Grammatical. Full of the ache of absence and the width of the sea.

She put the newest one on the desk and did not let go of her end of it.

‘You don’t need my stamps, Mrs Grebe,’ said Dorcas gently. ‘You knew before you crossed the bridge.’

‘I want to hear it said.’

Dorcas read it. It was a very good letter. It would have consoled a stranger completely. ‘There’s somebody near this letter,’ she said at last. ‘Standing right next to it, I’d say, and paying his penny. But he isn’t in it.’

Mrs Grebe nodded, once, like a judge. ‘Then I’ll have a proper one wrote back. Never mind the spelling. And you put in this, word for word.’ She leaned in. ‘Ask him: what is buried under the pear tree.’

It went out on the next boat, and for five weeks Mrs Grebe did her washing on Thursdays, and told the neighbours nothing, and wore her second-best patience thin, and then the answer came, and she brought it to the stall unopened, because some things you do not do alone, and paid her sixpence, and Dorcas slit it and read it aloud.

It was creased and tar-thumbed and spelt like a shipwreck. It said: the dogs colar. It said: mam I been payin a penny a leter becos my hand shames me, it makes words like other people has coats. It said: I will rite my own after this even tho they come out ronge, the weather here is all sides at once, my tooth is out, the one you said about. It said the sea was too big to put in a letter, and he had given up trying. It said pease-pudding things, weather nobody had asked after, a secret tooth surrendered, all lumps, no polish, and Mrs Grebe sat on the client’s stool with her hands over her mouth and cried a full one-and-six worth, tears extra, no charge.

It was the worst-written letter Dorcas had seen all year. There was no doubt whatever about the stamp.

⁂

The girl had been watching the stall for eight days before Dorcas spoke to her. She was about eleven, sharp-faced, the kind of child the street sands down early, and she had watched the way some children watch conjurers, not for the wonder but for the method.

‘You’ll be wanting to learn letters,’ said Dorcas.

‘I know letters,’ said the girl, whose name was Prill. ‘I want to learn the other thing. The thing where you know.’

So Dorcas took her on, and the first thing she taught her was not the pen. She put the pen away. She sat Prill on the stool where the customers sat, and taught her the questions: what does she call you, what did you eat on Tuesday, what are we leaving out, what does the weather do there. Because the pen was never the trade. The trade was that a letter is not words going somewhere. A letter is a person, folded small enough to post, and the ants, given enough questions, could do the folding now, more or less. What they could not do was answer for it. Somebody had to be the one who could be asked, afterwards: why this word, why that silence, who let this person in. That had become the trade, if it had ever been anything else.

‘You said you’d teach me the thing where you know,’ said Prill, who missed nothing.

‘You said that. I never did,’ said Dorcas. ‘Knowing had a good year. Then it met a nephew with a key to an attic. What there is, is finding out who is speaking. It’s slower, and it can be wrong, and when it’s wrong it goes back and asks more questions. That’s the whole of it, and it doesn’t fit on a stamp.’

As it happened, the first customer of Prill’s apprenticeship was Wallace Sonk, back with his cap and a new occasion: the mother in Sto Lat was poorly, and wanted a letter, and Sonk wanted it right. Dorcas sat on her hands, which is the hardest part of teaching, and let the girl ask.

‘What does she call you?’ said Prill.

‘Our Wally,’ said Sonk, and then, because the stool does something to people, ‘she won’t say what’s wrong with her. She says it’s nothing. It’s in how she says nothing.’

Prill glanced at Dorcas, got nothing there either, and went on alone. ‘What did you eat, last time you were home?’

‘Pease pudding,’ said Sonk. ‘She burnt it. First time in forty years.’ He looked at his hands. ‘Put that in. Put in that I noticed.’

So the letter said pease pudding, and burnt, and noticed, and did not say poorly, and was spelt the way Sonk spelt, and when Prill read it back he held it like a warm plate and said the old words, the guild’s whole charter in three of them: that’s me, that is.

‘What’s the first question, then?’ said Prill, afterwards. ‘The one you always ask first.’

‘Who’s it from,’ said Dorcas.

Above them the clacks tower at the bridge end blinked its traffic into the dusk, freight rates and futures and small hard questions going home to be checked, and in the gaps between them, as there had been every evening for years and would be for years yet, a dead signalman’s name went up the Line and back again, kept moving by hand.

Genuine, and her own. The use of onions was a disciplinary matter within the Guild of Letter-Writers, a small guild which met in the back room of a pub that kept changing its name, under a motto that translated, loosely but accurately, as No Somebody, No Shilling. ↩
The University had pioneered the use of ants in thinking machinery some years earlier. The ants were not consulted then either. ↩
The imp had previously spent two centuries on punctuation for a firm of Genuan lawyers and held opinions about the semicolon that Mr Hopkin had learned not to raise after six in the evening. ↩
The Forgers’ Guild’s own correspondence was famously heartfelt. ↩

Perpetua Vink and the unminuted Sundays

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Perpetua Vink had been educated in Lancre, which is not something that happens to a person so much as something that is done to them. Her teacher was Mistress Esmerelda Weatherwax, of whom it was said, mostly at a safe distance, that she was the greatest witch on the Disc, and who held that the craft came down to two things. The first was First Sight, which is seeing what is actually there, rather than what ought to be there, or what everyone agrees is there. The second was Second Thoughts, which are the thoughts that watch the thinking. Mistress Weatherwax had never mentioned that the second one would turn out to be the expensive one, on the grounds that some bills a young witch has to run up for herself. There were, she allowed, Third Thoughts, which watch the world and think for themselves, and she did not teach those, since nobody could. Fourth Thoughts, which ask what might be done about whatever the first three have found, she regarded as politics, and not her department.

The rumour arrived in the mountains the way rumours do, worn smooth by handling. The world’s money, it said, was decided in a tower beside a railway station in Basel, by people nobody had chosen, at meetings nobody could attend, and the police were not allowed in. Perpetua, who had been raised to hold that a rumour is only a fact that has not yet been made to show its papers, went to look.

The tower

The tower was easy to find, being a tower, and the first surprise was that the rumour had understated things. Every other month, on a Sunday, a few dozen people gather there. They are the governors of the world’s major central banks. The bimonthly meetings leave no public record of what was said; the Economic Consultative Committee convenes on the Sunday, and the Global Economy Meeting that follows brings together the governors of thirty central banks representing roughly four fifths of global GDP. Under its Headquarters Agreement with the Swiss state, the buildings and archives of the Bank for International Settlements are inviolable; no agent of the Swiss authorities may enter without the Bank’s consent. Finance ministers are not among them. Entry, for anyone, is by invitation.

The second surprise was where the confirmations came from. The Bank publishes its own arrangements, and the publications go back to 1930. Perpetua, who had expected to spend a week listening at windows, instead sat down and opened the first document. It handed her the next.

First sight

The Bank was created at The Hague Conference of 1930 to administer German war reparations; the reparations file led to March 1939, days after German troops occupied Prague, when gold held for the National Bank of Czechoslovakia in a BIS account at the Bank of England moved to a Reichsbank account, an instruction issued under duress that the BIS decided to honour. The gold led to Bretton Woods, 1944, where the assembled nations adopted a resolution calling for the liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at the earliest possible moment. The liquidation never happened, and an institution that survives its own internationally recommended abolition raises the obvious next question, what power the people in it still hold. A decision of the ECB’s Governing Council can reprice markets within minutes, including markets whose interest-rate-linked contracts run into the hundreds of trillions, and its makers stand for no election. Several sit in the Group of Thirty, a private, Washington-based body where serving central bankers meet executives of banks under their own supervision; when the European Ombudsman found this to constitute maladministration and recommended that the ECB president suspend his membership, the ECB considered the recommendation and declined. Article 130 of the treaty forbids the ECB and the national central banks from taking instructions from any government, and forbids governments from trying to give them. A Dutch finance minister has no vote, no seat, and no standing to demand one. And over all of it lay the synchrony: rate moves arriving in step across jurisdictions, crisis programmes that rhymed, a profession that appeared to act as one.

Somewhere along that chain the pieces fitted, and the click was audible. A bank born of one war, compromised in the next, sentenced to liquidation and quietly reprieved; immunity from the local police; unminuted Sundays; a private club shared with the supervised; elected governments legally barred from the room; and coordinated movement across a continent. Perpetua felt the click arrive, and it felt like being right, which is a feeling with excellent manners and no references. It was not the click of a fool: every piece was documented, most of it by the institutions themselves. The picture assembled itself, and what it appeared to show was a directorate.

She wrote one word at the top of the page: directorate. She sat with that for a while, because it was warm.

Second thoughts

Then the training reasserted itself, the way training does, at the least welcome moment. Granny Weatherwax had said it once, in the voice she kept for weather and other facts, over a matter of goats that had turned out to be a matter of yew: a click only ever tells that a pattern has been found, never where it lives, in the world or in the finder.

So Perpetua asked of each piece one flat, unglamorous question: what does this piece actually require? A directing hand, or something cheaper?

The exclusion of the elected was the first piece to show its own papers, because it had a paper trail running in exactly the wrong direction for a secret. The inflation of the 1970s discredited politically steered money across the West; the Bundesbank’s record made the German model the envy of every neighbouring treasury; the academic case was built in the open, from Kydland and Prescott’s 1977 argument (“Rules Rather than Discretion”, Journal of Political Economy) that discretionary policymakers systematically produce inflation nobody wants, to Rogoff’s 1985 case (Quarterly Journal of Economics) for handing the printing press to someone more conservative than the median voter. Maastricht in 1992 turned the fashion into treaty law, ratified by national parliaments, the Dutch one included. The corridor where the minister waits was drawn deliberately, and the drawing was published in the Official Journal. Even the privacy turned out to be a published calibration: the ECB announced in December 2014 that it would publish unattributed accounts of its monetary policy meetings four weeks afterwards, while the confidential records remain subject to a thirty-year access restriction, and the Federal Reserve releases complete transcripts on a five-year lag. Perpetua noted, with a witch’s respect for the practicalities, that arrangements bent on concealment do not print their constitutions and invite commentary on the result.

The synchrony took longer, and broke open into something more interesting: the biographies. The economics of central banking passes through a handful of graduate departments, one above all. Stanley Fischer’s MIT taught or advised Bernanke, Draghi, and later governors of the central banks of Australia, Brazil and Japan; Draghi and Bernanke took their doctorates there in the late 1970s, and Bernanke and Mervyn King occupied adjoining offices as young academics in 1983, a quarter-century before facing 2008 as, respectively, Federal Reserve chairman and Governor of the Bank of England. The guild runs versions of the same models, publishes in the same handful of journals, and cites itself. Two governors reaching the same decision in separate buildings need no telephone call between them: same model, same data, same answer. Perpetua knew this mechanism from Lancre. A village where everyone was raised on the same three stories will finish each other’s sentences forever, and no meeting is ever required. Herding is observationally almost indistinguishable from coordination, and considerably easier to arrange.

And whatever steering capacity the guild possessed, 2008 had measured it. The crash arrived unforecast by nearly the entire profession, central banks included, and it took an actual queen to ask the obvious question. When she did, at the LSE, the considered reply came in a letter from the British Academy: principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people to understand the risks to the system as a whole. It had been written as an explanation. Perpetua read it as a verdict. A hand on the wheel is at least responsible for where it steers. A monoculture cannot notice what its shared model does not contain, and in 2008 the model did not contain the banking system.

What second thoughts keep

Second Thoughts are not an acquittal, and in several places they read harsher than the click did, which was the part Perpetua had not expected.

The distributional record of quantitative easing is a central bank finding about itself. The Bank of England’s 2012 analysis of its asset purchases noted plainly that the policy worked by raising asset prices, and that holdings were heavily skewed, with the top five per cent of households holding forty per cent of the relevant assets. The distributional effect was upward through asset prices, acknowledged in house, and the consequences did not end with the first purchase programme. Greece, 2015, sits in the press releases: on 28 June, with a national referendum called for 5 July, the ECB announced that emergency liquidity to Greek banks would stay capped at its Friday level rather than rise to meet the accelerating deposit run; the banks did not open on Monday, capital controls followed within hours, and an unelected institution had materially constrained the financial conditions under which a democratic vote would take place, announcing each step publicly as it went. Perpetua read that file twice and did not smile once. The Group of Thirty stayed too, and stayed a choice: no structure forced the ECB to decline the Ombudsman, and Perpetua noted the difference between a structural inevitability and a decision. The 2019 nomination of the ECB presidency as one item in a package deal on the EU’s top jobs, assembled over three days of horse-trading and reported live, completed the picture: the scandal was in the press releases. Nothing had required a leak. It had required reading.

No door

The directorate had not survived the question, and its absence made the picture colder, not warmer. A directorate has a door. Behind a door there can be an exposure, a resignation, a dismantling; the problem carries its own remedy inside it. Convergence has no door. There is no meeting whose exposure would fix the distributional record of asset purchases, no membership list whose publication would have put a banking system into the models of 2008. Nobody is driving, and the vehicle is real.

Third thoughts

Granny Weatherwax had said it once, over a matter of a barn fire and the boy who had been carrying a lantern through it, that explaining the hay does not explain the boy.

Herding as an explanation reaches the system level. It does not reach the Governing Council that capped emergency liquidity to Greek banks in the week of a national referendum, because that cap was the decision of specific people in a specific room at a specific hour. It does not reach the institution that received a written recommendation from the Ombudsman, replied in writing, and declined. Nor does it speak for the economists who published a distributional analysis of their own institution’s programme, or for the institution that ran the programme again in 2016 and in 2020. Herding produces convergence across jurisdictions; it does not produce every specific resolution on every specific day. Herding and discretion are not rivals: they occupy the same meeting and act together.

Fourth thoughts

Mandates can be reconsidered, accountability written into amended treaties. The argument was made at Maastricht in a form that excluded the minister, and can be made differently, at the cost of ratification in every member state. This is available.

The Ombudsman’s recommendation is in the public record. The distributional analysis is in the public record. The emergency liquidity cap and its timing are in the press releases. The Group of Thirty membership, maintained after the Ombudsman finding, is in the record. The institutions published it, under their own names, in their own documents, and the question is not where to find it but which of these decisions, made by people in a room with a door, could be made differently.

The tower beside Basel station publishes no record of its Sunday discussions. Its inviolable archive, meanwhile, has been open to researchers since 1998, thirty years after the fact, by appointment.

Perpetua made an appointment.

Perpetua Vink is an original character written in homage to the Discworld of Sir Terry Pratchett. Mistress Weatherwax, Lancre, First Sight, Second Thoughts and Third Thoughts are his, and remain the property of his estate; they appear here with gratitude, without affiliation, and without commerce. Fourth Thoughts are an addition. Everything the documents say is, probably and regrettably, real enough.

Curating the dead

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A state can keep a Holocaust museum and defend a man whose signature sits on a 1941 order concentrating Jewish people into a ghetto, and Lithuania does both without apparent strain. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius runs a permanent exhibition on the murder of the country’s Jewish people. In the same years, an official research centre has defended the wartime record of Jonas Noreika, an anti-Soviet partisan hero named in the paperwork of the Siauliai district in the summer of 1941. Acknowledgement in general, exculpation in particular: the two are held together, and held calmly.

A shortage of heroes

The condition underneath is a century that changed hands too often. Soviet occupation in 1940, German occupation from 1941 to 1944, then the Soviets again until independence at the start of the 1990s. The anti-Soviet suffering was not invented: mass deportation and killing ran for decades, and a state rebuilt after 1990 needed usable heroes to stand on. It found them in the Forest Brothers, the partisans who fought the returning Soviets, and in named resistance figures of the 1940s.

Underneath those figures sits the other occupation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the Germans murdered about ninety per cent of Lithuania’s Jewish people, one of the highest rates in Europe, that detachments of the Einsatzgruppen together with Lithuanian auxiliaries began the killing in June and July 1941, and that Lithuanians carried out violent riots against Jewish people both shortly before and immediately after the German arrival. Yad Vashem puts the Jewish population at roughly 220,000 when Germany invaded in June 1941, and about 200,000 of them were killed, most by the end of that year. The two histories do not sit side by side so much as overlap in particular people. Some of the material a national story is built from also touches the summer of 1941.

Certifying the past

That overlap is managed, where it is managed, by an institution. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre is a state body charged with studying the crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations. It issues the findings that certify who counts as a hero of the resistance, and it has become the focus of a charge that it minimises collaboration. Its defenders put the same fact the other way, that it holds a line against a foreign campaign to smear the nation’s dead. Both descriptions fit its position. The centre sits exactly where the two histories cross, and an institution placed there produces findings that read as history and function as adjudication.

A signed order

Jonas Noreika, who went by the codename General Vetra, is honoured as a hero of the anti-Soviet resistance. A signed order of 22 August 1941 ties him to concentrating the Jewish people of the Siauliai district into the Zagare ghetto and to the disposal of Jewish property. His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, set out the documentation in The Nazi’s Granddaughter (2021). Grant Gochin, a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish people, sued the research centre to overturn its conclusions about Noreika and lost. On 2 April 2020 the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the suit on jurisdictional grounds and ordered him to pay 950 euros in costs. The ruling settled who may decide the question, not what Noreika did.

The centre’s own 2015 report is where the shape is clearest. It concluded that Noreika “nedalyvavęs žydų masinėse naikinimo operacijose” (“did not take part in mass extermination operations”), while conceding that the Nazis “pavyko įtraukti […] į su žydų izoliavimu susijusių reikalų tvarkymą” (“succeeded in bringing […] into the administration of affairs connected with the isolation of Jews”). Isolation conceded, extermination denied: the dispute lives in that distinction, and it arrives as an administrative sentence rather than a slogan, which is part of what makes it hold.

Books off the shelves

The pattern is not confined to a courtroom. Our People, by Ruta Vanagaite and the Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff (2016), broke a domestic taboo on local participation in the killing. In late October 2017 the publisher Alma Littera recalled all of Vanagaite’s books after she raised questions about the partisan leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, the chief executive calling her statements incompatible with the values of the publishing house. A recall is a commercial decision, not a prosecution, which is the point. The narrative is not kept by the state alone. It is kept by institutions that decide they know where the line runs.

Even-handed on paper

At the edge sits a memory law. Article 170-2 of the Criminal Code, in force since 2010, criminalises the public condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of crimes committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against Lithuania or its inhabitants, where the conduct is also threatening or abusive or disturbs public order. The statute is even-handed in its wording. The one prosecution to reach a courtroom is not: it turns on the approval of Soviet crimes and the denigration of the partisans, not on the Nazi crimes the same law also names.

In March 2026 the Vilnius District Court opened the case of Artur Fridman, charged with public approval of Soviet crimes and defamation of the memory of the dead, over a Facebook post said to have called the partisans “forest bandits” and Ramanauskas-Vanagas a “pseudo-hero”. He denies the charge. Advocates for Fridman, among them Gochin, describe the same prosecution as a man tried for honouring his Jewish grandfather, a Red Army veteran, and attach to it a 220-page indictment and travel restrictions.

Mixed messages

A tidy version would call this denial, and it would be wrong. Lithuania apologised at the level of the head of state, when President Brazauskas addressed the Knesset in 1995. It funds the Jewish museum and its Holocaust exhibition, set up an international commission on the two occupations in 1998, and has prosecuted collaborators: Aleksandras Lileikis was charged before his death in 2000, and Kazys Gimzauskas was convicted in 2001 of taking part in the Nazi killing of Jewish people. The record is mixed rather than closed.

The Soviet occupation is not a pretext either. The partisans faced a real occupier, and their victimhood is not a story the state made up. What the case turns on is a collision of two true things: a people genuinely brutalised by the Soviets, some of whose heroes were also present at the murder of their Jewish neighbours. A person persecuted by one occupier could be a perpetrator under the other, and both facts hold only when neither is allowed to cancel the other.

There is an external hand on the scale as well. Russia has long used Baltic wartime collaboration as a weapon against the Baltic states, which raises the cost of an honest reckoning and makes any Lithuanian who attempts one, easy to caricature as doing Moscow’s work. That is part of the condition the country reads its past inside, not an excuse for the reading it settles on.

Design or difficulty

Whether this is design or difficulty is the question the material did not close (yet). The Noreika record, with its careful administrative distinction held across a court case, leans towards something deliberate. The wider picture, museum and commission and prosecutions set against the recalls and the memory law, looks more like a small nation holding two incompatible truths under pressure and managing the strain case by case. The evidence leans one way in the sharp instance and the other in the aggregate, which is why this reads as selective narrative control rather than denial: a past acknowledged whole and defended in its parts.

The archive and the oracle

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An enterprise document agent gets priced as a reader. A licence per seat, ingestion per gigabyte, an integration project, perhaps a governance workshop to reassure the records manager. What it changes, though, is not the reading; it is the nature of the estate. A document estate was never only storage. It was a system of frictions, and most of the frictions were doing unpaid work: the permissions sprawl that made wholesale reading impractical, the filing effort that forced a classification decision on every document, the obscurity that let dormant records stay dormant, the sheer unreadability of ten million files that functioned as a de facto limit on what any one person could assemble. The agent removes friction wholesale. That is the product. Each removed friction then sends its bill separately, later, under another name.

The genre changes too. An archive answers the question “what was written”. An oracle answers the question “what is so”. The two have different failure modes, and an agent over a document estate converts the first into the second without anyone signing off on the conversion.

An archive preserves evidence, and evidence includes the awkward kind: the drafts, the dissents, the versions that lost. It exposes disagreement, because contradictory records sit side by side with nothing to reconcile them. It requires interpretation, which keeps a person and a judgement in the loop. And its reach is bounded, by permissions, by findability, by the patience of whoever is looking. An oracle produces answers rather than preserving evidence; hides disagreement inside a single voice; supplies the interpretation instead of requiring one; and its reach expands with every connector added. None of the four exchanges gets announced as an exchange. Deployment trades the first set of properties for the second, mostly without anyone noticing that the first set were properties at all, rather than inconveniences.

The deeper change is not the removal of friction but its relocation. The friction of finding, visible, resented, easy to time, does not disappear; it moves downstream of the answer, into deciding, validating, governing, remembering and maintaining, where it is quieter, harder to time, and billed to other cost centres. Friction keeps getting reported as removed because the stopwatch stands at the old location.

Throughout, the choice on offer is not between friction and no friction. It is how friction returns: accidentally, as failure, or deliberately, as governance.

The second estate

Ingestion produces a parallel copy of the estate: embeddings, chunk stores, caches, summaries, generated drafts, answer histories. Records policy was written for the first estate. Retention schedules, legal holds and privilege markings attach to documents; nothing attaches them automatically to derived artefacts. A summary of a privileged memo is a new document carrying no privilege marking. A chunk of a record due for destruction persists in an index that no destruction schedule mentions. Under a legal hold, the honest answer to “where does this content now live” becomes long and partly unknown.

Data protection has its own version of this. A fair amount of personal data in old estates was lawful in practice mainly because it was unfindable, protected by what used to be called practical obscurity. Total recall ends that arrangement: the dormant grievance file, the medical note in a 2011 attachment, all of it now surfaces on request. Erasure obligations meet content diffused into an index and a hundred generated answers, and diffusion is not a format erasure was written for. The parallel estate also concentrates what the original sprawl dispersed. The index is the whole estate in one queryable place, a target the mess never offered.

Capability changes expectation too, and expectation is where the lawyers live. An archive with practical boundaries supported a modest operational sentence: these systems were searched, and nothing was found. The sentence worked because completeness was never on offer, and diligence was judged against what a bounded search could do. A universal reader retires the modesty. Once the system is known to be able to search everything, “nothing was found” becomes a claim about everything, and its failure sharpens. If the agent could have found it, the question of why nobody knew will not come from inside, in a calm retrospective, but from a claimant, a regulator or an auditor. Capability changes the standard against which diligence is judged: discovery requests widen to match the tool, audit expectations inflate to match the capability, and a system bought to reduce workload quietly raises the bar its owner is measured against. Nothing has to fail for this cost to arrive. It is a property of being known to be able to look.

The doubling reframes the questions that arrive later in the deployment’s life. The legal question, where did the record go, becomes: which estate is the record now in. The reliability question, why did the answer change, becomes: which state of which estate produced it. The governance question, who owns this, becomes: who owns the derivative estate. The later costs are rarely new problems; they are old questions asked of an estate that no longer has one answer.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
retention attached to files	a parallel derived estate	re-attaching policy to artefacts
practical obscurity	total recall	erasure and exposure, on demand
bounded search	a universal reader	an inflated diligence standard

The reader becomes a runtime

Enterprise access control was designed for a human opening one file at a time. Each grant was priced on that assumption: this person, this folder, tolerable. Nobody priced the aggregate, because no reader could realise the aggregate. An agent can. The mosaic problem arrives immediately: every document individually authorised, and a synthesis across four thousand of them crossing a line that no single grant crossed. Salary bands assembled from expense reports, an acquisition inferred from travel bookings and NDA filenames, a reorganisation visible in the drift of distribution lists. Compartmentalisation by chaos was never a policy, but it functioned as one, and it is gone the day the index finishes building.

Deployment tends to discover this before any attacker does, at a price of its own. The permissions mess was tolerable because humans tolerate mess: thousands of inherited grants nobody can explain, former employees still attached to groups, project folders shared permanently just in case, confidential material resting in general repositories because moving it never became anyone’s job. None of it was a crisis while no reader could realise the aggregate. The agent makes the aggregate real, so the mess becomes a blocking dependency, and the AI project turns out to contain an identity governance programme that appeared on no slide of the original deck. Mid-rollout, before the estate can be safely read by one principal, its permissions have to be understood for the first time, and understanding a legacy permission structure is archaeology, priced by the layer.

Enterprise security also rests on a set of separations old enough to be invisible: data is data, code is code, instructions are instructions, and the controls are organised accordingly. Executables get signed, scanned and sandboxed; configuration gets change control; documents get, at most, malware scanning and a classification label, because a document is inert. The agent retires the assumption. A PDF is data until an agent reads it, at which point it may be instruction. A wiki page is documentation until it becomes a control input to an automated action. A meeting summary is a record until it is retrieved into next quarter’s decision. The security function inherits a category its whole control estate was not built for: content that behaves like code without looking like code, arriving through channels no software supply chain policy covers, authored by anyone with write access to a shared folder, which is to say authored by everyone.

The cost is not one control but the re-derivation of a model. Least privilege loses its unit of account. The old question, can this person open this document, has a checkable answer, and every existing access control answers it correctly. The operative question becomes whether this person may ask a question whose answer requires combining eight hundred documents, and that question has no place in the model at all: each of the eight hundred grants is individually valid, the combination is the exposure, and the combination is constructed at query time, differently for every query. An access matrix can be technically correct in every row and still inadequate, because it was drawn for readers who could not aggregate. Per-query reasoning about the sensitivity of a synthesis would answer the operative question, and that is an unsolved problem currently being carried in production.

The same concentration reshapes the attacker’s economics. A compromised credential used to buy months of folder-crawling and guesswork; it now buys a natural-language exfiltration interface over the whole estate, with the reconnaissance phase reduced to a well-phrased question. And the estate itself becomes an instruction channel. An agent that reads documents and acts on what it reads treats every file as potential input, which means a poisoned document planted in a shared drive is a command waiting to be retrieved. Shared drives are attacker-writable by design; that is what sharing means. Instructions and data arriving through one channel is a problem software engineering learned to recognise, classify and constrain, reintroduced here in an estate that was never built around that assumption.

There is a shorter route still, and it is the cheapest on the menu. Everything the agent can do hangs from what it treats as instruction: the system prompt, the configuration, the standing orders that tell it what it is and what it may touch. That text is a single point where words become estate-wide action. An attacker who reaches it needs no malware, no exploit chain, no lateral movement through a dozen systems; the reach that once required compromising many accounts and hosts now sits behind one writable surface, and the currency of the attack is prose. This is the flip side of the amplification being sold. Capability was concentrated, so that one reader could do the work of many, and concentration does not check who is speaking; an amplifier amplifies whoever holds the microphone. The defender’s cost curve and the attacker’s cost curve dropped together, and only one of them appears in the business case.

Persistence changes character along with the entry: a poisoned instruction crashes nothing, trips no signature and leaves no binary to find, and the audit target becomes natural language, a medium with no parser, no checksum and no invariant to verify. Detection tooling grew up around code behaving strangely. Instructions via a prompt is a younger problem, and the tooling for it is mostly not on the shelf.

Review changes tempo along with unit. Software security review has moments: before deployment, after major change, at audit. The moments exist because the reviewed object holds still between them. Nothing in this arrangement holds still. Documents change daily, which changes what the agent can say; permissions change, which changes what it can reach; connectors are added, which changes where its words can land; models update, which changes how it reads; prompts get edited, which changes what it is; and users keep discovering uses nobody threat-modelled, which changes what the system is for. A review conducted at the project gate describes a system that no longer exists by the first quarterly meeting. Security review of an agent over a living estate is an operating activity, staffed and recurring, and it is budgeted as a one-off assessment almost everywhere.

The audit trail thins at the same time. Human access left per-file traces: who opened what, when. A synthesised answer leaves a different kind of entry, that the agent read widely and said something, and the full price of that entry surfaces later, when reconstruction is attempted.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
per-file access grants	query-time aggregation	aggregation control
inert documents	content read as instruction	guarded instruction surfaces
review at moments	a system that never holds still	continuous security review
per-file audit traces	synthesised answers	reconstruction after the fact

Convincingly wrong

Security and reliability tend to get filed together, and they are different bills. Security asks who can make the system do something harmful. Reliability asks what happens when the system, unprompted and unattacked, confidently does the wrong thing. The business case usually budgets for the first question, at least nominally; the second is where the quieter costs live, because the failure modes changed underneath the procurement.

A document system fails visibly. File missing, search returns nothing, permission denied: hard failures, annoying and self-announcing, each one generating its own ticket. An agent fails softly. A synthesis that is plausible and wrong. A retrieval that is incomplete without indicating incompleteness. A ranking that surfaces the persuasive document over the authoritative one. An outdated source selected over its successor because the successor was named worse. A contradiction resolved silently in the wrong direction. None of these announces itself; each arrives formatted exactly like success. The failure mode of the whole class is not that the system did not work but that it worked convincingly in the wrong direction, which is a category of failure the organisation has no ticket type for.

Degradation inherits the same silence. A broken search system becomes obvious within the hour. A degrading agent can remain useful enough that nobody files anything: retrieval quality slips a little, old documents gain unearned weight as the index ages, a newly connected repository is ingested under the wrong assumptions, users quietly develop workarounds and stop reporting whatever the workarounds route around. The system never fails; it becomes slightly less trustworthy every month, and slight monthly losses of trustworthiness are exactly the signal that operational monitoring, tuned to outages, does not carry. By the time the degradation shows in outcomes, it has been compounding in answers for a long time, and the answers have been circulating.

Testing meets an unbounded surface. A document management system could be tested against enumerable cases: can this user open that file, does this query return that record. An agent’s input space is every question in natural language, times every phrasing, times every ambiguity, times every combination of documents the retrieval might assemble, times every workflow users have invented since the last review. Exhaustion is not on offer, and the discipline that replaces it in software, representative suites maintained against regression, has no equivalent in most knowledge programmes, because the deployment was rarely classified as software. The missing discipline would be regression testing for language behaviour: any change anywhere in the chain, model, prompt, index or estate, can move answers, and only a maintained set of questions with known good answers would show the movement.

Reliability debt is the closest thing this domain has to technical debt, and it compounds quietly. A programme can launch fast on broad ingestion, permissive access, weak metadata, no ownership model and minimal evaluation, and the launch will look excellent, because a system that has read everything answers everything, and breadth photographs well in a pilot. The mess is not visible in the answers at first; it is being learned. Retrieval habits form around the unowned folders; summaries absorb the contradictions nobody resolved; users build workflows on answers whose sources nobody curated. Later, every improvement is harder than it would have been at the start: tightening access changes answers people rely on, cleaning the estate changes them again, and introducing evaluation reveals a baseline nobody wants to publish. A database without constraints becomes difficult to repair after years of growth, not because repair is technically hard but because everything since has grown around the absence. A knowledge system without discipline follows the same curve, with one difference: the database’s corruption stayed in the database, and the knowledge system’s has been advising people the whole time.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
loud failure	fluent soft failure	drift detection and evaluation
a passive store	an active knowledge layer	reliability engineering

The account replaces the record

In daily use, people act on the agent’s answer, not on the underlying file. The summary becomes the working document; the original goes unread; decisions inherit whatever the summarisation dropped. This is a known trade and sometimes a good one. The overlooked part is what it does to disagreement. Estates contain contradictions, and the contradictions were information: two versions of a policy disagree because the organisation disagrees, and the disagreement had owners, history and stakes. An agent asked a direct question resolves the conflict silently, picks a version, and answers in one confident voice. The disagreement does not get settled; it gets hidden, which is not the same thing and costs more later. Ambiguity in an estate was a visible signal that judgement was required; fluency erases the signal without resolving anything underneath it, so what disappears is not the uncertainty but the warning label that used to travel with it.

Estates also contain the dead. Superseded policies, abandoned proposals, drafts that lost the argument, the report everyone learned to ignore, the numbers from the manager nobody trusted. The knowledge of which records were live and which were furniture was never written down anywhere; it lived in people, as weighting, and it worked. The agent reads everything with a straight face. Tacit metadata, being tacit, did not survive ingestion, and the organisation discovers this one confidently wrong answer at a time.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
visible contradiction	one confident voice	disagreement hidden, not settled
tacit weighting of the dead	a straight-faced reader	confidently wrong answers

The oracle keeps no register

Wrong answers were always available; what changes is their career path. An answer given with confidence gets repeated, quoted in a deck, pasted into a briefing, and repeated, and somewhere in the circulation it stops being an answer and becomes a fact. The organisation begins to accumulate folklore of a particular provenance: statements that are true because the assistant has said them often enough. Remediation looks like a documentation problem and is actually a memory problem, because correcting the record requires knowing which beliefs entered through evidence and which entered through the oracle, and a ledger of that distinction rarely exists. The estate records what was written. Nothing is built to record what was answered.

The chain of justification changes shape underneath this. The traditional chain ran document, interpretation, decision, and a person stood at the interpretation step who could be asked why. The new chain runs documents, retrieval, synthesis, answer, decision, and the synthesis is an intermediate authority that belongs to nobody. Even with every source preserved, a future investigation stalls at a new place: asked why this was believed, the honest reply becomes that the system presented it as the answer, which is a statement about trust in a process rather than a judgement about evidence, and it leaves nobody to cross-examine. Reconstruction carries a temporal problem on top of the attributional one. The answer was produced by a particular model version, under a particular prompt, against a particular index, with particular permissions, over an estate that has since changed. Yesterday’s answer is not merely unlogged; it is unreproducible in principle, because the ground it stood on has moved. Chains of custody were designed for files. This one would have to hold language, and the language’s context expires.

The culture drifts with the chain. Producing a convincing answer used to require finding evidence, and the effort disciplined the confidence. When a convincing answer requires only a question, fluency becomes cheaper than verification, and under time pressure organisations reward what is cheap. The tell is small: meetings in which “where is the evidence” quietly gives way to “how useful is the answer”.

The oracle also changes voice. Estates changed slowly; readers, being people, changed more slowly still, and nothing in records management assumed otherwise. An agent is a moving component in a system that never had one. A model update can change summarisation habits, retrieval ranking, the interpretation of ambiguous requests, refusal behaviour and extraction accuracy overnight, unannounced and unversioned from the estate’s point of view, so the same question asked across a quarter is answered by a succession of slightly different oracles, none of which signed their work. What follows has a familiar name in software and no name at all in knowledge work: regression testing, release management and change control, applied to how the organisation answers questions. Governance inherits the tempo problem whole. The old pattern let process catch up with each new document type at leisure; every new connector, repository, capability and update now opens a surface at integration speed, and the governance function graduates from designing the archive to chasing the archive’s offspring.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
evidence before belief	answers repeated into fact	folklore without a ledger
a stable reader	a moving oracle	change control for answers
slow organisational change	capability at integration speed	governance permanently behind

The lost observers

The estate never contained only information. It contained the people and practices that continuously interpreted the information, and the interpreting was mostly invisible because it was distributed: into filing, into asking, into searching, into the handling of exceptions, into the slow formation of newcomers. The agent preserves recall while bypassing the processes through which understanding was produced. The losses are six rather than one, and they compound rather than repeat: distinctions go unmade, ties go unmaintained, memory goes unformed, and each loss removes part of the capacity to notice the others.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
filing discipline	semantic retrieval	taxonomy decay and an exit cost
the negotiated layer	explicit-layer answers	a lost exception catalogue
staff who made distinctions	salaries saved	distinctions nobody can make
asking colleagues	instant answers	network thinning
search that left residue	externalised retrieval	recall without memory
rummaging as curriculum	a closed question loop	a map of the agent

Filing was thinking

A taxonomy is recorded judgement. Deciding where a document goes is deciding what it is, and years of that deciding left a structure that encoded how the organisation understood its own work. Semantic retrieval makes the folder tree optional, then vestigial, then wrong, because naming discipline and filing discipline decay as soon as retrieval stops depending on them. The estate quietly reshapes itself around the agent. The exit cost, when it comes, is not the licence fee; it is that the estate has become a heap navigable only through the tool that made it one, and the option of operating without the tool expired somewhere along the way without a write-off.

Reversibility degrades further than the heap suggests. Replacing a document system used to mean migrating files. Replacing an agent-shaped estate means migrating embeddings, retrieval assumptions, classifications, a sediment of generated knowledge, user habits, workflows, and the undocumented prompts and policies that turned out to be doing governance. Somewhere in the adoption, a tool stopped being a tool and became part of how the organisation knows, and there is no migration format for that.

The negotiated layer

A document estate carries a second content that appears in no file: negotiated meaning. The policy says one thing; the exception process says another; the operational workaround says a third; and the gap between them is frequently where the organisation actually functions. Written rule and lived practice are connected by a translation layer, and the translation layer was mostly people. An agent retrieves the explicit layer with great competence and has no natural access to the negotiated one, because negotiation lives in conversations, habits and reluctances, none of which were ingested. Deployment reveals that the organisation never had a documentation problem in the first place. It had a translation function, unbudgeted, and the agent answers as though the documents were the practice.

Exceptions are the sharpest case. Process language treats exceptions as failures; in mature organisations they are commonly where competence lives. The experienced employee carries a catalogue with entries of the form: the form says X, but this case belongs with Y, because of a decision taken in 2018 that nobody ever wrote down as a rule. The agent sees the form, and possibly the 2018 record, and has no way of knowing that the exception is the important part, because importance of that kind was never a property of any document. The cost is not the occasional wrong routing. It is the gradual disappearance of the exception catalogue itself, which was maintained in people, and which the redundancy round removes.

Negative knowledge sits in the same shadow. Archives preserve positive statements: this happened, this was decided, this is the number. Experts preserve the negatives: this was tried and failed, this assumption was retired, that team calculates the figure differently and the difference bites. Negative knowledge rarely has a document, because it accumulates through failed attempts and gets encoded as reluctance, and reluctance does not file well. Where a failure was written down, the agent can retrieve it; what it cannot inherit is the organisational flinch the failure created, which was the thing that actually prevented the repetition. An estate read by an agent is an estate of what was asserted. Much of what an organisation has painfully learned takes the form of what it quietly stopped asserting.

The estate that walks out

The business case has a line for salaries saved, and the people on that line are the part of the estate that walks out of the building. Records managers, document controllers, the departmental assistant who knew where things were, the archive function that looked, from a distance, like overhead. Some of what leaves with them already has a name: the weighting of live against dead, the taxonomy judgement, the knowledge of which numbers came from the manager nobody trusted. While those people were employed, that knowledge was recoverable in principle; it could be asked for, elicited, occasionally even written down. Redundancy closes the recovery path. The soft losses become permanent on the day the badge is handed in, which is rarely the day anyone prices them.

A kind of capacity leaves too, one that never showed up in throughput: exception handling, surge, the absorbing of cases the process did not cover. A records function doing its work well is nearly invisible; regulation done well looks like nothing happening. Nothing happening reads, in a headcount review, as nothing being done, so the function is mistaken for idle precisely because it is working. The timing then compounds the error. The salaries come out during the old arrangement’s late stability, priced against a system still running on the habits of the people being removed, while the costs arrive during the chaos the change itself brings, when the estate is half old and half new and the exceptions multiply, and the people who used to absorb exceptions are gone.

Underneath sits a loss in the counting itself. The variety of an estate is not a property of the estate alone; it depends on the observer and the distinctions the observer can make. Distinctions that existed because someone could make them, this file the real minutes, that one the version circulated for effect, stop being well-defined when the discriminating observer leaves. The estate does not merely lose staff. It loses distinctions, and no regulator can act on a distinction no one can make.

Asking was networking

Before the agent, finding a document often meant finding a person, and the finding did double duty. The walk to another desk, the message to the colleague in legal, the question to whoever ran the project in 2019: each request was an interaction, and each interaction carried more than the document. It came back with an aside (that appendix is stale, the numbers moved since, check before quoting), it created a small debt and the occasion to repay one, and it kept a weak tie alive across a departmental boundary the org chart does nothing to bridge. The organisation’s informal network was maintained as a by-product of the inefficiency of finding things, and nobody maintained it on purpose because nobody had to.

The agent answers instantly and alone. Every answered query is one fewer occasion for contact, which sounds like a rounding error and compounds like one on the other side of the ledger. The network does not fail loudly; it thins. Its absence surfaces only in the situations that run on it: the incident at two in the morning resolved because someone knows exactly who to call, the reorganisation that lands gently because trust already exists across the seam, the exception no process covers and a favour does. Newcomers feel it first and show it least. The old way of learning who knows what was asking, badly, in person, and being corrected; the new way is knowing the agent, which knows documents and not people. What thins here was never listed as a task, which is why it appears in no business case as a cost, and it is the same tissue that later gets called resilience when its absence becomes an incident report.

Recall without memory

Retrieval used to leave traces in the retriever. A person who spent an afternoon hunting a contract came away with more than the contract: a sense of where things live, of what was hard to find and why, of which documents smelled wrong, of which projects failed quietly, of which names keep recurring across unrelated folders. None of that was the goal, and all of it accumulated, which is how organisational memory formed in individuals: as a residue of inefficient search. The agent externalises retrieval without transferring the experience of having retrieved. Answers arrive; the residue does not. The organisation gains recall and loses memory formation, which sound like the same faculty and are not. Recall is having the answer available. Memory is having been changed by finding it. A workforce with perfect recall and thin memory knows whatever it asks and only what it asks, and the questions themselves come from memory, which is the part now going unfed.

The grain

An estate is also a learning environment, the prepared environment in which newcomers assemble their model of the organisation. Rummaging was the curriculum. Following a contract back through its amendments, finding the losing proposal filed next to the winning one, noticing what the 2016 incident report was careful not to say: self-directed, unsupervised, and slow, which is what made it formative. The agent replaces the open-ended middle of that exploration with a closed loop, question in, answer out, and the newcomer arrives at competence in answering without ever passing through familiarity with the terrain. The map they build is a map of the agent.

Environments shape behaviour along their grain rather than through anyone’s decisions. If asking the agent is easier than reading the original, originals go unread, not because anyone chose that but because the grain now runs that way. If querying is easier than walking over, the walk stops. If the unsafe path is the smooth one, the unsafe path is the path. That reframes most of the costs so far: they are not misuse, and exhortation will not fix them, because they are what this environment, prepared this way, reliably produces. An environment produces what its grain permits, and reshaping the grain is what has changed the output for long, where anything has.

Documents instead of decisions

Agents produce as well as read: minutes, status reports, summaries of summaries. The estate grows faster than it did, in prose no person wrote and few will read, and the agent becomes necessary to digest what the agent produced. An arrangement in which the tool manufactures the problem the tool solves has the commercial structure of a subscription, whatever the pricing page says.

Cheap generation also changes what a document is for. When producing a report costs an afternoon of someone’s attention, a report is usually an attempt to say something. When producing one costs a sentence of instruction, the report becomes available for other work: deferring a decision, dressing a disagreement, being seen to respond. Organisations knew this move long before agents; committees have produced papers instead of choices for as long as there have been committees. What changes is the price. The friction of producing a document was rationing the avoidance all along; removing it relocates the cost downstream, into reading, navigating and the decisions deferred beneath the prose. Uncertainty can now be answered with volume, disagreement with a summary of positions, and the estate grows not because more is known but because more is being avoided, in prose. The agent then completes the circle as the instrument required to navigate the avoidance it made affordable, which is the subscription structure again, one level up.

The commons and the weeds

Ownership in most estates was fuzzy and worked anyway, because it was distributed. A team owned its numbers in the operative sense: everyone knew whose they were, and the knowing carried an obligation to keep them roughly right. Universal retrieval weakens that boundary from the outside. Everyone can now reach everything, and responsibility does not expand with access; it dilutes. The estate drifts toward a commons in the precise, unhappy sense: used by all, tended by ever fewer, because tending was always a by-product of the ownership that access has just diffused.

The weeds change status at the same time. A badly named, contradictory, obsolete document used to be harmless in proportion to how buried it was; nobody found it, so it cost nothing. Retrieval quality inverts the relation. Every forgotten PDF becomes a candidate source, every abandoned draft a potential citation, and the estate’s neglected corners are exactly as active as its maintained ones, because the index does not grade on upkeep. Old policies, superseded designs and previous organisational structures return to circulation with the confidence of the newly found, and time starts going into re-burying what was once safely lost: correcting resurrected ghosts, retiring revived assumptions, explaining to a new hire why the 2014 org chart the agent produced is not the org chart. Cleaning the archive could be treated as a migration task precisely because nobody was reading everything. With everything readable, hygiene becomes operational, continuous, and somebody’s job, arriving at the moment the somebodies have left the building and the ownership that might have volunteered has been diffused into the commons.

The archive joins the stack

The deepest reclassification is the quietest. Documents used to be records of activity: written after the fact, consulted occasionally, wrong at leisure. Fed to an agent that acts, they become inputs to activity, and inputs have different physics. A typo in a record was an archival defect; a typo in an input is an operational event waiting for its trigger. A stale assumption in a 2019 design note was history; retrieved into a change ticket, it is a live parameter. The archive has been promoted into the application stack without acquiring any of the disciplines the stack takes for granted: no testing of documents, no review gate for prose, no rollback for a bad paragraph, no monitoring of which records the day’s actions happen to depend on. The poisoned document is the adversarial face of this; the accidental face needs no attacker at all, only an old file, a confident retrieval and a downstream action. In estates that touch operations, where an answer can end in a work order, the promotion calls for the scrutiny given to any other component acquiring write access to the world, and it mostly gets none, because the component still looks like a filing system.

Buying half the law

Two moves have always been available against an environment that produces more kinds of trouble than there are kinds of response: amplify the regulator, or attenuate what arrives. Requisite variety is the arithmetic behind the pair, and it sets a ceiling: outcomes cannot be regulated below the gap between the variety of what arrives and the variety of what the regulator can do about it. The agent is amplification in its purest commercial form, one reader with more reach, more speed, more repertoire. Meanwhile, the deployment has been raising the variety of what arrives. The second estate multiplies artefacts; generation swells the corpus; the instruction channel adds a class of disturbance that did not previously exist. A programme that deploys the agent and stops has bought the expensive half of the law and left the cheap half on the table, while making the cheap half more necessary than it was. Attenuation, in this setting, looks unglamorous: fewer authoritative versions rather than more copies, a deliberately small writable surface feeding the agent rather than the whole shared drive, an estate segmented so that a poisoned document in one place cannot become an instruction everywhere.

The channel is the other place the law bites, because the law is indifferent to repertoire that cannot be reached. Regulators fall short as often through deafness as through poverty of response, and the thinning of the audit trail is a channel loss: disturbances still arrive, but the path from what happened to anyone positioned to respond now runs through a synthesis that obscures it. A control nobody can observe is not a control, and an estate read through one summarising voice is an estate whose disturbances are heard through that voice or not at all.

Interpretive variety belongs in the same arithmetic. Different teams reading different documents used to produce competing interpretations, which was inefficient and also a distributed challenge mechanism: somewhere in the disagreement, weak readings got tested. One agent answering everyone collapses that plurality into a single interpretive voice, and the collapse lands on the wrong side of the inequality. Consensus here is attenuation applied to the regulator: the disturbances remain as varied as ever while the variety of readings available to meet them contracts toward one. The law has no objection to consensus as an outcome; organisations reach for it deliberately all the time. What arrives with the agent is consensus as a default, manufactured by architecture before anyone decided it was wanted, and an organisation that wants its disagreement back discovers it has to engineer for plurality on purpose, against the grain of a tool whose product is the single answer.

The stopwatch

The metrics arrive pre-selected by ease. Questions answered, time saved, documents found, satisfaction scores: everything a search replacement can be measured as, the agent will be measured as, and the numbers will be good, because finding really did get faster. The rest of the bill lives in the metrics nobody collects: wrong decisions prevented or not, ambiguity surfaced or smoothed, exceptions routed correctly, tacit knowledge retained past the next redundancy round, memory formed in the people doing the asking. A search replacement is easy to measure. A change to how an organisation thinks is not, and the stopwatch, pointed at the finding, cannot see the queue re-forming behind the answer, where retrieval used to be the constraint and interpretation now is. The organisation may turn out never to have had a document problem at all; it had an interpretation bandwidth problem, and the agent has moved the queue rather than shortened it.

The hours saved on finding were not homogeneous either. Some searching was waste; some was discovery; some was relationship maintenance; some was the sanity check that caught the wrong number before it reached a board paper. The stopwatch records them all as the same saved hour. What the measurements will show, for the first year or two, is a success. What they are structurally unable to show is which stocks the success is drawing down, which is the general problem with stocks, and the reason relocated friction keeps being reported as friction removed.

The answer economy

Underneath the metrics sits an incentive shift, and it may be the most purely economic of the costs. Asking used to carry a price paid by the asker. A question meant finding the right person, explaining enough context to be understood, defending the question’s relevance, and sometimes admitting ignorance in front of someone whose opinion counted. The price was resented, and it was doing selection: questions that could not justify their cost did not get asked, which meant the questions in circulation had passed a filter, and the filter was attention-shaped. Answers were expensive to request, so a request carried information about what someone actually needed to know.

Free questions dissolve the filter, and demand behaves the way demand behaves when a price goes to zero. Every passing uncertainty becomes a query. Every disagreement becomes a request for a synthesis. Every meeting produces a document, the document produces questions, the questions produce answers, and the answers get pasted into the next meeting’s document. The organisation becomes a very efficient converter of uncertainty into text, and the conversion can run indefinitely without ever passing through a decision, because deciding was never the step the machinery accelerated. Documents produced to avoid deciding are the supply side; the demand side completes the market: unlimited queries meeting unlimited generation, with attention, the actually scarce input, priced at zero throughout and billed to whoever has to read.

What gets rewarded drifts accordingly. An organisation that measures answer production starts optimising for it, and the production of answers is not the production of understanding, any more than recall was memory. Understanding shows up as fewer questions, better ones, and the occasional refusal to ask before thinking, none of which displays well beside a dashboard of queries served. The danger was never that people stop working. It is that the organisation gets progressively better at the step that was never the constraint, and books the improvement as productivity, while the constraint, judgement applied to answers, queues quietly at the same width it always had.

Old friction	Removed by agent	New friction
costly document production	cheap generation	avoidance, in prose
distributed ownership	universal reach	an untended commons
buried weeds	an index blind to upkeep	continuous hygiene
records of activity	inputs to activity	operational scrutiny for prose
plural readings	a single interpretive voice	plurality engineered on purpose
finding documents	retrieval	validating what was found
costly questions	free queries	attention billed to the reader

Friction on purpose

None of this argues against deploying the thing. It argues that the frictions removed were performing governance for free, and that the ones performing real work can be reinstated deliberately, at a price, now that they no longer come with the furniture. Listed one by one, the reinstatements become another catalogue of separately arriving bills; grouped, they are three restorations.

Restoration	What it buys back
provenance	the path from answer back to evidence
boundaries	reach priced at the aggregate, an exit kept open
discipline	failure that announces itself again

The first is provenance. Derived artefacts inherit their parents’ obligations, retention, hold and privilege travelling with the content rather than the file. An authoritative-version discipline the agent surfaces rather than flattens, with contradiction reported as contradiction instead of resolved into confidence. A register kept for the oracle that keeps none: answers logged with model version, prompt state and index state, so the question of why something was believed has somewhere to go, and model updates treated as releases, with the regression discipline the word implies. And provenance of judgement, bought from the people the business case removes before they go: the weighting elicited and recorded, the exception catalogue walked through case by case, the network seams at least mapped, on the sober understanding that most of it will not survive the transfer, because most of it never does. What cannot be transferred can at least be priced, which would make the business case honest, and honesty about that line item has a way of changing the headcount decision it was meant to justify.

The second is boundaries. Aggregation-aware access in place of per-file grants priced one file at a time. Attenuation beside the amplifier, fewer authoritative versions, a small writable surface, a segmented estate, serving as the procurement list, with instruction surfaces guarded like the administrative interfaces they have become. And a human-navigable spine through the estate, maintained the way staircases are maintained in buildings with lifts, so the option of operating without the tool stops expiring unnoticed.

The third is operational discipline. Golden question sets, curated and versioned, run on schedule and on change. Retrieval quality as a metric with an owner rather than an anecdote with a thread; drift detection for the slow silent losses; answer evaluation sampled by people qualified to disagree with the answer; incident review and rollback for a component that fails in prose. Periodic reading of originals, done on purpose, by people whose judgement the organisation intends to keep, and hygiene given named owners while owners still exist. On the security side the same discipline itemises quickly, injection testing as a practice, change control on prompts, monitoring of agent actions among the lines; each line is ordinary work, and the sum is a second security programme standing beside the existing one, for a system that was bought as a productivity feature. The roles all this implies belong in the business case at the start rather than in year two; the titles are new, and the competence is largely the competence that left in the redundancy round, hired back at contractor rates under different names.

The discipline entries are the least glamorous, and the ordering is the point: cheap early and expensive late. Curated ingestion before broad ingestion, an ownership model before popularity, evaluation before the baseline becomes embarrassing, golden questions before the first model update rather than after the first incident. Reliability debt is the one line on the whole bill an organisation gets to decline at the start, and only at the start; everywhere else the choice on offer is merely when to pay and in whose budget the payment lands.

Where the friction went

Laid end to end, the costs stop looking like a catalogue and start looking like one mechanism observed in different rooms. The friction of finding became the friction of validating what was found. The friction of filing became the decay of ownership and taxonomy, waiting downstream as an exit cost. The friction of access boundaries became the problem of aggregation control, which no existing matrix can express. The friction of asking colleagues became the thinning of the network that asking used to maintain. The friction of slow archival search became the forensic reconstruction of provenance for answers whose ground has since moved. The friction of interpreting documents personally became interpretation risk, concentrated in one synthetic voice and dressed in fluency. The friction of slow organisational change became governance run at integration speed, permanently behind. And the friction of maintaining a passive store became reliability engineering for an active component the stack now depends on.

Each entry has the same shape. The oracle gains a capability; an archival restraint lapses; the restraint turns out to have been a control. The old frictions shared three properties that made them cheap: they were visible, they were paid at the moment of the work, and they were paid by the person doing the work, who could feel when the price was wrong. The new frictions invert all three: quiet, deferred, and paid by other people, often by roles that do not yet exist, which is why every one of them clears the business case and none of them appears in it. The relocation is not a defect of an immature product category, and better agents will not repatriate the costs; a more capable oracle relocates more friction, further downstream, more smoothly. What was bought as the removal of friction was, throughout, a change of address.

The licence prices the reading. The remaining bills price everything the frictions used to do, and they arrive, as such bills do, later and elsewhere.

Nothing reached the gate

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:00:00 +0200

The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket arrives at 23:40.

This ticket asks for a route from an engineering workstation segment to the historian database on the process network. The agent evaluates it against the policy set and finds it outside the permitted space: no path crosses into the process network without conditions the ticket does not carry. Execution stops.

An exception notification goes to the on-call manager, carrying the ticket, the policy triggered, the segments affected, and the relevant history. The manager reads it, recognises a shortcut someone is trying to take before Thursday’s acceptance test, and sends it back with instructions to use the jump host. Twelve minutes, end to end.

The instruction that fell outside policy never executed, no machine decided the outcome, and the whole episode sits in a decision log an auditor can read. The architecture did exactly what its designers promised.

The same night, on the packaging line, a vendor’s support engineer is on site for a recurring gearbox fault. A specialist in another timezone wants to watch the drive parameters live. The engineer plugs a cellular modem into the service port of the line controller, tapes it to the inside of the cabinet door, and gets on with the fault. By morning the specialist has traced the trouble to a worn bearing, which is what the visit was for.

No instruction was issued. Nothing was evaluated against policy. Nothing routed to the on-call manager, because there was nothing to route: no ticket, no request, no event. The gate did not fail. The gate was never involved. The night produced one exception, and it was the harmless one.

The missing verb

Policy gates are appearing across proposals for governing agentic systems, and the reasoning behind them is usually some version of the same correction: post-hoc oversight reviews decisions already made, so the harm precedes the human; a gate arranges things so that no decision at the boundary is made by a machine at all.

One recent formulation, the Seven Axioms of Agentic Governance (Walls and Karman, 2026), requires a gate “between instruction receipt and execution” and places a human, exclusively, at the boundary of the policy space. The justification arrives in its opening. Human organisations survive their own governance because human actors “notice, pause, refuse, and escalate”, and agentic systems do none of these things: the dilemma forms and the output is produced in the same step. Hence the gate.

Four verbs, and the gate builds machinery for some of them. It gives the system somewhere to pause: execution stops when an instruction falls outside policy. It gives the system a basis for refusal: the policy set. It gives the system a route through which to escalate: the exception path, ending in a person with authority. Three of the four, delivered as architecture rather than as exhortation, which is a genuine advance over frameworks that deliver none of them.

Notice is not among the three, because it is not confined to operations performed on instructions. The other verbs take an instruction as input. Notice does not necessarily begin with one. The modem on the packaging line generated no instruction, and an engineer who might once have paused at that cabinet and thought, “that is not supposed to be there”, was performing no governed action either. Something becomes salient to someone. It can then become an event, a ticket, a risk, an exception.

The gate stands downstream of that point. Not temporally downstream; a gate can be arbitrarily fast. Architecturally downstream: it operates on situations that have already acquired representation, while noticing can be what prompts representation in the first place.

The packet

The gate works exactly as designed, as it did at 23:40. An instruction falls outside policy, execution stops, and a notification reaches a human. The paper is specific about the notification: it carries “sufficient context for a human to decide without AI assistance”. The requirement is well aimed. It is trying to prevent the human terminus from becoming a signature on a machine’s summary.

Sufficient context, assembled by whom? The packet is a selection of what counts: what happened, which entities are involved, which state is current, which history counts as relevant, which policy fired, and what accompanies the exception as evidence. Each selection embodies a judgement.

Not necessarily a bad one, and not necessarily a machine’s: the selections may have been fixed at design time by whoever specified the notification format, years before this particular Wednesday. But the judgement occurred upstream of the human, and the judgement is not itself in the packet. The manager at 23:40 decided well, but not what evidence would constitute the case.

If the packet is assembled from the same set of representations that produced the classification, the human has not been placed outside the machine’s world in order to judge it. The human stands at that world’s edge, judging what the world contains. Human-at-the-boundary can quietly become human at the boundary of the model’s world. The position was preserved with real care. What can be seen from the position was settled somewhere else.

A channel that was never a task

The obvious rejoinder is that the gate forbids nothing. Nobody has been instructed to stop noticing. The engineers are still in the building. True, and the mechanism is one step subtler than a prohibition.

Noticing was never a task. It appears in no job description, no runbook, no task inventory, because it was a by-product of presence, and presence was a by-product of routine work.

The electrician was at the panel to replace a contactor. The operator walked the line at shift change because handover ran that way. Somebody registered an unfamiliar supplier name because invoices used to cross a desk on paper. None of these observations came through a channel anyone had designed, and only a fraction of them ever became evidence. The channels were messy, inconsistent, difficult to audit, and occasionally the only means by which the organisation discovered that its model of itself was wrong.

Automation is often scoped against the task inventory, and reasonably so: the inventory records what the work is, and the automation is judged complete when the inventory is covered. But the task inventory does not record everything that becomes observable because a person is there. The by-product can disappear without the transition plan registering that anything has disappeared, because the thing being lost was never written down as a thing being done.

The paper says as much in its own opening: when autonomous systems replace human actors, the silent corrections stop. What it does not follow upstream is how the replacement process would know what was stopping.

A transition plan can preserve every function it can name. Presence is not a function. Formalising decision-making does not only formalise the decisions. It can formalise the conditions under which something is permitted to become a decision at all.

The axioms

Five of the seven bear on this directly. Axiom 1 inverts the usual direction of blame: no governance system may place an actor in an impossible dilemma, and when one occurs the system has failed, not the actor. Axiom 3 asks the governance system to surface emerging tensions continuously rather than waiting for them to announce themselves. Axiom 5 asks it to verify that the information it acts on is independent of the processes it governs. Axiom 6 asks it to identify, maintain, and recover its own boundary.

Axiom 7 supplies the gate, with the human placed at the boundary of the policy space, a location considerably more precise than human-in-the-loop or human-on-the-loop: the human is not reviewing a machine’s decision, because the machine made no decision at the boundary. The set is stated with unusual explicitness, which is precisely what makes the prior question visible. What happens to something that has not yet become a governed object?

Two answers are within reach. Axiom 5.2 treats information gaps as escalation signals rather than tolerable conditions. Axiom 6.2 requires the system to detect governed entities operating beyond its boundary and to treat the breach as an Axiom 1 failure already forming. Both are the right instincts, and both presuppose the thing they cannot supply.

A gap can be escalated only if it is representable as a gap. The modem on the packaging line is not a hole in the coverage map. There is no representation of the discrepancy; from inside the map, the map is complete. Absence does not arrive as a breach event, or as anything else.

The axioms govern the model of the system with genuine rigour. The step at which the model stops corresponding to the system happens off the page: at a service port, in a packet’s assembly rules, on a shift where nobody walks the line any more.

The independent sender

Axiom 5 also carries an idea that travels further than the rest: the algedonic channel, a fast path to governance whose sender is independent of the governed system, so that the governance layer is not reduced to ratifying the system’s account of itself. The idea works well beyond agentic systems. It also has a limit the paper does not mark.

Independence of source is not independence of observation. The sender exists within an architecture that defines its authority, field of observation, and route into governance. Its independence does not remove those choices.

The vendor’s engineer is independent of the change agent, the asset inventory, and the monitoring stack. They observed the modem being installed because they installed it. Independence was never the missing property. What is missing is an architecture in which that observation has anywhere to go, and a reason to go there.

An independent signal reports what it sees. Deciding what there is to see remains an act of design, performed upstream, usually once, and usually quietly.

Before the sequence

The paper offers an observation almost in passing: the boundary at which the work began “turns out to contain a larger system than it appeared”. Taken at its word, that is the finding.

The boundary between instruction and execution turned out to contain classification, context selection, evidence assembly, and a human decision. And before that sequence sits something else: something happens; someone or something notices; it becomes representable; it becomes governable. Every arrow in that second sequence precedes the gate, and none is supplied by it.

The architecture answers the question of who decides at the boundary, and answers it well. The harder question is what the architecture leaves in place that can notice the boundary is in the wrong place. A governance system can become very good at controlling decisions, better than any human arrangement it replaced, while becoming worse at noticing what deserves to become a decision. The gate held everything that reached it. What might yet go wrong was never on its way.

The evidence starts too late

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

The hinge ended with a person doing the comparing: for example, an analyst who takes what the systems report, holds it against what is actually happening, and decides which of the two to believe. Route around that job in one place and it reappears in another.

So the obvious next proposal: give the comparing to a model. Let it read the alerts, the tickets, the risk register and the audit evidence, and make the call. It reads faster, never tires, never has a bad Tuesday, and holds more in one context window than a shift of analysts holds in a year.

The question is what happens to the work when the analyst is gone and the model has the job.

The claim is narrow. Not that models lack context. Not that intuition is magic. Not that the current generation falls short, an argument with an expiry date printed on the box. The claim is positional: what gets noticed is settled before the model has anything to read. A model works with records, evidence, telemetry and other representations of what has happened. Whatever was never observed, recorded or instrumented before the model receives its input is absent from its world.

What gets into the record

In an information security management system, things that happen become things the organisation can record, review and act on. Asset inventories, risk registers, vendor questionnaires, audit evidence, telemetry, control documentation and incident records all do this in different ways.

An engineer walking a rack room finds a fibre patched into a port decommissioned last year, notices the label is handwritten, remembers the same thing in another room in March, and cannot place who would have done it. What reaches the organisation’s records is a change ticket: port 14 disabled, patch removed, closed.

The ticket is true. The handwriting, the March echo and the inability to place it had nowhere to go, because no field on the form was asking.

The asset inventory has the same boundary. A configuration management database is accurate about everything that was onboarded, which is the point. The box zip-tied inside a cabinet on a plant floor, a programmable logic controller installed by a contractor during a shutdown eleven years ago and never entered anywhere, is not misrepresented. It is unrepresented.

A model reading the inventory can recognise that inventories of this kind are incomplete, estimate likely gaps, and recommend a discovery scan. All useful. All downstream. The model can reason about missing assets as a known class of problem. Whether the scan ever reaches this cabinet was settled years earlier by somebody else. What the model cannot do is find this particular box before somebody has put it in its field of view. That requires the floor: the walk past the cabinet.

Before anything was measured

The risk register moves the boundary further upstream. Somebody, at some meeting, decided that a thing counted as a risk, described it, and entered it. A model can score the wording, probably more consistently than the committee ever managed, and rank the register beautifully.

The thing that never became a risk is not ranked low. It is not ranked.

A model fed threat intelligence, sector taxonomies and the processed incidents of a thousand other organisations can propose risks the register never contained, and anyone who has watched it happen may reasonably think the omission problem has been solved.

It has not. The proposals come from other organisations’ records, from what they saw once it had been turned into shareable information. The model can widen the range of distinctions available to the organisation. What it cannot supply is the risk in this organisation that nobody has yet noticed, named or recorded.

A committee member may half-recognise it from something glimpsed in a corridor, and still not be able to phrase it.

The Tuesday night shift

Certification scales the problem up.

An auditor reviews evidence: policies, tickets, screenshots, exports, records of records. A model can chew through the packet superbly, cross-reference every clause, and find every inconsistency between the access policy and the joiners-movers-leavers log.

The packet is an account of the organisation’s controls. The Tuesday night shift is elsewhere.

The operator who has learned which alarm on which line means a loose sensor rather than an intruder does not escalate. That is also how a real intrusion gets waved through, by an attacker who has learned the same pattern. There is no ticket, no exception record, no incident report. The auditor cannot review a decision that left no evidence. The model cannot process evidence that does not exist.

When judgement is still forming

An analyst can escalate with nothing more than: “This bothers me and I cannot yet say why.”

Not mysticism. A mismatch between what is perceived and what can so far be said. Sometimes that is the first sign of an intrusion. Sometimes it is simply a distinction arriving before its vocabulary, the March echo the engineer had nowhere to file. No special faculty was involved there either, only several weak observations that had not yet become something the form could hold.

“I closed it, but I did not like it” is not a conclusion. It is evidence about the state of the comparison, and it travels by handover, by tone, by somebody saying it out loud on a bridge call. The ticket says closed. A judgement that shows itself unfinished can be picked up by the next shift. One that arrives finished gets filed.

A model can give the same fluent surface either way.

“Benign administrative activity consistent with expected patterns” can be the conclusion of a sound inference or a confabulated one. The trouble is not the error rate. Errors can be counted. The trouble is that the output need not carry any sign that the judgement behind it was unfinished.

Interpretability does not automatically hand that sign back. Attribution scores and reasoning traces are further outputs, instrumented by somebody and read by somebody, creating another place where judgement is required.

The agent with hands

The strongest objection has hands. A model doing the comparing no longer just receives reports. It runs the runbooks itself: queries the SIEM, pulls endpoint telemetry, launches scans, reads back years of tickets. Surely that is different. Surely the model is now observing the estate.

It is collecting.

An agent gathering its own data is still gathering data through instruments somebody configured. What is queryable was fixed before the agent arrived: which systems were onboarded, which fields were retained, how data was normalised, which collectors were deployed, which protocols they can parse.

The segment that was never logging does not appear in the agent’s world as a blind spot. It does not appear. It is the cabinet again, at network scale.

A person can find the silence itself odd, an absence conspicuous against an expectation the telemetry never carried. An agent told to check coverage checks the coverage inventory, which is another record. It can confirm that every segment in the inventory reaches the SIEM. Whether the inventory lists every segment is the same question again, one level up.

Where the job goes

Automating the triage desk moves the job somewhere else.

The analyst leaves. Judgement reappears as whoever assembles the context each alert arrives with, whoever decides what the model never sees, whoever samples what it closed, whoever decides when auto-closure stops being believed.

Nothing vanished.

The judgement now watches dashboards about model behaviour instead of anything about the estate. Nobody stopped judging. The work was scattered into positions with worse sightlines.

Stocking, not occupying

None of this argues the model out of the room.

Variety can be engineered around a regulator as well as inside one, and a model amplifies well: clusters alerts, correlates tickets, drafts timelines, digests intelligence, widens what one analyst can attend to in a shift. Variety only helps with distinctions the system can make, though. A model can supply more distinctions from the records it receives. It cannot supply one the organisation has given it no way to make.

That is the case for putting the model around the job, and the case against giving it the job. It is an enormous stock of distinctions borrowed from other organisations’ records. That is not where a situation’s own distinctions get made.

Sampling the discard pile tests how the model distinguishes: what it auto-closed, where it repeatedly failed to tell two things apart, what its confidence looked like just before it was wrong.

Manufacturing events tests the record: whether the organisation’s instrumentation can represent what actually happened. Red teaming, read this way, is not only about proving that a defence can be beaten. It creates events that test whether the records, alerts and controls can capture what happened. Does the trace survive? Does anything fire? Does the silence get heard?

Giving the job to a model answers the throughput question, and can widen the record besides. The comparing is what is left when the available evidence has done all it can.

The model receives the world after somebody has already decided what to observe, what to record and what to discard.

Keeping a person in that job was never the sentimental option. It is what the job has always been.

The hinge in the attention argument

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Cassie Kozyrkov’s question is a good one: if machines now do the doing, what is left for leadership?

Her answer is attention. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice, optimise and repeat. That is a useful shift, but the argument becomes more interesting if Ashby’s law and Lewin’s field theory are read a little more literally than the familiar management versions allow.

Ashby’s law does not say that a controller has to be as complex as the system it governs. It says that the regulator’s variety has to cover the variety of disturbances, relative to the outcomes that have to remain within limits. That difference gives two ways of closing the gap: increase the variety available to the regulator, or reduce the variety arriving at it.

Attention can be the second move, but only if what is filtered out is genuinely outside the control problem. Otherwise the filtering has not reduced the variety of the disturbance. It has reduced the variety the regulator can see. Either way it does not put attention outside the system. It puts another operation inside it: deciding what counts as a distinction worth surfacing.

Ashby’s semaphore makes the difficulty clear. One observer can distinguish sixty-four positions, another only thirty-six. The semaphore has not changed. The observer’s variety has.

That is where Lewin becomes useful. His B = ƒ(P, E) is not simply a reminder that people have characteristics. E is the lifespace, the situation as the person actually reads it. What lies outside that field has no purchase on the behaviour, however real it may be from somewhere else.

So an attention system cannot simply decide what the person will notice from outside the situation. It can surface distinctions the person can recognise. It can make some things harder to miss. It can also institutionalise a blind spot.

That changes what “attention scaffolding” can mean. The scaffold is not outside the control problem. Someone decides what it surfaces, what it suppresses and what counts as a useful distinction. That decision is itself made from somewhere, by an observer with a lifespace, a channel and a finite variety of their own. The problem has moved up one level, not disappeared.

Whoever decides that is working from a stock of distinctions, and the stock is mostly borrowed. Not every import pays for itself. A hidden attractor is not merely a poetic name for behaviour that an organisation does not understand. It has a precise definition: its basin of attraction does not touch any neighbourhood of an equilibrium, so looking at where a system comes to rest will not find it. The Cassini family of curves gives a still sharper example of what a mathematical import can contribute: a parameter crosses a threshold, and the curve changes from two regions to one. Once the parameter, threshold and organisational referents are specified, the analogy can be wrong. That is useful. It has introduced a distinction that can fail.

The same test applies to attention. What does the system distinguish? What does the filter act on? What disappears before it can be surfaced? Who can tell that something has disappeared? A queue that suppresses everything below a severity threshold has answers to what it distinguishes and what it acts on, printed in its configuration. Forty low-severity events from one supplier and forty from forty different suppliers come out of it as the same silence.

Those are not implementation questions added after the attention system has been designed. They are part of the system being designed.

What is left is narrower than a claim about the value of human judgement. The comparison between a model and a situation has to happen somewhere, and that somewhere has an occupant. Even the mechanism intended to decide what reaches that occupant has to be held against a situation by somebody.

What the occupant can tell apart is finite, and the count moves with the position. Their channels determine which distinctions can reach them. Under pressure, their stance changes what they can recognise. And when a construction meets the work and does not fit, the resulting gap is not necessarily failure of the person or the model. It can be the evidence that the position has discovered a distinction it did not previously have.

That makes attention less like a scarce resource to be optimised and more like part of the control problem itself, and whoever designs it is inside that problem too.

The machines can do the doing. They can also do an extraordinary amount of noticing.

A distinction becomes useful only when somebody, somewhere, holds it against a situation.

All of it would survive an audit

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

The Monday report is accurate and on time. Its third column has a name that made sense to whoever built it, and that person moved teams in 2021. Everyone who reads it knows roughly what the column counts, and no two of them would write the same sentence about it.

Down the corridor a working group is meeting for the fourth time. It has a chair, terms of reference and eleven open actions, three of them carried over from the group that came before it. What it was convened about happened again in September.

Nothing here has failed. The report is correct. The working group is properly constituted and well attended. A policy page contradicts the handbook and is still up because taking pages down was never anybody’s job, and everyone who needs the rule knows to go past it. All of it would survive an audit. Most of it has.

Most organisations do not have an information problem. Three teams can each say how many suppliers there are. The company cannot.
Why intelligent people disagree while using exactly the same words. The risk was understood four ways in one hour, and the minute recorded agreement.
AI is exposing old organisational weaknesses. An assistant answers from a policy page nobody had taken down, and the review calls it a hallucination.
The hinge in the attention argument. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice. Whoever designs that is standing inside the same problem.
Why maturity models disappoint. 412 documents attest to the change process. The release a month later had no rollback plan.
The organisation without a model of itself. Eleven steps, three swimlanes, and an accurate map that does not show which of the steps anyone present could change.
Concerns as an organising principle. A policy, a questionnaire and a dashboard, all current and all owned. The supplier account is still open.

A column of figures is one thing. What its readers take it to mean is another. Data and information. A viable system and a value stream. Most organisations let one word carry both meanings.

Metier runs through cybernetics, enterprise architecture, governance, information science, systems thinking and knowledge management. It is Jaap Karman’s framework, built over years and still growing. One thing it does is hold pairs like those apart.

The report goes out again on Monday. The third column still has its name.

Concerns as an organising principle

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0200

The reorganisation was announced in October. Four directorates became three, the data team moved out of IT into a function called Information and Insight, two roles went and three were created. The intranet A to Z was updated inside a fortnight.

By April the new structure was being asked what the old one had been asked: who owns this, why it broke at the handover, why it was found so late, and why nobody had the whole picture.

Three owners in six years

In 2019 third-party access sat with the security team. The security team wrote a policy.

In 2021 it moved to a vendor risk function under procurement. Vendor risk built a questionnaire.

In 2023 vendor risk was folded into Data and Trust. Data and Trust commissioned a dashboard.

The policy, the questionnaire and the dashboard are all current. All three have owners. All three are reviewed.

Third-party access touches the joiner and leaver process, the contract register, four identity systems, the people who approve exceptions at month end, and whoever happens to notice that an account is still open. The security team held the joiner and leaver process and the identity systems. Vendor risk held the contract register. Data and Trust holds the dashboard.

In each of those three years the same thing turned up, a supplier account still open after the contract ended.

Divided into three parts

Resilience was one team until 2021, when a reorganisation divided it: infrastructure took the platforms, operations took the runbooks, business continuity took the plans. Each of the three tests its part twice a year.

The dependency between the payments platform and the notification service has never been tested, because it sits in none of the three parts.

In November the payments platform failed over correctly. Nobody could tell customers, because the notification service had gone with it.

Forty-one workstreams and a completion report

Data protection readiness was a programme. It ran for two years, delivered forty-one workstreams and closed in 2019 with a completion report.

The record of processing activities the programme produced has not been updated since it closed. Answering the audit committee takes about a fortnight, and starts by asking three teams what they hold.

The question it was set up to answer, whether the organisation can say what personal data it holds and why, comes back twice a year. It is answered by whoever is free that week.

The reorganisation after next

A fourth reorganisation is scheduled for next year. Third-party access will be given its fourth owner.

Reorganisations change who answers the door. They do not change who keeps knocking.

There is an index built on concern, asking what, where, when, who, how and which. It is called Metier.

Departments describe where people sit. Projects describe what people are doing. Technologies describe what people are using. Concerns describe what keeps coming back.

The organisation without a model of itself

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0200

In March a new starter sat for a week without a login. Six people met four times and recommended a pre-start checklist. The checklist was adopted. In September a new starter sat for a week without a login.

The March report named three causes: unclear ownership of onboarding, a communication gap between IT and HR, and a need for better forecasting of start dates. All three were true.

January, February, March

In January IT consolidated identity management onto one platform. The licence cost fell, and provisioning moved from on request to a nightly run.

In February HR added an e-signature step to contracts, closing an audit finding. It added two days.

In March a new starter sat for a week without a login. The working group was convened by the service desk, and looked at the service desk.

Each decision was correct on its own terms, and each was taken by people who had been told what their part was for.

Someone from IT sat on the working group. The January consolidation did not come up. The group had been asked about onboarding delays.

Eleven steps, three swimlanes

Time to productivity is on the quarterly scorecard. There is a monthly service review, an escalation path with three tiers, a target of five days, and an owner for each of the four onboarding sub-processes.

There is also a process map. Eleven steps, three swimlanes, accurate. Nothing on it shows which of the eleven steps anyone in the room can change.

The map is owned by the process improvement team, which owns none of the steps.

Up the service desk’s line

The delays appear as item four on the monthly service review. The instruction that comes back is to review the onboarding process.

The March delay was escalated twice. Both escalations went up the service desk’s line.

The onboarding process was reviewed in April. The review recommended a pre-start checklist.

The report has gone up every month for eleven years. The instruction has come back in some form for most of them.

Everything travels up or comes back down. Nothing travels across.

One level down, one level up

The service desk lead can change a ticket’s priority. Changing the provisioning schedule needs the platform owner. Changing the signing step needs HR and legal.

One level down, a team lead can chase a ticket and cannot change the nightly run it waits for. One level up, the director who could change the schedule and the signing step does not see a new starter waiting.

The service desk holds its own weekly review. Ticket ageing is item two. The instruction that comes back from it is to review ticket ageing.

The September report named unclear ownership of onboarding, a communication gap between IT and HR, and a need for better forecasting of start dates. It recommended a pre-start checklist.

A regulator needs a model of what it regulates. The result predates every one of these meetings, and it sits in Metier beside two things that share an abbreviation and are not the same: viable systems and value streams.

Stafford Beer called the first of those the Viable System Model, and built it around the question of how a system stays able to sense, decide and act.

The working group reconvenes in March.

Why maturity models disappoint

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0200

The assessors came for three days in October. The evidence pack ran to 412 documents, 61 of them written that fortnight. The verdict was level three of five, with a roadmap to level four. The certificate hangs by the lift.

In November a release went out without a rollback plan, the way releases had always gone out.

Policies, minutes, screenshots

Policies. Process descriptions. Minutes. Review schedules. Screenshots of the pipeline configuration. Nine interviews. None of it was untrue.

Nothing in the three days watched a decision being made.

The score for each process came from six questions on a five-point scale. Whether the thing exists. Whether it is written down. Whether it is reviewed. Whether the review is scheduled. Whether the schedule is met. Whether the whole is signed off.

The assessors asked nine people to describe the change process. Seven described the process as written. Two described what they do. The difference was recorded as inconsistent adoption, and the score for that process came down half a point.

The team that had never needed it

The highest-scoring evidence in the pack was the rollback procedure of a team that had never used it. Current, reviewed on schedule, signed off, one version, never handled.

Another team had used its rollback procedure three times and simplified it after each one. It could produce three versions, and approval records for one of them. It scored lower.

Evidence keeps better when nothing touches it. Use marks it.

Which document answered which question

The second assessment took three weeks instead of six. A coordinator had been appointed for three days a fortnight, and knew which document answered which question. Two of the templates were reused unchanged.

Before the second assessment the people due to be interviewed were sent a briefing note on how the change process is documented.

At the first assessment the question was how deployment approval works. At the third it was where the deployment approval document is.

The certificate by the lift was replaced with the new one. The old one is in the pack.

Finding 17

The evidence request had 140 items. The pack answered 130 of them without anyone opening a system. Two findings were raised, one closed by adding a paragraph to the change policy and one by scheduling a quarterly review of it.

The report recorded a mature and well-documented control environment.

The quarterly review produces minutes, and the minutes are evidence for the next assessment. The pack ran to 412 documents in October and stands at 470.

In the steering meeting nobody asked whether a release could be rolled back. They asked whether finding 17 was closed.

Everything the assessment had to work with was an interview or a document. Both return something simpler than the process, on Metier’s reckoning, and in most situations nobody has an overview of the real one. There are no verified independent maturity levels, which does not make the measuring pointless: without metrics any change is disputable.

The work of producing evidence now has a description, a schedule, an owner and a signature. It would score well.

AI is exposing old organisational weaknesses

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The assistant went live on a Tuesday, indexed the intranet, and was asked by somebody about to resign what notice period applies. It answered three months, quoting a policy page from 2019. The answer has been one month since the 2022 handbook. The pilot review recorded a hallucination. The model had not hallucinated. It had read the intranet.

Nobody had taken the 2019 page down. There was never a reason to. The people reading it were checking a rule that applied to them, and they knew to go past it to the handbook. The ones who did not know asked somebody who did. The page does not link to the handbook, and the handbook does not link to the page.

The correction nobody wrote down

This page is superseded. That report double counts anyone who transferred mid-year. The Friday pack runs a month behind. The regional totals still stop at the pre-merger boundaries. None of it was written down, because none of it looked like work. It was what reading the intranet consisted of.

There was no villain in that. A written correction is a second document describing the errors in the first, which is an odd thing to propose in a meeting and an easy thing to decline. It would also have needed an owner, and the pages had none. They were written by somebody who has since left, in a team reorganised twice.

Somebody raised a ticket about the page in 2021. It was closed as no action required, because the handbook was correct.

Anyone who knew all this got the right answer. Anyone who did not asked a colleague who did, and got the right answer a little later. The documents stayed as they were, wrong in the same places for years, and the wrongness stayed a private arrangement between the staff and the pages.

The page was corrected every time it was read, and never once changed.

Elsewhere, in procurement

By the end of the month of the pilot every renewal in the queue was blocked, three buyers were raising exceptions by hand, and somebody was writing down, for the first time, which purchases the rule had never really covered.

A workflow was found too rigid, and a project opened to make it configurable.

Procurement policy says anything over ten thousand euro needs three quotes. It has said so for years, and it is accurate in the sense that somebody wrote it and somebody signed it. Renewals were never put through it, because there is nothing to get three quotes for when the question is whether to carry on with a supplier already installed. The policy had been incomplete for as long as anyone could remember, and it had made no difference, because nothing had ever applied it exactly.

A tool that cannot object

The pilot review came back with three recommendations: better retrieval, a fine-tuning pass, and a policy on where the assistant may be used.

None of those recommendations are new. An algorithm is one transformation among several in Metier’s account of information processing, and it arrives with a requirement older than any pilot: no data insight is worth taking seriously until it has been tested on new data.

When something goes wrong, an explanation usually goes in one of two places. One is a specific local cause: this operator, this batch, this machine, on this morning. The other is the system, whatever would still be there tomorrow if the person were swapped out. W. Edwards Deming spent his career moving the balance towards the second, away from blaming a person for a mistake. A tool is new, it is external, it has a vendor attached, and it cannot object.

The retrieval was improved. In March somebody about to resign read the 2019 page itself.

The intranet has been wrong since 2022, and it has cost nothing. The assistant was the first to take it at its word.

Why intelligent people disagree while using exactly the same words

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0200

Four people leave a meeting agreed about the risk of moving payroll to a new provider in January. The minute says so, and none of them has reason to doubt it. In the room, the payroll manager meant the chance that the first run would come out wrong. Finance meant what it would cost to put right. Legal meant who would answer for wages paid late. The programme lead meant the three months of roadmap a parallel run would eat. All four said risk, all four heard risk, and nothing in the hour gave any of them cause to check.

The four readings are not four points on one line. A botched payroll run is an event, the cost of putting it right is a quantity, answering for late wages is a relation between people, and giving up three months of roadmap is a decision. Two people using one word for a quantity and for a decision have nothing to disagree about until something forces both into the same sentence.

A disagreement about a number announces itself, because the two numbers sit on the same slide. A disagreement about a word can leave the room in four heads and carry on working. Weeks later a mitigation arrives: a contingency line in the budget, sized to cover corrections and a month of overtime. The payroll manager reads it and cannot say what is wrong with it, only that money set aside to repair a bad run is not the same as a run that comes out right. The agreement is minuted by then, the budget is allocated, and reopening it would look like obstruction.

Agreement of that kind is common, and not a failure of intelligence.

Words outlive the distinctions they were cut from

A word is durable. It gets repeated in meetings, printed on templates, written into job titles, and it survives without anyone attending to it. A distinction has no such life of its own. It exists while somebody is making it, and the making leaves no trace: nothing is minuted on the day a team stops separating a rule from the procedure that carries it out.

Rule and procedure tend to collapse first. A rule says what has to hold. A procedure says what somebody does about it. A credit limit that once sat in a policy ends up in step four of the onboarding script, and from then on it is whatever step four says. It moves when somebody edits step four, and nobody has to decide that it moved. A procedure, a step in a procedure, or an action is not a business rule, which Metier says at length and the onboarding script does not say at all.

Functioning and functionality go the same way, two words most organisations use interchangeably and Metier does not. A report saying the payroll system is functioning can mean that it ran, or that it paid people the right amount, and nothing in the report says which.

Buying some would solve the problem

Two weeks after the contingency line went into the budget, somebody proposed a reconciliation tool. It would run the old system’s output against the new one, line by line, and flag every difference. Nobody spoke against it. It would find every difference and settle none of them.

In Metier, business becomes functional, because business reads as a cost centre and the work in question is implementing the organisation’s goals. Technology becomes technical, because technology carries the suggestion that buying some would solve the problem. Information communication becomes compliancy, because the communication an organisation actually runs on, the expectations and the instructions, is not the communication its cables carry.

The glossary agreed with all four of them

Most organisations of any size already have a glossary. It is accurate. It was reviewed, circulated and signed off, and the entry for risk is broad enough that each of the four people in that meeting would have read it and found their own reading sitting inside it. That is why it was approved. An entry narrow enough to exclude three of them would not have survived the review.

A glossary records the words an organisation uses. What held the chance of a bad run apart from the cost of one was never a word. It was a habit of keeping two things separate, maintained by people who had some reason to keep them separate, and it went when the reason did. The entry stayed on the intranet, accurate and undisturbed, and by then it described a distinction nobody was making.

Something stricter would be a term, synonyms included, pointing at a single concept within a stated context. That needs a business vocabulary with a concept model underneath. A glossary can be written in an afternoon.

None of the four was working from a definition. They were working from a word, and the word was working perfectly.

Most organisations do not have an information problem

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:00:00 +0200

A familiar ritual follows organisational trouble. A decision goes wrong, a delivery slips, a risk materialises that somebody somewhere had documented, and the retrospective lands on a convenient conclusion: the information wasn’t good enough. The remedy writes itself. Another dashboard. A new report. A data lake, properly governed this time. An AI pilot to surface insights. More policy on how information ought to flow.

The ritual is comfortable because it frames the problem as scarcity, and scarcity has an obvious cure. A walk through almost any large organisation suggests no shortage at all. Dashboards refresh nightly and go unwatched. The same metric appears in three decks with three different values. Reports run on schedules nobody remembers setting, for audiences nobody has confirmed still exist. Meetings re-litigate facts that were settled in other meetings. The organisation is not starving. It is standing in a warehouse of maps, unsure which one describes the territory outside.

What is often scarce is not information itself. It is confidence that the information means what it is taken to mean.

Four hundred suppliers, or nineteen hundred

Somebody asks how many suppliers the company has. Procurement says 400, the ones on its approved list. Finance says 1,900, every entity it has paid. Legal says 250, the ones with a negotiated contract rather than standard purchase order terms. The reflex is to hunt for the wrong one. There is no wrong one. A supplier is an obvious thing, obvious enough that nobody has written down what makes one, and three teams have settled it three different ways without noticing. That is not a data quality failure. It is an unreconciled meaning, surfacing as arithmetic.

Each of the three made sense where it was minted. The trouble starts when a word travels, carrying the confidence of home into a place where a different definition quietly holds. The same travelling has long kept business and ICT talking past one another.

An organisation in this condition can add information indefinitely without settling a single definition. Each new report is a new message, written in the local dialect of whoever built it, and each one raises the reconciliation bill for whoever reads it. The bill is never itemised.

Messages to the future

Stored data is “a message, a communication, to people in the future”. Ronald Ross has spent a career on business rules, and that is his compact description of it. A message implies a sender with an intent, a receiver who was not in the room when the intent formed, and a gap the message crosses alone.

Distance in time behaves like distance in space. The analyst who named the column has moved teams. The assumptions behind the metric were obvious to everyone in the room in 2019, and the room has dispersed. The report still arrives every Monday, fluent and confident, a message from senders who can no longer be asked what they meant. Each reader supplies a plausible meaning of their own.

Organisations rarely notice, because the compensating works well enough to stay invisible. Somebody always knows which version of a figure to believe. A pre-meeting reconciles the figures before the real meeting sees them. These compensations are genuine organisational competence, and they share one weakness: they live in particular people, and they go when those people do. What walks out the door is not information, which stays neatly in the databases. It is the knowledge of which number to trust, and why.

Custody of meaning

A message that has to survive its sender needs somewhere to be kept. Metier’s information life cycle has distinct stages: a landing zone for what is unverified and might be information, a staging area for what has been checked, a semantic stage where an intermediate form is shaped, and only then a product verified as fit for delivery. The stages read less like storage tiers than like a chain of custody. Data lineage traces the same chain backwards: where a piece of information came from, and what has been done to it along the way. At each stage, someone vouches: still what it claims to be, still meaning what it was minted to mean.

As plumbing, such a pipeline is easy to dismiss as ceremony, the boring part of ICT, keeping the lights on. As custody, it is the difference between a warehouse of maps and a map that can be trusted at the moment of stepping outside. A reliable message is one that complies with the rules of the context that produced it. Verification stops being bureaucratic caution. It is what keeps the message decodable after the sender has gone.

A figure can be trusted only as far as its meaning is maintained, and maintaining meaning is work, with owners, stages and failure modes of its own. Organisations often fund the production of information more visibly than the custody of its meaning.

Data and information are kept apart in Metier, and so is most of what everyday language runs together. The distinctions are filed by concern.

A count rarely taken

“What information was missing” almost always has an answer, which is part of its appeal. Something can always be named, and a report commissioned to supply it. A different count is seldom taken: of everything already held, how much gets acted on without a corroborating phone call.

Where most of it would be acted on, even a thin report goes a long way. Where little of it would be, no amount of additional reporting is likely to help. The appetite for one more dashboard rests on a scarcity that, in most organisations, ended years ago.

The phrase survived. The definition did not.

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Consider a medieval castle. It is tempting to imagine that its security rested on the thickness of its walls, and that a besieging army faced essentially one problem, repeated: get past the stone. But that is not how a defended position worked, and the people who built them knew it.

A castle was arranged so that every successful advance exposed the attacker to a new disadvantage. The moat forced engineering work under fire. The wall forced escalade or breach, both slow, both loud, both costly in men. The gatehouse compressed the attackers into a killing corridor where their numbers stopped helping them. The courtyard beyond it was overlooked from every side, so that taking the gate meant standing in the open beneath defenders who had been waiting for exactly this. And the inner keep meant that even total success outside its walls bought the attacker another siege, on worse ground, with a depleted force.

None of these layers existed because someone believed more layers were better. Each one changed the geometry of the attack. Each imposed a cost. Each bought time. Each forced the attacker into conditions the defender had chosen. The position was designed around a single organising question: what does each successive layer force the attacker to do?

That is the principle of defence in depth, though not yet the name. The phrase is a twentieth-century one, from the industrial battlefields where armies gave up the single trench line for successive defensive zones. The castle had been building the idea into stone for centuries before anyone thought to name it.

Cybersecurity borrowed the phrase. It quietly forgot the definition.

Layers are not the point

The phrase has become something people recognise rather than examine. They say it approvingly, in architecture reviews and audit responses and vendor decks, and very rarely ask the question the military origin would have asked first. What does each successive layer force the attacker to do? If the answer is nothing, there aren’t layers. There are decorations.

Multiple controls do not automatically create depth. Depth exists only when successive controls satisfy conditions that turn out to be surprisingly demanding. They need to be independent, so that the failure of one does not imply the failure of the next. They need to be differently vulnerable, so that the technique which defeated the first is useless against the second. They benefit from being able to detect the failure of what came before them, because a layer that cannot tell it is now the front line behaves as though it is still safely in the rear. And each one needs to force new attacker effort: new tooling, new access, new noise, new risk of discovery.

Measured against those conditions, a great deal of what passes for depth thins out considerably. A firewall behind another firewall is not necessarily depth; if both fall to the same misconfiguration class, they are one layer drawn twice. Two antivirus products are rarely depth; they tend to share signature economics, evasion techniques, and blind spots. Three identity systems that all ultimately defer to the same Active Directory forest are certainly not depth. They are one point of failure with three logos.

Depth is about changing the attacker’s problem. It is not about enlarging the architecture diagram. The two can look identical from the defender’s side of the drawing, which is rather the difficulty.

Military doctrine cared about cost

It is worth going back to the origin, which is more recent and more specific than the castle. The modern doctrine took shape on the Western Front, in the German defence organised in depth that gave up the forward line for a system of belts and counterattacks, so that every metre the attacker took cost him more than the last. It contains an assumption that cybersecurity has been reluctant to inherit. Military defence assumes that every layer will eventually fail. Not might. Will. The wall is going to be breached, on a long enough siege, and the doctrine is entirely comfortable with this, because the question was never “can this wall hold forever?” The question was “what happens after it doesn’t?”

In a well-designed position, every successful attack becomes harder than the one before it. The attacker who takes the outer wall has spent men, time, and equipment to arrive somewhere worse: overlooked, channelled, further from resupply, and facing defenders who now know exactly where he is. Success is supposed to be expensive, and each success more expensive than the last, not merely a milestone passed on the way to the objective. And expense, in the doctrine’s accounting, was never only casualties: it was time, ammunition, logistics, information surrendered, fatigue accumulated, morale worn thin.

This is precisely where many cyber architectures quietly fail, and the failure has a recognisable shape. Once one credential is compromised, everything after it trusts it. The attacker who phishes a session does not encounter a new problem at the next layer; the next layer greets the stolen token as an old friend. Authentication was the wall, and behind the wall the courtyard turns out to be furnished, well-lit, and unguarded, on the theory that anyone standing in it presumably belongs there. The remaining layers become scenery: present, catalogued, compliant, and irrelevant to the path actually being walked.

The military designer would call this a position with a strong outer work and nothing behind it, and would not call it deep, however many structures appeared on the plan.

Interaction beats accumulation

Organisations inventory controls. Attackers experience systems. These are not two views of the same object; they are different objects.

An inventory is additive. Each control is assessed on its own terms, found adequate, and counted. The list grows, and the growth feels like progress, because in an inventory it is. But an attack path is not experienced as a list. It is experienced as a system, and systems have the awkward property that their behaviour emerges from interaction rather than accumulation. Ten excellent controls can combine into one weak system, if they share assumptions, trust each other’s outputs, or all stand behind the same authentication event. Three modest controls can combine into a genuinely resilient one, if each fails differently and each failure is visible to the others.

Interaction is what does the work. Not count. Security architectures have emergent properties. Control catalogues do not, and a catalogue is what most depth claims are actually describing.

Negative space

If there is a single question that separates real depth from its portrait, it might be this one, asked of the whole architecture at once: what assumptions do all the layers share?

Not what does each layer defend against. What do they all rest on? The answers, in most environments, arrive quickly and are uncomfortable. A shared identity provider. Shared DNS. Shared administrators, whose workstations touch everything. A shared cloud tenant. Shared monitoring, and shared logging, so that the system’s ability to notice its own compromise travels through one pipeline. A shared supply chain. A shared time source, which is a stranger dependency than it first appears, since so much of authentication and correlation silently assumes the clocks agree. And, least visible of all, shared thinking: the same threat model, held by the same people, embedded in every layer they designed.

Because no individual control owns these assumptions, no individual control assessment tends to discover them. These common dependencies are the negative space of the architecture, the part no diagram draws, and they flatten the apparent depth into a single point of failure. Ten layers resting on one substrate have the depth of the substrate. The castle analogy holds here too, unkindly: it does not much matter how many walls stand between the attacker and the keep if every wall is keyed to the same gate, guarded by the same garrison, and built on the same foundation the attacker has learned to undermine. Depth disappears not because any layer is weak, but because everything rests on one thing, and the attacker has found it.

Defence in depth versus bureaucracy in depth

Many organisations, asked to demonstrate depth, proudly present a stack. MFA. EDR. SIEM. SOAR. DLP. CASB. PAM. XDR. The list grows year-on-year, each acronym its own procurement, its own dashboard, its own line in the audit response. It reads as formidable. It is certainly expensive.

Then the attacker steals a session cookie, and most of the stack quietly becomes irrelevant. Not defeated; nothing so dramatic. Simply not consulted. The MFA already happened, upstream of the theft. The identity layer sees a valid token. The alerting layers see a user doing user things. The attack proceeds along a path that intersects perhaps two of the eight acronyms, and neither of those two knows anything is wrong.

The architecture was layered. The attack path wasn’t. That is the whole distinction, and it suggests a name for what has actually been built in many of these environments. Not defence in depth. Bureaucracy in depth: an arrangement in which every control is present and individually defensible, and in which the attacker’s experience is nonetheless of moving through open country. The layers satisfy the auditor. The attacker meets a different building.

OT remembered something

There is one corner of the field where the original meaning survived, largely because it was never imported through cybersecurity at all. Industrial systems did not set out to implement defence in depth. They arrived at it as a by-product of how engineering has always handled dangerous processes, and the principle they arrived at can be stated in one line: OT never relied on copies of the same protection. It relied on different physical realities.

Each thing standing between a compromised control system and a disaster exists in a different domain, obeys different rules, and fails for different reasons. The networks are genuinely apart, not merely logically adjacent. The safety instrumented system runs its own logic on its own hardware, designed by people who assumed the basic process control would fail and planned for the day it did. The mechanical interlock holds regardless of what any computer believes; it fails as metal, not as software. The analogue gauge reports the pressure actually in the pipe, and the operator watching it is entitled, indeed expected, to distrust the screens. Behind all of it, the emergency shutdown exists to bring the process to a safe state even when everything upstream is lying.

The consequence is exactly the property that layered cyber stacks can lack. The interlock does not care that the SIS was bypassed. The operator does not care that the alarm server is compromised, because the gauge is analogue and the pipe is audibly wrong. An attacker who defeats one of these arrives at the next facing a genuinely new problem, often in a different discipline entirely, which is a very expensive kind of progress.

That is what the military people meant. It survived in OT because process safety engineers never trusted metaphors in the first place. They counted failure modes.

A depth test

The whole argument reduces to four checks.

If this layer fails, what genuinely new problem appears for the attacker?
If the answer is “none”, there isn’t another layer.
If the answer is “the same problem again”, there also isn’t another layer.
If defeating the next layer takes the same capability that defeated this one, the two are probably one layer, drawn twice.

Run against a real architecture, the test tends to shorten the list of layers considerably. Whatever survives is the depth.

Keeping the layers, misplacing the cost

None of this is an argument that the phrase is wrong. “Defence in depth” captured a real piece of engineering insight, and for a while it did useful work: it pushed organisations past the fantasy of the single perfect control. The trouble began when the metaphor started to be taken more seriously than the engineering underneath it, at which point “depth” quietly came to mean “quantity”, and the organising question was misplaced.

Defence in depth was never an instruction to accumulate controls. It was an instruction to make every success more expensive than the last. Depth is not measured by how many controls appear on the architecture diagram. It is measured by how many new problems the attacker encounters after the first one fails.

Somewhere along the way, we kept the layers and misplaced the cost. The layers were always the easy part.

The trouble with calling it zero trust

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A medieval city was never secured by its wall alone. It had guilds that vouched for their members, letters of introduction carried from town to town, gate guards who knew faces, innkeepers who noticed accents, and neighbours who registered a stranger in the lane before any official did. The wall was one instrument among many, and arguably not the most effective one. What kept the city safe was a dense weave of overlapping trust relationships, most of them informal, all of them cheap (in financial terms).

Trust may be one of civilisation’s least expensive technologies. It lets people coordinate without drafting a contract for every interaction, a transaction cost in the sense Coase gave the term. Societies with high levels of it appear to spend less on verification, oversight, and enforcement, and to get more done with the savings. Fukuyama built his account of national prosperity on that observation. Organisations function for the same reason: colleagues routinely extend each other credit, admit mistakes, lend judgement, and occasionally bend procedure because reality insists. Verification is the expensive alternative, and complete verification is impossible, which is why trust exists at all: every functioning organisation chooses, mostly unconsciously, where verification ends and trust begins. Security architectures can move that boundary. They cannot eliminate it. If a consultant walked into a boardroom and proposed eliminating trust from the organisation, the proposal would be recognised at once as absurd, and probably as sinister.

The curious thing about “zero trust” is that it appears to propose exactly that.

Except it doesn’t. The word trust is carrying at least two meanings here, and the distance between them is where everything interesting in this story happens.

What the phrase was meant to do

The term has an author and a birthday. John Kindervag, then an analyst at Forrester Research, published No More Chewy Centers: Introducing The Zero Trust Model of Information Security in September 2010. The title refers to an old joke in the field: that networks were built like a certain chocolate sweet, hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy in the middle. The perimeter was fortified; everything behind it was assumed benign. Kindervag’s diagnosis was that this trust model was broken at the root. Firewalls had a trusted interface and an untrusted interface, and the labels were doing work the underlying reality could not support. Packets, he observed, are not the kind of thing trust applies to.

He was not the first to notice. The Jericho Forum, a mostly European group of corporate security officers, had been arguing since 2004 that the perimeter was already dissolving under the weight of outsourcing, mobility, and intercompany connectivity, and that survival lay in what they called de-perimeterisation. And the engineering world caught up in its own way when Google published the BeyondCorp papers from 2014 onwards, describing how the company was moving its internal applications off a privileged network. Access decisions would rest on who the user was and what state their device was in, rather than on where the request came from. In 2020, NIST attempted to fence the term formally in Special Publication 800-207, defining zero trust architecture in terms of resources, requests, and continuous evaluation.

Strip the branding away and the engineering claim is almost disappointingly modest. Network location is not an identity claim; it is an accident of topology. A packet arriving from the corporate LAN inherits the credibility of the LAN, which is to say the credibility of whichever forgotten device was compromised last. So: don’t authenticate the cable. Authenticate the requester. Check the device. Do it per request, not per morning.

That is sensible, and it was arguably overdue. It is also a claim about routing and credentials, roughly as ideological as a recommendation to stop accepting photocopied passports. So why does the phrase read like a manifesto?

The name had an author too

A comfortable answer would be that a modest engineering idea was corrupted in transit, that vendors and executives took an innocent technical term and inflated it into a philosophy of suspicion. That answer is too kind, and the founding document itself is a witness against it.

No More Chewy Centers does not build its case on misconfigured routers. Its examples are people, chief among them an insider at a firm supplying software to credit bureaus, who sold tens of thousands of customer records over two years, undetected, from a position of trust. The report’s argument moves freely between packets and people, listing malicious insiders in trusted positions among the reasons the old model fails, and dismissing “trust but verify” as a useless buzz phrase. In the years since, Kindervag has repeatedly described trust itself as a vulnerability, a human sentiment that has no rightful place in digital systems. One can read that charitably, as a compressed way of saying that trust decisions belong at the identity layer rather than the network layer. Charitable or not, the name was not an engineering label that escaped the lab. It looks chosen for its reach. “Zero trust” fits on a slide and stirs the blood. “Location-independent request authentication” does neither, and would have sold no reports.

Technical terms do not stay inside RFCs. Executives, boards, auditors, and journalists read them literally, and then organise around the metaphor. The phrase did not accidentally invite expansive readings. It invited them from the moment it was coined, and it went on doing so in rooms its coiner never controlled.

The name escapes engineering

Once the phrase reaches the boardroom, a natural inference presents itself. If trusting networks turned out to be dangerous, perhaps trusting employees is dangerous too. The inference is invalid, but it is not stupid; it is what the words say. And so a second family of products arrives wearing the badge: user behaviour analytics, insider risk scoring, keystroke and screen monitoring, sentiment analysis of internal chat. Some of this has a foothold in NIST’s specification and some of it has none. Its trust algorithm does take historical behaviour patterns as an input, and the document names insider threat directly. But its interest in behaviour stays tied to the access decision. It does not reach for keystrokes, screen contents, or whether Marieke in finance seems disgruntled this quarter. Nothing in the architecture required that. The name licensed it.

The industry’s favourite “castle and moat” slide quietly redraws history. It depicts a wall and a gate, then invites a laugh at their inadequacy. What disappears are the guilds, the letters of introduction, the reputations, the neighbours whose watchfulness made the city function in the first place. The slide removes trust from the picture, then sells the omission back as insight.

Trust is infrastructure too

Bruce Schneier’s argument in Liars and Outliers is that security is not the opposite of trust but its enabling condition: the whole apparatus of locks, laws, and reputations exists so that strangers can cooperate at scale. On that reading, strip the trust out and there is less left for security to protect. Onora O’Neill made the adjacent point about institutions in her 2002 Reith Lectures: regimes of ever-increasing accountability and audit, introduced in the name of restoring trust, tend instead to corrode it, replacing professional judgement with defensive compliance.

Both observations bear directly on the surveilled organisation. The behaviours security actually depends on are voluntary and fragile. Someone admits they clicked the link. Someone mentions that the contractor’s questions felt off. Someone escalates an uncertainty they could have quietly ignored, or stays late to help a colleague recover a mistake that would otherwise surface in an audit. Every one of these runs on psychological safety, and psychological safety is difficult to sustain when one’s keystrokes are being scored for risk. An organisation that signals institutional distrust of its people tends to receive, in return, exactly the information flow it has priced in: none.

There seems to be an inversion. The more an organisation works at removing interpersonal trust, the more weight its technical controls carry, since they now operate without the human early-warning system around them. And the more weight the controls carry, the less gracefully the organisation degrades when they fail, which they eventually do. Distrust is not a free upgrade. It is a transfer of load onto the most brittle part of the structure.

Identity is negotiated

Identity systems tend to assume identity is crisp: one person, one credential, one continuous session of unambiguous intent. Real organisations are not like that, and everyone in them knows it. Weinberg would have recognised the shape at once: a people problem wearing a technical costume.

A nurse borrows a colleague’s terminal mid-emergency because logging out and back in costs ninety seconds the patient does not have. A maintenance account is shared because the vendor shipped it that way in 2009 and the machine has never once been offline long enough to change it. An engineer fixing something at three in the morning is using whatever access still works. A consultant is covering a role she does not formally hold, with everyone’s blessing and no one’s paperwork. These are not violations that happen to occur; they are trust behaviours humans have negotiated, continuously and mostly well, using context the policy engine cannot see. The architecture classifies them as attacks not because the architecture is stupid but because context is not easily computable, and humility sits better with that limit than enforcement does.

What the plant already knew

Operational technology is where the abstraction finally collides with physics. An industrial site contains controllers that cannot perform authentication at all, safety loops that cannot tolerate the latency of a policy decision point, deterministic timing that a dropped handshake would violate, and equipment considerably older than any framework now assessing it. Per-request verification is not resisted there out of conservatism. It is resisted because the request is a valve, and the valve cannot wait.

More interesting than what the plant lacks is what it has. Engineers on a site do not trust each other because of network identity. They trust presence: who is physically standing at the cabinet. Presence is itself a security control. They trust competence, demonstrated over years. They trust professional reputation, which travels between sites faster than any credential, and operational judgement, which is why the person who has run the unit for two decades gets believed at 3:00. These are genuine trust mechanisms with genuine verification built in, and they are primary structure.

The OT world even had its own vocabulary before the slogan arrived. IEC 62443 organises a plant into zones and conduits: regions of comparable trust with controlled channels between them, a gradient rather than a zero. That is not an industrial peculiarity. It is the model most organisations run without writing down, and one sector happened to standardise. Zero trust arriving in these environments as “add another gateway” proposes zeroing a gradient that was already doing useful work.

A category mistake

The phrase joins two different things under one word. There is epistemic trust: I have evidence that this request is genuine, this credential valid, this device in a known state. And there is social trust: I believe this person will act competently and honestly, the expectation that Diego Gambetta and his contributors spent a volume dissecting as a quiet condition of cooperative life. The first is a property of claims and can, in principle, be verified per request. The second is a property of relationships and cannot, because it is precisely the willingness to proceed without full verification. It is what stands in where evidence runs out, which in any real organisation is most of the time.

Engineers hear a claim about evidence. Everyone else hears a claim about a relationship. Both readings are reasonable, which is the whole problem.

Zero trust, as engineering, addresses only the first. Its readers, being human, hear the second. The boardroom inference and the surveillance products it licensed both follow from collapsing these two meanings into a single marketing phrase. And the founding report, which built its case around a human insider, shows the collapse was present at the christening rather than introduced in transit. That is the category mistake, and it has been compounding ever since.

Recovering the precision

None of this argues for abandoning the architecture. The engineering insight survives perfectly well once the two trusts are prised apart again. A security architecture can verify requests all day without teaching an organisation to distrust itself. The discipline is small and unglamorous: noticing, before a trust relationship is removed, which kind of trust it is, what work it is currently doing, and what will carry that load once the boundary between verification and trust has moved.

The architecture never asked anyone to stop trusting people. It asked them to stop trusting IP addresses. Somewhere between the research note and the boardroom, those became the same sentence. A city that tore down its guilds because the wall had failed would not be more secure. It would merely be alone, inside a very well-authenticated gate.

Sources

Kindervag, J., No More Chewy Centers: Introducing The Zero Trust Model of Information Security, Forrester Research, September 2010.
Jericho Forum, Jericho Forum Commandments, The Open Group, 2007.
Ward, R. and Beyer, B., “BeyondCorp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security”, ;login:, USENIX, December 2014.
Rose, S., Borchert, O., Mitchell, S. and Connelly, S., Zero Trust Architecture, NIST Special Publication 800-207, August 2020.
Schneier, B., Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive, Wiley, 2012.
O’Neill, O., A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Gambetta, D. (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Fukuyama, F., Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Free Press, 1995.
Coase, R. H., The Nature of the Firm, Economica, Vol. 4, No. 16, November 1937.
IEC 62443-3-2, Security for industrial automation and control systems, Ty Myrddin, 2025
Weinberg, G. M., The Secrets of Consulting, Dorset House, 1985.

Peace has running costs

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Organised violence tends to appear where the substrate makes it the higher-return move, and to recede where it does not. That is one way to read the origins of war. Inverted, the same reading yields a second claim, less obvious and more useful. If war is what the ground rewards under some conditions, then peace is what the ground rewards under others, and neither is the default. A long stretch without organised violence is not the absence of something. It is the presence of conditions under which cooperation pays, and conditions like that can be built, and they can wear out.

Which turns the anxious question of the moment into a more tractable one. Not whether the world is becoming more dangerous, but which of the conditions that keep cooperation cheap are getting more expensive to hold in place. The difference is the difference between prophecy and maintenance.

Nowhere left to route around

There is a darker reading of the present, and it captures something real: the exits are closing, and not only in the geographic sense the origins of states turned on. Robert Carneiro’s circumscribed valleys produced conquest states because a defeated group hemmed by desert and mountain had nowhere to walk to, so losing meant submission rather than departure. The unsettling feature of now is that the same condition, no cheap exit, is being reproduced across the whole system at once, on axes that have nothing to do with terrain.

A globalised economy runs through a handful of narrow passages, which are the modern equivalent of Carneiro’s desert wall. The Strait of Hormuz carries about a quarter of the oil traded by sea and nearly a fifth of the liquefied gas traded, through a channel whose navigable lanes are two miles wide. Iran largely closed it during the 2026 war. Since then the status of passage has itself become contested, which is what a chokepoint is for. Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Turkish and Danish straits, Panama, the Taiwan Strait: whoever sits on a passage holds the thing nobody else can route around. That is circumscription for the entire trading system, and it does not need anyone to intend harm in order to bite.

The pattern extends past shipping. The advanced-chip economy sits on one contested island, where a single firm makes more than nine in ten of the most advanced semiconductors. The energy transition has quietly relocated the old oil geography onto lithium, cobalt and rare earths, whose refining is concentrated in one country across nineteen of twenty strategic minerals. The cables and satellites that carry the information economy are chokepoints made of glass and orbit. Water, among the oldest substrates, is contested along shared rivers and depleting aquifers. Sovereign debt pulls future production into the present and then needs growth simply to service itself. Climate sits under all of it, shrinking the habitable and productive ground and pushing people toward the parts that still function, while borders harden at the moment they are most needed as exits.

The war in Ukraine, still grinding through intermittent truces that have not held, reads on a substrate lens as a contest over ground: grain, minerals, Black Sea access and a strategic buffer. It also carries competing historical narratives, security concerns and ideologies. The rights of that war are a separate question, and selecting one explanatory layer is not the same as claiming the others away. The claim is only that the material layer is carrying more than the stated reasons admit, on more than one side, which is what a substrate reading tends to find in any war once the justifications are set aside.

The common thread through all of it is not scarcity, which has always been present. It is reduced optionality. Each of these is a narrowing of the room to move, walk away, route around, or wait. It is Carneiro generalised: the frontier disappears, and when the frontier disappears, the arithmetic that once made raiding worthwhile comes back, because taking starts to look like the only way left to get more.

The frontier keeps moving

There is a second historical pattern, and it cuts against the first. Human societies have repeatedly escaped apparent limits not by finding new land but by manufacturing new substrate. Agriculture, oceanic navigation, coal, oil, electricity, nitrogen fixation, the shipping container, the internet: each opened a frontier without discovering a continent, converting a ceiling into a floor. So the deeper pattern may not be a finite world pressing in. It may be that the world keeps running out of one substrate a little before it discovers the next, and lives through the gap in fear.

Whether the current squeeze is the terminal one or just another gap before another expansion is not knowable now. Cheap solar, fusion, biotechnology, whatever artificial intelligence turns out to be, material pulled from asteroids: each is a candidate for the next frontier. Both patterns are real, the closing exits and the moving frontier, and which one governs the coming decades is not yet written into the ground. A substrate reading does not settle that, and is not built to: it reads ground already walked on, which is a different job from seeing ahead.

Growth defers the argument

The growth economy belongs on the list, but its mechanism is subtler than the usual complaint about a system that has to expand to survive. Growth is what allows conflict to be deferred. When everyone expects tomorrow to be larger than today, compromise is cheap, because a smaller share of a growing whole can still be an absolute gain. When tomorrow looks smaller, compromise turns expensive, because every settlement is now visibly at someone’s expense. The politics shifts from how to make more to who gets less, and the second question is the one that has historically been decided by force.

This holds inside borders as much as across them. Housing, healthcare, pensions, migration: an expanding economy lets these be positive-sum arguments, and a contracting one turns them distributive, which is a polite word for a fight over who is made poorer. The inequality hypothesis, that surplus creates elites and elites compete, sharpens here. When the pie stops growing, the easy politics of dividing an expanding surplus gives way to the hard politics of who holds the existing one, and elites with armies have always had more say in that than people without them.

Trust is infrastructure

One substrate belongs on the list that is easy to miss, because it is made of nothing that can be weighed. Trust, not as a virtue but as infrastructure. Markets assume accounting. Money assumes belief. Diplomacy assumes that signals can be read. Insurance assumes that contracts will hold. Science assumes that results will reproduce. Each is a load-bearing assumption of shared reality, and each lowers the cost of transacting to something a society can afford. When the shared reality fragments, the cost of every transaction rises at once, because nothing can be taken on trust and everything has to be verified or secured.

This is the security dilemma seen from the other side. That mechanism is worst where nobody can verify anyone, and the information domain may be the most opaque substrate yet built: capability that cannot be counted, intent that cannot be read, deniability that is cheap. Trust is the machinery that keeps verification affordable, and it is quietly one of the things now getting more expensive to maintain.

Peace is engineered

All of which reframes the thing usually filed as a moral achievement. The most durable accomplishment of the order built after 1945 was not peace in the abstract. It was making conquest a bad trade for a large number of states. Germany grew richer trading than it ever did invading, and so did Japan. The point is not that these countries became virtuous. It is that the payoff matrix was rebuilt underneath them, so that the cooperative move paid better than the predatory one.

The clearest case is the one that founded the European project. German coal and French steel, the contested substrate the two countries had fought over within living memory, were pooled under the Schuman Plan of 1950, implemented by a treaty signed the following year and running within two years of that, which turned the thing worth fighting over into a thing that only produced value when shared. That is not diplomacy in the ordinary sense. It is substrate engineering: a deliberate change to the ground so that the higher-return move changed with it.

Seen that way, a long list of unglamorous machinery turns out to be the same class of object. Mutual defence pacts, the interbank settlement system, shipping and salvage law, the insurance markets that price maritime risk, satellite positioning, the agreements that govern undersea cables, container standards, commercial arbitration: none of these is a moral monument, and all of them, by design or by accident, ended up serving the same function, keeping cooperation cheaper than the alternative. They are the industrial-age descendants of the apparatus at Taş Tepeler, where the monument and the feast appear to have formed part of what made working together the higher-return strategy, rather than merely decorating it.

Civilisation, seen from here, stops looking like the opposite of war and starts looking like a large, expensive, poorly documented collection of arrangements that keep the price of violence above the price of trade.

Technology rearranges

Technology sits awkwardly in this, because it does not point in one direction. It opens exits and closes them in the same motion. Container shipping collapsed the cost of distance and widened everyone’s options; semiconductor fabrication concentrated a critical input onto a handful of sites and narrowed them. The internet abolished distance for information; cloud infrastructure then re-centralised it into a few buildings owned by a few firms. Precision agriculture raised the land’s carrying capacity; the rare-earth dependence underneath the machinery concentrated supply. Technology does not reliably open the frontier or close it. It rearranges the substrate.

The upkeep

Prophecy is the wrong output, and the wrong appetite. A substrate reading offers a maintenance schedule instead: it says where to look, and what the looking costs. Prediction rewards whoever sounds most certain. Upkeep rewards whoever is still checking.

Two things continue to price war above cooperation. Modern war remains extraordinarily expensive, widely thought unwinnable in its largest form and, in a networked and armed world, rarely worth the cost of holding what it takes; and the machinery of cooperation built over the past eighty years still lowers the cost of peaceful exchange. Both are under strain. Neither has failed. The open question is a race between the exits closing and the upkeep holding. If the growth ceiling, the epistemic fragmentation and the climate squeeze turn the world zero-sum faster than the machinery can be maintained, the substrate starts pricing conflict as the higher-return move again, region by region. If the cost of modern war and the density of shared interest hold, the alternatives stay cheaper and the machinery survives, strained. That race is genuinely undecided.

The comfortable belief that peace is the natural resting state of things, interrupted occasionally by war, does not survive the arithmetic. The evidence runs the other way. The passages stay useful only while they are kept open and verifiable rather than captured. The frontier stays peaceful only while it stays genuinely positive-sum. The shared reality that makes transacting cheap survives only while it is defended like the infrastructure it is. None of it happens on its own, and none of it is ever finished. Peace is the built state, and building decays without upkeep.

War follows the ground

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Humans have probably always killed one another. Warfare is something narrower. It implies groups, planning, logistics, memory, leadership, and enough social organisation that violence stops being a personal act and becomes a collective institution. The interesting question is not when humans first killed. It is when killing acquired administration.

Ask that question and a small crowd of theories turns up, each with its own literature, its own favourite dig site, and its own conviction that the others have missed the point. The Hobbesians say war is ancient. The Rousseauians say civilisation invented it. The circumscription theorists say geography did. The economists point at surplus, the anthropologists at prestige, the international relations scholars at the security dilemma. Each theory has evidence. Each has counterexamples. The usual response is to pick a champion and treat the rest as noise.

There is a less exhausting option: to stop asking which theory is correct and start asking which substrate each theory is describing. Because they are not rivals. They are snapshots of different eras, each one accurate for the conditions it grew out of. Humanity’s circumstances kept changing, and the rational case for organised violence changed with them. The theories only look contradictory when thirteen thousand years are flattened into a single question.

By substrate I mean the relatively stable conditions that constrain behaviour: geography, climate, resources, technology, institutions, population density, information, and the cost of the alternatives to fighting. People choose within those conditions; they do not choose the conditions. And the claim is not that every theory of war is right, which would be a cheap sort of generosity. Plenty are wrong and stay wrong. It is that each of the major surviving theories names a real mechanism, one that tends to dominate only where the substrate makes it the decisive one.

War before walls

The obvious place to start is Hobbes, or at least the tradition that carries his name. In this view warfare is simply human competition scaled up: territory, mates, prestige, revenge. The cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, roughly thirteen thousand years old, is the usual exhibit, and it has recently become a more interesting one for a reason its original excavators did not intend. A 2021 reanalysis of the remains set aside the old reading of a single massacre and argued instead for a long succession of small raids and ambushes. Most of the individuals carried injuries, and a substantial share showed both healed and unhealed wounds, which is the revealing detail: these were people who survived being attacked and were then attacked again, across time rather than in a single afternoon. The team tied the pattern to the upheaval at the end of the last ice age, reading this stretch of the Nile as a refuge where groups displaced by a shifting climate were pressed together and left competing for the same narrowing ground.

That is worth pausing on, because it quietly changes what the site is evidence of. It is probably not a war in the sense earlier writers imagined. It is recurrent raiding under pressure, and the pressure is environmental: the substrate compressed, exits closed, and violence became a standing feature of life in the refuge rather than an event. Territorial aggression is common in mammals, revenge cycles are observable in small societies today, and agriculture, in this reading, merely scaled something already present. But the older claim that Jebel Sahaba shows warfare deep in the hunter-gatherer past looks weaker than the claim it now supports, which is subtler and more useful: even foragers fight repeatedly when the ground stops letting them disperse. There is also Nataruk, a roughly 10,000-year-old massacre of foragers in Kenya, which sits beside Jebel Sahaba as a contested data point in that debate.

The wider record is real but uneven. Organised violence appears in patches, with long stretches and whole regions where it seems largely absent, and that unevenness suggests the Hobbesian picture is not a law of nature. It is a description of what happens under particular conditions: groups in contact, something contested between them, and no cheap way to avoid each other. Where those conditions held, people fought. Where they did not, apparently, people mostly did not bother.

Which is already a substrate observation, even if nobody involved would have used the word. The substrate here is thin: access to hunting grounds, water, perhaps grievance itself, since revenge is a resource of sorts once honour systems exist. Fighting over it stayed small because the substrate could not support anything larger. No stores to seize, no fields to occupy, no population that stays put long enough to be ruled. Victory bought very little, so nobody built institutions to pursue it. The Jebel Sahaba refuge is the exception that names the rule, and it names it early: when the substrate takes away the option of walking off, even people with almost nothing worth stealing will fight, and keep fighting.

Before the fields

One site refuses to line up on either side of the forager-farmer divide, and it happens to be the most consequential dig of the last thirty years. Göbekli Tepe, in south-eastern Anatolia, has monumental enclosures dating to roughly 9500 BCE, built by people who were still essentially hunter-gatherers. Its sister site Karahan Tepe, some forty-odd kilometres away, is part of the same Taş Tepeler world and was founded, on current readings, the better part of two thousand years before farming took hold in the region, though its monumental structures are largely later. This is the wrong way round for the standard story. The standard story has settlement and surplus arrive first, and monuments follow once there is wealth to spare. Here the monuments come first, and the wheat comes after. Einkorn’s wild ancestor sits on the Karacadağ slopes some sixty kilometres off, though both einkorn and emmer are now read as having more dispersed origins than the single-site story allowed, and one live hypothesis is that the pressure to feed large recurring gatherings is part of what drove the domestication, rather than the other way about.

That inversion is a problem for any account that treats stored grain as the origin of everything downstream, and the site does real damage to the sequence rather than merely adding to it. Whatever these people were accumulating, it was not a harvest. The substrate at Göbekli Tepe was open steppe grassland with abundant wild cereals and migrating gazelle, hunted alongside a wide range of other species rather than a single staple. What was being built up and defended, if anything was, was ritual capacity and the sheer mobilised labour to quarry and raise T-shaped megaliths. That is a kind of substrate the farming-first story has no slot for: fixed, valuable, non-portable infrastructure, arriving before agriculture and consisting of monuments rather than granaries.

It also unsettles the comfortable idea that mobile people own nothing worth taking. The reading of Göbekli Tepe has itself shifted, and instructively. The original excavator, Klaus Schmidt, framed it as a pure temple visited by wandering bands, the world’s first sanctuary. Since his death the project, under Lee Clare, has moved steadily away from that: there is now evidence of domestic structures, extensive cereal processing, a water supply, and everyday tools, pointing to a quasi-sedentary population living at or beside the site rather than pilgrims trekking in and out. If that reading holds, then here are people still largely foraging who are nonetheless staying put and piling up grinding stones, cisterns, and megalithic stone, none of which can be picked up and carried off. Stealability, in other words, did not wait for farmers. It began with foragers who stopped moving.

The violence signature is the telling detail. These sites show plenty of interpersonal violence and very little that looks like organised war. At nearby Körtik Tepe, from the same early horizon, researchers find raised levels of interpersonal violence and homicide but, so far, no evidence of fighting between groups. The German Archaeological Institute team’s own framing of the wider Taş Tepeler picture is careful and almost too apt: clear interpersonal and probably intergroup violence, more than Körtik Tepe alone attests and still well short of organised war, and the first stirrings of social inequality, running alongside visible strategies for defusing conflict and organising cooperation, with feasting and shared ritual acting as the incentives that pull people into working together. On that reading the enclosures are less a fortress than an institution, and the thing they institutionalise is not war but its avoidance. Nothing at these sites is fortified. The monumental architecture is emphatically not defensive.

The one detail that points the other way is a skull cult, and it is worth handling with tongs. Fragments of three carved and drilled human skulls from Göbekli Tepe carry deliberate post-mortem modification of a kind not seen elsewhere, and the excavators offered two readings without choosing between them: veneration of ancestors, or the display of dispatched enemies. The circumstantial weight sits slightly with veneration. One skull lay in a concentration of ochre, the drilled hole is placed so the skull would hang facing forward, and the surrounding Anatolian tradition of exhuming, displaying, and replastering skulls is overwhelmingly about ancestors rather than enemies. The enemy reading is real, and has its own comparanda in mutilated dead elsewhere in the Neolithic Near East, but even at its strongest it describes the display of individually dispatched dead, which belongs to the register of interpersonal violence and the treatment of the dead, not to organised between-group war. The more durable point is the meta one: the same institute that found the skulls has since argued the site was quasi-sedentary rather than purely ritual, which is a clean demonstration of an interpretation revising itself as the evidence accumulates, and a caution against reading any of this too confidently. A small fraction of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated, and whether it is best called residential or ritual is still openly contested.

Against the substrate frame, the site stops being an anomaly, though prediction is the wrong word for it: nobody predicted Göbekli Tepe, and the reading arrived long after the digging. If fighting appears where the substrate makes it pay, then a substrate that rewards gathering and building over raiding could very well produce cooperation instead, and Göbekli Tepe is a case where it did. Which substrate is which is mostly read off what people did on it, so the frame explains after the fact rather than forecasting. A new substrate appears here, sedentism, monumental capacity, feasting-driven intensification of wild and then domesticated cereals, well before agriculture proper. And it does not produce war. It produces the machinery of cooperation: gatherings, shared building, ritual, the apparatus a society uses to keep interpersonal violence from escalating into the organised kind. The substrate, not the calendar, is what settles it. Change the substrate and what fighting is worth changes with it, in either direction. At Jebel Sahaba a compressing substrate made recurrent raiding rational. In the Taş Tepeler hills a substrate built around gathering and building made cooperation the better bet. Same species, a few thousand years and a few hundred kilometres apart, pulled opposite ways by what the ground and the moment made pay.

What the farmers made stealable

Then people settle down, and the Rousseau tradition gets its turn. Agriculture concentrates a list of things that were, before it, either absent or thin on the ground: land ownership, grain stores, permanent wealth, defensible settlements, and eventually taxation and hierarchy. A forager’s stores cannot easily be stolen: everything is carried, and the owner can walk away. A farmer’s harvest can very much be stolen, and the farmer knows it, which is one plausible reading of why early settlements acquire walls.

Göbekli Tepe complicates this, and the complication is worth keeping rather than smoothing over. The foragers of the Taş Tepeler hills were already accumulating fixed, non-portable things: cisterns, grinding installations, tonnes of raised stone. Agriculture did not invent stealability. It concentrated it, standardised it, and made it storable and countable. A harvest sits in one place, can be measured, taxed, hoarded, and carried off, and it comes back every year. That is a different order of target from a monument that cannot be moved or a herd that has to be chased. The Rousseauians are not wrong that something changed with settled farming. They are describing the moment the substrate first made organised taking a reliably better return than organised hunting, year-on-year.

Jericho’s stone wall and tower, from perhaps the ninth millennium BCE, is the monument everyone reaches for, and it turns out to be the wrong one, because the fortification reading of it has largely collapsed. Kathleen Kenyon dug it in the 1950s and called it a defensive system, which made Jericho the first city under arms. That reading has not held. Ofer Bar-Yosef’s objection is architectural: the tower stands inside the wall rather than projecting out from it, so it offers defenders no field of fire and makes no sense as a bastion. There are no warfare-specific finds, no battle damage, no trauma in the bones to match a besieged town, and the arrowheads read as hunting gear. What is left is a wall that most now take for flood and debris defence against the wadi to the west, where the ground is lowest, and a tower read variously as ritual, as communal statement, or, on one proposal, as a solstice marker aligned to the shadow of the summit behind it. The single most famous early wall in the popular story of war turns out to be, on the best current reading, probably not a war wall at all. Which is inconvenient for the tidy Rousseauian sequence, and entirely consistent with the substrate one: walls appear when there is something fixed and vulnerable to protect, and water, silt, and the labour of the community are things worth protecting long before the neighbours are.

What changed here was not human nature, which had presumably been available for violence all along. It was that the substrate became dense, storable, and reliably worth taking. Conquest turned profitable in a way it had not been, and stayed profitable season after season, which is the part that lets institutions grow up around it.

The exits close

Robert Carneiro’s circumscription theory adds the piece that turns raiding into states. Conflict only accumulates power when the losers cannot leave. In an open landscape, a defeated group walks somewhere else and the victory evaporates. In a constrained one, a fertile river valley hemmed by desert or mountains, losing means submission, because there is nowhere to walk to. Population grows, the good land fills, and suddenly defeat has a new meaning: incorporation.

This is why early states appear where they do, in the Nile valley, Mesopotamia, coastal Peru, parts of Mesoamerica, rather than everywhere agriculture existed. The theory is sometimes presented as being about warfare, but it is really about exit costs. The substrate feature that does the work is not the fertility of the valley. It is the desert around it. Circumscription is a theory of what happens when the substrate removes the option of leaving. Carneiro’s valleys are the political equivalent of Jebel Sahaba’s climatic refuge: in both, the exits disappear, and violence that would once have walked away has nowhere left to go.

Surplus buys specialists

Agriculture changes one more thing, quietly and permanently. Surplus allows specialisation, and among the specialists it allows are full-time warriors, alongside the priests, bureaucrats, and kings who direct them. Hunter-gatherer bands rarely support a standing military class; every fighter is also a hunter, and war has to fit around subsistence. States can keep men under arms through the harvest. War stops being an emergency and becomes a profession, with equipment, training, doctrine, and a payroll.

A large historical databank has since let this be tested directly. Weighing seventeen rival drivers of social complexity, Turchin and colleagues found the best-supported combination to be rising agricultural productivity and the spread of new military technologies, iron weapons and cavalry above all, with state-level features like territory size carrying surprisingly little weight. That is close to a restatement of the paragraph above: surplus feeds the specialists, and the specialists’ tools do much of the scaling. In their data the megaempires arrive three or four centuries after cavalry does, a lag the authors read as consistent with the speed of change their model predicts; one commentator, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, reads the same lag the other way, arguing that a delay that long makes military technology “a very remote predictor of the outcome”. Both readings accept the sequence; they differ on what it licenses. Whether a gap that wide still counts as a cause is the actual question, and a substrate reading does not get to answer it for free.

Surplus stacks the deck

Once war is a profession, it acquires professionals, and professionals have interests. Which leads directly to the inequality hypothesis: surplus creates wealth differences, wealth differences create elites, and elites compete. A peasant may have little interest in conquering the next valley. A king with debts, ambitious sons, and an army that expects to be paid has rather more. It seems plausible that many wars in the historical record reflect elite incentive structures more than popular need, dressed afterwards in whatever justification the era found respectable. The substrate here is not land or grain. It is the surplus extraction machinery itself, which has to keep running, and which occasionally finds war the cheapest way to keep running.

The inequality hypothesis has its own dataset now. The GINI Project, coding house-size disparity across hundreds of sites, finds that war did not simply widen the gap between rich and poor or level it, but did both, depending on how collective the governance was and whether land or labour was the scarce input. An older strand of the same work adds a substrate detail worth keeping: Old World inequality kept climbing where societies could harness large draft animals, cattle and later horses, which let the already-rich work more land and pushed everyone else toward a landless class, while the New World, without such animals, plateaued. The animals available to be domesticated are themselves part of the substrate that sets how steep a hierarchy can grow.

Prestige, revenge, and other renewable resources

Not everything reduces to material return, and the anthropologists are right to insist on it. In many tribal societies raiding demonstrates courage, adulthood, leadership, and masculinity, with the loot almost incidental. East African cattle raids illustrate the blend: the animals have economic value, but they are also status, marriage wealth, and identity. That institution has not stayed fixed, though. Since automatic weapons spread through the rangelands in the 1980s, the raiding has been commercialising, the AK-47 turning a ritualised contest of young men into organised theft for cash markets, and the prestige logic thinning as it goes. The act looks similar from a distance; the substrate beneath it has changed, and the reason for the raid with it. War as social signalling is real and recurs, but even signalling answers to what the ground will pay for.

The revenge machine is real too. One killing demands another, which demands another, until nobody remembers the original dispute and the feud has become the relationship. Blood feuds show how violence sustains itself without any material benefit at all, and the mechanism scales. Tribes inherit grievances. So do states.

It is tempting to treat prestige and revenge as exceptions to a materialist account, but they fit the substrate frame comfortably enough. Honour and obligation are social substrates, not physical ones. They are stores of value, they can be raided, and they compound. The distinctive thing about them is that they are renewable. A grain store can be emptied. A grievance refills itself.

Wars nobody wanted

The security dilemma is the odd one out, because it needs no aggressor at all. Nobody intends conquest. Everyone intends safety. One village builds a wall; its neighbour, reading the wall, recruits fighters; the first village, reading the fighters, confirms its fears and arms further. Neither side wanted war. Both manufactured it out of mutual visibility and mutual uncertainty. The pattern recurs from village palisades to naval arms races, and it suggests that some fraction of warfare needs no explanation in terms of anyone’s interests at all. The substrate condition is simply proximity plus opacity: close enough to threaten, not transparent enough to reassure. There is a second substrate variable underneath it, what strategists call the offence-defence balance: when conquest is cheap the fear the dilemma runs on is rational, and when defence holds the advantage the same fear can subside. Experimental work suggests the thinking is not easily talked down once it has taken hold between rivals who already distrust each other.

It is also a substrate made almost entirely of information. Nothing material changes hands and nothing shifts on the ground; what moves is only what each side believes about the other. The mechanism that runs on belief alone is the one that reaches furthest into the present, where information has become the contested ground itself.

Ideology arrives late, and mostly writes the press release

Religion, nationalism, and political ideology dominate how wars get narrated, which makes it easy to assume they dominate why wars get fought. The record suggests something more modest. Many medieval wars filed under religion also involved taxation, succession, trade routes, or dynastic manoeuvring, and modern ideological wars still run on industry, logistics, and territory. Ideas seem to decide who counts as friend and who as enemy. Material conditions tend to decide whether fighting is feasible, and often whether it is worth anyone’s while.

The honesty tax on this argument is the Crusades, the very case a materialist would most want to claim. The older reading of them as land-hunger in pious dress, younger sons riding east for estates, has largely been abandoned: charter evidence shows the crusaders were drawn from wealthy families, with the eldest sons going about as often as younger ones, and typically mortgaged or bankrupted themselves to go, while the current weight of scholarship puts genuine religious impulse near the centre, at least for the First Crusade. The substrate still set what was feasible, who could be fed and moved and paid, but here it does not look like the thing that lit the fire.

None of this makes ideology mere decoration. Sorting the world into friends and enemies is real work; it just tends to sit on top of the machinery rather than drive it.

Clausewitz called war politics by other means, and the line survives because it is half of a truth. The other half inverts it: politics may exist largely to avoid fighting. Negotiation is vastly cheaper than mobilisation, and diplomacy becomes attractive precisely because war is so expensive. Read that way, the history of civilisation is not merely the history of war. It is also the history of inventing alternatives to it, and pricing them.

Reading the substrate

Lined up together, the theories share a spine. Each one answers the same underlying question for a different era: what substrate made fighting a rational strategy here?

For hunter-gatherers, the substrate was access, territory, water, and the renewable resource of grievance, and it supported only small, episodic violence, except where a compressing climate closed the exits and made raiding recurrent, as at Jebel Sahaba. For the quasi-settled foragers of the Taş Tepeler hills, it was monumental and ritual capacity, and it pulled the other way, toward gathering and building and the machinery of cooperation, rather than toward war. For early farmers, it was stored grain and fixed land, and it made hoarding, walls, and taking all sensible at once. In circumscribed valleys, it was the geography of no exit, and it turned victory into accumulation and defeat into incorporation. For kingdoms, it was surplus and the extraction machinery, which bought professional armies and gave elites both the means and the motive. For tribal honour systems, it was prestige and obligation. For neighbours in general, it was proximity without transparency.

The Taş Tepeler case is the one that keeps the lens honest, because it is a counterexample the frame accommodates rather than trips over, though accommodation is the easier of the two tricks. If the substrate is what makes fighting rational, then some substrates should make it irrational, and reward cooperation instead. A world organised around large recurring gatherings and shared building is such a substrate, and it appears to have produced institutions for defusing violence rather than conducting it. The claim was never that the substrate drives people to war. It is that the substrate sets the price of war against its alternatives, and people, then as now, tend to read the price.

The long quarrel between war-is-ancient and war-is-invented now has a careful adjudication. Reviewing the global archaeological record region by region, Hugo Meijer finds neither camp vindicated: lethal violence runs deep in the human lineage, but whether it surfaced as war varied enormously across time and place, a plasticity rather than a constant. The deep-roots and shallow-roots camps are each describing a real part of the range. Naming the substrate as what decides between them is a gloss on that finding rather than part of it, though it is a gloss the record seems to invite.

The ideology changes dramatically across this history. Gods, crowns, nations, classes, civilisational missions: the narrative layer turns over every few centuries and sometimes faster. The substrate changes much more slowly. Arable land was worth fighting over for ten thousand years. Trade routes for five. Industrial capacity for two hundred and counting. Anyone trying to read a conflict, past or present, could do worse than to ignore the stated reasons for a moment and ask what, underneath, is actually contested, and what made contesting it by force look like a reasonable bet to somebody.

That is the same move as reading any substrate: the narrative layer records what people say, the substrate records what constrains them, and the two rarely agree. The origin of war is not a single event awaiting discovery in the right stratum of the right dig. It is a pattern that reappears, era after era, whenever the substrate makes organised violence cheaper than its alternatives.

The naming and the finding out

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At eight in the evening on 31 August 1939, a small team in Polish uniforms seized a radio transmitter at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia and broadcast a few minutes of anti-German agitation. By the following morning the event had a name, an author, and a consequence: a Polish provocation, answered by the invasion that began the Second World War in Europe. The name held for six years. The finding out took until December 1945, when the sworn affidavit of the SS officer who ran the operation was read into the record at Nuremberg, complete with the code name for the murdered prisoner left at the scene.

That gap, between the naming and the finding out, is the subject here. Recognising a false flag in hindsight is easy; the archive does the work. Recognising one in the moment appears to be among the hardest problems in conflict analysis, and the record is humbling about how rarely it has been done. But the record also has a shape, and the shape is instructive. Confirmation, when it came, came through the same narrow set of channels: a perpetrator testifying under legal or moral pressure, an archive opening after a regime changed, a declassification decades later, an operational failure at the scene, a judicial investigation grinding on for years. None, on that record, was confirmed by someone reading the event correctly at the time. Contemporary sceptics existed, and some guessed right, but they guessed alongside people who guessed wrong for identical reasons, and being right for weak reasons is not detection.

What those channels share, in the vocabulary of an earlier essay in this series, is that they are all substrate channels. The story of a false flag is by construction self-consistent; it is the fabricated part, built to survive scrutiny of exactly the kind a story invites. What eventually gives it away is the material and institutional residue the story cannot fully control: the range of a gun, the chemistry of an explosive, the paper trail of a mobilisation, the memory of a man who drove the car. A false flag is arguably the limit case of the pattern that essay describes. Not a story that under-reads its substrate, but a story manufactured precisely because the substrate cannot be admitted. The substrate essay’s Iran section described a motive too useful to name, dressed in a rotating wardrobe of announceable reasons. A false flag goes one step further: the costume is not merely worn over the substrate but cut to point away from it.

Which suggests a method, or at least a discipline: two questions per event, asked in order. Where is the meaning being made, and what is the residue saying? The first question locates the room: the broadcast, the diplomatic note, the anonymous phone call, the press briefing, the venue where the event acquires its author and its significance. The second question ignores that room entirely and reads the enabling conditions on both sides: whether the accused party had the capability, access, and trajectory the story requires, and whether the accuser’s material preparations predate the trigger they are supposedly responding to. When the two layers agree, the event is probably what it claims to be. When they diverge, the divergence is worth more attention than the story. What follows walks the confirmed cases with those two questions, then asks what the method is worth in a sensor-saturated present, and ends where this series keeps ending, in a strait.

Gleiwitz: a war waiting for its incident

Where the meaning was made: a transmitter, then a podium. The broadcast itself was the first act of naming, agitation in Polish from a German station, designed to be overheard. The second act came the next morning in the Reichstag, where Hitler folded Gleiwitz into a catalogue of border incidents, three of them described as quite serious, as the justification for the invasion already underway. The significance was assigned before most Germans had finished breakfast. It is worth noting how little effort went into making the story durable. Hitler had told his generals on 22 August that he would provide a propagandistic casus belli and that the victor would not be asked whether he told the truth. The meaning only needed to hold for a news cycle, because the meaning was not the cause of anything. It was the garment.

What the residue was saying: everything, to anyone positioned to read it. The invasion it justified, Fall Weiss, had been planned for months and was scheduled before the transmitter was seized; armies of that size do not assemble overnight in response to a radio broadcast. On the accused side, the substrate was silent in the way that is itself informative. Poland in August 1939 had no mobilisation posture, no strategic interest, and no operational logic consistent with raiding a German provincial radio station on the eve of a war it was desperate to avoid. The story supplied an intention; the substrate could not supply a capability or a reason. And the scene itself over-explained. A body was left behind, a Polish-sympathising Silesian farmer drugged unconscious by a man in a doctor’s coat, then shot, the operation’s cold term for such props preserved in the Naujocks affidavit. Genuine scenes tend to be underdetermined. This one came with its conclusion attached.

The confirmation took regime collapse, then a tribunal with subpoena power. A substrate channel, six years late.

Mainila: guns withdrawn out of range

Where the meaning was made: a diplomatic note and a front page. On the evening of 26 November 1939, Molotov handed the Finnish ambassador a note stating that Finnish artillery had killed four Soviet soldiers near the border village of Mainila, and Pravda carried the casualties the next day. The note came with a demand attached, the withdrawal of Finnish forces from the border, and the demand came with a deadline. Within four days the Soviet Union had renounced the non-aggression pact and launched the Winter War. The venue of meaning-making was diplomatic and journalistic, and it was airtight in the way a closed system is airtight: Finland proposed a neutral joint investigation, and the Soviet Union refused it and broke relations instead. Refusing the investigation was, in retrospect, the loudest sentence in the whole exchange.

What the residue was saying: the case is almost embarrassingly clean, which is why it repays study. On the accused side, the commander of the Finnish artillery confirmed that no battery could reach across the border, Mannerheim having ordered the guns held well back, and the border guards who watched the shells fall saw a Soviet party come up to inspect the damage and promptly leave. On the beneficiary side, the preparations predated the trigger by an implausible margin: Soviet war games in 1938 and 1939 had rehearsed a war sparked by border incidents at Mainila specifically, invasion plans were complete by late November, and a later Russian historian working through declassified unit records found no personnel losses reported in the area during the period in question. The dead soldiers of the diplomatic note did not exist in the substrate. The scriptedness even extended to the choreography of restraint: the note stressed that Soviet troops, under strict orders, had not returned fire. It is a detail a study of the incident’s propaganda framing treats as systematic: innocence established in advance of an invasion.

The confirmation came from archives and memoirs: Khrushchev’s recollections, crediting the incident to a marshal of artillery; Zhdanov’s private papers; and eventually a Russian president conceding in 1994 that the Winter War had been Stalin’s aggression. Substrate channels again, half a century late.

Cairo: the device that told on its owner

Where the meaning was supposed to be made: nowhere, which was the design. Operation Susannah, the 1954 Israeli military intelligence operation that became the Lavon Affair, planted devices across Cairo and Alexandria, in British-, American-, and Egyptian-associated civilian sites, timed to detonate after closing. The attacks were meant to be attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood, communists, or unspecified local nationalists, with the aim of persuading London that Egypt was too unstable to leave. The meaning-making venue here was the rumour mill and the foreign desk: no broadcast, no note, just a pattern of incidents inviting the obvious wrong inference. It is perhaps the quietest variant of the form, and in some ways the purest, because the intended significance was to be assigned by the victims’ own analysts.

What the residue did instead: it misbehaved. One of the devices ignited prematurely in an operative’s pocket on the way to a cinema, the operative was arrested, and the network unravelled from the scene outward. This is the operational-failure channel in its most literal form, the substrate refusing to keep to the script at the level of chemistry. What followed inside Israel is a study in the afterlife of a failed fabrication: a decade of inquiries and counter-inquiries over who had authorised the operation, a defence minister forced out, a document later found to be doctored, and fifty-one years of official denial ending only in 2005, when the surviving operatives were publicly honoured. The naming of the affair itself is instructive: it carries the name of the minister blamed, not the country bombed, because the meaning-fight the institution cared about was internal.

Northwoods: the pretext as a design document

One case in the record involves no event at all, and it may be the most clarifying of the set. In March 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff signed and forwarded to the Secretary of Defense a memorandum proposing pretexts that could be manufactured to justify an invasion of Cuba, including a staged shootdown of a civilian airliner and a fabricated attack on the Guantanamo base. Kennedy rejected it; nothing in the document was executed; the papers surfaced in the 1990s through the JFK Assassination Records Review Board and were published in full by the National Security Archive.

Where the meaning was to be made: that is what the document specifies, and the specification is the value of the case. Northwoods is a false flag with the event removed and only the meaning-making machinery left visible: casualty lists to be published, funerals to be staged, a wave of national indignation to be produced on schedule. Reading it is like reading the stage directions without the play. The document demonstrates, from the inside, that the naming of an event and the event itself are separable engineering problems, and that a planning staff can work on the first without reference to the second. It also demonstrates the ordering the confirmed cases keep repeating: the desired end state, invasion, came first, and the incident was to be reverse-engineered from it. A pretext is a dependency of a plan, not a cause of one.

Celle: evidence that over-explains

Where the meaning was made: the manhunt apparatus and the evening news. On 25 July 1978 an explosion opened a hole about forty centimetres across in the outer wall of Celle prison in Lower Saxony, and the event was immediately legible as a Red Army Faction attempt to free the prisoner Sigurd Debus. The legibility had been manufactured with some care: a stolen Mercedes found nearby containing forged passports, one bearing Debus’s photograph, plus ammunition; escape tools planted in Debus’s own cell to be discovered in the search; a suspect from the criminal milieu presented to the media. The meaning held for eight years and did real work in the world. Debus’s conditions of detention were tightened, the high-security wing was upgraded, and Debus himself, denied relief with the supposed escape attempt cited against him, joined a hunger strike in 1981 that killed him.

What the residue was saying: the scene suffered from the professional deformation of planted evidence, which is completeness. A genuine escape attempt tends to leave gaps and improvisation; this one left a car conveniently intercepted with documents conveniently identifying the desired beneficiary, forged on blanks whose serial numbers traced to German authorities, next to a hole too small for anyone to have escaped through. And the attack that was supposed to inaugurate a series never acquired a sequel. The story was revealed in 1986 not by any of this being read at the time, but by a journalist at the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung receiving leaks showing that the state’s own domestic intelligence service and GSG 9 had staged the bombing, nominally to build cover for informants. A parliamentary committee followed. The German press coined a durable phrase for the affair’s monument, the preserved chunk of wall with its hole, and the case settled into its role as the Federal Republic’s standing reminder that false flag is not always paranoia in German political argument.

Peteano: the forensic report as part of the crime scene

Where the meaning was made: an anonymous phone call and a laboratory. On 31 May 1972 a car bomb at Peteano killed three Carabinieri who had been lured to the vehicle; two days later an anonymous call implicated the Red Brigades, and the police response rounded up some two hundred people on the left. The forensic layer was then bent to match the naming: the explosives expert consulted by the investigation, himself a member of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo, certified the explosive as consistent with Red Brigades usage. This is the case where the meaning-making room and the evidence room turn out to be the same room, which is worth sitting with. Substrate reading assumes the residue is at least neutral. Peteano shows the residue can be captured, for a while, by whoever controls the chain of custody.

What the residue was saying underneath: the explosive was in fact C4, and an arms cache containing identical C4 had been stumbled on near Trieste earlier the same year, one of what proved to be more than a hundred buried NATO stay-behind caches. When the magistrate Felice Casson reopened the dormant case in 1984, the chemistry was the thread: the fraudulent expertise, the matching cache, and eventually the confession of Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the Ordine Nuovo member who had planted the bomb and who testified that after the attack an entire mechanism of state protection had come into action to cover him. His trial statements described the purpose with unusual candour, a campaign to attack civilians so the public would turn to the state for protection. What such a campaign buys is a flow, not a stock: the turning-to-the-state drains unless renewed, which is why strategies of tension run to series, and why the series needs hands. That testimony, plus Casson’s later access to the military intelligence archives in 1990, forced the prime minister’s public acknowledgement of the Gladio network. The confirmation took twelve years of judicial attrition and one perpetrator who decided that being abandoned by his protectors dissolved his obligations to them. Perpetrator testimony and archives: the same two channels, again.

Ryazan: the case where the channels never ran

The set so far might suggest the substrate always testifies eventually. Ryazan is the standing counter-example, and its structure explains why it remains contested rather than confirmed. On the night of 22 September 1999, during the wave of apartment bombings that killed some three hundred people across Russia, residents of a building in Ryazan reported men unloading sacks into the basement from a car with doctored plates. The local bomb squad found sacks wired to a detonator and timer, with a field test indicating the military explosive hexogen, the substance used in the other bombings. The building was evacuated. The three suspects were traced, partly through an intercepted call to FSB headquarters in Moscow, and arrested by local police. They were FSB officers.

Where the meaning was made: a press centre, twice, in opposite directions. For roughly two days the event was officially an attempted terrorist attack; a criminal case was opened, sketches were broadcast, Putin praised the vigilance of Ryazan’s residents and ordered the bombing of Grozny that opened the second Chechen war. Then the FSB director announced that the whole affair had been a training exercise and the sacks had contained sugar, and the arrested officers were released. The significance of the event was reassigned in a single televised sentence, after the war it had helped justify was already in motion.

What the residue was saying, and what happened to it: the local police who ran the field test stood by their reading; the interior minister who had publicly praised the thwarting of a terrorist act had evidently not been told of any exercise; a Novaya Gazeta investigation found a soldier who had sampled sacks labelled sugar at a military depot near Ryazan, the contents of which turned out to be hexogen. And then the channels that confirmed every other case were closed, deliberately and durably: the sacks, the detonator, the exercise records, and the identities of the officers were sealed as state secrets, and successive Duma motions to investigate were voted down. The journalists and legislators who kept pulling at the case had a notable actuarial profile in the years that followed. An honest conclusion is not that the case is proven, but that the impounding is itself part of the record. Access behaviour is evidence, and even on the official account, secrecy of that degree is an unusual institutional choice.

What the residue keeps saying

Walking the cases in a row, the patterns are few and consistent, which is some comfort, since a method with forty indicators is a method for confirming whatever one already believed.

The first is the speed differential. Meaning arrives in hours; residue accumulates on the timescale of investigations, archives, and careers. The asymmetry is not incidental: a narrative is socially produced and can be assembled at the speed of a press conference, while residue is physically and institutionally produced and accumulates at the speed of the world. In each of these cases the naming was essentially instantaneous, and the significance was assigned with a completeness real investigations rarely manage on day one. Attribution that arrives fully formed, with the culprit, the motive, and the required response all in the same breath, looks more like a script than a finding. Real events tend to spend their first days being confusing.

The second is the mismatch on the accused side. A genuine attack usually has enabling conditions: capability, access, logistics, an escalation trajectory, some material history preceding the bang. The fabricated culprit is chosen for legibility rather than capability, the way labels in the Sahel travel because they are fundable and announceable, and legibility leaves no residue. A frame’s fit is supplied, not found, and fit alone is close to no evidence; a false flag is supplied fit, industrialised, a culprit arriving pre-shaped to a frame the audience already holds. Poland had no posture for Gleiwitz; the Finnish guns were out of range; the RAF prisoners knew nothing of the plan to free them; the Red Brigades had no C4.

The third is the beneficiary’s lead times. Wars and crackdowns run on logistics measured in weeks and months, and the material preparations cannot wait for the pretext, because they are what the pretext exists to launch. Fall Weiss was scheduled before Gleiwitz; the Winter War was planned and even war-gamed at Mainila before Mainila; Grozny was bombed before the Ryazan story had settled on a version. The incident is the garment; the mobilisation is the body it was cut for, and bodies of that size are increasingly hard to hide.

The fourth is over-complete evidence. Planted scenes tend to over-explain, because the planter’s incentive runs opposite to reality’s: the passport that identifies the desired culprit, the escape kit in the right cell, the forensic certificate that names the right group. Genuine scenes can stay underdetermined for a long while.

The fifth is access behaviour. Finland proposed a neutral investigation and the Soviet Union refused; Ryazan’s residue was sequestered; by contrast, failed fabrications like Cairo and Celle came apart where the perpetrator lost control of access, to a scene, to a leak, to a suspect in custody. Delay, refusal, and sealing are what a scene-editor would do, and while they are not proof, they are never nothing.

The last is insider surface. Operations of this kind require hands, and hands remember. Naujocks, Vinciguerra, the drivers and V-Männer and warehouse guards who appear throughout these cases: the leak rate of a conspiracy appears to scale with its headcount and its age, which is presumably why the durable uncertainty attaches to the operation with the smallest and best-disciplined surface. It is also, one suspects, why the form has been evolving towards variants that need fewer hands.

The sensor-saturated present

The environment these patterns now operate in has changed in ways that cut both directions, and it seems worth being precise about which direction each change cuts.

For the reader of residue, the world has become involuntarily instrumented. MH17 was not a false flag, and it appears here for a different reason: it may be the clearest demonstration that residue can now be reconstructed independently of any official narrative. A Buk launcher’s journey from a base in Kursk into eastern Ukraine and back was reconstructed from dashcam clips, roadside photographs, and soldiers’ social media posts, first by volunteers at Bellingcat and then, independently and to a criminal standard, by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team, down to the identifying dents on one vehicle. Commercial satellite imagery, radar-based sensing that ignores cloud and darkness, ship and aircraft transponders, and the reflex of bystanders to upload everything have together made the beneficiary’s lead times, the third pattern, close to unhideable at scale. A related development is that evidence now ages against the fabricator. A staged scene is a snapshot answering the forensic questions of its own day; the questions keep improving, and the scene cannot be updated. The fabricator has to anticipate every test that will ever be applied, including tests that do not yet exist, which is a losing position held indefinitely.

The same asymmetry has reproduced itself in the domain where the form seems to be migrating. Cyber operations were supposed to solve the attribution problem for the perpetrator, and planted artefacts are cheap there: the malware that disrupted the 2018 Winter Olympics carried a forged build fingerprint matching North Korea’s Lazarus group so exactly that several firms initially attributed it to Pyongyang, alongside other clues pointing at China and Russia simultaneously. What undid it was residue: the forged fingerprint failed a deep consistency check against the code it claimed to describe, infrastructure overlapped with known Russian operations, and the operation eventually appeared, with named officers, in a US indictment of the GRU’s Unit 74455. The Guccifer 2.0 persona, a manufactured Romanian hacktivist wrapped around the GRU’s 2016 DNC operation, was undone by a single operational slip, one login without the VPN, leaving a Moscow address that resolved to GRU headquarters. The general principle seems to be that fabricated evidence is internally consistent but externally shallow. It matches the story; it does not match the world at the depth the world can now be queried.

Synthetic media was supposed to be the next solvent, and so far the record is more modest than the anxiety. The deepfake of Zelensky ordering surrender, pushed through a hacked news site three weeks into the invasion, was debunked within hours, partly because the Ukrainian government had warned two weeks earlier that exactly this fake was coming. The deeper cost of the technology appears to be the one researchers call the liar’s dividend: the existence of convincing fakes licences the denial of real evidence, and studies of the war’s first months found people dismissing authentic footage as deepfaked. The fabricator’s best product may turn out to be not the fake event but the general fog in which no event can be pinned to anyone.

The Zelensky case also points at a genuinely new defensive move, which is prebuttal. Through late 2021 and early 2022 the US and UK repeatedly declassified claims that Russia was preparing staged provocations, including, three weeks before the invasion, a fabricated atrocity video complete with corpses and actors, publicised, in the State Department’s words, to dissuade Moscow and to lay the groundwork bare in advance. The tactic spends intelligence to close the window a false flag depends on, that brief interval of unchallenged narrative. Whether any specific claim was accurate is beside the structural point, and the structural point cuts both ways: a government that has learned it can pre-attribute has also learned it can pre-accuse, and the accusation of a false flag is itself now a standard disinformation move, deployed reflexively after real atrocities. The vocabulary has been democratised faster than the discipline.

That is an honest limit of the whole method. Confirmed false flags are rare; accusations are constant; and substrate mismatch also occurs in genuine events, since proxies, lone actors, and deniable irregulars all produce real attacks with thin material trails, and a real adversary can time a real attack to coincide with an opponent’s pre-existing mobilisation. These patterns are indicators, not verdicts, and a defensible posture is asymmetric: the hypothesis earns consideration only from specific anomalies, never from mere benefit or mere distrust of the accused. Most of the people who called Gleiwitz correctly in September 1939 would have called a dozen real events false by the same reasoning. Being calibrated is harder than being suspicious, and considerably less popular.

The strait, again

Which brings the method home to the case that closed the substrate essay. That essay argued that the American strikes on Iran were narrated through a rotating set of announceable reasons, obliteration, resolve, a nuclear programme by turns destroyed and in need of destroying, while the substrate that had the shape of a motive, the strait carrying roughly a quarter of global oil trade and a rival’s supply downstream of it, stayed unnamed because it could not be said from a podium. That was written when the pattern was a reading. Five months of war have made it a description. The war that began in February has, by this week, collapsed onto its substrate: the fighting is now literally about tanker transit through Hormuz, the negotiations that stall and resume are negotiations about maritime traffic through the strait, and an oil-sales waiver is switched off as an instrument of escalation in the same news cycle as the airstrikes. The unnameable motive became the battlefield. The narrative layer eventually ran out of costumes, and the substrate was standing there underneath, exactly where it had been.

Epilogue: an eye on the strait

Events have not waited for the ink to dry. The latest exchange began with attacks on three commercial tankers in the strait, which Washington attributes to Iran and which Iran has not claimed, its state television saying only that a vessel ignored warnings. The configuration has a precedent: in June 2019, tankers in the same waters were damaged in an incident where the US presented video of a limpet mine being removed while the Japanese owner of one vessel insisted his crew had seen a flying object strike above the waterline, and the attribution never fully settled in public. Nothing here asserts fabrication, in either year; deniable attacks by a capable party are the likelier reading, and deniability and fabrication are neighbours on the same spectrum rather than the same point.

But an incident in a chokepoint that licences one side’s strikes and demonstrates the other side’s throttle without formal ownership is an incident whose ambiguity serves everyone armed and no one reading. It is the class of event the two questions were built for, and both are currently unanswerable from open sources: where the meaning is being made is visible enough, a CENTCOM statement, a Revolutionary Guard communiqué, a presidential post from a NATO summit; what the residue says, hull metallurgy, blast direction, the lead times of the response measures on each side, has not yet been read by anyone independent, and may not be soon. The record suggests the residue will testify eventually, on its usual delay, to whoever is still paying attention. In the meantime the discipline is unglamorous: holding the naming and the residue apart, refusing to let the first stand in for the second, and keeping an eye on the strait, which has been saying the same thing in its own vocabulary all along.

Reading the envelope

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reading the Substrate argued that analysis of conflict tends to read a story first and the ground beneath it late, and that the ordering is often backwards in its emphasis: ideas set a conflict’s direction, conditions set its reach. That was a claim using looking backwards, about explaining wars that have already happened. A fair question is whether the same method survives being turned around to face forward. If conditions set reach, can a reading of conditions say anything useful about what comes next?

It can, though less than a forecaster might like, and the gap between what it can say and what it cannot is itself the interesting part.

Take Russia as a worked example, since it is the case most often read entirely through a single man. The temptation is a decision tree with Putin at the root and his next move at the leaves. That temptation is precisely the error Reading the substrate warned against. Putin is intention, and a reading organised around one figure’s psychology reintroduces the narrative layer as the whole story. The substrate here is not a personality. It is an envelope: a set of material conditions that determine what any Russian leadership can afford and sustain, inside which a disposition selects. The envelope does not name the move. It sets the price of the available moves, and the interesting analytical work is watching which ones are quietly getting dearer.

A reasonable question is why an envelope is worth watching at all, if it never names the move. A part of the answer is that an envelope changes more slowly than a decision does. Speeches, doctrines, elections, and personalities can turn over in weeks; hydrocarbon revenue, industrial capacity, logistics, and demographic structure tend to move over quarters and years. A slower object is often the more useful one to watch, not because it settles what a leadership decides, but because it steadily reshapes the menu a leadership decides from. That slowness cuts both ways, and it is worth admitting the cost up front rather than at the end: the same inertia that makes an envelope legible makes it a poor stopwatch. A constraint that tightens over years can be leaned against for years, which is why readings of this kind tend to be directionally right and chronologically early, and why the honest output is a direction of travel rather than a date.

Six gauges do most of that work.

Hydrocarbon revenue is the master gauge, because it funds both the war and the domestic arrangement that keeps a war politically survivable. A useful reading watches not the headline oil price but the discount on Russian crude and the running cost of the shadow fleet that moves it, since sanctions on Russian oil operate mainly by widening the gap between the world price and the price actually realised rather than by halting the flow. That gap is itself a moving quantity, which is why a spot figure ages badly: the Brent-Urals wedge sat near $12.50 a barrel in October 2025 and had roughly doubled by December as fresh sanctions bit, on the same Brookings tracking. When realised revenue per barrel compresses while volumes hold, an envelope tightens without any dramatic cutoff to mark the moment. This is a slow gauge, and it may be the one that most governs how long anything can be kept up.

Fiscal depth is the shock absorber. The liquid portion of the sovereign fund, a current-account surplus, a deficit being run: together these set how many bad quarters a system can absorb before it has to choose openly between guns, subsidies, and the currency. The reading that lands is in quarters of runway at current burn, not in an absolute reserve figure, because a large number tells an observer little without a burn rate beside it. Bruegel’s December 2025 assessment reaches the shape the gauge predicts rather than a headline: Russia can probably keep financing the war at least through 2026 by raising taxes, cutting non-war spending, borrowing more, and draining what remains of the fund, though every one of those adjustments has an obvious limit. Reserves impress until one divides by the monthly spend.

Component access is a harder ceiling, and a slower one to lift. A modern military can conjure manpower faster than it can conjure the microelectronics, optics, and machine tools that precision munitions and advanced platforms depend on. Sanctions leak, grey imports route through obliging third countries, and the constraint shows up not as a wall but as substitution downward: cruder munitions, cannibalised platforms, degraded accuracy. Chatham House’s 2025 study of the Russian defence industry describes exactly this, an overreliance on lower-quality Chinese components and a shift to what it calls retain-and-adapt: production that is no longer innovation-led but proceeds by bolting new solutions onto proven older systems. When a force grows materially blunter over time, that is this gauge speaking, and it does not answer quickly to willpower.

Manpower and its political price reads as psychology and is mostly material. The pool of men who can be sent without disturbing the urban, connected classes a leadership most fears is finite, drawn down by casualties and by emigration. The binding question is not how many bodies exist but how many can be taken from which regions before a domestic arrangement frays. Reporting on the 2026 draft strategy makes the geography of that constraint explicit: the Kremlin recruits heavily from poorer rural and ethnic-minority regions and shields Moscow and Petersburg, on the blunt logic that it is the capitals where revolutions may happen. Mobilisation that stays in the periphery costs one thing; mobilisation that reaches into the two big cities costs quite another, and a leadership tends to know the difference to the decimal.

Export leverage is the offensive substrate, the part of the envelope that can be pointed outward. Grain, fertiliser, energy routed to particular buyers: each dependency can in principle become pressure on a third party. The weaponisation of the Black Sea grain corridor is the worked example, Moscow allowing the corridor to function, choking it off, then trading its resumption as leverage, and spiking war-risk insurance across the region in the process. The forward-looking reading asks which of these can be weaponised, and at what cost to the relationships that keep discounted crude flowing east, since leverage spent in one direction tends to be paid for in another.

Logistics and access geography sets where force can physically be projected and held: the Black Sea, the Arctic, the land bridge, the choke points. It is the slowest gauge to move and, for that reason, perhaps the most genuinely predictive of the six, because a supply line cannot be wanted out of existence. The Black Sea shows the point: with Turkey holding the Bosporus and Dardanelles closed to warships under the Montreux Convention and Ukrainian drones having driven the fleet back, Novorossiysk is left as Russia’s only fully functional naval base in the theatre, a geographic fact no amount of resolve rewrites in a hurry.

None of these gauges, singly or together, names a move. Here is where a disposition enters, and it enters as a modifier on a material reading rather than as a root cause. An identical tightening of the envelope can produce opposite responses. One leadership reads the constraint, banks it, and freezes to consolidate. Another, reading time as an enemy, spends down a reserve in a gamble to force a decision before the envelope narrows further. Same substrate, opposite move, and the difference sits in risk tolerance and time-horizon, which are dispositional inputs and not material ones.

For present purposes, three aspects of disposition seem to do most of the work. Risk tolerance sets how near the edge of the envelope a leadership will operate. Time-horizon sets whether a tightening constraint reads as wait or as act now. And a survival logic sets which constraints actually bind, because a leadership will tolerate a great deal of economic pain before it tolerates the particular kind that threatens its hold. That last point is why the recurring prediction that sanctions will force a stop keeps disappointing its authors: it reads the economic gauge as binding when the binding gauge is political survival, and the two are not the same instrument. An economy can groan for years while the arrangement that rules it stays perfectly intact.

What a reading of this kind can honestly produce takes a particular shape. Something like: the envelope appears to be tightening on revenue and components, holding on logistics, and given a leadership that seems to treat time as an enemy and to carry a high pain threshold on the economic axis but a low one on the axis where mobilisation reaches the cities, the affordable-and-tolerable option set appears to be narrowing towards this and away from that. It is a contestable analytical claim, which is the most an honest reading offers. What it cannot produce is next spring he does the following, and a framework that refuses to produce it is not being coy. The refusal is the method holding its line. Conditions set reach, a disposition selects within it, and anyone offering the specific move at a confident price is reading the story again and calling it the ground.

Two limits are worth stating plainly rather than burying. Several of these gauges have live values that shift week to week, and a reading is only as current as its worst-dated number, so each figure carries the date it was true. And even fully populated, an exercise like this is a thinking aid assembled from open sources, not an instrument that forecasts. A forward-looking reading of this kind stays a guess; the claim is only that it is a better-informed one, with its base rate improved rather than its uncertainty escaped. That is not a small thing, since the alternative to a better-informed guess is rarely certainty and usually a worse-informed guess. What the exercise buys is a discipline: it forces an observer to name which gauge is thought to be binding, and to say why, which is worth more than a confident forecast and a good deal cheaper than either.

Backward and forward, as expected, turn out to be two halves of one method. “Reading the Substrate” says that to explain a war already fought, an observer can separate intent from reach. “Reading the Envelope” says that to think about a war not yet fought, an observer can separate choice from feasibility. They are siblings, not sequel and original, and the forward-looking half quietly answers the backward-looking half’s weakest point. A substrate reading can always be accused of hindsight, of finding the material layer only once the outcome is known. A constraint set is drawn without knowing the outcome, which is what makes the envelope the more honest instrument of the two: it commits before the fact.

Humbler than prediction and, perhaps for that reason, more durable. An observer can watch the envelope tighten and loosen, name the gauge that appears to bind, and hold the disposition as a live variable rather than a solved one. The envelope does not say what a leadership will choose. It says which choices are quietly becoming unaffordable, and that is a different kind of foresight: slower, less dramatic, and possibly more reliable than any attempt to name the next move. Strategy is often less a matter of predicting what will happen than of recognising what can no longer happen, and recognising it some time before everyone else does.

Reading the substrate

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season that arrived late or not at all, a grazing corridor quietly ploughed under for cropland, a herd pushed a hundred kilometres further south than the route it followed a decade ago, into country that was never its own. The label arrives first. The condition that produced it, if it arrives at all, arrives as background colour. Between the two sits a gap, and what falls into it.

The claim that lives in that gap is not that war is really about resources, or that ideology is a story we tell over the top of material facts. To say so would be its own kind of error, an overcorrection, and the Sahel, as we will see, is where it gets made most often. The claim is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: analysis of conflict tends to privilege intention over the conditions that enable it. It reads the narrative the combatants tell, the belief and the strategy and the grievance, and treats the physical and institutional substrate beneath that narrative as scenery. The word is borrowed from biology and horticulture, where a substrate is the medium a thing grows in: not why it grows, which is the surface story, but the ground that decides whether it takes and how far it spreads. The ordering this produces is consistent. Analysis begins with intention and treats the substrate as context. I think the emphasis is often backwards: ideas tend to set the direction of a conflict, but conditions tend to determine its reach, and a reading that attends only to the first is liable to misjudge the second. Ideology is real. Leadership is real. A state that chooses to kill is not reducible to its rainfall, and a leader who chooses to bomb is not reducible to anything but the choice. None of what follows dissolves the political into the material. It reorders which layer gets read first. Often the substrate is what is actually moving.

The pattern has an instructive limit, and the story ends there. Four of the cases below show a material layer that is present and consequential and routinely under-read: the Sahel, the Indus basin, the war in Ukraine, the Rwandan genocide. The fifth, the American strikes on Iran, pushes the pattern to a limit the others do not reach: a substrate present and central and unusually live, yet never the thing the force is narrated through, so the stated reason could change from one month to the next without the force pausing. The first four show what gets missed when we read only the story. The last shows what happens when the substrate is not missed at all but left unsaid, so the story stays free to change because it was never the thing doing the work.

The Sahel: a story that arrives pre-labelled

The semi-arid belt south of the Sahara has become, in the language of security analysis, the epicentre of global terrorism. That description is not wrong about the body count. It is wrong about the order of operations.

The underlying pressure is physical and slow. Warming and erratic rains have reduced grazing availability, and a 2025 synthesis on pastoral livelihoods in the Sahel describes the consequence plainly: herders are driven into longer migrations across unfamiliar territory in pursuit of diminishing pasture and water, reshaping transhumance routes that had been stable for generations. Push a herd south into cropland it never used, in a year when the farmers’ own margins are thin, and a dispute over a trampled field follows. As New Internationalist’s reporting on the Nigerian middle belt puts the mechanism: as farmland pushes deeper into what were once seasonal grazing corridors, herders crowd settled communities whose crops a single herd can destroy in minutes, farmers form vigilante groups, herders arm in response, and a single incident of crop damage or cattle theft escalates into reprisal. Add weak land governance, unclear boundaries, the steady availability of small arms, and the dispute becomes a killing. None of this requires anyone to believe anything in particular. It requires a seedling, a cow, and no functioning mechanism to adjudicate between the two. In Nigeria, clashes between herders and farming communities have killed hundreds and forced some 2.2 million people from their homes since 2019.

Then the killing gets a name. In late 2025, an American president folded this violence into a narrative of Christian persecution, naming Nigeria a country of particular concern and telling the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action over the “mass slaughter” of Christians. The framing did not survive contact with the analysts. Some attacks do target Christians, but as conflict researchers and the monitoring data told CNN, across the north most victims of the overall violence are Muslims, and a senior International Crisis Group adviser called reports of a systematic anti-Christian campaign seriously misread and exaggerated. The independent monitor ACLED, briefing PBS, recorded a sharp rise in Fulani-herder attacks but found the vast majority of incidents were over land disputes, not religious targeting. The label is not arbitrary; armed groups do move into these spaces and exploit the grievances, and real Christian communities have been massacred. But the label travels because it is legible to the institutions receiving it. A counter-terrorism mission, or a designation of religious persecution, is fundable and announceable. A pasture-corridor arbitration is neither.

Here is where the honest version has to turn on itself, because the Sahel is also where the material story becomes its own lazy shorthand. As security journalism and a good deal of the policy literature converged on farmer-herder competition as the engine of the violence, fieldwork by the International Institute for Environment and Development found that the simplification was supported by neither the recent history nor the surveys of actual armed violence, in its work on mitigating farmer-herder conflict. The resource story, repeated often enough, becomes as much a substitute for looking as the jihadist one. So the Sahel teaches the harder lesson, the one a single-cause lens would miss: this conflict can be read wrong in both directions. Reaching for ideology misses the cow and the corridor; reaching for climate misses that, as a recent survey of sub-Saharan peacebuilding put it, climate stress alone does not kill, and that violence escalates only when it meets weak institutions, poor land governance, corruption, ethnic stereotyping, and political manipulation. The discipline the case demands is not “prefer the material” but “read the substrate, material and institutional both, before reaching for any story at all.”

So the Sahel is the transparent case in a double sense. The conditions are unusually easy to see, and so is the speed with which they get overwritten, in either direction, by whoever is naming the dead.

The Indus: a material story almost nobody reads

If the Sahel shows a substrate being mislabelled, the Indus basin shows one being missed entirely, hidden inside a rivalry so famous that no one thinks to look beneath it.

On 19 September 1960, after nine years of negotiation brokered by the World Bank, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in Karachi. It divided six rivers, granting India the three eastern rivers and Pakistan, the downstream party, the three western ones, an allocation that Foreign Policy notes has prevented a water war between the two for over sixty years even as they fought three others. It is one of the most durable instruments in the history of interstate cooperation. It is also, in a sense its drafters could not have intended, an artifact of a vanished climate.

The treaty was built on an assumption that was rarely questioned at the time: that the Himalayan glaciers feeding the system were a fixed quantity, a stable tap. As one recent analysis describes it, there was then a lack of comprehensive studies on glacier mass balance, the glaciers were assumed to be relatively stable, and future changes from glacial melt were never built into the treaty’s design, nor was groundwater depletion. That assumption is now failing in real time. Chatham House records perennial snow and ice cover in the Indus declining by up to a quarter in the two decades to 2021, among the highest rates of glacial retreat anywhere, while shifts in the timing and intensity of the summer monsoon reshape the rest of the supply. Meanwhile the populations of the two states have gone from 46 million and 436 million in 1960 to over 240 million and 1.4 billion, with more than 300 million now relying directly on the basin for their survival. The instrument that has kept the peace was, as another assessment puts it, negotiated before the emergence of modern climate science, and no longer accounts for these transformations.

In 2025 India suspended the treaty, citing cross-border terrorism, and the two states moved closer to open conflict than they had in years. The suspension was read, reasonably, through the lens it was offered in: Kashmir, militancy, the long quarrel. That reading is true. It is also the narrative layer sitting on top of a physical one that almost no commentary touched. The thing the treaty was built to manage is changing faster than the treaty can, and the analysts who track it have begun saying so directly: the suspension reflects a regional trend in which South Asian states increasingly treat water as a strategic asset rather than a shared resource, amid rising mistrust, climate stress, and geopolitical competition. Pakistan’s exposure is near-total; as one Indian water scientist observed, roughly 70 percent of the country’s GDP depends on the Indus, from Basmati rice to textiles.

Nobody is brawling over the hydrology directly. They are brawling over sovereignty and security and the disputed valley, in the vocabulary that gets a state’s attention. But the substrate is moving under all of it, and a frame trained to read only the strategic vocabulary is liable to keep being surprised by a crisis whose schedule is set, in part, by glaciers.

Ukraine: the material story inside the famous one

Ukraine is the case most likely to draw objection, and the objection has force. The war is, manifestly, a war of ideas: sovereignty, empire, the question of whether Ukraine is a nation or a province, a Russian narrative of historical reunification against a Ukrainian one of national survival. To start talking about wheat can sound like a change of subject, or worse, like ventriloquising the aggressor’s own economic pretexts. So let me be exact about the role the substrate plays here. It does not explain why Russia invaded. It explains a great deal about how the war has been fought, what has been targeted, and who, far from the front, has gone hungry because of it.

Begin with what Ukraine is, materially. In peacetime, its agricultural sector accounts for around a fifth of the economy and nearly half of exports, and over 90 percent of that grain leaves the country south through Black Sea ports such as Odesa and Mykolaiv. The national flag, blue over gold, is sky over a field of wheat, and the symbolism is not idle: this is a country whose grain feeds a meaningful slice of the world. More than half of Ukraine’s food exports go to lower-income countries, predominantly in Africa and the Middle East, and the World Food Programme has estimated Ukrainian farmland could feed some 400 million people.

Now watch what the war did to that. Within days of the February 2022 invasion, Russian naval vessels surrounded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and laid mines, Ukraine mined its own shallows in defence, and the count of outgoing commercial ships fell from more than 150 a day to nearly zero. Over 20 million tonnes of grain sat trapped in Ukraine’s ports, global food prices spiked, and the spectre of famine appeared in the countries most dependent on Black Sea wheat. The blockade was not incidental to the war. It was an instrument of it, an attempt to crush a critical economic sector and a source of national pride at once, and the response became a theatre of the war in its own right: the UN- and Turkey-brokered grain corridor, which moved nearly 33 million tonnes of food over its year of operation before Russia withdrew from it in July 2023, and the improvised Ukrainian humanitarian corridor that followed.

The grain war has not stopped. In December 2025, Russian strikes on Odesa-region ports forced the shutdown of grain terminals and left the largest of them operating at a fraction of capacity, and Ukraine’s seasonal wheat exports fell year on year as a result. Analysts now read peace prospects and grain logistics as a single variable: any meaningful de-escalation, one shipping assessment noted at the end of 2025, would extend well beyond energy markets and materially reshape Ukraine’s grain export landscape.

The point is not that the war is “about” wheat instead of sovereignty. It is that a reader supplied only with the clash-of-empires narrative is liable to under-register the war’s material reach: that its weapons include a blockade, that its casualties include Egyptian and Sudanese households priced out of bread, that the timing of any peace will be legible in export tonnages as much as in communiqués. The substrate does not explain the war’s intent. It explains its reach, and its reach is the part of the war that touches people who have never heard the speeches.

Rwanda: a country with no room in it

I have saved the case that, by rights, ought to break the argument. If the material reading is going to fail anywhere, it is in Rwanda, where the ideological and political character of the violence is least in doubt. A genocide is not a resource dispute. To reach for the substrate here can sound like an evasion, a way of changing the subject from an act of will to a map of constraints.

So let me state the order plainly before defending it. The Rwandan genocide was not caused by land pressure or population density. It was caused by a state that chose extermination and a propaganda apparatus that prepared the ground, and it was triggered by the shooting down of the president’s plane in April 1994. The decision was political; the permission was ideological. What the material conditions explain is not the decision to kill but the ease with which the killing spread, and the narrowness of the space ordinary people had to refuse it.

Scott Straus, who interviewed convicted perpetrators at length for The Order of Genocide (2006), does not contest that the genocide was organised, state-directed, and ethnically framed. What his fieldwork undercuts is the popular mechanism: that ordinary Hutu killed because they had been brainwashed into ancient hatred. In his account, ethnicity functioned more as a background condition than as the proximate driver. The proximate drivers were fear and intra-ethnic intimidation inside a collapsing state during a civil war the Rwandan Patriotic Front was winning. Local authorities gave orders; refusal was punished as treason. People killed because the alternative, in that moment, in that place, was often to be killed.

But fear operates differently where people can run, and in Rwanda they could not. This is the hinge of the case: the substrate here is not land, it is constraint. Everything material about Rwanda in 1994 narrowed the space in which a person could refuse. It is among the most densely populated countries in Africa, with no remote interior to flee into, so the exits were closed for victims and reluctant perpetrators alike. Its state was unusually effective, reaching down to the smallest administrative cell, so an order from the centre arrived everywhere within hours and a refusal was visible to the neighbours who would report it. Its land was scarce, so the demographic pressure that had made neighbours into competitors was already there to be turned to account. These are not four separate causes. They are one condition seen from four sides: a country with almost no room in it. None of that produced the intent to kill. All of it determined that once the intent existed, it could be executed almost everywhere, almost at once, with almost nowhere to hide and almost no margin to opt out.

The clearest test of this ordering sits in the long argument over the hate radio, RTLM, the “radio machete” of the conventional account. Here, if anywhere, is ideology as direct cause. And here the scholarship splits down the middle. Straus, weighing exposure, timing, and content, argued that the radio was a conditional amplifier whose effects registered only inside an existing context of violence, noting that fewer than 10 percent of Rwandans owned a radio in 1994 and that the signal barely reached much of the rural country where the worst killing happened. Against him, the economist David Yanagizawa-Drott used village-level prosecution data and a propagation model built around Rwanda’s hilly terrain to attribute roughly a tenth of the violence to the station. They reach opposite headlines. But the point is not who wins; it is that both argue through the same physical facts, who could receive the signal, across what topography, at what literacy. Even the maximalist case for ideology-as-cause turns out to have its volume set by the terrain, and newer work has since pushed back toward the lower estimate. The most ideology-coded debate in the literature is, underneath, a debate about reception and hills.

Mahmood Mamdani, in When Victims Become Killers (2001), extends the frame backward and shows that the constraint itself was made, not given. The categories the genocide ran along, Hutu and Tutsi as rigid and racial rather than fluid and social, were hardened by Belgian colonial administration, then inverted but not dissolved by the 1959 revolution. The demographic pressure, the regional instability spilling from Burundi, the land tenure under strain: residue of colonial cartography and post-colonial failure, not facts of nature. The substrate has a history, and the history has authors.

So Rwanda does not break the argument. It does something more useful: it shows the argument holding at the limit. The ideological frame explains why the state wanted the Tutsi dead. The material frame explains why the wanting became a nationwide slaughter in a hundred days rather than a contained atrocity, and why so few could stand outside it. A reader who attends only to the first will understand the intent and misjudge, almost invariably, the scale and speed and inescapability that are the substrate’s contribution. That misjudgement is not academic. It is the difference between seeing a genocide build and dismissing the warning as overheated.

Iran: the substrate that cannot be named

The four cases so far share a shape: a substrate, physical or institutional, that is present and consequential and goes under-read because the eye is on the story. Iran does not break that shape. It pushes it to a limit the other four do not reach. The substrate is present, and central, and unusually live, yet it is the one thing the decision is never narrated through, because naming it would cost more than the shifting cover stories do. If the other cases show analysis reading the narrative layer first and the substrate late, Iran shows what happens when a substrate is read well enough and left out of the account on purpose: the stated reason for force floats so free of any stable fact that it can be revised at will, and the revision changes nothing about the bombing. This is not a different subject. It is the explanatory hierarchy of the first four cases with its lower rung deliberately hidden rather than merely missed.

The sequence is on the record. On 21 June 2025, the United States struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, in Operation Midnight Hammer, joining an Israeli campaign that had begun on 13 June; the President announced that Iran’s key enrichment facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated”. Within days, an early classified U.S. intelligence assessment found the strikes had not destroyed the core of the programme and had likely set it back only by months, a finding the administration disputed while continuing to repeat “ obliterated.“ By early 2026, the administration was preparing to strike Iran again, on the stated grounds that the programme needed destroying, the same programme it had described as obliterated, and a White House document by then said only that the earlier strikes had “significantly degraded” it.

What is striking is not the inconsistency itself but how little it cost. As CNN observed, the administration rarely took care to provide consistent rationales for using force; the stated reason for striking Iran again shifted from the nuclear programme, to Tehran killing protesters, and back to the nuclear programme, while the prospect of force held constant throughout. The same pattern, the same outlet noted, had governed the operation to oust Venezuela’s leader, justified by turns as being about drugs, about law enforcement, and about oil. The narrative was not a reason for the action; it was a garment the action put on and took off as convenient.

There is a real substrate here, and the people fighting over the airwaves were not naming it. Roughly 27 percent of global oil trade and 22 percent of global natural gas trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran sits astride and has shown it can throttle. Iran is also a major supplier of oil to China, which makes pressure on Tehran, read one way, pressure on a rival’s intake, the denial logic that a bottleneck reading of the same period traces through the Gulf and the defence documents that name the passages to be held. And in the months before the strikes, the IAEA had reported Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium rising sharply, the genuine non-proliferation fact at the centre of the crisis. These are material facts with consequences, and at least one of them, the strait and the rival downstream of it, has the shape of a motive. What it does not have is the shape of a motive that can be said aloud. “Deny a rival its oil” is not announceable in the way “obliterate a nuclear programme” is. So the decision was narrated through obliteration and resolve and “peace through strength,” and when those failed to cooperate, the narration moved on, while the substrate that could not be spoken stayed exactly where it was.

Iran is a limit case in the strict sense, but the limit is not an absent substrate. It is a substrate too useful to admit. The other four show a substrate the frame cannot see. Iran shows one the frame can see perfectly well and will not name, so it names everything else instead, and keeps the freedom to change the name next month. If the first four cases are an argument that we read the wrong layer, Iran is what it looks like when the right layer is read and then left out of the story on purpose.

The expertise that never reaches the room

It seems to be an explanatory hierarchy: a habit of ranking intention above the conditions that enable it, of asking what a combatant wants before asking what is breaking down around them. Once the habit is named, the obvious question follows. If the substrate is so often the thing that is moving, why is it so reliably the thing that is read last?

The unglamorous answer is not that the expertise is missing. Governments employ environmental-security units, climate-intelligence cells, food-security analysts, agronomists, and hydrologists; the knowledge exists. The trouble is where it sits. The people who frame a conflict, who staff the senior desks and write the briefs that ministers read and design the missions, are trained overwhelmingly in political science, international relations, security and area studies: in reading intention, ideology, alliance, and strategy, the narrative layer. The substrate specialists are real but adjacent, consulted downstream of a framing already set, rarely in the room at the moment a situation is given its name. This is not a conspiracy and not stupidity. It is a question of which expertise has standing where the interpretation is decided, and the answer tends to be the expertise of intention.

The institutional machinery then compounds the bias. The funding categories that exist, counter-terrorism, stabilisation, governance, are categories of intention and ideology. There is no comparably fundable line for “rewrite a water treaty around glacial retreat,” or “arbitrate transhumance corridors before the next dry season,” or “war-game the grain corridor before the ports are mined.” The reporting formats reward a legible threat narrative over a slow-variable diagnosis, because a threat narrative justifies a deployment and a diagnosis justifies, at best, a study. So the substrate is not merely unseen. It is structurally unfundable, which is a more durable kind of invisible. And the Iran case shows a further turn: sometimes the substrate is read well enough and left out of the account anyway, because it is the kind of motive an apparatus cannot announce. The narrative is then free to be inconsistent, not because nothing is checking it against a substrate, but because the substrate that would check it is the one thing no one at the podium can say.

The correction is not exotic and not a matter of caring more. It is a matter of who is in the room and what question gets asked first. The default first question of conflict analysis is some version of what do they believe, and who is mobilising them. It is a good question. It is not the only first question. Alongside it belongs a second, asked with equal seriousness and equal budget: what is physically breaking down here, and on what timescale. The hydrologist travels with the diplomat. The soil scientist is paid what the threat analyst is paid. The export tonnages are read alongside the communiqués. The suggestion sounds slightly absurd, and the absurdity is the diagnosis: it sounds absurd only because the present arrangement, in which the people who can read the substrate are almost never consulted until it has already failed, has been normal for so long that it stopped looking like a choice.

The habit is not wrong so much as wrongly ordered, and the reordering is modest. Direction and reach are different questions; so are intention and condition; and the apparatus is fluent in the first of each pair and halting in the second. The story is worth reading. So is the substrate it runs on, a glacier retreating, a corridor closing, a port burning, a strait too useful to name, a hillside too crowded to flee. The substrate does not speak the vocabulary that gets a state’s attention, and it moves anyway. A lens that claims to see war whole while reading only what the combatants say about themselves is not the widest lens available. It is the narrowest, mistaking the layer it knows best for the whole of what is there. We could learn to read the substrate before settling on the story, or better still, to read both together, rather than arriving at it only after it has set the terms of the next catastrophe.

Legible

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There have been and are prominant figures whose conduct is usually filed under unpredictability. The word does a lot of work, and most of it is concealment. Unpredictable is what an observer says when a pattern is present but a frame that would catch it has not been picked up. It describes the watcher, not the watched. The interesting question is whether a frame exists that turns the noise into something legible, and what such a frame would have to leave out to manage it.

This is not a profile. It is a reading, for exploring a possible structure beneath it. A profile is a claim about a person. This is a test of four lenses, run on a hard case to see which of them reach anything the others miss. A figure is here to put the lenses under load. If the lenses only confirm what was already assumed, they have failed the test even where they feel most persuasive. The case is incidental, the configuration not singular. The method is the subject.

The problem with lenses

The rule from an earlier reading carries over without change. Any lens explains something, because a lens is built to find its pattern and will find it whether or not the pattern is the live one. So the fact that a frame fits a figure is close to no evidence that the frame is the right one to be holding. Every frame clears that bar. The test has to come from outside the lens, from the residue: the part of the behaviour that stays strange after the ordinary account has been given in full, and which lens, if any, reaches it.

The ordinary account here is the familiar one: impulsive, vain, transactional, allergic to constraint, loyal to no position longer than it serves him. That reading is not wrong, and it explains a great deal. What it accounts for less easily is the regularity underneath the noise: that the impulsiveness has a direction, that the same kinds of people rise and fall around him in the same sequence, that the swerves are surprising in their timing and not at all surprising in their shape. A man who was merely erratic would sometimes be erratic in a way that helped him hold a relationship together. This one tends to be erratic in the same direction every time. That is the residue. It is what a lens has to earn its place by reaching.

Four are worth trying.

Lens one: chokepoints

The first lens is the one from the bottleneck reading, and it transfers from the map to the man without much strain. Power sits at the narrow passages the material has to pass through, not at the source. Hold the passage and the cost rises for everyone downstream, no ownership of theirs required. The leverage is not the stuff. It is the position the stuff is forced through, and the willingness to constrict it.

Read through that lens, a good deal of the figure’s foreign conduct stops looking like temperament and starts looking like a consistent instinct for the chokepoint. The reach for tariffs over trade, for the threat of denial over the offer of exchange, for the squeezing of an ally at the point where the ally has nowhere else to go: these appear less like separate moods than the same move, applied wherever a passage can be found. The instinct seems to be to locate the place where pressure costs the other side most and oneself least, and to stand on it. It is chokepoint logic carried into a personal register, the dial rather than the embargo, the licence delayed rather than the door shut, the visible capacity to constrict held as the thing itself.

The strategic thinkers around him probably gave that instinct an architecture. if so, the figures who set the defence and foreign posture have written the denial logic down in documents that name the passages to be held and the rival to be starved of them. What in the principal is an instinct, a reflex toward the squeeze, is in the periphery a doctrine with terrain attached. The reading worth holding is that the instinct came first and the doctrine arrived to dress it, not the other way round. The advisers did not teach him to reach for the chokepoint. They found a man already reaching for it and built him a map.

This is a point in the bottleneck piece worth repeating as a caution: the fit is supplied, not found. Not every move is a chokepoint move. Some are domestic theatre, some are the look of a map with more of it coloured in, some are habit with no passage anywhere near. The lens catches the ones that line up and goes quiet on the rest, and the reader who has fallen for it will start seeing passages where there are only moods.

Lens two: status-accounting

The chokepoint lens explains the foreign conduct. It does not explain the domestic churn, the revolving door of advisers, the same sequence of rise and fall, the pattern of who is heard and who is discarded. For that a second lens is needed, one that looks at how advice is weighed and who rises and falls around the centre.

The second lens is the one the centrepiece was built on, turned from the holder to the room around him. Advice in a hierarchy is weighed twice: once for whether it is right, and once for what it does to the standing of the person receiving it. The second weighing tends to win when the two diverge. Counsel that flatters the centre, that returns standing to him, that lets him feel the larger figure in the room, is heard and kept. Counsel that carries a status cost, that requires a concession or makes him the smaller party to a better-informed adviser, is discounted in proportion to how correct it is. Correctness is exactly what makes it expensive to accept.

Run that forward and the revolving door explains itself. The adviser arrives useful, is heard while the counsel flatters, and begins to fall the moment the counsel starts to cost. The competent ones fall fastest, because competence is what eventually produces the costly correct thing, the warning the principal does not want, the no he cannot afford to hear from someone positioned below him. The sequence looks less like random churn than a filter with a direction. It tends to remove correctness whenever correctness carries a status charge, and keep flattery whenever flattery is cheap, running in one direction only.

The mechanism is worth naming: it is what makes the lens predictive rather than merely descriptive. The standing the advisers orient around is a flow, not a stock. It is granted continuously by their willingness to keep orienting, and it drains when the grip tightens, because tightening teaches the room to look for the exit. So the filter does not only degrade the advice. It degrades the relationships that supply the advice, and it does so fastest at the moment the principal most needs them to hold. The fall starts the moment the adviser is right in public in a way that costs the centre standing. It is often visible before the principal sees it, because the principal is reading the flinch and missing the drainage, as the centre always does.

The caution is the same shape as the last one. Not every departure is a status-accounting departure. Some advisers leave because they are genuinely incompetent, some because they are caught, some because the job is miserable and the pay is elsewhere. The lens reads every exit as the filter running, and will overcount. The residue it earns its place on is the narrower thing: the correlation between an adviser’s correctness on a costly question and the speed of their removal, which the ordinary churn account does not reach.

Lens three: scarcity-worldview

The status-accounting filter is too consistent to be self-explanatory. The third lens reaches what drives it.

The claim is that the centre operates on a zero-sum assumption. There is never enough. Every gain is someone else’s loss. Every exchange has a winner and a mark. On that assumption a great deal of otherwise strange conduct lines up: the refusal to admit error, because an admission is a transfer; the obsession with loyalty over competence, because loyalty is the only thing a zero-sum actor can trust; the transactional read of every relationship, because a relationship that is not being worked for advantage is one in which the other party is doing the working.

The lens presents the worldview as a structure rather than a choice. The figure appears not to be deciding to see the world as a fixed pie. The seeing seems to come first, and the decisions fall out of it. Which is why arguing with the conclusions tends not to move anything: the conclusions are downstream of an assumption the argument never reaches.

Here the warning has to be louder than the lens. A scarcity reading is the diagnostic kind, and the diagnostic kind has the worst characteristic bad day, because there is no behaviour it cannot absorb. Generosity becomes a calculated move. Restraint becomes a longer game. An admission becomes a feint. The frame swallows the counter-evidence, which is precisely the sign that it has stopped discriminating and started decorating. It reaches something, the internal consistency under the noise, but the moment it explains everything it explains nothing in particular. It earns a place only if held to the residue and not an inch past it.

Lens four: the performance-self

The scarcity lens explains the refusal to admit error and the obsession with loyalty. It still assumes a stable self that holds the worldview. The fourth lens questions that assumption.

The claim is that there is no stable self at the centre to consult, that the identity is assembled outward from feedback rather than held inward as a conviction. The crowd does not appear to be an audience for a self that exists before it. It may be where the self is manufactured, in the moment, from the response. The media appears to be a mirror the figure uses to find out what he is, which is why its attention is sought even when the attention is hostile, hostile attention being preferable to the unbearable alternative of none.

Read through this lens, the contradictions stop being contradictions. A self assembled from feedback will hold incompatible positions without strain, because the positions were never the point; the feedback was. The absence of a fixed ideology reads less as hypocrisy, which would require a real position being betrayed, than as the expected output of a centre with no fixed thing to betray, only a next audience to assemble in front of. The shifts cease to look like failures of conviction and start to look like the mechanism working as designed.

What would count against this lens? Evidence of a stable conviction held consistently across audiences, a private self that differs from a public performance, a moment of genuine reflection that is not for an audience. None of these has been observed. That is not proof. It is a reason the lens is worth trying, and a reason it has to be held lightly.

This lens has the deepest reach and the thinnest discipline. It reaches the part the other three leave behind, the why underneath the status-accounting and the scarcity, the engine that needs the standing and fears the loss in the first place. But it is unfalsifiable in a way that warrants unease. A frame that cannot be wrong is not reaching the residue. It is painting over it. Of the four, it is the one most likely to feel like the deepest insight and be the least accountable to anything outside itself.

Formation

A note on where dispositions like these tend to be learned, kept brief. They are rarely worked out alone. There is usually a formative figure earlier in the line, and the lesson tends to come down to three rules: attack, never apologise, deny everything. Attack, so that the other side is always defending and never building. Never apologise, because an apology is a concession and a concession is a transfer. Deny everything, because a fact admitted is a position surrendered, and a fact denied long enough becomes contestable, and a contestable fact is a fact defeated.

The three rules are the four lenses in their original training form. Attack is the chokepoint instinct before it had a map. Never apologise is status-accounting reduced to a reflex. Deny everything is the scarcity worldview applied to truth itself, in which a shared fact is a loss because it has passed out of one’s hands. The lesson, where it is taught, is not a set of opinions. It is a way of standing in the world, and it transfers, because what passes from the earlier figure to the later one is not a position but a function.

What the lenses explain

Put the four down together and the behaviour becomes more legible than it was. Legible is not the same as predictable, though, and the lenses carry their own cautions into the claim.

The tightening of the grip is predicted, by the status-accounting filter and the scarcity reflex together. The re-centring of power on the smallest possible circle is predicted, by the same filter run long enough. The slow drainage of each relationship he leans on is predicted, by the flow-not-stock mechanism the centrepiece set out. None of these required knowing his mind. They required only the four structural assumptions and the willingness to follow them.

Which returns the unpredictability to where it actually lives. He appears genuinely hard to predict at the level of which adviser wins a given week, which passage he reaches for, which audience he assembles in front of next. At the level of how he chooses once the options are in front of him, he seems highly predictable, because the four dispositions appear stable and the choosing tends to run through them every time. The unpredictability appears real, and seems to sit one layer up from where the observers were looking. It lives in the antechamber, in the churn of who holds the room, not in the man, whose responses to whatever the room produces are nearly mechanical. The word unpredictable was describing the watcher’s vantage all along.

There is one more, the one the reader this was written for will notice most. The four lenses describe a figure who is legible inside the option set he curates and illegible against the thing he does not select. The adversary who declines to play the status game, who operates off the frame he reads, who supplies no leverage to be squeezed: against that adversary the lenses go quiet, because all four are tuned to a man acting on a world he has arranged, and none of them is tuned to a world that refuses the arrangement. The same legibility that makes him predictable to a profiler is what makes him exploitable by anyone willing to operate outside the room. That is not a fifth lens. It is the edge of the four.

What the lenses leave behind

By the method’s own rule, the reading has to be turned on itself. The four lenses together still leave a residue, and naming it is the test working, not a concession.

They leave behind the grudge that is just a grudge, the personal animosity that runs on nothing structural at all, the particular face the figure cannot stand for reasons that predate any of the four assumptions and answer to none of them. They leave behind chance, the accident of timing, the meeting that did or did not happen, the event that arrived from outside the system and that no disposition predicted or shaped. They leave behind the possibility of change, which all four lenses are constitutionally unable to see, being built to find the stable pattern and therefore blind to the moment it might break. A frame tuned to regularity reads every sign of change as noise, right up until the change is the only thing left to explain.

And they leave behind the part no structural reading reaches, the inside of it, whatever it is actually like to be the centre of that drainage and not to see it coming. The lenses model the behaviour from outside, as a system optimising for things no actor needs to consciously intend. What the system feels like from the only seat that cannot use these lenses, the seat in the middle of it, is exactly the residue the structural reading is built to leave behind. It was never going to reach that. Nothing built from the outside does.

The reader’s turn

So the method ends where the earlier ones did, turned back on its use. The four lenses reached most of the residue and left a specific remainder, and the remainder is not a footnote. It is where the next reading would start, if there were one. That part is the reader’s. Most of the fun, too.

Whose shield

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A law arrives in the language of protection, positioned as a boundary between harm and those exposed to it. What can happen in these moments is less interruption than conversion. The existing practice remains. Its surface becomes clean, its paperwork complete. The activity is now recognisable, regulated, and formally permitted.

Once upon a time

The practice had been in place for centuries. A worker who left before a contract ended, refused an instruction, or simply failed to appear could be fined, have wages withheld, or be imprisoned with hard labour. A master who broke the same contract, or failed to pay, faced at most a civil claim for damages. Labour was bound. Departure was criminal.

The English Master and Servant Acts gave this arrangement modern legal form. The 1823 act described itself in terms of regulating servants, labourers and work people, framed as order and fair dealing between contracting parties. Both sides were named. Only one side was exposed to criminal sanction. Between 1858 and 1875, prosecutions under these acts ran to thousands a year in Britain. In a single year, more than ten thousand working men were imprisoned at the suit of their masters, and not one master at the suit of the men. This was not unique to one jurisdiction. The same structure appeared across imperial and European legal systems, each expressed in local legal language, each producing a similar asymmetry.

The practice did not begin with the law. Labour already functioned under constraint enforced by the possibility of imprisonment. Regulation provided a formal frame, presenting the arrangement as orderly and contractual. What changed was not the substance but its status. An existing asymmetry became lawful, administrable, and backed by the authority of the state.

Twice as sure, twice as wrong

Across the industrial period and into the modern regulatory state, a dense architecture of safety standards developed. Factory acts, product regulations, certification regimes and compliance frameworks grew around the promise of measurable safety. The harm was real. Industrial work injured bodies. Manufactured goods failed in ways that could kill. A mediating structure between practice and harm was not optional. Standards filled that role.

That was the intention. What follows is a structural drift rather than a historical event, and it recurs wherever standards take hold. Conformance becomes the objective, and safety becomes something inferred from it. Compliance displaces outcome. What counts is not what happens in the world, but whether the correct boxes have been completed against a document. The certificate attests alignment with specification rather than assurance of safety in practice. The gap between specification and lived reality becomes the space in which harm persists, now accompanied by formal proof of compliance.

What emerges is a quieter form of failure. Not driven primarily by intent, but by substitution. A check performed because a check is required. A deadline shaping what is examined. A system in which responsibility is distributed until it becomes difficult to locate. The effect is that compliance can function as a ceiling on care rather than a floor beneath it. Harm is not prevented so much as absorbed into a system that declares itself correct.

The structure also produces a defensive effect. Once certification exists, it can be invoked as evidence of safety even when outcomes contradict it. The framework designed to reduce harm becomes part of the defence for its continuation. Protection language remains present, but it attaches to process rather than outcome. The appearance of care is maintained even where care has thinned into procedure: the certificate on the wall, the energy spent passing the audit rather than on the thing the audit was meant to assure.

The defensive function is not hypothetical. In litigation following the Grenfell Tower fire, a contractor argued that the cladding system it installed had complied with the regulations in force at the time. The court held otherwise, and in doing so set down that a product certificate is not a guarantee of compliance but an aid to demonstrating suitability, evidence that can be rebutted rather than a conclusive answer. The detail underneath that ruling is the more telling one. Of more than six hundred buildings clad in aluminium composite material before 2014, none met the combustibility requirement as later interpreted. Architects, suppliers, building control officers, certifiers and manufacturers had all worked to a rating that the system treated as sufficient. Responsibility was distributed across every party and located in none. The certificate had stood in for the thing it was meant to certify, for years, across an entire industry, until a fire made the gap visible.

Three times is a pattern

For roughly two decades, large-scale personal data collection has expanded as an ordinary feature of digital infrastructure. The associated harms are widely described. Surveillance becomes ambient. Behaviour is profiled. Lives are translated into datasets that can be stored, analysed and recombined elsewhere. In response, data protection regimes emerge, centred on consent, transparency and individual rights. The framing is explicitly protective.

What develops alongside this is a consent structure that stabilises extraction rather than constraining it. Agreements proliferate. Interfaces present choice in standardised form. Access to services becomes conditional on acceptance. Consent becomes legible, recorded, and portable across systems. The underlying extraction continues, now accompanied by documentation that records agreement.

The regulatory layer does not remove the practice. It formalises it. The dataset assembled under that lawful process becomes the foundation for the next system built on it, now carrying the clean provenance that training a large model on personal data requires, the provenance the earlier, unregulated version lacked. The protection framework, intended to govern collection, becomes part of the mechanism by which collection is normalised and scaled. The lawful record of consent begins to function as permission for reuse.

The clearest illustration is the consent machinery itself. The Transparency and Consent Framework, the industry standard behind most of the cookie banners shown to European users, was built expressly to deliver GDPR compliance for online advertising. In 2022 the Belgian data protection authority found that the framework itself breached the regulation, its chair noting that people are invited to give consent while most have no idea their profiles are being sold many times a day. The Brussels Court of Appeal largely upheld that finding in 2025. The instrument designed to record protection had become the instrument that recorded permission, and a regulator had to rule the protection itself unlawful.

A regulatory system can reduce harm, it can define categories of legitimacy, and it can confer formal recognition on practices already in motion. These functions often coexist. The tension appears when protective language is most visible at the same moment that legitimisation is doing most of the work, and when the formal beneficiary of protection is not the same as the party primarily affected by the underlying practice.

A simple separation begins to recur. One side receives protection. Another receives legitimacy. They do not consistently align. Once was an exception. Twice was a coincidence. By the third, the divergence looks less like accident than design.

The fourth time one can choose

A further case is still unfolding, and its boundaries are not settled. Frontier artificial intelligence development already sits inside a competitive dynamic in which capability growth is rapid and unevenly distributed. The associated harms are largely prospective but increasingly discussed in concrete terms: exploitation of software vulnerabilities, automated offensive capability, systemic instability introduced by misaligned deployment, and the broader risks of accelerating capability without equivalent control.

Regulatory frameworks are developing alongside this competition, presenting themselves as protective structures for the public and emphasising safety, oversight and responsible deployment. The European Union’s AI Act is the most developed of them, and its General-Purpose AI Code of Practice is the instrument through which the largest model providers are meant to demonstrate compliance. Adherence to the Code is treated by regulators as evidence of meeting the Act’s obligations, which makes signing it both a compliance step and a public marker of responsibility.

The drafting of that Code is where the pattern becomes legible. An investigation by Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl documented that the companies the Code is meant to govern were given privileged access to its drafting, invited to dedicated workshops with the working group chairs, while civil society and smaller stakeholders were largely confined to upvoting comments on an online platform. One side was in the room. The other side reacted to it. Among the changes secured during that process, a concerted effort by Google and Microsoft moved large-scale illegal discrimination off the list of systemic risks and into a weaker category of risks for optional consideration. The harm was not removed from the world. It was reclassified, by the parties on whom it would otherwise have fallen, into something the framework no longer required them to treat as serious.

The pattern is structurally similar to the earlier cases. A practice associated with harm develops. A protective framework is introduced. The framework formalises the practice, often by making it legible, governable, and therefore more stable. The legitimacy of actors within the system increases, even as the underlying dynamic continues. None of this requires that the framework was designed to legitimise harm. The possibility exists wherever the regulated become participants in defining what regulation means.

The earlier cases have the advantage of distance. Their consequences are visible, their disputes largely settled. This case does not. The framework is still being written, the categories still being defined, the protections still being assigned. The earlier examples are history. This one is still a negotiation.

Neither side of the canal

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

A friend who was at HackIT 2026 in Firenze sent me a photograph of a printed handout. Two pages, a bit creased, a faint smear of something on the second one. It was the material for a workshop called Imagining collectivity under oppression, run on the Friday afternoon in Sala M by two people going by Alecs and webbie. I did not attend. So I am reviewing a piece of paper, which is worth saying out loud: a workshop is the room and the people in it, not the script. Most of what follows is about the script. By the end, that gap might be the whole point.

This is a piece about reviewing something, then suspecting the review came too easily, then trying to do better and landing on the same mistake in a different coat. Mostly it is me catching myself, which may or may not be your idea of a good time.

What the workshop is

The official description says the facilitators draw on real biographies of people living through war or authoritarianism, recent and distant. It builds an imagined society where connection and affection grow scarce, and invites participants to inhabit it. It is careful about safety. You can leave without announcing it. Nobody is owed a reason. The stated goal is to find answers, within ourselves and with each other, that pave the way to solidarity in violent times.

The handout fills that in. There is a war. The government flies surveillance drones, the enemy flies reconnaissance drones, purchases are tracked, internet is rationed to a few hours a day. Children use the words for spy and informant as insults. People who never trained are encouraged to show up for fitness drills and drone-operation practice, get two days off work for it, and some take the deal while others organise underground. Then three personas to step into. Noa, who collects and repairs fallen drones on a cargo bike. Alex, a military nurse who becomes an informal post office for soldiers’ letters. Sam, who has a broken leg and feeds the gossip of visiting journalists to the night-time resistance, which targets the power-hungry: greedy bosses, a corrupt official, a violent drill sergeant who is found one night swimming in the canal.

The first review, which I have started to distrust

My first pass came out warm, and most of the warmth holds. The shift of attention reads as real to me. Most talk about war is states, armies, weapons, geopolitics. This is letters, favours, repair work, shared housing, gossip, mutual aid. That looks like a genuinely under-examined layer, and the nurse-as-post-office is a lovely observation about how connective tissue grows when formal structures fail. The safety scaffolding looks like competent, trauma-aware work. None of that is faint praise and I would not want to walk it back.

Then the dissonance started, and oddly it is the part I trust more than the praise.

The scenario presents itself as a neutral exploration, and to my eye it quietly installs a fairly specific worldview. The resistance reads as sympathetic. Surveillance is the state’s. The underground organisers arrive in soft focus. Military service is ambiguous at best. The resistance targets people you seem invited not to mourn. And there is little equivalent attention to how resistance movements themselves can turn coercive, paranoid, violent.

Sam is where this concentrates. Sam is helping an underground group identify targets, and the framing comes across as almost cosy: tea, gossip, community. People end up dead, disappeared, in the canal, and that gets very little weight. The drill sergeant in the canal is offered to the room as a small satisfaction. Here is why I cannot take it that way.

I had an uncle. Hendrik Jan Fokma, Henk, who I never met, and who is findable now in the war archives, at Oorlogsbronnen and the Oorlogsgravenstichting, under his cover name Hendrik van Suylen. He studied medicine, then worked through the occupation as a foreman on the Dutch railways, and under that name he committed sabotage. He put German military telephone lines out of action in Nijmegen. He kept firearms. I remember a family gathering where, when I pressed about the firearms, someone told me he had also eliminated collaborators. The resistance ran in the family. His father, my grandfather, directed the municipal electricity works in Nijmegen and refused to hand the occupier the personnel lists for the Arbeitseinsatz, after which the whole household went into hiding. Henk’s younger brother, Klaas Erik, was in the resistance too, and was shot at Kamp Vught in 1944. Henk was arrested in November 1944. The route is documented with the awful precision of those archives: the prison at Zwolle, then Kamp Amersfoort, prisoner 8934, Block 9, then Neuengamme on a transport on the first of February 1945, then Sandbostel, a satellite camp, where he died just before liberation. The Red Cross recorded it as somewhere between the fourteenth and nineteenth of April 1945. The sources disagree on how. Some say extreme exhaustion. Others say he was killed during an escape attempt. He has no known grave.

So when the handout hands me the drill sergeant in the canal as a tidy moral payoff, the problem is not abstract. Henk did the things the workshop romanticises. The telephone lines, the firearms, the elimination of collaborators. He is not the counter-example to Sam. He is Sam, and he is also my uncle, and he died in Sandbostel with no grave between two dates the Red Cross had to estimate. I cannot stand cleanly on either side of the canal. I cannot wave it away as fine, and I cannot condemn it from a safe distance, because the person in the water might have been put there by someone I loved and never got to meet. That is the position the workshop does not leave room for, and it is the only honest one I have.

So my objection is not that Sam’s tradecraft would not survive the surveillance state the scenario itself describes, though I doubt it would. It is that the design has already decided Sam is on the right side, which makes the canal fine. That verdict survives even if you fix every technical hole. And it is the verdict I am least able to take, from either direction.

There is a harder turn still. Decades after the war, when the trauma had softened enough for people to look again, it came out that some of those executed as collaborators had not been collaborators at all. Some had worked against the Germans the whole time, by means that looked, from outside, exactly like collaboration. The resistance that killed them had acted on what it knew, and what it knew was wrong. So the question the workshop never asks is the one I cannot stop asking. Who decides who lives and who dies, and on the strength of what information, gathered how, checked by whom? Sam hears gossip and passes it on, and the design treats the passing-on as care. But gossip is exactly the kind of information that puts the wrong person in the canal. I do not know whether Henk was ever sure about the people he eliminated. I do not know whether anyone could have been. That uncertainty is not a flaw in my reading of the workshop. It is the thing the workshop sands off, and it is the thing that actually happened to my family and to people my family killed.

And there are technical holes. The scenario wants drones, tracked purchases, infiltration paranoia, and at the same time keeps the phones working, the landlines up, the cable television on, and a resistance that coordinates at night without consequence. Pervasive surveillance and functioning unmonitored coordination do not sit in the same world. But I want to be careful, because the surveillance complaint is the one a security person reaches for first, and reaching for it first can be a way of dodging the harder thing. The broken threat model is a symptom. The pre-loaded verdict is the problem, and the blurb half-says so: the destination is solidarity, named before anyone sits down. The workshop is not really asking whether solidarity is the answer. It starts from the answer, with the room there to feel its way to a conclusion already on the page.

So I tried to build a better one, and built the same thing

The honest move was not to grade the workshop but to try and write a stronger version, and see whether I could do the thing I was asking of them.

My instinct was to update the threat model. Drop the drones-and-tanks aesthetic, which is not what authoritarianism in Europe might look like, and reach for something closer to the bone: a hard right that arrives through elections, backed by big tech and big capital, oppression delivered as efficiency and safety and convenience. No jackboots. A loyalty score. A payment rail. A verification badge. Coercion that is ambient and half voluntary, because people opt in, because it is easier. I spread the personas across the moral field instead of clustering them on the sympathetic side. Someone administering a piece of the system in good faith. Someone harmed who cannot prove the system did it. Someone resisting who is themselves a small unaccountable power. Someone who simply benefits and means to keep benefiting. I was rather pleased with it.

It has the same disease, and arguably worse, because better hidden.

“An extreme right backed by big tech and big capital.” That phrase sat in my framing, not in the personas, which I had carefully balanced. Which is exactly where the original hides its assumptions too: not in the characters, in the world. I had moved the verdict one layer up, into the architecture, where it is harder to see and harder to argue with. The original knew the answer was “war plus surveillance plus resistance”. Mine was “platform capitalism plus soft authoritarianism”. Same move. The threat is pre-identified, the moral concern pre-chosen, the exercise left to explore consequences rather than diagnosis. I had built a diagnosis-shaped hole and filled it in myself before the room arrived, then congratulated myself for leaving the personas open.

The tell is simple. If I were a participant in my own workshop, twenty minutes in I would be the one asking: what if the system is answering something real? What if there had been actual fraud, real sabotage, foreign interference, an identity-theft epidemic, and the integrated system came in after broad consultation and stayed popular because it worked? The moment that holds, the administrator turns sympathetic, the verification stops being mere control, the beneficiary’s comfort stops being mere selfishness, and the resistance turns genuinely ambiguous. The exercise becomes hard to resolve. I had carefully kept it from being hard to resolve. I had picked a villain and hidden it in the set design, which might be the more sophisticated version of exactly what I was criticising.

The thing about the room

Cognitive dissonance cannot be prevented, and I am not sure it is worth trying to. It tends to be where learning starts, not a defect in it. The trouble with both scripts, theirs and mine, is not that they produce dissonance. It is that they give it somewhere safe to discharge. They hand you a side. Once you have a side, the discomfort resolves, the resolution becomes the lesson, and the lesson was written before you walked in.

The stronger version, as it looks to me, is not “imagine an authoritarian future”. It is closer to “imagine a future where every measure has a plausible justification and everyone can explain themselves sincerely”. The discomfort then comes from not being able to find a clean villain. And that feels much closer to what European societies are already in? Few durable systems run on terror alone. Most lean on something quieter, the daily choice of enough people to keep orienting around the arrangement, for reasons that are rarely reasoned all the way down: habit, self-interest, fear of disorder, a sense that the alternative is worse, narrated afterwards as a case they could make if asked. The people inside a contested order rarely divide into heroes and villains. They divide into people prioritising different fears. One fears disorder. One fears exclusion. One fears violence. One fears state power. One fears fragmentation. One fears conformity. Each fear can be real. The argument is mostly about which fear comes first.

A world built that way might need competing solidarities, not solidarity-versus-power. Both my draft and theirs had lonely dissidents on one side and faceless power on the other. Real societies are messier. The union backs the system because it delivered for its members. The minority feels safer under it and resents being called dupes. The reformist thinks the resister is reckless. Others think the resister is dangerous. When every position has a constituency, a fear, something real to lose, collectivity stops meaning “how do the resisters find each other” and starts meaning “how do people who disagree about what is even happening keep sharing a society”. That question is harder, and I doubt it resolves into a closing slide.

Why this workshop, then, and what it might cost to mean it

The workshop stops being about oppression and becomes about legitimacy. Not “how do we stay human under a bad system” but “how would we even know the system is bad, when it solves real problems and hands out both benefits and harms”. And if you genuinely leave it open, you may have to allow that a thoughtful participant concludes the system is, on balance, a reasonable trade, defends it well, and is not treated as having missed the point.

That is the test, and it falls on the facilitator, not the script. Can they hear someone make the persuasive case for the thing they fear, watch half the room nod, and answer with curiosity rather than correction? The untrained instinct is to add nuance and restore the balance, which is correction wearing curiosity’s clothes. The discipline, maybe, is to sit on your hands and ask the room what they noticed in themselves when they found it persuasive. Because a lot of facilitators say they want ambiguity when what they want is complexity, and those are not the same. Complexity says this bad thing is more complicated than you thought, and ends with a lesson. Ambiguity says we do not actually know whether it is bad, and ends with no lesson at all. So the question is not whether they can tolerate someone defending the system, but whether they can tolerate someone defending it persuasively. That might be where you find out whether you are running inquiry or pedagogy. The scenario teaches little on its own. It gives the disagreements already in the room somewhere to stand. Who trusts institutions, who does not. Who reaches for security, who for autonomy. Who thinks legitimacy comes from consent, who from outcomes. Who thinks rights limit majorities, who thinks majorities define rights.

And in honesty, this may not be the workshop Alecs and webbie set out to run. The blurb names solidarity as the goal. They may want to build solidarity against an imagined authoritarianism, which is a legitimate thing to want, and the version I am describing is a different project, one that asks whether the participants can even agree on what authoritarianism is. Telling them their exercise should be my exercise would be the original sin again, facing the other way: the facilitator who knows best, grey hat instead of white. So I will not. I will only say the seam looks real, that the official description names a destination, and that naming a destination and calling the journey open inquiry is the tension worth noticing.

I would, for the record, still go. Happily. And about twenty minutes in I would, despite every word above, probably become the person asking whether the resistance has a counterintelligence branch, who maintains the drone supply chain, and whether the drill sergeant in the canal was actually guilty. Which is not quite the conversation the facilitators appear to be aiming for. I have made my peace with being that person.

I am sure that being that person is not the same as being right. And I know where the asking comes from. Not contrarianism, or not only. I carry a man who did what the handout flattens into a persona, and who I am told put at least one other person in the ground himself. I cannot honour him and condemn him at once, and I cannot do either and stop. The workshop may hand out a clean answer to some. I do not.

Een toets heeft een stabiel object nodig

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bestuurlijke instrumenten beoordelen toestanden. Een toets, accreditatie of kader stelt vast of iets op een bepaald moment in de juiste staat verkeert, en ontleent zijn waarde aan de aanname dat die toestand stabiel blijft tot het volgende toetsmoment. Dat werkt zolang de eigenschap waar het om gaat berust op een stabiel object: iets dat zich laat aanwijzen, vastleggen en opnieuw onderzoeken.

Veel eigenschappen waar beslissingen uiteindelijk over gaan, gedragen zich anders. Ze liggen niet besloten in een object, maar ontstaan in een proces, verhouding of gebruik. En die houden niet stil voor de meting. Dan komt een instrument niet tot een verkeerde conclusie, maar meet het een ander soort eigenschap dan de relevante. Niet omdat het slecht ontworpen is, maar omdat het aangrijpt op iets anders dan waar de relevante eigenschap ontstaat.

Zo ontstaat een systematische blinde vlek: niet een gemiste meting, maar een soort eigenschap die het instrument structureel niet kan zien. Die laat zich niet wegwerken door beter te toetsen. Een scherper kader verschuift alleen de grens, maar wat in een proces ontstaat, blijft van een ander soort dan de toestand die een toets vastlegt.

Macht en zeggenschap

Een accreditatiekader voor clouddiensten toetst wat het kan zien: of de verbinding versleuteld is, of data binnen de Europese Economische Ruimte blijven, of het contract de juiste clausules heeft. Het Rijksbreed cloudbeleid stelt zulke voorwaarden, en een dienst die daaraan voldoet, is op die punten werkelijk in orde.

In het voorjaar van 2025 werd de hoofdaanklager van het Internationaal Strafhof de toegang tot zijn Microsoft-diensten ontzegd, nadat de Amerikaanse regering sancties tegen hem instelde. Aan de techniek mankeerde niets. De versleuteling was niet gebroken, de servers stonden waar ze hoorden, het contract was niet geschonden. Alle eigenschappen die een kader zou toetsen, waren precies zoals bij de accreditatie. En toch viel de toegang weg, door een beslissing buiten dat kader om.

Wat zichtbaar werd, is een laag die in de toetsing niet voorkomt: wie, als het erop aankomt, mag beslissen of een dienst blijft werken. Versleuteling en opslaglocatie zijn eigenschappen van het systeem; ze zitten in het ding. Een contract ligt al minder vast: het is geen eigenschap van het systeem, maar van de verhouding tussen partijen, al gedraagt het zich op papier als een ding. Die stabiliteit is geleend, en houdt op zodra een sterkere verhouding zich eroverheen legt. Dat is wat bij het Strafhof gebeurde: een staat oefende gezag uit over een bedrijf binnen zijn rechtsmacht, en die machtsverhouding overschreef de contractuele.

De CLOUD Act is hiervan het bekendste voorbeeld, maar niet de kern. Een leverancier kan ook van eigenaar wisselen, een moederbedrijf onder een ander regime komen, een sanctie volgen: telkens verandert er niets aan het systeem en alles aan wie erover kan beslissen. Toen Defensie aankondigde met KPN en Thales een eigen cloud te bouwen voor staatsgeheime gegevens, werd de keuze verdedigd met een zin die niet over een systeemeigenschap gaat: Nederland blijft zo zelf de baas over de gegevens. Dat is een beschrijving van een verhouding, precies in termen die het oorspronkelijke kader niet kon toetsen.

Eerlijkheid en bewijslast

Een toetsingskader voor algoritmes bij de overheid stelt scherpe eisen, en terecht: is er gecontroleerd op vooringenomenheid, laat de uitkomst zich uitleggen, is vastgelegd wie verantwoordelijk is. De Algemene Rekenkamer legde negen algoritmes langs die meetlat en vond bij zes ervan serieuze tekortkomingen.

Bij de Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens kwam een algoritme aan het licht dat de kwaliteit van pasfoto’s beoordeelt. De Rekenkamer stelde vast dat de dienst niet kan nagaan of het dat eerlijk doet, en wees op het risico van discriminatie. Een terechte vraag. Maar de ambtenaar die pasfoto’s beoordeelde voordat het algoritme er was, kreeg die vraag nooit. Niemand kon nagaan of de menselijke oordelen systematisch afweken, omdat het proces zich niet liet onderzoeken.

Hier zit de eigenschap niet in het systeem maar in de aantoonbaarheid ervan. Een algoritme laat zich toetsen: een expliciete procedure is uit te voeren op testdata. Een menselijk oordeel laat zich veel moeilijker onderzoeken, niet uit geheimhouding, maar omdat de afweging nooit in een toetsbare vorm bestond. Zo verschuift de bewijslast naar de kant die meetbaar is. “We hebben het nooit gemeten” is eigenlijk een alarm, maar het werkt als een vrijbrief, omdat de afwezigheid van meting zich niet laat afkeuren zoals een tegenvallende meting dat wel doet. Wanneer de toets het algoritme laat sneuvelen, keert de beoordeling terug naar een mens of een ouder proces. Dat kan een vergelijkbare vooringenomenheid hebben, maar nu zonder dat iemand die vooringenomenheid nog kan onderzoeken. De Rekenkamer wees op iets vergelijkbaars bij de Sociale Verzekeringsbank: een algoritme stilleggen brengt zelf ook risico’s met zich mee, zoals meer handwerk en minder signalen van mogelijk misbruik. “Dan laten we een mens ernaar kijken” klinkt als een terugkeer naar zekerheid, maar de mens is hier de ongetoetste variant.

Doel en gebruik

Doelbinding betekent dat wie persoonsgegevens verzamelt op dat moment vastlegt waarvoor, in welbepaalde en uitdrukkelijk omschreven bewoordingen. De wet bewaakt dat het gebruik bij dat doel blijft. Het doel staat opgeschreven en laat zich toetsen.

In 2018 kopieerde het Hongaarse telecombedrijf Digi klantgegevens naar een aparte testdatabank. Die gegevens waren ooit verzameld om abonnementen af te sluiten. Toen een datalek volgde, moest het Europese Hof van Justitie beoordelen of dat oorspronkelijke doel was veranderd. Het loste het op met een toets: verdere verwerking mag zolang het nieuwe gebruik verenigbaar is met het oorspronkelijke doel. De wet is hier niet naïef, en bij Digi werkte het instrument, want er was een aanwijsbare handeling, het opzetten van een databank, om tegen het oude doel te houden.

Die toets heeft een stilzwijgende voorwaarde: ze kan een nieuw gebruik pas beoordelen op het moment dat het zich voordoet als een concrete handeling. In een gedeelde data-omgeving is dat moment er vaak niet. Iemand draait een query, legt twee verzamelingen naast elkaar, correleert, en ziet een verband dat niemand had voorzien. Geen van die handelingen kondigt zich aan als een nieuw doel, en toch ontstaat er een doel dat er bij het verzamelen niet was. Hier zit de eigenschap in het gebruik, niet in de gegevens. Het doel ontstaat in de handeling die de gegevens oproept. Doelbinding bindt aan het doel dat bij het verzamelen werd opgeschreven, terwijl het doel dat ertoe doet pas later ontstaat.

Niets laat zich bevriezen

Drie instrumenten, drie eigenschappen, één vorm. Telkens wordt een instrument dat een toestand vaststelt gevraagd iets te certificeren wat geen toestand is maar een verhouding, een aantoonbaarheid, een gebruik: iets wat in de tijd zijn vorm krijgt en niet stilhoudt voor de meting. De macht om de zeggenschap morgen te veranderen, de eerlijkheid van een oordeel dat geen spoor nalaat, het doel dat pas bij het combineren ontstaat. Geen ervan laat zich bevriezen in een vaststelling.

Dat is geen pleidooi tegen toetsen. Een kader dat echte dingen meet is beter dan geen kader, en niet elke eigenschap is een proces; veel zitten wel degelijk in het object, en daar werkt de toets. Het gaat om iets subtielers: waar de eigenschap die ertoe doet in een proces of verhouding zit, levert een instrument dat toestanden beoordeelt een zekerheid naast de vraag. De blinde vlek is niet wat het instrument verkeerd ziet, maar wat het per soort niet kan zien. En juist daar wordt het werkelijke risico beslist.

The part that stays strange

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Any lens explains something. That is the problem with them, not the recommendation. Point a strong enough frame at a situation, and it will find its own pattern there, because a frame is built to find that pattern, and the finding feels like discovery rather than like the frame doing what it was made to do. So the fact that a lens explains a thing is almost no evidence that the lens is the right one. Every lens clears that bar. The question worth asking is narrower and less flattering: what does the situation still leave unexplained after the usual reading has done its work, and which lens, if any, picks that up.

This is a piece about choosing, then, more than about any particular situation. The situations are here to test the method, not the other way round. But the method only shows itself on a real case, and it shows itself most clearly on a hard one, so most of the weight falls on a single example, with a second brought in at the end only to check that the method was not quietly built to fit the first.

The favourite mistake of every lens

It helps to start by admitting what a lens costs. A lens sees one thing well by making everything else blurry. That is not a defect to be fixed; it is how a lens works, and it is the same trade whichever one is picked up. Each has a characteristic way of being wrong, and the way it is wrong is the shadow of the way it is sharp.

A lens tuned to normalisation of deviance sees creeping acceptance everywhere, every standard quietly slipping, even where a standard is simply being met. One tuned to leverage and relationship sees control substituted for trust everywhere, even where a relationship is healthy and the control incidental. A recentring lens sees coalitions rearranging themselves around every crisis, even crises nobody is profiting from. A stock-and-flow lens sees every problem as a flow misread as a stock, even the ones that really are about a fixed quantity. None of these is a bad lens. Each is a good lens having its characteristic bad day, and the bad day arrives precisely when the user has fallen in love with what the lens is good at and stopped noticing what it is blurring.

Which is why “does the lens explain the behaviour” is the wrong test. It always does. The lens was selected, consciously or not, because it does. The test has to come from outside the lens, from a fixed point the lens cannot move, and the only fixed point available is the residue: the part of the behaviour that stays strange after the ordinary explanation has been given in full. That residue does not belong to any lens. It is what a lens has to earn its place by reaching.

The hard case

Take the situation that is least often read through a systems lens, because that is where the method has the most to prove. Israel’s conduct is usually read in terms of intention, morality, history, trauma, security, ideology, leadership. Those readings are not wrong and this is not an attempt to replace them. They do a great deal of work. The security reading in particular explains most of what needs explaining: why force is used, why a state surrounded by declared enemies and scarred by repeated attack treats threats as existential and responds to them hard. Take all of that as given, and given its full weight.

Something is still left over. The security reading explains why force is used. It accounts less easily for why measures introduced as exceptional, temporary, justified by a specific emergency, tend not to end when the emergency that justified them passes, but to widen and settle. It accounts less easily for why a state that describes its goal as security, which is to say an end state, a condition of being safe, organises itself more and more around the permanent absence of that condition. If safety were the goal, achieving it would be a relief. A system that has arranged itself around never quite achieving it behaves, on inspection, as though something other than safety were being served.

That residue is almost a systems question already, which is why it is worth following. The question stops being “why the security condition never quite arrives” and becomes “what now exists only inside the continuing emergency”. Institutions, budgets, bureaucracies, command structures, political coalitions, careers, a whole apparatus that came into being to manage an exceptional situation and that has, over time, no role outside it. Once that apparatus exists, the exceptional situation is no longer only a thing the system is suffering. It is a thing parts of the system are, in the plainest structural sense, sustained by.

The lens that reaches this is adaptation rather than correction, with normalisation of deviance close behind. A system takes a shock. The response works, partly. The response creates new problems. Instead of returning to the prior state, the system adapts to the new one, and the adaptation becomes the baseline from which the next shock is met. No one approves the drift. Each step is a reasonable answer to the step before it, taken under real pressure, and the measure that was extraordinary last year is ordinary this year because last year it was already in place. The emergency normalises not because anyone decides it should but because the alternative, dismantling the apparatus the emergency built, would now itself be disruptive, and the apparatus has acquired people whose position depends on its continuation.

It is fair to ask, by the essay’s own rule, whether this lens is doing more than several others would. The residue does not point to one frame and no other. A recentring lens would catch part of it: a prolonged emergency makes the security services more central and the civilian institutions more marginal, and a coalition reshaped that way has its own reasons to keep the emergency on. A leverage-and-relationship lens would catch another part: deterrence treated as a stock to be held rather than a standing relationship that has to be renewed. These are not rivals to the adaptation reading so much as cuts through the same body at different angles, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to claim the one lens that wins. What adaptation-rather-than-correction reaches that the others reach less directly is the time dimension, the ratchet, why the baseline only ever moves one way and never resets. That is the specific part of the residue it earns its place on. If it claimed more, it would be the frame manufacturing its pattern again.

Said carefully, this is not an accusation. It is a different hypothesis about what the system optimises. The intention-and-morality reading asks what the actors want. The systems reading asks what the structure rewards, which need not be anything any actor wants or even sees. A behaviour that looks irrational if peace is the goal can look perfectly rational if the emergent goal, the one no one chose, is the maintenance of a permanently mobilised system. There is a plain way to put the question: if the threat vanished tomorrow, which parts of the system would shrink. Whatever would shrink has, by that fact, an interest in the threat not vanishing. Not from malice. From structure.

What this lens, too, leaves behind

If the argument stopped here it would be doing the thing it warned against: choosing a lens and reading everything through it. The permanent-mobilisation lens has its own favourite mistake, and honesty about it is not a concession but the method working as it should. The lens is disposed to read every security measure as self-perpetuation, and it will therefore tend to see the real threat as smaller than it is. Some of the apparatus that does not end is sustained by institutional interest. Some of it does not end because the danger genuinely has not ended, and reading that second kind as if it were the first is exactly the error a lens makes when it has fallen in love with its own sharpness. The residue the security reading left behind was real. The residue this reading leaves behind, the portion of continued mobilisation that is simply warranted, is real too, and a fuller account would have to hold both.

That is not a retreat from the systems reading. It is the systems reading applied once more, to itself. The test was never whether a lens explains. It was whether it reaches something the others leave behind, and the same test, turned on the systems lens, finds its limit in turn.

The control case

A method built on a single hard case might be a method, or might be an elaborate way of saying one thing about one country. The way to tell is to run it somewhere else and see whether it was secretly shaped to fit the first example. Russia serves, and serves precisely because it is the easy case, the one already read through systems language so often that the reading risks preaching to the converted.

The ordinary account is territory, spheres of influence, security, historical claim, buffer zones. It explains the appetite for control. What it explains less easily is the willingness to bear costs, economic, diplomatic, demographic, that seem out of all proportion to the security the control was meant to buy. The residue there points to a different lens, the one about leverage mistaken for the thing it was leverage over. Buffer zones were once a means to security. The lens worth trying is the one in which the means has become the end, security treated as a stock to be held in territory rather than a relationship that has to be produced and reproduced. Stored security ages. A system that does not trust relationships tries to bank safety in ground, and banked safety decays, and the decay calls for more ground, in a reinforcing loop: more insecurity, more control, more resistance, more insecurity. The same shape, reached from a different residue. And the same discrimination applies: a permanent-mobilisation lens would explain some of this too, the war economy that now has constituencies, but it leaves untouched the willingness to keep paying after the mobilisation has stopped buying anything, which is the part the leverage lens reaches and the part that earns it here.

This is deliberately brief. The point is not to analyse Russia, which others have done at length, but to show that the move, residue first, lens second, lands on a different lens here than it did for Israel. That is the evidence that the method is a method and not a verdict wearing a method’s clothes. Two cases, two residues, two lenses. Had the same lens fitted both equally well, that would have been the warning sign, the frame finding its pattern everywhere.

It is worth being plain that the two cases are not being equated. They are a test and a control, not a comparison, and the symmetry of putting them in one essay should not be read as a claim that the situations are alike. What they share is only that each leaves a residue the usual reading does not reach, and that in each the residue points somewhere specific. Where it points is different.

Choosing

So the rule, if it is a rule, is not a list of lenses with instructions for when to apply each. It is a single habit, applied before any lens is chosen: give the ordinary explanation its full due, withhold nothing from it, and then look hard at what it has not touched. If nothing is left over, no systems lens is needed, and reaching for one would only be the frame manufacturing a pattern. If something is left over, the lens worth trying is the one that reaches that specific thing, and the lens is worth keeping only as long as it goes on reaching it without quietly starting to read everything else through it as well.

Which means the real subject was never Israel or Russia. It was the reader holding the lens, and the discipline of noticing what the lens makes invisible while it is busy making one thing clear. Every map leaves something off. A map of passages leaves off the people downstream of them. A lens that finds permanent mobilisation leaves off the threat that is really there. This account leaves off something too, and the same method that found the residue in the cases will, turned on this essay, find the residue in it. That last finding is left to the reader, because finding it is the whole of what the method is for.

The map is mostly bottlenecks

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

The usual way of reading the contest over resources is to look at where they are. Whose ground holds the oil, the gas, the rare earths, the cobalt. On that picture power follows the deposit, and the country sitting on the richest seam holds the strongest hand. It is the picture behind a great deal of the current talk about resource grabs, and it is wrong in a way that the talk mostly misses.

The thing it misses is that raw material in the ground is close to useless until it has moved and been processed, and movement and processing happen at a small number of narrow points. A barrel of Gulf oil has to pass through a strait to reach a buyer. A tonne of Congolese cobalt has to pass through a refinery to become a battery. The deposit is spread across the map; the control sits at the chokepoints the material is forced through on its way to being useful. Read that way, the map of the world’s resources is mostly a map of bottlenecks, and the contest is over who holds them.

Two kinds of bottleneck

There are two sorts, and keeping them apart makes the rest legible.

The first is physical: the narrow sea passages through which seaborne trade is funnelled. The figures are routinely public, from the US Energy Information Administration. The Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and Oman, carries around 20 million barrels of oil a day, close to a fifth of world consumption, and there is no overland route of comparable size: only Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pipelines that can go round it at all. The Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, carries even more, and it is the single passage through which most of the Middle East’s oil reaches East Asia. A handful of others, Suez and Bab-el-Mandeb, the Danish and Turkish straits, the Panama Canal, carry the rest. Whoever can close or threaten one of these can raise the cost of trade for everyone downstream of it, without owning a single barrel.

That is not a hypothetical at the moment of writing. After fighting between the United States, Israel and Iran escalated early in 2026, Iran largely closed shipping through Hormuz, and US forces have been working to reopen it since, with a blockade in place and an exchange of strikes that was still going on this week, coastal radar sites hit after drones were launched toward the strait. The point of a chokepoint, in other words, is being demonstrated in real time: a single state astride a single passage can throttle a fifth of the world’s oil, and the cost lands on everyone downstream whether they are party to the quarrel or not.

The second is industrial, and less visible because it has no postcode in the way a strait does. It is the refinery, the smelter, the processing plant. Critical minerals are mined in many places, but the concentration analysis is consistent across sources: the great majority of them, whatever the country of origin, pass through China to be turned into anything usable. The figures cited tend to cluster around 60% of the world’s lithium and cobalt refining and close to 90% of rare-earth processing, with the share for the heavy rare earths that go into high-performance magnets and defence electronics higher still. The ore can come from Australia or Congo or Chile; the gate it has to pass through to become a magnet or a battery is in one country.

Both are the same shape. The material is dispersed and the passage is concentrated, and power lives at the passage, not at the source.

What the bottleneck is worth

A bottleneck is only leverage if its holder is willing to tighten it, and the past year has shown what tightening looks like. It is rarely a full closure, because a full closure is a blunt instrument that hurts the holder too. It is the quieter version: an export licence delayed, a permit held up for review, a quota adjusted. When one country processes nine-tenths of a material, those small frictions are enough to raise costs and bend outcomes across whole industries downstream, which is why the reporting on China’s mineral controls describes them less as an embargo than as a dial. The goal is not to stop the flow but to be visibly able to.

This is the part the deposit-centred reading cannot see, and it is worth dwelling on because it recurs. The leverage is not the stuff. It is the position the stuff has to pass through, and the willingness to constrict it. A country with huge reserves and no processing capacity has a weak hand; a country with little in the ground but most of the world’s refineries has a strong one. The contest is not really about owning resources. It is about owning the passages, and about whether the others have anywhere else to go.

The map beneath the map

Everything up to here is the lens: power sits at the bottleneck, not the source. What follows is a reading through that lens, which is a different and more tentative thing. Set the current scramble against the bottleneck map and a good deal of it falls into place, though the fit is something a reader supplies rather than finds, and the pattern can be overstated. Not every move is about passages; some are about domestic politics, or a leader who likes the look of a map with more of it coloured in. But enough of them line up that the map begins to read differently.

China holds the industrial bottleneck and appears to be building toward the physical ones. The processing dominance is the strong card, the one already played in the form of export controls. Alongside it runs what looks like a long campaign to secure the sources that feed the refineries and the routes that carry them: ownership of much of Congo’s cobalt production, investment in ports and infrastructure along the trade routes, a stake in Arctic gas. The deposit and the strait seem to be gathered toward the same hand that already holds the refinery.

Russia holds a different bottleneck, the northern one. Its Arctic territories carry the bulk of its gas and a long stretch of coastline along a sea route that, as the ice retreats, is becoming a passage between Europe and Asia that runs outside the straits everyone else depends on. A route that bypasses the chokepoints is itself a kind of anti-chokepoint, a way around the leverage others hold, and it is one reason the Arctic has drawn so much sudden attention from states that are not anywhere near it.

The United States, on this reading, looks more like the player reacting than the one setting the terms, which is not how the louder version of the story goes. Several of its recent moves line up with the bottleneck map. The move to bring Venezuela’s oil back under friendly control, in the country holding the hemisphere’s largest reserves; the campaign against Iran, a major oil supplier to China and the state on one shore of Hormuz; the convening of some fifty countries to build mineral supply chains that route around China. None of these makes much sense as a grab for material the United States itself is short of. They make more sense as attempts to deny passages to a rival, which is a different motive wearing the clothes of the first. Greenland fits the pattern less neatly, and is worth separating out: less a chokepoint than a bid to build alternatives to the ones others hold, rare-earth deposits outside Chinese control and a position on Arctic routes that bypass the existing straits. The denial and the alternative are two sides of the same concern, but they are not the same move, and lumping them flattens the difference.

Who is sitting on the passages

If the contest is about passages, one thing worth looking at is how many of them already have a military presence sitting on them, and how that presence has taken on fresh significance. This is less a sudden land-grab than a set of old positions acquiring new weight. Around Hormuz the change is real and recent: a naval blockade and an air campaign that did not exist a year ago. Elsewhere the bases are long-standing and the shift is one of emphasis. Diego Garcia, the base in the Chagos archipelago that sits in the middle of the Indian Ocean between Hormuz and Malacca, has been held for decades, but its status has become contested enough that Chatham House described the surrounding posture as a “Donroe Doctrine”, a Monroe-style claim to spheres of influence stretched across an ocean. Djibouti, the small Horn-of-Africa state commanding the approach to Bab-el-Mandeb, has hosted foreign bases for years, but now hosts the armed forces of several rival powers at once, which is its own kind of signal. And Oman, controlling the far shore of Hormuz, is a case of diplomatic pressure rather than military positioning: it has so far resisted American pressure to break with Iran. The pattern is not that the passages are suddenly being seized. It is that the positions already on them are being read, and used, through the lens of who they let one squeeze.

The same reading can be run from the other direction, and is worth running, to keep it honest: China’s long campaign of port-building along its trade routes, and Russia’s grip on the Arctic coastline, fit the same logic. A passage is only leverage if it can be held, and the holders tend to turn up in person, with ships and bases, at the narrow places. That is a tendency the bottleneck frame brings into focus. It is not proof that every base was placed with a chokepoint in mind.

What the documents say the motive is

It is worth being careful here, because motive is usually the part a reader supplies. In this case there is a little less guessing to do than usual, because one relevant document is fairly direct. The US National Defense Strategy published in January 2026 sets out a hierarchy: defending the homeland and deterring China at the top, everything else secondary. As summarised by the analysts who read it, it names Greenland, the Panama Canal, and the Gulf of Mexico as terrain to be controlled, in what they took as a revived Monroe-style claim to the hemisphere, and it frames the China contest as the organising one, pursued through what it calls deterrence by denial. The wording is worth reading first-hand rather than through a summary, this one included, but the direction the document points is not much in dispute.

Denial is the word that ties the map together. The point of the chokepoint, in that frame, is not to feed oneself but to be able to starve a rival. Venezuela and Iran both supply oil to China; pressure on them is pressure on China’s intake. Greenland sits on routes and resources a rival would otherwise reach; holding it is denial. Read through the strategy’s own logic, the scattered grabs are a single campaign to control what China has to pass through, answered by China’s existing control of what everyone else has to pass through. The fear driving it is not imagined: the rival’s grip on processing is real and has already been used. The question the documents cannot settle is whether the answer fits the fear.

What the passages cost

A bottleneck does two things with cost, and a map shows neither. The first is that it concentrates the leverage for the few who hold a passage and distributes the damage to the many who merely live downstream of it. When Hormuz tightened this year, the oil price went above a hundred dollars a barrel and stayed there, and the World Food Programme reported the result reaching far beyond the Gulf: an additional 2.5 million people pushed into acute hunger in Somalia, another 2.3 million in Afghanistan, another 1.3 million in Sri Lanka. None of those places has any stake in who controls the strait. They were reached through the price of the fuel and food that has to pass through it, which is the quiet violence of a chokepoint: the pressure is applied at one narrow point by people who can see exactly what they are doing, and the harm surfaces a continent away among people who never appear in the calculation.

The second is subtler and runs the other way. Thinking of the world as a set of passages to be held or denied does not only describe places; it turns them into passages, including the ones that are also countries where people live. Ukraine is the clearest case. Its support against invasion has been tied, through the reconstruction fund signed in 2025, to a half-share of the revenue from its own lithium, titanium, graphite and rare earths, a deal struck while the war was still being fought. Read through the bottleneck lens, a country fighting for its survival becomes a deposit to be secured and a corridor to be kept open, and the reading is not wrong, which is the trouble. The frame works. It is just that what it sees, when it looks at a place, is the passage and not the people, and a way of seeing that reliably looks past the inhabitants tends, over time, to be a way of treating them as though they were not there.

Congo sits in the same position from the other end of the supply line, its cobalt a line item in everyone else’s battery, its mines largely owned from elsewhere. The downstream poor and the resource-rich both vanish into the diagram the same way: as quantities at the ends of the arrows, not as the point of the exercise.

Where this reading runs out

The honest limits. A bottleneck map shows where leverage could be applied; it does not show that it will be, or that applying it will work. It is sometimes said that the threats are safe enough because carrying them out is too disruptive for anyone to actually want to, but Hormuz this year is the standing rebuttal: the strait was closed, the blockade and the strikes followed, and the disruption arrived. The map shows the loaded positions. It does not show the restraint that was once assumed to come with them, because that restraint turns out not to be reliable.

It is also a reading that flatters its own coherence, and it is worth treating as a warning rather than a confirmation. Laid out as a single argument about passages, the world’s resource politics looks almost tidy, every move slotting into the pattern. Real decisions are messier, driven by domestic politics, personal conviction, accident, and motives that have nothing to do with cobalt. The bottleneck frame catches something true, and will, like any frame that catches something true, tempt the reader into seeing it everywhere. Some are about ambition, or habit, or a leader improvising, and have nothing to do with passages at all.

And the frame is silent on the cost of the contest itself. Treating the world as a set of passages to be seized or denied is a way of thinking that tends to produce the very rivalry it claims to manage. A country that fences its supply chains against a rival teaches the rival to fence back, and the bottlenecks that were meant to provide security become the places where a small friction can escalate into something larger. It is the same mechanism that plays out elsewhere on the scale of a single ruler, where holding the leverage gets mistaken for holding the relationship that gives it force: the grip tightens, and the thing it was meant to secure quietly rearranges itself out of reach. Whether the scramble leaves anyone safer, or simply converts a web of trade into a row of trigger points, is not a question the map can answer. The map shows where the pressure can be applied. It says nothing about whether a world organised around applying it is one worth building.

The centre that depends on the room

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:00:00 +0000

The usual way of reading power treats it as a possession. Someone holds the leverage or they do not; the troops, the money, the umbrella, the seat at the head of the table. On that picture the strong actor is the one who can hurt the others more than they can hurt back, and the others arrange themselves accordingly because they have no better option. It is a tidy model, and it is wrong in a particular way that takes a while to show.

The thing it misses is that leverage and relationship are not the same object. Leverage is the means of pressure: the capacity to withhold, to punish, to raise the cost of leaving. The relationship is the standing arrangement by which others orient themselves around the holder, defer, buy what is sold, hold the line that is drawn, treat his priority as theirs. The first looks like the source of power. The second usually is. And the second is not owned. It is granted, continuously, by the people doing the orienting, and it can be withdrawn the same way, which is the part the holder of the leverage tends not to see until it is happening.

Stock and flow

It helps to borrow two words from systems work. A stock is a thing that sits there: water in a tank, money in an account, a stockpile of weapons. A flow is a rate, a thing that only exists while it is happening: water through a pipe, income, the daily act of an ally choosing, again, to be an ally. Stocks persist through inattention. Flows do not. Once the tap is shut the flow is simply gone, however full the tank once looked.

The recurring mistake is to treat a flow as if it were a stock. To look at decades of deference, or sympathy, or the willingness of neighbours to stay inside an arrangement, and to read it as a reserve held in hand rather than a rate others keep up. It feels like a stock because it has been there so long. It behaves like a flow, because the moment the choosing stops, the standing it produced starts to drain, and no amount of leverage refills it, since leverage was never what filled it.

The same shape, three times

There is the actor who holds a real and genuine guarantee over others, and who begins to treat the guarantee as a thing he owns rather than a promise others have to keep believing. He leans on it, threatens to withdraw it, uses it to extract better terms, on the assumption that the deference it bought will stay put while the guarantee itself is openly in question. What he overlooks is that the deference was the flow and the guarantee only the tap. Those who oriented around him did so because the promise was credible; spend the credibility and the orientation goes with it, not at once, but steadily, and the relationships he thought he held turn out to have been a rate all along. Worse, the orienting was itself the larger part of his power, the part that came free: the buying of his goods, the following of his lead, the treating of his interest as the default. Threaten the small thing, the guarantee, and the large thing, the standing, quietly begins to leave with it.

There is the actor who has long enjoyed the support of a powerful patron and a sympathetic audience, and who spends both as though they were inexhaustible. Each call on that support draws it down; each act that assumes the sympathy will hold makes a little less of it hold. Because the reserve was large and old, the drawing-down is invisible for a long while, which is exactly the trap. He reads the absence of immediate consequence as proof that the support is a stock, a thing he has, when it was a flow all along, kept up by others’ continuing willingness to extend it. By the time the flow has thinned to a trickle, the habit of treating it as owned is too settled to break, and the surprise, when it comes, arrives as betrayal rather than as the predictable end of a rate that was never replenished.

There is the actor who holds a circle together by raising the cost of leaving it. Stay, and life is bearable; leave, and it is ruinous. This looks like control, and for as long as nobody tests it, it is indistinguishable from loyalty. But coercion buys compliance, not allegiance, and the difference is invisible precisely until the moment it counts, when the pressure is most needed and least able to summon anything beyond what it can force. A circle held by the cost of exit has no reserve of willing attachment to fall back on. And the act of tightening the grip is the very thing that teaches the members to look for the exit, so that each turn of the screw, meant to secure them, instead rehearses their leaving. The ones who break away first do not return when the cost is raised again; the raising is what drove them, and the leaving, once done, does not reverse.

Three figures, three different reserves, one shape. In each case the holder mistakes the means of pressure for the relationship it sits on, treats a flow as a stock, and is blindsided by a drainage that his own pressure accelerates rather than prevents.

Why the drainage does not reverse

There is a second thing the possession-model hides, and it is the one that makes the mistake expensive rather than merely embarrassing. Some processes do not run backwards. Heat a piece of metal and let it cool and it does not return to the arrangement it had before; it keeps a memory of having been bent. Relationships of the kind described here behave the same way. Once an ally has built its own capability, found its own partners, learned to do without the centre it used to orbit, removing the pressure does not restore the orbit. The investment in independence is real, and it stays real after the threat that prompted it has passed. A partner can be pushed away and not, on later reflection, pulled back to where it was, because in the interval it became something that no longer needs the centre in the old way.

This is why the timing of the realisation is always wrong. The pressure appears to work, because the first response to it is the visible pain of the one being pressured, and pain reads as leverage doing its job. The drainage of the relationship is slower, quieter, and shows up only later, by which point it has set. The holder is reading the early signal, the flinch, and missing the late one, the quiet reorganisation of everyone around him into an arrangement that no longer has him at its centre.

The group reforms without its centre

The deepest part of the blind spot is the assumption of being indispensable, of being the fixed point around which the others arrange themselves. But a centre is a position in a network, not a property of the thing occupying it. The network can re-centre. The allies can orient around each other instead, or around a different partner, or around a newly built capability of their own. The patron’s sympathy can migrate to other recipients. The captive circle can find that its members have quietly agreed among themselves that the cost of leaving, borne together, is bearable after all. In none of these cases does the former centre get a vote. The reorganisation happens around him, and the first he tends to hear of it is when his pressure, applied as usual, produces nothing.

To state the mistake plainly: the holder confuses the leverage he has over others with independence from them, when in fact it was the arrangement of those others around him that carried his position, and that arrangement is theirs to withdraw.

Where the lens reaches its edge

It would be neat to conclude that every hard, coercive actor makes this mistake. The neatness is the warning. It is exactly the kind of conclusion a single lens produces when it has stopped seeing anything else.

The pattern is real, but it is not a law. Plenty of pressure works. Plenty of coercive arrangements last a very long time. Plenty of guarantees are used carefully rather than squandered. The mistake is not coercion itself. It is forgetting that the relationship beneath it is continuously maintained rather than permanently owned.

The clearest evidence is the actor who does not make the mistake. Some people hold exactly the same leverage, the indispensable position, the thing others need, yet never confuse it with ownership. They keep the wider game in view, extract value from their position without consuming it, and avoid pushing any relationship past the point of no return. From the outside they can look just as hard-nosed or opportunistic as everyone else. The difference lies entirely in how they understand their position. They see it not as something they possess, but as something that continues to be granted.

The possession model of power is not wrong because leverage is unreal. It is wrong because it stops at the leverage itself and ignores the arrangement that gives it force. That arrangement is made of other people’s continuing choices. It can be withdrawn.

A shape of European rearmament

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows by now that Europe is rearming. That part is easy to write and carries almost nothing, because “investing in defence” survives any amount of vagueness. The interesting reading sits a little lower down, in the documents that have to name things: how much money, raised in what way, spent on what, through which legal route, under whose command. Those are harder to write and harder to take back, because somebody has to act on them. Read side by side, they sketch a shape, and the shape says more than the announcements do.

None of what follows is secret. It is all published, on the European Commission’s own sites, in the European Parliament’s own papers, in think-tank reports anyone can download. The work is just in putting the pieces next to each other, which is a thing anyone can do with a free afternoon, and which tends to show outlines that no single document sets out to show.

The guarantor steps back

It helps to start with the cause, because for once it is written down rather than guessed at. The Commission’s defence white paper, from March 2025, says it about as directly as an official document ever says anything: the United States, long the main guarantor of European security, now believes it is over-committed in Europe and means to step back. The European Parliament, in its resolution on the same paper, put it more bluntly still, recording that the US “appears to have ceased to be a reliable ally within NATO”. Whatever one thinks of the wording, this is the institutions describing their own situation, not an outsider reading it onto them. Seventy years of assuming the Americans would be there, and then the assumption quietly coming up for review.

What followed was fast, and the speed itself turns out to be part of the story. The scale gives a sense of the register: at the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, the allies pledged to spend 5% of national income a year on defence and security by 2035, more than double the old 2% mark, split into 3.5% for core military forces and 1.5% for related things like infrastructure and industry. Whatever else that number is, it is a commitment to spend on a scale Europe has not contemplated since the Cold War.

The fast road round Parliament

There are now two big money instruments, and the difference between how they were made is more telling than either one on its own.

The first is called SAFE: up to €150 billion that the Commission borrows on the financial markets and lends on to member states for buying weapons together. According to the Parliament’s own briefing, it was built on an emergency article of the EU treaties, the kind meant for crises, which needs only the member-state governments to agree and leaves the elected Parliament out of the decision. It is the same article that was used to set up the COVID recovery fund. And it was done quickly: agreed in May 2025, a few months after it was proposed.

The second instrument, EDIP, does much the same sort of thing but went the ordinary way, through the Parliament as well as the governments. That route took about two years, from a proposal in early 2024 to final approval in December 2025.

So the same destination, reached by two roads: one fast and quiet, going round the body whose job is to ask questions, and one slow and noisy, going through it. There is nothing sinister in preferring the fast road in a hurry, and the hurry is real. But it is worth noticing which corners get cut when an institution is in a rush, because the corner that tends to go first is scrutiny. The Parliament noticed too; the same briefing records the worry about being sidelined and about leaning too hard on emergency measures. And the two big instruments are not the whole of it: a defence “simplification” omnibus proposed in June 2025 to thin out the legal and administrative framework, and a military-mobility package in November 2025 to move troops and equipment across the continent faster, both pull in the same direction, toward speed and away from friction. Each single decision to take the fast road looks small enough not to fuss over, and because they come one at a time, the pattern is hard to see until it has quietly become the normal way of doing things, at which point it is much harder to undo than any one decision would have been to stop.

The fence and the open gate

There is a second tension hiding in the financing, and it is about the word “European”.

The €150 billion of jointly borrowed money comes with a string attached: at least 65% of what it buys, by value, has to come from inside the EU, its close neighbours, or Ukraine. Buy European, in other words. The newer EDIP programme sharpens the same idea, capping non-European components at 35% and barring parts from countries whose interests clash with the EU’s.

But that fence only goes round the shared pot. Alongside it, member states have been let off their normal spending limits so they can each spend up to 1.5% of national income a year on defence, which the Commission reckons could add up to something like €650 billion. That is the far bigger number, and it carries no such string at all. Each country decides on its own where the money goes, and nothing stops it going across the Atlantic. So the smaller, shared pot is the one fenced to European industry, and the much larger, national pot is left open. For all the talk of standing on Europe’s own feet, the bulk of the actual spending is left free to wander wherever each capital prefers.

Drones, and the wiring between them

Drop down one more level, to the shopping list, and the vagueness disappears entirely, because here the documents have to name things and put prices on them. The European Defence Fund’s 2025 plan spreads about a billion euros across roughly fifteen budgeted categories, broken down into named items. The single biggest slice, €192 million, goes to ground combat, and one line inside it reads “drone-based affordable mass munitions”, which is procurement-speak for cheap attack drones made in quantity. That is the lesson of Ukraine written straight into a budget. There is money for watching from space, for fighter aircraft, for a “naval combat cloud”, for defending undersea cables, for cyber.

Two threads run through the whole list rather than sitting in one place. One is artificial intelligence and machines that act on their own, woven through the drones and the sensors and the systems meant to tie everything together. The other is exactly that tying-together: a great deal of the money goes on getting separate national systems to talk to each other. That kind of spending is what happens when a single big partner can no longer be assumed to supply the glue. An alliance confident the Americans will provide the connecting wiring does not generally pay to build its own. That one is worth holding on to. It comes back when the shape gets clearer.

Names early, money later

The obvious next question is who pockets all this, and here the open record is honest about its own limits, which is worth being honest about in turn.

The breadth is real and visible. The latest round of fund projects involves more than 600 different organisations across the member states and Norway, and small companies make up well over a third of the participants. The rules push that way on purpose: a project needs partners from at least three different countries to qualify, so the money cannot simply pool in one national champion.

What is harder to see is where, inside all those consortia, the money actually settles. The Commission publishes promptly which companies are in which project, but not how much each of them takes home: the factsheets name the members of a consortium, not the split between them, and they leave out the affiliated entities and subcontractors entirely. A great many small firms taking part is not the same as a great many small firms getting paid, and the figures for who received how much in the most recent round are not settled yet; the independent trackers that piece them together say that will not be done until well into 2026. So the list of names arrives early and the money-trail arrives later and more quietly, which is its own small lesson about which facts a system makes easy to find. For now the honest answer is that the participation looks broad and the concentration is not yet readable, and the gap between those two is a thing to keep an eye on rather than a thing to conclude from.

The official line, and the other one

Money and weapons are the visible half. The harder half, and the more interesting one, is what shape all this is meant to fit into, because a pile of drones and a combat cloud are not a defence; they are parts waiting for an architecture. And here the official line and the working assumption seem to be pulling in different directions, sometimes in the same week.

The official line is steady and often repeated: NATO is the cornerstone, all of this is complementary, nobody is walking away from the alliance. In late January 2026 the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, told the European Parliament that anyone who thinks Europe can defend itself without the United States should “keep on dreaming”. He was specific about the price of going it alone: not the agreed 5% of national income but 10%, and a home-grown nuclear capability costing billions, because the alternative is losing what he called the ultimate guarantor of European freedom, the US nuclear umbrella. That is the position as it appears on the news, and it is not posturing; it is largely true. America still supplies the bulk of the alliance’s actual fighting strength, something like 75,000 troops still stationed across Europe, and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s top military officer, has been an American without exception since the post was created in 1951.

And yet the official choir does not sing in unison. A few weeks later, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, the European Commission’s own president, Ursula von der Leyen, took the opposite tack, calling for Europe to bring its own mutual-defence clause to life and stating flatly that mutual defence is not optional for the EU but an obligation under its treaty. The head of the EU’s executive, pressing in public for European self-reliance days after the head of NATO told Europe to keep dreaming about it. Two senior figures, two halves of the same coin, held up at once. The think-tank world has a useful name for the resulting condition: “Schrödinger’s NATO”, an alliance in which the United States appears both committed to it and absent from it at the same time, formally inside while behaving as though it were halfway out the door.

The Americans, for their part, also made some more noise. The US National Defense Strategy published on 23 January 2026 reordered priorities openly: defending the homeland and deterring China sit at the top, and everything else, Europe included, is secondary. The document tells European allies they will take primary responsibility for their own defence, with what it calls more limited US support.

The tells in the structure

If the official line were the whole truth, the spending and the institutional fidgeting would not make much sense. Nobody prepares for a thing they are confident will not happen. The more revealing reading is to treat the words as a reassurance and the structure as intention, and to ask what the structure seems to be quietly getting ready for.

The clearest single tell sits at the very top of the command chain. There has been open, serious discussion of appointing a European to the role of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the post an American has always held. There is no legal obstacle; the founding treaty never specified the commander’s nationality. On its own it is a personnel question. As a signal it is a bit louder than that: nobody rehearses handing over the top military job without imagining a day when the current holder’s country is no longer the one in charge.

The second tell is nuclear, and it is the sharpest of all, because nuclear deterrence is exactly the thing the United States currently provides and exactly the thing a Europe-without-America would have to find for itself. Rutte named this as the clinching argument for why going alone is folly: lose the Americans and the umbrella goes with them, and replacing it costs billions.

The striking thing is that the conversation he meant as a warning is already under way. At the Ile-Longue submarine base on 2 March 2026, the French president set out a doctrine of “forward deterrence”, extending the idea of French nuclear protection to its neighbours and announcing the first increase in France’s warhead count since 1992. He had already raised aloud, earlier in the year, whether the survival of France’s closest partners might be bound up with France’s own vital interests, which in the careful language of nuclear policy is a very large question to ask at all. This did not come from nowhere: France and the United Kingdom had signed a declaration in July 2025 pledging to deepen their nuclear coordination, and there is now open talk of formalising nuclear discussion among Europe’s main military powers, the so-called E5. Nobody builds a shared nuclear conversation as a hobby. It is the kind of thing that only becomes worth the political pain if the American umbrella can no longer simply be assumed: the very scenario Rutte called dreaming is the one the nuclear talk is quietly costing out.

The third tell is the one already sitting in the procurement. The money going into a European combat cloud, a European reconnaissance constellation in space, the wiring to make separate national armies talk to one another, all of that is the material version of the same hedge. These are the connective and strategic functions the United States has supplied for decades. Buying them in-house is, in budget form, exactly what preparing to operate without the American backbone looks like. The white paper can call NATO the cornerstone in its text while the annexes quietly fund the means to stand without it. Both things are true at once, Schrödinger’s NATO means in practice.

And then there are the shocks that keep nudging the hedge from prudent option toward working assumption. The clearest was the early-2026 pressure on Denmark over Greenland, with Washington threatening tariffs and pointedly declining to rule out force against the territory of a fellow NATO member. When the supposed guarantor of the alliance starts leaning on a member of it, the question of how to manage without that guarantor stops being theoretical for everyone watching.

A NATO that can run on European hands

It would be easy, from all this, to leap to “Europe is building its own army” or “Europe is leaving NATO”. Neither is what the documents show, and the most recent and most detailed reading of the shape, a June 2026 policy paper from the European Council on Foreign Relations, is worth following because it is unusually clear-eyed about what will and will not work. It frames the task within a window of five to seven years, the period in which European generals reckon the risk of Russian aggression is highest, which is the clock the whole effort is running against.

What will not work, on its own, is a tidy grand design. A single integrated EU army, or an EU nuclear deterrent, puts the cart before the horse: the EU has never been given the command structures, the operational authority, or the mandate to run a large military operation, and its members are not about to hand those over. Decisions about sending people to die remain national, and will stay national. Nor can the EU’s own mutual-defence clause simply be swapped in for NATO’s Article 5; the machinery behind it does not exist. So the futuristic versions, the ones that make the headlines, are the parts least likely to happen.

What the paper sketches instead is more modest and more plausible, and it is the shape worth watching for. It has three layers, each built from something that already exists rather than from a grand new institution. NATO’s command structure stays as the operational backbone, only reorganised into sub-regional coalitions of European countries that share a threat and can act together quickly. The EU supplies what it is actually good at: the money, the industrial coordination, the pan-European legitimacy to hold the effort together. And flexible coalitions of the willing provide the speed, the ability to act when the formal institutions stall, for instance if triggering Article 5 gets delayed or blocked. The whole arrangement is designed, in the paper’s own summing-up, to let Europeans defend themselves with America where possible, with less America where necessary, and without America if it comes to that.

That formula is the shape, stated plainly. Not separation from NATO but a NATO that can run on European hands if the American ones let go. Not a new superstructure but a re-wiring of the existing one so it keeps working through a delay, a blockage, or an absence at the top. The drones and the combat cloud and the talk of a European commander and the careful French sentence about partners’ survival are not separate stories. They are the same preparation seen from different angles: the build-up of a defence that can stand on its own the day it has to, while saying, truthfully and for now, that it hopes not to have to.

Where the reading runs out

The budgets say what is being paid for, not whether it will ever be built, or work, or arrive in time; defence spending has a long history of money committed and kit not delivered. The headline €800 billion is mostly not EU money at all but hoped-for national spending that no one is actually obliged to make, so it may be the most quotable and least certain figure in the whole business.

The shape, too, is a reading and not a certainty. The same facts could be told as a story of loyal burden-sharing inside a healthy alliance, the Europeans paying their way, exactly as Washington has demanded for decades, with the hedging amounting to no more than sensible insurance. That telling is available, and parts of it are surely right. Which story turns out to be the true one depends on things that have not happened yet: whether the American troops stay, whether Article 5 is ever tested, whether the coalitions hold when frightened. The documents fix the preparations, not the outcome.

And none of it can reach the one thing most worth knowing, which sits furthest from any invoice or org chart: whether all this makes Europe safer, or only better armed, and whether a continent rehearsing how to fight without its old protector is steadying a dangerous moment or helping it along. A budget can say what a thing costs. A policy paper can sketch a command structure. Neither can say whether the whole endeavour was wise, and anyone claiming otherwise is doing the speeches’ trick again, this time with footnotes instead of fine words.

Reading the procurement, not the press release

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

A policy speech says what an institution wants to be seen wanting. A procurement document records what it has agreed to pay for. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is usually the more interesting reading. A press release costs nothing to write and binds no one. A call for tender names a budget, a deadline, a set of deliverables and a contract that someone will sign and then have to deliver against. Intentions are cheap. Commitments leave a paper trail, because somebody has to do the work and somebody has to account for the money.

That is the whole premise. To know where a system is actually heading, read the documents that commit resources, not the documents that announce ambitions. The European Union publishes both, in the open, and the procurement layer is more honest than the rhetoric layer for the simple reason that it is operational. Below is a way to read it, with European health data as the worked example, because that is where the method pays off most clearly right now.

How to read between the layers

The thing to understand first is that EU funding is not one document. It is a stack, and each layer is more concrete and less deniable than the one above it. Reading well means reading the transitions, not the individual documents.

At the top sits the work programme. For health this is an annual Commission Implementing Decision, a financing decision that sets the themes and allocates the budget for the year. The 2026 EU4Health call runs under the 2025 Work Programme, adopted by Commission decision in July 2025. This is the layer closest to rhetoric: it speaks in objectives and added value. But it already commits money to named themes, so it is the first place the intentions acquire a price.

Below that sit the calls for proposals, the grant invitations. Here the direction starts to show, because the Commission is offering to co-fund projects in specific directions and the directions are listed, costed, and given deadlines. This is the layer that shows what the institution wants others to build.

And below that, the calls for tender: the actual procurement. Not “we will co-fund your project in this direction” but “we are buying this service, here are the specifications, here is the ceiling”. A tender is the least deniable layer. Someone wrote a statement of work, someone will bid, someone will sign, and at the end there will be a contract notice naming the contractor and the value. With a signed contract, intention has become obligation.

The reading happens between the layers. A theme that appears in the work programme but never descends into a tender is talk. A tender that appears without a visible policy parent is worth a second look, because the money is moving ahead of the stated reason. And a theme that runs cleanly down all three layers, work programme to call to signed contract, is a direction the institution is actually committed to, whatever the surrounding language says.

What the documents say, before any interpretation

The codes themselves are readable once the grammar is clear. Take EU4H-2026-SANTE-PJ-04. It parses as programme (EU4Health), year, directorate (SANTE, health), instrument (PJ, a project grant), and a sequence number. Behind it sits a second internal code, CR/CV&NCD-g-25-16, which encodes the policy cluster: cardiovascular and non-communicable disease. The taxonomy is not hidden. It is sitting in the reference number, and it shows which bureaucratic drawer the money came out of.

The call fiche for the 2026 health grants lists nine topics. Three are cancer screening pilots, for gastric, lung and prostate cancer. Several are clinical: lifelong cardiovascular prevention, orphan medical devices for children, a medicine pricing tracker. But two of the nine are not about a disease at all. They are about data. Topic 04 is a flagship initiative to leverage AI and health data for cardiovascular care, framed as laying the foundations of a trusted European data ecosystem for health innovation. Topic 08, budget €14.4 million, is health data for biotech innovation leveraging the European Health Data Space, including the deployment of what the call calls AI factories.

The fiche also rewards close reading in a way summaries do not. Its history of changes records that for topic 04, the expected number of grant agreements was revised from one to “one or more”. A single line, but it shows the flagship was reconsidered: from a single large consortium to possibly several. The revisions are where the uncertainty shows.

Then drop a layer, to a tender. HADEA/2024/OP/0034, “support to stakeholders on secondary use of data within the European Health Data Space”, a ceiling of €1.5 million. This is not a grant for someone’s project. It is the Commission buying a service. Read the specification and the actual purchase is narrower and more telling than the title suggests: not data infrastructure, but coordination. The contractor is to build and nurture a community of practice for the secondary use of health data, support the governance procedures around it, and run the whole thing under a certified project management method. It is, in plain terms, a secretariat-and-facilitation contract for the human layer around HealthData@EU, the cross-border infrastructure for reusing health data.

The specification also rewards the method directly, because it names its own neighbours. It lists the adjacent initiatives the contractor is to work alongside: a 2023 capacity-building call, a joint action in which member states prepare for the reuse of data, the self-established community of practice of Health Data Access Bodies, the QUANTUM project labelling dataset quality, the HealthData@EU central services. One tender, and the whole surrounding constellation is legible from its reference list. There is no need to find the other documents; the document names them and shows how it sits among them. And the keystone: the contract was signed in November 2025. Intention became obligation. Someone is now doing this work.

So the chain is complete and visible, no rhetoric required: a work programme that prioritises a European Health Data Space, calls for proposals that fund AI on health data and biotech use of it, and a signed contract for the human scaffolding of secondary use. Three layers, one direction, money moving through all of them.

I am the one interpreting

Everything above is on the record. What follows is not. The moment the reading moves from “the documents say this” to “this means that”, it has crossed from reading into interpretation, and interpretation has an author with a position. Significance is not a property of the documents. It is something a reader assigns, and the reader is always somewhere, looking from a particular place with particular concerns. I am not exempt from that and neither is anyone who says what a tender “really means”. So take the next part as mine, not as the data’s.

What the procurement layer reads like to me is sequencing. The European Health Data Space runs as a continuous thread through every layer, and the operational support was bought ahead of the law that governs it. When this tender was let, in late 2024, the EHDS Regulation was still a provisional agreement, and the specification says so in a footnote: pending finalisation and publication in the Official Journal. The regulation has since been adopted, in February 2025, and entered into force that March. So on its own the timing is unremarkable: a regulation in provisional agreement is close to final, and procuring against it is a reasonable bet.

The sharper point is downstream of that. The regulation is in force, but the part this tender serves, the secondary use of health data, does not become applicable until March 2029. The community of practice, the governance procedures, the stakeholder coordination, all of it is being built now for a legal regime that does not bite for years. That is not a bet on a draft law. It is scaffolding erected well ahead of the thing it scaffolds, and the gap is measured in years, not months. The direction is being committed to, and staffed, long before the obligations it prepares for come into effect.

That is not a scandal and I do not want to inflate it into one. Building the human infrastructure ahead of the legal deadline is defensible, even sensible: a community of practice takes years to grow, and standing it up the week the obligations bite would be too late. But the order is legible, and the order is a choice. The money and the coordination are moving on a timeline of their own, set years ahead of the law’s, and that shows the direction is settled well before the public deadline that is supposed to mark its arrival. The documents do not say the order was wrong. They say what the order was, and that is already more than the press releases do.

There is a second thing the layering shows, quieter than the first. The disease topics in the call, the cancer screening, the cardiovascular prevention, are the visible health policy, the part that reads as care. The data topics are framed in the same language of health and innovation, but what is being built underneath is infrastructure: a durable, cross-border, reusable substrate for health data. Infrastructure outlasts the policy that justified it. Whatever the screening pilots achieve or fail to achieve, HealthData@EU will still be there, and the question of who governs it and on what terms is settled now, in tenders, while attention is on the diseases.

What the method leaves out

The honest part. A procurement document is a strong source precisely because it is narrow, and the narrowness cuts both ways. It records what was bought. It does not say whether the thing will work, whether it will be delivered on time or at all, or whether the contractor will quietly underperform against a specification nobody later checks. A signed contract is a commitment, not an outcome.

It also does not say who wins. A call names a ceiling and a scope; the award notice names a contractor, but the deeper question of which firms have built the capacity to bid on European health data infrastructure, and how few of them there are, is not answerable from any single document. The direction of the money is readable. What is not, from the procurement alone, is the concentration of the market that receives it. That requires reading across many awards over time, and even then the result is inference.

And the method is silent on the thing that counts for most and is the least visible: whether any of this improves anyone’s health. Procurement measures expenditure and deliverables, because those are what an institution can hold a contractor to. Health outcomes sit too far downstream, mediated by too many other systems, to be a line in a contract. So the documents that are most honest about what is being built are also structurally incapable of saying whether it was worth building. That is not a flaw in the reading. It is the boundary of it, and pretending otherwise would be the same move the press releases make, dressed in evidence instead of ambition.

The method gives direction, commitment, and sequence, read from documents that had to be honest because someone had to act on them. It gives those things and stops there. The step from “this is what they bought” to “this is what it means” is one a reader takes, from wherever they happen to be standing, and the most useful thing the method does is make that step visible as a step, rather than letting it pass as a reading of the facts.

Een transparantiewet die vindbaarheid eist

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Er is een gewoonte in detection engineering die een organisatie tijd kost om af te leren. Een team kijkt naar de waarschuwingen, de dashboards en de dekkingsrapporten, en beschouwt die als de plek waar detectie gebeurt. Dat is niet zo. Het is de plek waar detectie zichtbaar wordt. Het werk dat bepaalt of er iets te zien valt, gebeurde veel eerder en veel stiller, toen iemand koos wat er gelogd werd. Zonder vastgelegde gebeurtenis genereer je geen waarschuwing. De prijs van een ontbrekende log betaal je pas tijdens een incident, wanneer blijkt dat het spoor nooit heeft bestaan.

De Wet open overheid heeft eenzelfde vorm, en die analogie verklaart meer over waarom departementen ermee worstelen dan welke verklaring ook in termen van archiveren of compliance.

Vindbaarheid laat zich niet voorschrijven

De Woo verving in 2022 de oudere WOB en hield haar centrale belofte overeind: een burger mag om overheidsinformatie vragen en ontvangt die informatie, tenzij er een grond is om te weigeren. Dat verzoekrecht kent geen overgangsrecht en kan dus over oude besluitvorming gaan. Een verzoek dat vandaag binnenkomt kan een dossier van jaren terug raken. Daar komt bij wat de WOB niet had: een plicht om bepaalde categorieën informatie actief openbaar te maken zonder dat iemand erom vraagt. Het gaat om Zeventien categorieën, die stapsgewijs per koninklijk besluit verplicht worden. En daarnaast, langs een eigen beleidslijn, de beslisnota: de ambtelijke notitie waarin de afwegingen onder een besluit van een minister of staatssecretaris staan. Daar zit de moeite: een staat kan niet openbaar maken wat zij niet kan vinden, en geen wet kan vindbaarheid voorschrijven.

Twee lussen, één knoop

Hoeveel iemand vastlegt op het moment van besluiten bepaalt hoe reconstrueerbaar het besluit later is. En reconstrueerbaarheid bepaalt hoeveel er aan de uitgang openbaar kan worden. Vastlegging voedt reconstrueerbaarheid en die voedt openbaarmaking. De wet grijpt aan op de laatste schakel, de openbaarmaking.

Op zichzelf werkt dat. Lage openbaarmaking wekt externe druk: een Woo-verzoek, een Kamervraag of een bevinding van de inspectie. Die druk trekt inzet naar de zichtbare laag: lakteams, publicatieportalen, openbaarmakingsprocessen. De inzet verhoogt de openbaarmaking. Dat is een balancing loop, het type dat zichzelf corrigeert. Dat is wat de wet bedoelt. De gemarkeerde relatie in de figuur is dat meer openbaarmaking de druk verlaagt. Dat sluit de loop.

Het probleem zit in de tweede lus, die een knoop deelt met de eerste. Aandacht is eindig. De inzet (mankracht, tijd, geld) die naar openbaarmaking (de zichtbare laag) gaat, komt uit dezelfde pot die anders naar vastlegging (ingang) zou gaan. Meer inzet op openbaarmaking betekent minder aandacht voor vastlegging, lagere reconstrueerbaarheid, lagere openbaarmaking, meer druk en weer meer inzet. Dat is een reinforcing loop. Hij werkt precies op de plek waar de balancing loop zou moeten corrigeren. Een departement kan de balancing loop niet harder laten lopen zonder de reinforcing loop mee te trekken. Aandacht (focus) is eindig en de druk zit op de uitgang, niet op de ingang.

Reconstrueerbaarheid is in de figuur als wolk getekend en niet als ovaal. Het is geen grootheid die het systeem geneigd is te meten. Haar meten zou vereisen dat een departement het oorspronkelijke besluit en de gronden ervan bijhoudt in een vorm die het later kan bevragen. En dat is juist wat erodeert wanneer inzet naar de uitgang vloeit. Het systeem kan heel scherp zien hoeveel het openbaar heeft gemaakt. Maar het kan niet makkelijk zien hoeveel van wat het besloot nog terughaalbaar is. Dat ontbreken van die maat is mede waarom de reinforcing loop ongezien blijft.

De Woo-instantie is de abstracte structuur met de ingevulde labels: vastleggen van het besluit en de gronden op het moment van besluiten, de reconstrueerbaarheid van hoe een besluit tot stand kwam, de omvang van de actieve openbaarmaking, de Woo- en toezichtdruk, en de inzet op openbaarmaking als de knoop waar beide lussen elkaar raken.

De detection-instantie heeft dezelfde topologie: telemetrie aan de ingang, reconstrueerbaarheid van wat er gebeurde (de wolk), dekking van waarschuwingen aan de uitgang, incident- en auditdruk, en inzet op tunen als de gedeelde knoop. De vertrouwde reflex wanneer een audit een gat vindt, is meer regels schrijven en meer dashboards bouwen. Dat is inzet op de zichtbare laag. Het is dezelfde lus, maar dan in operationele kleren.

De macht blijft buiten schot

Hier houdt de structurele analyse op neutraal te zijn. Het is de moeite waard om voorzichtig te zijn met de volgorde. Het mechanisme hierboven werkt, of iemand het nu bedoeld heeft of niet. Maar zodra het werkt, is de plek waar de wet de druk aanlegt een keuze.

Een vastleggingsplicht aan de ingang geldt voor de persoon die beslist, op het moment dat hij beslist. Een openbaarmakingsplicht aan de uitgang geldt voor een latere ambtenaar, vaak een andere, die moet vinden en vrijgeven wat wel of niet is vastgelegd. De vastleggingsplicht grijpt in op het moment van machtsuitoefening. De openbaarmakingsplicht grijpt pas achteraf in op de administratie. Een wet die transparantie vraagt door op de uitgang aan te grijpen, kiest het punt dat de uitoefening van macht het minst verstoort. Dat de eis aan het verkeerde eind van het systeem landt voor het voortbrengen van de gewenste eigenschap, is niet alleen een technisch feit. Het is ook een feit over wie de wet ontziet.

Ik wil dit niet overdrijven tot intentie. Het punt is structureel, geen uitspraak over motieven. Maar de structuur treft niet iedereen even zwaar. En die asymmetrie opmerken is iets anders dan alleen de lussen zien.

Verloren blijft verloren

Beide lussen zijn vatbaar voor interventie. Een departement kan de balancing loop morgen al harder laten lopen: meer capaciteit (inzet) voor openbaarmaking, meer portalen, meer mensen. Het kan de reinforcing loop onderbreken door het aangrijpingspunt naar de ingang te verplaatsen. Dan voedt de inzet de vastlegging in plaats van haar leeg te trekken. Beide interventies liggen binnen handbereik.

Aan het vastleggen van gisteren valt niets meer te doen. De schakel van vastlegging naar reconstrueerbaarheid loopt alleen vooruit in de tijd. Wat een departement gisteren niet heeft vastgelegd, halen beide lussen niet terug. Telemetrie die niet is verzameld, is er gewoon niet. Een besluitvormingsspoor dat niet is vastgelegd op het moment van besluiten, is achteraf niet te reconstrueren zonder de reconstructie zelf verdacht te maken. De lussen beschrijven wat een systeem nog kan beïnvloeden. Over een verleden dat nooit is opgeschreven, zeggen ze niets.

De wet erkent dit zelf, maar schuin. De actieve openbaarmakingsplicht geldt niet met terugwerkende kracht: zij geldt alleen voor documenten die zijn opgesteld of ontvangen nadat de plicht voor het bestuursorgaan inging. De wetgever vraagt het oude bestand dus niet alsnog actief naar buiten. Dat lijkt een praktische overgangsmaatregel, maar het is ook een stilzwijgende toegift. Je kunt niet verplichten openbaar te maken wat niet vindbaar is vastgelegd. Dus stelt de wet het verleden vrij in plaats van het op te eisen. Het verzoekrecht kent die vrijstelling niet en kan oude besluitvorming wel raken. Daar bijt de reconstrueerbaarheid: een verzoek over een dossier van jaren terug stuit op wat toen wel of niet is vastgelegd. Geen openbaarmakingsproces aan de uitgang verandert daar iets aan.

Het compliance-kader doet alsof het onhaalbare haalbaar is: hard werken tot het verleden terugkomt. Maar niemand neemt dat serieus. Wat wel klopt, is dat een deel van het verleden structureel weg is. Het nuttige is om dat als ontbrekend te registreren in plaats van een plausibele versie te fabriceren. Een departement dat kan zeggen welke periodes van zijn eigen besluitvorming niet meer reconstrueerbaar zijn, doet iets preciezers en nuttigers dan een departement dat een openbaarmaking produceert over een verslag dat er nooit echt was.

Dezelfde lus elders

Dit is hetzelfde mechanisme als in de stabiliteit van disfunctie, maar dan vanuit een andere hoek. Aanpassen aan een probleem is goedkoper dan de oorzaak wegnemen. Aanpassen kan lokaal, maar correctie vraagt om coördinatie. Openbaarmaking onder druk is aanpassing aan slechte vindbaarheid. Ze absorbeert het symptoom, één verzoek tegelijk, zonder de vastleggingspraktijk te raken die het symptoom voortbrengt. De wolk rond reconstrueerbaarheid is hetzelfde type als die rond de verschoven baseline: ongemeten, omdat meten zou betekenen dat het systeem iets vasthoudt waarvoor het niet wordt beloond.

Wie ooit een verouderd systeem heeft moeten vervangen terwijl het oude bleef storen, kent de lus van binnenuit. Energie en tijd gaan zitten in het blussen van brandjes in het oude systeem. Dus komt het nieuwe later en moet het oude langer mee. Het symptoom van vandaag trekt de inzet weg van de oorzaak van morgen. Die aandacht komt uit dezelfde eindige voorraad.

Niets hiervan zegt dat de wet verkeerd is. Actieve openbaarmaking is een redelijke eis aan een staat. De observatie is alleen preciezer: een eis aan de uitgang kan geen eigenschap voortbrengen die aan de ingang ontstaat. Druk alleen dicht dat gat niet. Wat het wel kan dichten, is veranderen wat een ambtenaar vastlegt op het moment dat zij besluit. En dat is de enige plek in de lus waar bijna niemand kijkt.

The stability of dysfunction

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The stability of dysfunction

Many discussions of large systems quietly assume that a stable system is a healthy one, and an unstable system is a sick one. Complex systems tend to violate that intuition. They can remain operational for a very long time without becoming any healthier, and they possess several mechanisms that let them do so. Normalisation is one of those mechanisms. It is not the whole story.

The whole story, if there is one, is that persistence and health are different properties, and large systems are often much better at achieving the first than the second.

It can help to separate the mechanisms, because each one explains a different puzzle.

Adaptation instead of correction

This explains why problems can persist despite widespread recognition.

A city with chronic housing shortages, an organisation with broken procurement, a state with dysfunctional institutions: none of these is necessarily unable to see the problem. The difficulty is that adapting to the problem is usually cheaper than removing its causes.

People learn to commute further, fill in more forms, build workarounds, hire consultants, stand up shadow systems. The system continues functioning.

Correction tends to require coordinated action. Adaptation can happen locally, one tired decision at a time, which is part of why it wins.

The asymmetry runs deeper than convenience. Adaptation can be unilateral: a person, a team, a household can absorb a problem without anyone else agreeing to. Correction usually cannot. It tends to need coordination, agreement, investment, and a tolerance for delayed reward against concentrated and immediate cost. The people who would pay for the fix are rarely the same people who would benefit, and rarely at the same time. That gap may be the deepest reason unhealthy states endure at all: not that nobody wants the problem solved, but that adapting to it is something one party can do alone while solving it is something many parties would have to do together.

Feedback on survival rather than correctness

The link from normalisation back to departures runs through a baseline shift, and that is where the quiet part happens. Departures are counted against the original standard. Normalisation moves the operative standard, the one people actually work to, away from that original. So as a practice becomes normal, conformity to the new normal already counts as a departure from the old one, and the count rises even though nobody inside experiences themselves as departing from anything. The baseline shift is drawn as a cloud because it is not a quantity the system tends to measure: seeing it would require holding the original standard on record, which is exactly what normalisation erodes.

This explains why “bad” trajectories often reinforce themselves.

Large systems rarely receive direct feedback about truth, quality, or fitness. They receive feedback about whether they remain operational.

An organisation that survives another quarter reads that as success, regardless of whether its decisions were wise. A government that avoids immediate crisis reads that as success, regardless of whether underlying problems are accumulating. A civilisation that reaches next year reads that as success, regardless of whether its long-term resilience is improving or eroding.

Survival is observable. Correctness usually is not. A system that cannot see whether it is right can still see, very clearly, whether it has failed yet, and it tends to treat the absence of failure as the presence of correctness.

Goal displacement

This explains why institutions can become detached from the purpose they were built for.

The classic examples are bureaucracies, but the mechanism appears almost everywhere. Once an institution exists, it develops internal needs: budget, staffing, prestige, continuity, risk management. These are not necessarily corrupt. They are often prerequisites for staying in operation at all.

The trouble appears when preserving the institution gradually becomes more important than achieving the purpose for which it was created. The organisation survives. Its mission becomes the secondary concern. From inside, this is difficult to detect, because it happens slowly and every individual step looks like prudence.

Path dependence

This explains why arrangements that are obviously suboptimal remain difficult to change.

Complex systems inherit infrastructure, laws, standards, incentives, habits, and expectations. Every decision constrains the next. At any given moment alternatives may exist in principle, but reaching them means crossing a landscape that has been built around the current arrangement.

Many systems are less optimised than sedimented. What looks like a choice is often just the shape left behind by older choices nobody is in a position to revisit.

Normalisation and shifting baselines

These enter as perception mechanisms, and it is worth keeping them in that role rather than letting them take over the argument.

Normalisation is the process by which a pattern becomes treated as ordinary, expected, and unremarkable, while nothing about the underlying reality necessarily changes. What changes is the system’s relationship to it. A train from Woerden five minutes late once is a disruption; five minutes late every day and the schedule is quietly adjusted. An unsafe shortcut taken occasionally is rule-breaking; taken for years it becomes how things are done here. The system is reducing cognitive load, because constant surprise is expensive.

The sharper version comes from Diane Vaughan, who studied the Challenger disaster and described a normalisation of deviance: organisations gradually accept departures from their own standards when those departures keep failing to produce visible failure. A rule is violated, nothing bad happens, the violation is tolerated, tolerance becomes expectation, expectation becomes norm. Eventually the organisation is operating well outside its original safety assumptions while everyone involved experiences the situation as normal. Risk accumulates invisibly while confidence accumulates visibly.

Shifting baselines are the longer arc of the same effect across time. Each generation tends to inherit a different sense of what is ordinary and to treat the conditions it was born into as the natural state. The phrase came out of environmental thinking, where each generation accepts the ecological conditions it inherits even when those represent a long decline from earlier ones. A society’s baseline is not fixed. It moves, and one era’s shocking development becomes the next era’s assumed reality.

Together, normalisation and shifting baselines explain how deterioration can become psychologically invisible. They do not explain why the deterioration occurs. They explain why it becomes hard to perceive. That distinction is what stops them swallowing the whole argument: they are about the observer, not the disease.

There is a related point worth keeping in view, associated with Foucault, that institutions do not only enforce rules but produce categories of normal and abnormal, after which people regulate themselves according to those categories. The useful question shifts from “who is the authority forcing this?” to “why does this feel natural?” That shift is the perception problem stated from the inside.

Stability is not health

This feels like the natural destination for the rest.

A system can be stable because it has become very effective at absorbing damage. People adapt, organisations compensate, workarounds proliferate, buffers are consumed, and the system continues. From the outside this looks like robustness. From the inside it may be a slow conversion of reserves into the appearance of stability.

The deeper point is that persistence is weak evidence of health. Large systems can survive for surprisingly long periods while accumulating distortions, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities, and their continued existence is routinely taken as proof that they are working well. Survival may only show that they have not yet met a disturbance large enough to expose the gap between adaptation and repair.

A system can remain extraordinarily stable precisely because people have become skilled at adapting to its pathologies. Stability and health are not the same thing, and the skill at the first can actively disguise the absence of the second.

Security as the clear case

Security is where these mechanisms tend to run hardest, because the feedback is worse than almost anywhere else.

Safety failures usually produce visible consequences. A machine breaks, someone is hurt, a train derails. Security failures can stay invisible for years. An attacker may already be inside the network, credentials may already be compromised, a critical dependency may already be vulnerable, and nothing obvious happens. The absence of visible failure gets mistaken for evidence of security, which is feedback on survival rather than correctness in its purest form.

The familiar phrases are all normalisation:

“We’ve always exposed that service to the internet.”
“Everyone shares that admin account.”
“That alert is always noisy.”
“The scanner complains about thousands of things.”
“Nothing bad has happened yet.”

Over time the organisation’s actual posture and its perceived posture drift apart. Some researchers call the accumulation risk debt, by analogy with technical debt: small compromises pile up because each one looks manageable on its own. A major breach rarely begins with a meeting where someone decides to become insecure. It emerges from hundreds of local optimisations: patching delayed under operational pressure, exceptions granted for convenience, alerts muted, legacy systems retained, access broadened. Each decision can look reasonable in isolation, which is exactly the adaptation-instead-of-correction pattern wearing operational clothes.

What any of this leaves for a person to do

One of the more awkward conclusions of systems thinking is that individuals have less leverage than self-help literature promises and more than fatalism allows.

If the problem is that large systems persist in unhealthy states through several reinforcing mechanisms, then most useful individual action is not about fixing the system. It is about interrupting those mechanisms locally, which is a smaller claim and a more defensible one.

A few of these are worth naming, mostly because they map directly onto the mechanisms above.

Noticing adaptation can start from a single question: what am I currently treating as a fact of nature? A great many pathologies survive because people stop distinguishing between “this exists” and “this has to exist”. Housing shortages, bureaucratic procedure, workplace practice, political arrangement, technological dependency, organisational ritual: some of these genuinely are unavoidable and some merely became familiar. The question separates the two surprisingly often.

Preserving institutional memory works against shifting baselines, which depend on forgetting. Someone who can say that a process took two days five years ago, or that a service once behaved differently, is holding a reference point the system tends to lose. Complex systems suffer from amnesia, and historical knowledge turns out to be more valuable than it first looks.

Rewarding truth rather than survival works against goal displacement. Organisations drift into measuring survival proxies: the budget was secured, the target was met, the report was filed, the dashboard stayed green. Asking whether a measurement still connects to its purpose sounds mundane, but goal displacement often survives precisely because nobody asks.

Maintaining small centres of competence is less dramatic than reform and frequently more load-bearing. Large systems often keep going because pockets of people continue doing the actual work, remembering how things function, holding standards, training newcomers, preserving tacit knowledge. Civilisations are held together by more maintenance than revolution.

Resisting learned helplessness is worth the effort because one thing large systems produce very efficiently is the sense that nothing is worth doing since the problem is too large. Sometimes that is accurate. Often it is scale confusion. Most meaningful change in large systems begins locally, in a team, a department, a town, a profession, a technical community. People rarely control the whole system. They sometimes influence the subsystem they live in.

Keeping independent measures works against normalisation, which is strongest when the system controls all of its own indicators. Professional standards, external audit, journalism, scientific research, local knowledge, historical comparison: the mechanism varies, but the common feature is that reality is being measured from more than one angle.

And then the mindset shift that probably does the most work: accepting that health and stability differ. People infer “ it still works, therefore it is healthy“, and complex systems encourage the mistake because they can absorb a great deal of damage before visibly failing. A better question is what hidden costs are being paid to hold the stability in place, which tends to surface the adaptation mechanisms that otherwise disappear into the background.

The slightly unsatisfying conclusion is that ordinary people rarely have enough leverage to redesign a society, an economy, or a civilisation. What they can do is keep contact with reality inside the systems they take part in. That sounds modest, but most of the mechanisms here depend on reality gradually becoming obscured: goals detaching from purposes, adaptation replacing correction, survival standing in for correctness, deterioration becoming normal.

The people who go on noticing those distinctions are doing something more important than it looks, not because they can change the system on demand, but because systems have a hard time correcting problems they can no longer perceive. The first defence against an unhealthy equilibrium is keeping the ability to recognise it as an equilibrium rather than a law of nature.

The box this is written from

It would be a strange essay about systemic dysfunction that exempted itself, so it is worth saying that this one is not outside the mechanisms it describes. An argument is also a small system with its own internal needs, the main one being to close cleanly and feel complete and quiet, and that need can drift from the purpose in exactly the way a goal displaces.

On its own terms, then, this essay is adaptation rather than correction. It offers better instruments for the commute rather than a shorter route. A satisfying explanation can become another adaptation, converting uncertainty into understanding without changing the conditions that produced it. Explanation tends to sedate, and a reader calmer at the end than at the start may simply have watched a baseline shift in real time. That an argument feels coherent is evidence that it hangs together, not that it is true, and the distinction between survival and correctness appears here too: an essay can succeed as an essay while failing as an account of anything that holds outside it.

Naming this does not climb out of it. There is a tidy version of self-awareness that becomes its own sedative, a way of being right about being implicated without the rightness costing anything, which is goal displacement wearing humility. The safest thing to do with the feeling of having understood all this is to treat it as the thing under suspicion. The essay can name the box. It cannot claim to be standing outside it.

What institutions do to successful ideas

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Many critiques of Agile assume something went wrong. The story is usually told as a fall from grace: a practical response to software uncertainty that then disappeared beneath ceremonies, certifications, frameworks, and consultants.

There is another way to read the same history. Perhaps Agile did not fail. Perhaps it succeeded, and what happened next is simply what institutions do to successful ideas. On that reading the interesting question is not why Agile became institutionalised. It is why successful ideas so reliably do.

The pattern

A new idea tends to emerge because the existing approaches are failing. It starts local, practical, fitted to immediate problems, and its advocates are usually reacting against some established orthodoxy. Early adopters have a lot of freedom because there are few rules yet, so judgement substitutes for procedure. There is nothing else for it to run on.

Then the idea proves useful. Others copy it. It spreads. And spread does something quiet on the way: it moves the idea further from the circumstances that produced it. The person who had the idea understands why it works. The tenth adopter understands how it works. The thousandth adopter often only sees the visible form and copies that, because the visible form is what arrived. Every stage of adoption puts a little more distance between the practice and the conditions it was an answer to.

At some point the environment around it changes too, because the challenge is no longer invention. The challenge is coordination, and coordination asks different questions than invention ever did.

From practice to doctrine

A practice can survive ambiguity. An institution generally cannot. Institution here does not mean a building or an org chart. It means whatever has to carry a practice across people who were not there when it formed: a management layer, a training market, a certification body, a procurement process, a profession. Anything that has to reproduce the practice for people who do not share the context that made it obvious.

As adoption grows, the questions shift from what works here to how to teach it, how to reproduce it, how to tell whether it is being done correctly, how to introduce it at scale, how to compare results across groups that do not share a room.

Those questions have a direction built into them. Answering them requires simplification. Concepts become principles, principles become rules, rules become procedures, and the practice becomes a doctrine. Not because anyone decided to kill the original thing, but because doctrine travels and judgement does not. A procedure can be put in a binder and handed to someone who was not there. Understanding cannot.

Agile as case in hand

The early movement came out of frustration with heavyweight software process, and its central insight was small: when requirements are uncertain and feedback is available, adaptation often beats elaborate prediction. That is less a methodology than an observation about a kind of work. It assumed teams would exercise judgement, that circumstances varied, that no process could stand in for understanding.

As it spread, the demands changed shape. Large organisations wanted consistency. Managers wanted visibility. Procurement wanted criteria to score against. Training providers wanted a curriculum. Consultants wanted something repeatable enough to sell twice. The original ideas were translated into forms that could travel through institutions, and so the frameworks, the certifications, the role definitions, the maturity models all appeared on schedule. What had relied on judgement came to rely on structure.

Why it happens

It is tempting to call this a distortion. It seems closer to an adaptation. Institutions exist to coordinate large numbers of people who do not share the same context, and local judgement only works when the participants can see the situation directly. A large organisation cannot assume that, so procedure becomes a substitute for the shared understanding that no longer scales. The trade is the familiar one: less flexibility for more predictability, less discretion for more consistency. The institution is solving a different problem from the practitioner, and solving it tolerably well.

Agile is a sharp case precisely because its theme was adaptation. Institutions tried to scale adaptation by standardising it, and that contains a contradiction that cannot be ironed out. Adaptation depends on responding to local circumstance. Standardisation depends on reducing local variation. So the resulting systems hold both impulses at once: teams encouraged to be flexible within prescribed frameworks, to self-organise within defined structures, to adapt according to established procedure. The contradiction is not a mistake anyone made. It is what happens when one idea is asked to serve two masters.

Agile is not unique

The pattern runs well past software. Educational reforms become administrative systems. Quality movements become compliance programmes. Innovation initiatives acquire governance boards. Risk management frameworks generate further risk management frameworks to manage the first ones. Successful ideas are converted into organisational machinery with a consistency that is almost reassuring, and the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the idea, the stronger the pressure to formalise it.

Procedures are only half of it. Successful ideas also become professions. Agile produced Agile coaches, quality management produced quality departments, risk management produced risk teams. This is the step that makes institutionalisation self-sustaining rather than a one-off event, because once a profession exists around an idea, part of its work becomes maintaining and reproducing the framework itself. The people whose role is to keep the practice alive have an interest in the form the practice takes, and the form they can teach and certify and audit is the doctrinal one, not the judgement that does not travel.

Something is lost in the conversion and something is gained, and it is worth being honest about both. What gets harder to see is the contextual decision, the experiment, the local adaptation, the tacit knowledge, the informal learning. These rarely vanish outright; they just stop being visible to anyone above the team. What gets built is real too: coordination across hundreds or thousands of people, knowledge that transfers without each newcomer learning everything from scratch, expectations clear enough to plan against. What is gained is scale. What is lost is some of the freedom that made the idea attractive in the first place.

The loop

So the history of Agile may say less about software than about institutions. Successful ideas rarely stay untouched. Once they are adopted at scale they are translated into something that can be taught, measured, governed, funded, and replicated, and that translation reliably frustrates the people who had the idea first. It is not an unusual story. It looks like the normal lifecycle of success.

An idea begins as a response to reality. It becomes a practice. The practice becomes a system. The system becomes an institution. And eventually someone, frustrated by the institution, has a new idea in response to it, which is where this started, and where it will start again.

Agile, where it fits and where it doesn't

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Most engineering disciplines accept that method follows from context. Nobody expects a bridge engineer, a documentary director, and a trauma surgeon to share a planning model, and nobody finds the difference remarkable. Software is one of the few fields where people go looking for a single methodology and then try to apply it to everything in sight.

Agile is the most successful instance of that search, which makes it an awkward thing to argue about. The useful question is not whether it is good or bad. It is what kind of work it was meant for, and that turns out to depend on two things that have nothing to do with how much anyone likes the method.

Reaction to

The early movement grew out of projects that spent months producing plans before any working software existed, by which point the plans no longer matched what anyone had learned. The insight underneath the reaction was modest. When the shape of what is being built is not yet known, learning is part of the building, and short iterations tend to beat elaborate prediction.

That is an adaptation strategy. It is not a productivity strategy, not a management framework, and not a claim about how teams ought to treat one another, though it has since been pressed into service as all three.

Two axes

The variable that does the work here is not project size. A large project is not automatically a poor fit, and a small one is not automatically a good one. Two things seem to govern the choice, and they pull in different directions.

The first is uncertainty: how much of the work is genuinely unknown at the start. A payroll system, aircraft certification paperwork, a medical device compliance dossier: the requirements are largely settled before anyone writes code. A consumer product, an early startup, an exploratory research tool: the requirements are partly a guess, and discovery is part of delivery.

The second is consequence: what it costs when something is wrong and reaches the world. A failed feature in an internal tool is an inconvenience. A defect in infusion pump firmware is not. The two axes are independent. Uncertainty can be high while consequence is low, the natural home of iterative work, and low while consequence is high, the natural home of anticipation.

Where uncertainty dominates and feedback is cheap, learning while building usually wins. Where consequence dominates and feedback is slow or irreversible, thinking before building tends to win. Most real work sits somewhere between and leans one way.

Iteration earns its place

Iterative approaches do well when the requirements are honestly unknown, when a mistake can be corrected quickly, when a failure is awkward rather than catastrophic, and when the architecture can absorb revision without falling over. Online services, internal tooling, and experimental products tend to meet most of these conditions at once. Learning from production works because production is a cheap and fast teacher and the cost of being wrong for a week is small.

Where it starts to strain

The failure mode is not scale. It is that reality becomes expensive to revise, and that expense comes in at least three forms.

The first is harm. In a safety critical system the bottleneck is not how fast the code gets written, it is how the code is proven correct before it touches anyone. A defect found after deployment in railway signalling or aircraft control or heart monitoring may already have done its damage, so learning from production is no longer available as a primary strategy. The feedback the iterative model relies on is exactly the feedback that cannot be waited for.

The second is lag. When the loop between a decision and its observable result runs in months or years, as in pharmaceuticals or nuclear work, the correction can be cheap in principle and still useless in practice, because it arrives long after the decision it was meant to inform. The assumption of rapid feedback quietly stops holding.

The third is reversal. Deep infrastructure, power grids and telecom backbones and water systems, is not unsafe to revise so much as costly to revise, because the architecture is long-lived and tightly coupled and a wrong early choice propagates through everything built on top of it. So the cheap move is to get the architecture roughly right before committing, which pushes the design work earlier, into anticipation.

None of this makes anticipation superior. It marks out a different region of the same two axes. A social media feature and a heart monitor are not arguments for opposing philosophies. They are points at opposite corners of one space.

The debate that misses it

Framed as Agile versus Waterfall, the argument is close to empty, because organisations that function at all already run hybrids: iterative delivery inside planned architectural boundaries, short-cycle implementation inside slow regulatory frameworks, long-term design wrapped around short-term adaptation. The genuine question for any given piece of work is not which camp wins but where prediction ends and learning begins, and that line moves with the work.

Pure anticipation is rare. Pure adaptation is rare. Almost everything worth building combines the two, and the practitioners who seem dogmatic about one usually turn out, on inspection, to be doing some quiet amount of the other. The disagreement, when there is a real one, is over proportions rather than principles: how much can be settled up front, and how much has to be left open and found out.

So treating either pole as universally correct is the mistake. Agile is valuable where discovery dominates. Planning becomes valuable where consequence dominates. The practical question is not whether to prefer iteration or planning. It is how much of a system one can afford to find out the hard way.

How a rebellion became a bureaucracy

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Few movements in software have been as successful as Agile. What began as a reaction against heavyweight process, exhaustive documentation, and centralised planning became the dominant way organisations talk about building software. And somewhere in that success it acquired certifications, prescribed ceremonies, maturity models, governance structures, a consulting industry, and dedicated management hierarchies, which is to say it acquired most of the things it was a reaction against.

The question worth asking is narrow. Not whether Agile succeeded, and not the broad point that institutions reshape ideas, but the specific mechanism. By what steps does a critique of bureaucracy turn into a bureaucracy, when nobody involved wanted that outcome?

Two mechanisms seem to do most of the work, and neither requires anyone to act in bad faith. From the participant’s side they feel like different phenomena: rituals becoming mandatory is not the same experience as numbers becoming targets. But they arise from a single source. Institutions have a structural preference for what they can observe, and there are two things they can observe: behaviours and numbers. Ceremonies are the observable behaviours. Metrics are the observable numbers. The symmetry is the argument.

Ceremony survives

Many organisations adopted the visible features of Agile before, or instead of, the assumptions underneath them. Stand-ups, retrospectives, sprint planning, story points, velocity tracking: these spread quickly and widely.

The trouble is an asymmetry in what can be checked. A ceremony is easy to observe. Judgement is not. A manager can confirm that a stand-up happened, that the retrospective was held, that the board has the right columns. A manager cannot easily confirm whether a team is actually learning from feedback, because learning leaves no attendance record. So the observable thing gets monitored, reported, and eventually required, while the unobservable thing it was meant to produce goes unmeasured.

Over time the ritual detaches from its purpose and keeps going on its own. The stand-up persists after it has stopped surfacing anything. The retrospective produces the same three action items nobody acts on. The form survives because the form is what anyone can see, and what can be seen is what gets defended when someone asks whether the team is doing Agile properly. The question itself, doing it properly, is the tell: it treats a set of observable behaviours as the thing, when the behaviours were only ever proxies for it.

Metrics become targets

If ceremonies are the observable behaviours, numbers are the observables that fit in a spreadsheet, and an institution likes those even better. This second mechanism is older than Agile and was simply inherited by it. Institutions run on measurement, and Agile arrived with a convenient supply of numbers: velocity, capacity, throughput, burn-down. These began as descriptive tools, ways for a team to notice its own rhythm and plan against it.

Once a number is visible to people who manage rather than do the work, it tends to stop describing and start governing. Velocity shifts from something a team observes about itself to something it is expected to hit, and then to increase. The moment a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure, because behaviour reorganises to optimise the number rather than the thing the number stood for. Story points inflate. Work is sliced to make the chart look right. The metric ends up describing the reporting system more faithfully than it describes the software, and everyone can read the dashboard while no one can read the work.

Quiet part

Left to run long enough, the two mechanisms stop Agile functioning mainly as an engineering approach. It becomes a governance layer. Its value to the organisation is in the reporting structure, the planning cadence, the budget conversations it supports, the portfolio oversight, the executive visibility. None of that necessarily improves what gets shipped. It does answer questions the institution genuinely has, about coordination and accountability and where the money went, and those questions are real even when they are not engineering questions.

This is the quiet part. The institution and the engineering practice end up serving different purposes through the same vocabulary, and because the vocabulary is shared the divergence is hard to name from inside. The team thinks it is doing the thing the words describe. The organisation needs the words to mean something else, and the words oblige.

It also explains why people keep performing rituals that have stopped working, which is otherwise a puzzle. They keep performing them because the artefacts have become evidence. A retrospective is no longer valuable because it improves anything; it is valuable because it demonstrates that retrospective activity occurred. A velocity chart is no longer valuable because it predicts delivery; it is valuable because it satisfies a reporting requirement. Once the artefact is the thing being asked for, producing the artefact is the rational response, and whether the underlying work improved becomes a separate question that nobody with a dashboard is positioned to ask. The participants are not being cynical. They are responding to what is actually being checked.

Agile did not become bureaucratic because its advocates secretly wanted bureaucracy. It became bureaucratic because the observable parts were the parts that could be required, and the descriptive numbers were the numbers that could be targeted, and an institution presented with something observable and something countable will tend to require and target them. A method built to help teams adapt to uncertainty became a system for helping organisations report on it. Those are related goals. They are not the same goal.

The distance between them is where the meetings live.

Audience design

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A friend asked whether the proof-of-concept I had sketched on a docs page was worth actually building. I said no, for the usual reasons, and also because the page in question had been written in the specific style of a document that does not want to be read. A four-layer architecture diagram without the diagram. Ingestion, storage, correlation, presentation. Bullet lists of API names with the dispiriting authority of a railway timetable. It reads like a tender response written by a tender response.

That was the point. Most readers close the tab around the third bullet of the first section, where the page introduces a graph database called Neo4j with the offhand confidence of someone who has never had to explain it at a dinner party. Beyond this point lies a country no casual reader returns from.

What I had not quite noticed, while writing the thing, was that I had chosen my reader without asking permission. Not the topic. The reader. And once you notice that, the world starts looking subtly different, in the way it does after someone explains what a quantity surveyor actually does for a living.

Mechanics

Every piece of writing filters its readers. This is not a profound observation, in the way that gravity is not a profound observation. It is mostly true, mostly ignored, and occasionally embarrassing to people who pretend otherwise.

Vocabulary filters. Length filters. The first sentence filters more than the rest of the document put together, although the second sentence, if it is long and contains the word “methodological”, can be relied upon to clear out the survivors. What changes is whether the filter is deliberate, accidental, or the work of a committee that did not realise it was making one.

Most writing about security assumes a single binary: public or classified, openness or secrecy, transparent or controlled. The interesting axis sits elsewhere, sulking. You can publish a document and still not be legible to most of the people who could open it. You can leave it in the open and let the prose do the work of keeping the wrong readers out, the way a really good Latin inscription on a public building does.

A vivid essay invites readers in. A four-layer architecture diagram politely shows them the door, holds their coat, and hopes they had a nice time. Both are public. Both are honest about what they are. The difference is who finishes reading, and whether they did it on purpose.

Survivors

A page that reads like a tender response filters by patience, not by intent. This is worth being clear about, because patience and intent are different things, and one of them is considerably rarer.

The bored hobbyist with three browser tabs open does not stay. The journalist on deadline does not stay. The undergraduate looking for a thesis hook does not stay. The retired engineer who genuinely wants the dependency graph between Dutch defence infrastructure and civilian utilities, and is willing to read seven pages of dry architecture to get to the interesting bit, does stay. He may also email you. He has thoughts.

So does a patient state actor, who has been patient for a living since before patience was fashionable. Tedium is not a defence against funded adversaries; it is a defence against incidental ones. That is a smaller defence than it sometimes looks. It is also not nothing. Most attention is incidental; most of the people who could amplify a finding never finish reading, and most of the rest assume someone else already has.

It works best when the underlying claim is one you are willing to make available to someone who reads the whole page carefully, and unwilling to make available to someone who reads only the introduction and the bit with the missing diagrams. Which, depressingly, describes a surprising amount of writing about infrastructure.

Precedents

Academic prose does this constantly, and has done since roughly the invention of academic prose. Legal documents do it by accident, then by habit, then by tradition, then by a kind of nineteenth-century institutional inertia that has by now acquired something close to the legal status of a person. Terms of service do it deliberately, although the goal there is to filter out anyone with the will to argue rather than anyone with the will to understand, which are different filters operating on entirely different muscles.

The pattern is older than the web. The web just made it cheaper. Where once you had to print and bind the Boring Bit and then post it to forty-six addresses, you can now upload it once and let the internet do the filtering for you, which it does with the impartial enthusiasm of a small dog at a checkpoint.

Reflective essays do the opposite. They are designed to lower the activation energy of attention, to pull a reader in further than they intended to go, the way a really comfortable chair in a bookshop will pull a customer in further than they intended to go and keep them there until the staff start, very slowly, turning out the lights.

Both modes are legitimate. The dishonest move is to write reflective prose about something better served by tedium, or to write tedious prose about something the reader genuinely had a right to follow without first qualifying as a chartered accountant.

Neighbours

If you write about systems, you are choosing whose attention to invite. This is true whether you admit it or not. The same set of facts can become an essay or an architecture diagram, and the choice between them is not about correctness; it is about who you want to talk to next, and which conversation you are prepared to have when they arrive.

Sometimes the answer is the essay. Sometimes the answer is the architecture diagram, sometimes the code. Sometimes, the answer is both or all three, on adjacent pages, with the essay quietly linking to the diagram for the readers who care enough to keep going. This is the shape most worth sitting with, because it is the only one that is honest about the existence of the filter at all.

It does not pretend the diagram is for everyone, in the patronising way that public consultations sometimes pretend they are for everyone. It does not pretend the essay is the whole story, in the comfortable way that a good essay can sometimes make a reader forget the diagram exists. It just lets readers self-sort, and trusts that the people who needed the diagram will find their way to it, the way moths find their way to streetlamps, and patient state actors find their way to graph databases.

Full disclosure: this one was designed for the friend who asked, and rather more for me. Most reflective writing is. It just does not usually say so.

The ones who close the tab were never the audience.

They were the weather.

DigiD and the rented engine room

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The story is, on paper, narrow. Solvinity, the Dutch contractor that operates infrastructure underneath Logius and DigiD, looks set to be acquired by Kyndryl, an American spin-off of IBM’s managed-services arm. DigiD itself remains owned by the Dutch state via Logius, so technically the system is still Dutch. Politically and operationally, the distinction does not calm many people down.

A rented engine room is still part of the ship.

Across Europe there has been a push for “digital sovereignty”, meaning less dependency on American hyperscalers and infrastructure providers after years of quietly outsourcing half the state to Silicon Valley with the serene confidence of a man juggling chainsaws because the first three catches worked out fine.

Governments spent decades optimising for lowest cost, outsourcing, scalability, procurement convenience, and “the market will solve it”.

Digital sovereignty, in that period, was treated mostly as a philosophical hobby for slightly anxious cryptographers and one Dutch professor with concerning amounts of coffee.

Then geopolitics changed faster than procurement cycles.

Dependency and the US angle

The concern is not that Americans individually are evil masterminds twirling ethernet cables. The concern is jurisdiction and leverage.

If infrastructure is operated by a US-headquartered company, several things potentially enter the picture.

US CLOUD Act

The US CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, amended the Stored Communications Act so US authorities can compel disclosure from US providers regardless of where the data physically sits. The trigger is “possession, custody, or control”, and corporate control is enough: an order served on Kyndryl in New York can reach data its staff can access in a Dutch datacentre.

Such orders commonly arrive with gag provisions attached. Providers can challenge them through a comity process, but that only functions properly when the foreign state has a CLOUD Act executive agreement. The UK has one. The Netherlands does not. That leaves no formal mechanism for Logius, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, or the Dutch government to be informed, contest the order, or even know disclosure occurred.

The risk is not wholesale extraction of DigiD. It is targeted access to records, logs, or metadata without Dutch visibility.

FISA

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act operates in parallel on the intelligence side. Section 702 allows the US government to compel providers to assist with surveillance targeting non-US persons abroad through classified FISA Court proceedings.

The 2024 RISAA reforms broadened the definition of covered providers significantly, potentially including firms with routine access to communications infrastructure. Authentication telemetry, session metadata, and account-linkage records all sit on systems companies like Kyndryl may maintain. Unlike ordinary gag orders, the existence of a FISA directive itself can remain classified.

There is no Dutch judicial review or parliamentary visibility. This is the scenario Dutch MPs gesture toward when warning about the US “pulling the plug”, though “plug” is the wrong metaphor. It is closer to a tap nobody is allowed to mention. See the EFF overview of FISA 702.

Sanctions pressure

Sanctions pressure works differently. Through Office of Foreign Assets Control, US firms face major legal and financial exposure if they facilitate prohibited transactions.

The result is often over-compliance: restrictions appear before direct orders do. After 2022, firms like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services restricted services in Russia under sanctions pressure.

In DigiD’s case, the concern is not that “the US disables Dutch citizens”. It is that operational decisions inside a Dutch civic identity system begin reflecting US sanctions logic because the operator cannot afford not to comply. The Dutch state then discovers the restriction through support escalation rather than treaty process.

Geopolitical coercion

Geopolitical coercion is softer, and historically more common. It does not require warrants or classified directives. It works through tariffs, export controls, intelligence-sharing leverage, procurement pressure, and market access.

The current US administration has shown willingness to apply such pressure to allies over disputes involving trade, defence posture, and international institutions. In infrastructure terms, the mechanism is conditional cooperation: support tickets slow down, updates arrive later, renewals gain awkward clauses, priorities quietly shift elsewhere.

None of this has to be illegal, and little of it leaves a clean audit trail. The autonomy loss sits upstream of the technology itself. Dutch policy decisions on unrelated geopolitical questions begin carrying implicit operational costs in the civic identity layer.

Corporate dependency risks and operational lock-in

Corporate dependency and operational lock-in deepen all of the above. Kyndryl is a US-listed services firm operating under shareholder pressure. It can restructure, cut staff, reprioritise sectors, or increase prices once switching costs become painful.

Meanwhile, the technical environment grows harder to leave each year: tooling, monitoring, deployment pipelines, certifications, and institutional knowledge become tightly coupled to the operator. Migration stops being a procurement exercise and turns into a multi-year engineering programme. Dependency compounds over time. Each renewal narrows Dutch leverage while widening the gap between European “digital sovereignty” rhetoric and the infrastructure reality underneath it.

Experts, MPs, and senior privacy officials linked to the Dutch government have publicly warned about all of this.

Several Dutch MPs warned about a scenario where the US could “pull the plug“ on DigiD.

Whether that exact scenario is technically realistic in a dramatic Hollywood sense is debated. Governments tend to present these systems as segmented, controlled, encrypted, and sovereign. DigiD itself does remain owned by the Dutch state.

But infrastructure dependence is rarely binary. Modern dependency tends to appear in the form of support contracts, specialised operational knowledge, supply chain access, privileged maintenance channels, proprietary tooling, and emergency response dependence.

Infrastructure control is less “off switch” and more “you now need permission, updates, expertise, licences, cooperation, and legal alignment from another jurisdiction”.

Strategically, that lands rather differently.

Can citizens refuse DigiD

In practice, mostly no.

Dutch residents can sometimes avoid DigiD for specific interactions by using physical appointments, paper forms, or alternative authentication methods. But many government and semi-public services increasingly assume DigiD participation.

The structural picture is:

DigiD is becoming functionally mandatory
participation in society increasingly depends on it
there is no fully equivalent citizen-controlled alternative

That creates a democratic tension. People are effectively compelled into a centralised digital identity ecosystem while having very little influence over procurement, hosting, jurisdiction, or architecture decisions.

A recent survey found that many Dutch residents would stop using DigiD if the takeover proceeds, while most also admitted they cannot realistically function without it.

Which is modern digital governance in one sentence: you are free to opt out, provided you also opt out of existence.

What else this surfaces

Beyond privacy, there are broader structural issues.

National resilience

Critical infrastructure increasingly depends on foreign firms across cloud, identity, email, productivity suites, DNS, hosting, and cyber defence tooling. DigiD is not isolated; it sits inside a wider European dependency stack.

One dependency is manageable. Twenty interconnected ones start to look like strategic vulnerability.

Legal opacity

Cross-border jurisdiction gets murky fast. Which law prevails during conflict? Who audits access? What secrecy obligations exist? Can Dutch authorities even know about foreign access requests?

This is one reason privacy groups and academics have been asking for transparency about the review process.

Democratic accountability

Citizens can vote out ministers. They cannot vote out multinational infrastructure providers.

Once critical systems are deeply outsourced, accountability tends to fragment. Government blames contractor. Contractor blames legal obligations. Regulator says “not our competence”. Procurement office says “continuity”. Parliament says “ concerning“. Everyone writes strongly worded PDFs.

Meanwhile the dependency remains.

Security concentration

Centralised digital identity systems are inherently attractive targets, whether to nation states, ransomware groups, espionage actors, or insider threats. Even if the takeover introduces no immediate compromise, concentration of identity infrastructure creates systemic risk.

If DigiD fails, large parts of Dutch administration wobble at once: taxes, healthcare access, pensions, municipal services, legal systems.

This is why critics keep classifying it as vital infrastructure.

Strategic contradiction

Perhaps the most awkward part is the contradiction itself.

The Netherlands and the EU publicly advocate strategic autonomy, European cloud ecosystems, reduced US dependency, and sovereign digital infrastructure.

At the same time, practical procurement decisions often continue reinforcing US dependence, because American firms tend to be large, technically mature, already integrated, hard to replace quickly, and sometimes cheaper in the short term.

So the state says, in effect, “we need digital sovereignty,” and then signs another extension because replacing the infrastructure quickly is operationally terrifying.

Which is not uniquely Dutch. Europe has been discovering that rebuilding sovereign infrastructure after decades of outsourcing is rather like deciding to grow your own vegetables after paving over the garden in 2004.

What it comes down to

The engine room is still rented. Two trajectories sit on the table for European states: keep extending the lease while writing strongly worded PDFs about sovereignty, or accept the operational cost of rebuilding what was paved over. Both are expensive. Only one of them ends with the keys in the right hands.

Either trajectory is also a choice the citizens being routed through DigiD did not get to make. That part travels with whichever option wins.

The administrative attack surface

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few days after sending an application to the Dutch Ministry of Defence for a senior cyber and information security advisory role, I read an NRC article about publicly accessible details of Dutch military infrastructure.

Not leaked documents. Not espionage. Not shadowy dead drops in rainy parking garages.

Public websites. Pipeline routes. Radar dependencies. Cable maps. Technical drawings. Backup systems. Segmentation details. Power feeds. Coordinates.

Bits of information scattered across agencies, permits, infrastructure registries, environmental datasets and planning portals like breadcrumbs dropped by a committee convinced that nothing bad ever happens in spreadsheets.

The article follows an ex-military technician who pieces together vulnerabilities in Dutch defence infrastructure simply by combining publicly available information. Not hacking. Not breaching. Just looking. Correlating. Thinking operationally.

In other words: systems thinking.

Shift

And while reading it, I had the uncomfortable thought: Do I really want the job?

I surprised myself with that thought. Not because the article was wrong. Quite the opposite. The problem is that I immediately understood the reasoning. Not the “destroy infrastructure” part. The dependency part.

If you work long enough in security, infrastructure, telecoms, OT, distributed systems or architecture, you stop seeing systems as isolated objects. You start seeing dependency chains, operational assumptions, trust boundaries, maintenance realities, failure cascades and single points of failure wearing fluorescent safety jackets.

You stop asking: “What does this system do?”

You start asking: “What does this system depend on, quietly, without anyone noticing?”

That shift changes everything.

Waterfall

A radar is no longer a radar. It becomes a layered arrangement of dependencies: power supply, cooling, maintenance windows, procurement chains, segmented networks, contractor access, backup duration, physical access paths and monitoring assumptions. Each part necessary, none sufficient on its own, all quietly holding each other in place.

A military fuel pipeline is not a pipe. It is timing and pressure, logistics and repair capacity, redundancy and response coordination, stretched across geography, institutions and bureaucracy that rarely meet in one place at once.

Modern infrastructure is rarely defeated by cinematic sabotage. It usually dies of correlations.

One agency publishes permits. Another publishes environmental maps. A contractor uploads technical drawings. A utility operator exposes cable metadata. A procurement system lists component models. An environmental review includes backup generators. A planning objection embeds security layouts.

Nothing is leaked. Nothing is obviously wrong.

And yet someone can stand in a wet Frisian field with a smartphone and enough context to see how the pieces connect into something operationally meaningful.

That is the actual story. Not secrecy versus openness. Not journalists versus government. Not “hackers”.

The real shift sits elsewhere.

Modern bureaucracies tend to classify information individually, while attackers tend to read systems collectively.

Those are not the same way of seeing.

And the awkward part is that this is also, quietly, how security architecture works.

You think in dependencies. You look for constraints. You follow how failure might propagate rather than how intention was written down. You assume that diagrams simplify, and that infrastructure behaves differently once it is under pressure, connected, or combined with other systems.

Back to the application

The Ministry of Defence vacancy talked about security frameworks, oversight, cloud, AI, policy development and strategic advisory work. Reasonable enough. Necessary, even.

But after reading the article I found myself wondering whether institutions genuinely want people who think this way, or whether they merely like the idea of them existing somewhere abstract and well supervised.

Everyone says they want “out of the box thinking” until someone quietly points at the box’s fuel supply, external contractors, maintenance dependencies and single shared conduit.

Then suddenly the room develops a passionate commitment to process (or logo design :-).

The strange thing is that none of this requires paranoia or conspiracy theories.

Only systems literacy.

You do not need classified access to identify many modern vulnerabilities. You need patience, context, technical curiosity and the ability to combine boring documents that were never meant to be read together.

That is partly why the line between architecture, intelligence analysis and security engineering has become increasingly blurry.

The attack surface is no longer merely technical.

It is administrative.

And this is where things become philosophically awkward for democratic societies.

Awkward

Open societies publish things because openness serves legitimate purposes: planning, accountability, environmental review, public participation, interoperability, safety regulation and coordination.

But modern states also depend on highly interconnected infrastructure whose vulnerabilities emerge through aggregation.

Each individual publication may appear harmless. The system-level picture may not be.

That is not hypocrisy. It is structural tension.

And structural tensions are rarely solved by pretending one side does not exist.

So yes, perhaps I do not want the job.

Or perhaps the opposite is true.

Perhaps organisations responsible for critical infrastructure and national resilience increasingly need people who are capable of reading systems the way attackers do, without becoming attackers themselves.

People who understand that security is rarely about dramatic secrets and far more often about operational assumptions quietly accumulating in public view.

People who know that resilience is not a policy document. It is behaviour under stress.

The uncomfortable possibility is that modern societies need this kind of thinking quite badly.

And yet …

None of this points only at refusal. The same correlations a person can read by hand could in principle feed a small system that does the looking automatically, running tender feeds and planning portals against each other and surfacing dependency concentrations. Collection is the easy part. The harder question is which flagged correlations count as a problem, which are already known and accepted, and which the relevant institutions can or want to act on. That part does not belong to the engine.

The even more uncomfortable possibility is that wanting a job and being wanted in the job rarely line up ;-).

How some ideas outlast their own evidence

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Across many mature organisations, the same phrases seem to keep coming back, like “Aligned with best practice”, “The control is in place”, and “We followed the framework”. They survive failure. They survive scandal. They survive the people who used them last time. The question worth asking is perhaps not whether they are accurate, but why they are so robust.

The usual explanations cover bureaucratic inertia, regulatory capture, and the well-documented limits of organisational learning. These are real, but they are not the most interesting part. The more interesting possibility is that these phrases are doing useful work. Just not the work they appear to be doing.

A statement like “the control was aligned with industry best practice” looks, at first reading, like a description of a control. Possibly not. It looks more like a multipurpose institutional artefact, in which the description of the control is, at best, the fifth thing on its list of jobs.

The other jobs

Consider what such a phrase actually accomplishes when uttered in a real meeting.

It can distribute liability. “Best practice” sources the standard somewhere outside the room. If something goes wrong, the failure is no longer a failure of judgement on the part of the people present. It is a failure of the industry consensus, which is harder to sue and impossible to fire. The phrase is a small legal jacket worn under the suit.

It can produce audit evidence. Auditors do not, as a rule, evaluate whether a control is effective. They evaluate whether a control was adopted, documented, and maintained according to a recognisable standard. A sentence anchored to “best practice” is a sentence that lands cleanly in an audit report. The phrase exists, in part, to be quoted back later by a third party in a compliant tone.

It can justify procurement. Tools and platforms purchased under the heading of “best practice” do not require the buyer to defend the specific outcome they will produce. They require the buyer to defend the alignment. This is a substantially easier conversation, and it scales beautifully across budget cycles.

It can reassure boards. Boards, almost universally, do not want to hear that the programme is being figured out as it goes along. They want to hear that it is aligned with something. The phrase produces the right shape of reassurance even when the underlying reality is undefined. This may be less a bug than a feature, cultivated over decades by people whose jobs depend on calm boards.

It can protect careers. The single most reliable use of “best practice” language is post-incident. “We followed the recognised standard at the time” is one of the few sentences capable of preserving an executive career through a public failure. The phrase is a parachute. People do not wear parachutes because they expect to fail. They wear them because they have noticed how gravity works.

Read together, the descriptive content of the phrase, the bit that purports to say something about the actual control, is doing perhaps a fifth of the total work. The other four-fifths are institutional housekeeping that has very little to do with the underlying risk.

Not just security

This pattern is not a security pathology. It is an organisational one, and it is everywhere.

Clinical governance has its own dialect: “Procedures were followed”, “The protocol was applied”, “The team acted within established guidance”. After avoidable harms in hospitals, similar phrases tend to appear in a particular order, doing what looks like the same five jobs as their security equivalents, with vocabulary tuned by clinical lawyers rather than by CISOs.

Financial regulation has another: “The model was within agreed risk parameters”, “The trade was consistent with the firm’s stated risk appetite”. Anyone who lived through 2008 can recite these from memory, and anyone who reads the post-mortems on the next financial crisis will recite them again, lightly modified. The language is not failing to learn. It is succeeding at something else.

Public-sector reviews into deaths in care, custody, or the family courts produce a specialised version: “All relevant procedures were followed”, “The case was assessed in line with the framework”, “Lessons will be learned”. That last phrase is so worn smooth by repetition that it now reads as a kind of ritual closing prayer, in which the lesson is the absolution rather than the necessary changes.

Once the pattern is visible across these very different domains, the security version stops looking like a security failure and starts looking like a feature of how organisations talk about themselves under threat of consequence. The vocabulary differs. The function is identical.

Why reform usually loses

This has an awkward implication for anyone trying to improve things from inside.

Most reform efforts, especially the well-meaning ones, target the language. Sharper words. Better metrics. More honest reporting. Outcome-based rather than capability-based assessment. These efforts almost always produce a brief flowering of clearer prose, followed by the slow re-emergence of the old vocabulary in slightly modified form. “Capability” gets replaced by “outcome”, and within two years “outcome” is being used to mean exactly what “capability” used to mean.

The reason may be that the language is not the problem. The function is. Liability still needs distributing. Audits still need surviving. Boards still need reassuring. Careers still need protecting. Meetings still need ending. As long as those needs exist, the organisation will generate vocabulary to meet them, and the vocabulary will be selected, over time, for its capacity to do those jobs without quite committing to anything testable.

Reforms that ignore this and treat the language as a moral failing tend to produce a tense and brittle period in which people simply learn to say less. Reforms that engage with the function, by giving people genuinely better ways to distribute liability, defend procurement, and protect themselves when things go wrong, sometimes work. They are also rarer, because they require admitting that the underlying needs are real and largely reasonable.

What this leaves

None of this means organisations are hopeless, or that the phrases are villainous, or that the people using them are stupid. Most of the people in the room genuinely cannot tell the difference between the descriptive job and the institutional one, because the phrases were carefully bred so that nobody would have to.

The quieter point is this. When a phrase keeps surviving its own falsification, the question worth asking is not “why don’t they learn?” The question is “what is this sentence actually for?” The answer is rarely a single thing. It is usually four or five things at once, none of which involve the topic ostensibly under discussion.

That may be how some ideas outlast their own evidence. The evidence appears to be grading them on the wrong rubric.

How security failures learned to sound reasonable

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most useful phrases in a modern security programme are the ones that cannot be argued with. “The platform gives us coverage.”, “We have visibility.”, “The tool supports MFA.”

Each one is calm, professional, and technically defensible. Each one can also be doing something quietly different from what the room hears.

How the grammar works

Three small grammatical moves do most of the heavy lifting.

The first is capability standing in for implementation: “The platform supports MFA”, “Defender has ransomware protection”, “Our firewall can do segmentation”.

All of these may be technically true while operationally meaningless on their own. A feature sitting disabled behind a licensing tier, a compatibility concern, or three years of deferred political negotiation is still a feature. The checkbox exists. The protection may not. The reassurance is generated by the checkbox, not by its state.

The second is telemetry standing in for comprehension: “We would see it in the logs”, “The SOC has eyes on that”, “Sentinel would alert”.

These could be the hallucination of omniscience not produced by LLM’s, but by dashboards. In practice, ingestion is throttled by licensing economics, retention can be shorter than anyone admits, parsers can drop fields nobody noticed, analysts perhaps triage by volume rather than significance, and a sophisticated attacker can have calibrated their behaviour to sit just under reporting thresholds.

Maybe the map gets mistaken for sensory perception. The organisation may believe it is watching the room because it can see the lights on the camera.

The third is the past tense standing in for the present state: “We have hardened the environment”, “We have segmented the network”, “We have baselined to CIS (or some other alphabet soup that can baselined to)”.

These could describe historical events, often performed once, by people who have since left, against an environment that has since drifted. Hardening is not a thing that is had. It is a thing continuously verified, and most environments quietly accumulate exceptions like sediment. Segmentation diagrams in particular can tend toward aspirational cartography: the picture is correct, the network a polite suggestion.

Once noticing these three moves, they are difficult to unsee. Most reassuring sentences in a mature security programme are doing one of them, sometimes even two at once.

Why the language passes the audit

The dangerous part, and the reason this style of language is so durable, is that none of these phrases are fully false. That is “the thing”.

“The control is designed to mitigate that risk” is not a lie. It is a description of intent. Whether the control is actually enabled, tuned, monitored, owned, tested, or capable of surviving a real adversary is a separate question, and the sentence does not ask it. The grammar is engineered to imply effectiveness without ever having to assert it.

This is legal-safe language masquerading as engineering confidence. It works beautifully in audit reports, board papers, and procurement justifications, because each individual phrase is defensible in isolation.

“Aligned with NIST”, “Supports zero trust principles”, “Has visibility into east-west traffic”.

Read one at a time, and every claim sounds reasonable. Read them together, and they describe a security programme that may or may not actually exist, depending on which week you arrive and who answers the door.

The same vocabulary recurs across the industry because it has been quietly optimised for survivability. “Coverage” is safer than “protection”. “Maturity” is safer than “competence”. “Alignment” is safer than “compliance”. “Capability” is safer than “outcome”. Each substitution reduces the testable claim. None of them quite remove it. The result is a fluent dialect that produces enormous quantities of reassurance per unit of measurable defence.

Adversaries, unhelpfully, do not read in this dialect. They read in terms of capability that is actually configured, telemetry that is actually retained, and controls that are actually functioning on the day they show up. An audit and an attacker grade the same environment on different ways, and only one of them issues a report you get to negotiate.

Do a (quiet) test

There is a small exercise that works surprisingly well in meetings, though it is worth deploying sparingly to preserve marriages and employment.

When a reassuring phrase lands in the room, try more or less silently (in your head or actually spoken) substituting the most pessimistic plausible reading, and see whether the comfort survives.

“The platform gives us coverage” can be heard as

“logs are technically being ingested from some subset of systems, with a retention period nobody has checked recently, parsed by rules nobody has tuned, into a tool that nobody has time to investigate”.

“We have a playbook for that” becomes

“a document exists, possibly accurate at the time of writing, describing a scenario that bears an unspecified resemblance to the one currently unfolding”.

“We have segmented the network” could simply mean

“a diagram exists”.

“Best practice” can be changed into

“we are doing what other organisations claim to be doing, on the assumption that they are not lying, this applied to our context as well, and that the practice still works against current adversaries”.

“Defence in depth” can for example, translate to

“we have several controls, all of which may share the same blind spot, none of which has been tested in combination”.

If the room or you (if not spoken aloud) still feels comfortable after the substitution, the phrase was doing real informational work, and the comfort was earned. If the room flinches, the phrase was doing something else. That flinch is the signal.

Is your threat model already behind?

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most organisations think they have a threat model.

What they usually have is a historical artefact: a snapshot of how the environment looked on the day several people sat in a room with diagrams, coffee, and varying levels of optimism.

The session happens. Assets are mapped. Threats are identified. Risks are scored. A document is produced. The document is reviewed, approved, uploaded somewhere nobody voluntarily visits, and occasionally resurrected during audits or post-incident archaeology.

At the time it was written, it may even have been accurate.

Then the organisation changed.

That is the part many security programmes quietly fail to account for. Threat modelling is often treated as a project milestone rather than an operational activity. Something completed, rather than something maintained. The result is a widening gap between the environment people believe they are defending and the environment that actually exists.

Drift happens quietly

The drift rarely arrives dramatically. Nobody announces: “Good news everyone, we have accidentally invalidated the threat model.”

Instead, it accumulates through ordinary organisational behaviour.

A business unit adopts a SaaS platform because procurement was taking too long. A cloud integration is expanded to support a new workflow. A vendor receives broader access because the temporary exception became permanent through the ancient administrative ritual known as “nobody revisited it”. An acquired company arrives carrying infrastructure held together by undocumented dependencies and hope.

Each individual decision appears reasonable in isolation. Collectively, they alter the attack surface.

The original threat model does not know this.

More importantly, the organisation often does not realise the model no longer reflects reality. The diagrams still look reassuringly official. The risk register still contains tidy entries with colour-coded severity ratings. Leadership still believes there is visibility over the environment because visibility existed at some point in the past.

This creates a particularly dangerous condition in security: confident misunderstanding.

An outdated threat model does not merely omit risk. It distorts decision-making. Resources are allocated against yesterday’s architecture. Defensive controls are prioritised around assumptions attackers have already moved beyond. Reviews confirm protections around systems that no longer represent the primary exposure.

Attackers adapt faster than governance

Three or four years ago, many organisations barely considered QR-code phishing campaigns, adversary-in-the-middle frameworks intercepting authentication flows, or attackers routing operations through legitimate cloud infrastructure to blend into normal enterprise traffic. Those techniques are now common enough to bore incident responders.

Attack methods evolve continuously because attackers are not constrained by governance cycles, annual reviews, or the thrilling spectacle of waiting three months for cross-departmental approval to update a spreadsheet.

Defenders often are.

A static threat model defending a dynamic environment gradually becomes less useful while still appearing authoritative. Nobody worries about a clearly broken model. The dangerous model is the one that still looks professional.

Practice beats the archived version

The useful distinction is between threat modelling as an output and threat modelling as an operational practice.

An output is finite. It is produced, reviewed, and archived. A practice evolves alongside the organisation itself.

In a maintained approach, changes to the environment trigger reassessment. New integrations. Infrastructure migrations. Acquisitions. Significant incidents. Discovery of undocumented dependencies. Major workflow changes. These events do not wait politely for the annual review cycle, and neither does the attack surface.

The review itself does not need to recreate the original workshop every time. Most of the work is narrower and more practical.

What changed in the environment?
Which trust relationships expanded?
Which assumptions are no longer true?
What attack paths exist now that did not exist six months ago?
What techniques are attackers using now that the current model barely acknowledges?

The organisations that keep their models closest to reality are usually not the ones producing the most polished diagrams. They are the ones treating the model as something operational: updated after incidents, adjusted after architectural changes, questioned after unexpected findings, and revisited whenever reality diverges from documentation.

That sounds obvious when written down. So does backing up data. Organisations still discover both only after a bad week.

The people who know where the bodies are buried

The most accurate understanding of attack paths rarely sits entirely with the people formally running the threat modelling exercise.

It sits with the engineer who knows two systems communicate in ways absent from the architecture diagrams. The operations administrator who knows a “temporary” firewall exception has existed since several prime ministers ago. The analyst who has spent months watching authentication abuse against externally exposed services. The infrastructure team quietly carrying technical debt nobody wants to discuss in steering meetings.

When these people are excluded, the resulting threat model develops fictional completeness. The map looks coherent because the missing terrain never made it onto the page.

The gaps are usually mundane rather than exotic. An undocumented connection. Excessive inherited permissions. A monitoring blind spot everyone assumed another team covered. A partner integration extending further into the environment than originally intended.

Threat modelling sessions that include operational staff uncover these findings constantly.

Those sessions also reveal something else: attackers are often using the environment more realistically than the organisation itself understands it.

Many threat models still describe attackers as abstract external entities interacting neatly with bounded systems. Real attackers move through inherited trust relationships, shared identity providers, forgotten integrations, unmanaged cloud assets, and administrative shortcuts accumulated over years of operational compromise.

They use the organisation the way the organisation actually works, not the way the diagrams say it works.

Surprise is a useful metric

A healthy threat modelling process produces surprises.

Not constant chaos. Not paranoia. Just enough friction to expose assumptions that had quietly hardened into accepted truth.

One of the clearest warning signs in security is a review process that never uncovers anything unexpected. A threat model that only confirms the existing picture is no longer exploring the environment. It is protecting the assumptions already embedded inside it.

Security programmes often mistake stability for understanding. A stable model may simply mean nobody has looked closely enough to disturb it.

A usual question after a review is: “Is the model complete?”

A more useful question to add is: “What did we learn that we did not know before?”

If the answer is “nothing”, the organisation has stopped looking in the places where uncomfortable answers live.

The Dealer smiles?

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are told that world politics is a chess game. Grandmasters move pieces across a board, sacrificing pawns to protect kings, calculating six moves ahead. It is rational. It is elegant. It is, above all, knowable.

This is a lie.

After walking through the resource wars of Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, Ukraine, Russia and China, and after one reader finally lost patience and called a certain former president a “greedy twat”, a different metaphor emerged. Not chess. Not even regular poker.

This is what we landed on: “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” ~ Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

Welcome to the real game.

The transactional truth

Look at what is actually happening, country by country, and the pattern becomes embarrassing in its consistency.

Ukraine

Take Ukraine. Continued American support is no longer being framed as charity. It is framed as an investment that must show a return. The headline demand was the equivalent of half a trillion dollars in rare earths, and at one point a fifty per cent stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources to “get the money back”. After a tense Oval Office meeting and months of grinding negotiation, a deal was finally signed on 30 April and ratified by Ukraine’s parliament on 8 May 2025.

Past aid was not converted to debt, but the agreement created a joint investment fund: a long-term strategic economic partnership that the White House now describes, with a straight face, as a “tacit security guarantee”. Grain is the quieter half of the same calculation. American officials have made it explicit that restoring Ukraine’s ability to export wheat through the Black Sea is part of the peace framework, because an “economically viable” Ukraine stops being a drain on the US balance sheet.

Naval drones have pushed back the Russian fleet enough to keep Odesa open, but exports remain well below pre-war levels. The deeper strategic logic, repeated in private by administration figures, is that Ukraine is a distraction from the real opponent, which is China, and the way out is to lock in a resource deal, push Europe to pay the rest of the bill, and pivot.

Venezuela

Venezuela follows a different logic but rhymes? The country sits on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, but the oil is heavy, sour, and stranded behind two decades of sanctions and infrastructure collapse. The interest there is not in some future supply chain. It is in unlocking assets that already exist, swapping sanctions relief or regime accommodation for investor access. The deal is not “give us your future”; it is “let us back into your past”.

Greenland

Greenland is probably the inverse. Almost nothing is being extracted today, and that is precisely the point. The interest is a trifecta.

First, breaking China’s effective monopoly on rare earth refining, which sits somewhere between seventy and ninety per cent of the global market.

Second, the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule, which is the frontline radar station for detecting Russian missile launches across the pole.

Third, the Arctic shipping lanes opening up as the ice retreats. Yet eighty per cent of Greenland is buried under an ice sheet up to two miles thick, the island has effectively no roads, ports or grid outside Nuuk, and in 2021 it banned uranium mining outright, killing the Kvanefjeld project that would have produced rare earths as a by-product.

Even on optimistic timelines, meaningful commercial rare earth production is a decade away. Greenland is therefore not a quick fix. It is a fifty-year bet on technology, supply chains, and Arctic security, dressed up as a real estate offer.

Iran

Iran then, is the leverage play. The headline objective is the dismantling of the nuclear programme: a twenty-year suspension of enrichment, the destruction of facilities, and the removal of the highly enriched uranium stockpile. Everything else, including the blockade and the public musing about seizing oil, is pressure aimed at that one outcome.

The naval blockade currently focused on Kharg Island, which handles roughly ninety per cent of Iranian crude exports, has reportedly trapped sixty-nine million barrels of unsold oil worth over six billion dollars. The rial has crashed to record lows, and Iranian onshore storage is running out.

The administration’s own description, “Economic Fury”, tells you the intent. The threat to “take the oil” is real enough to be briefed as a military option, including special forces missions against the uranium stockpile and a partial seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, but it is held back by two things: the political reality that Americans do not want another long ground commitment, and the simple fact that the blockade is, for now, working.

Russia

Russia is the war economy in its purest form. Resources are simultaneously the strength, the weapon, and the vulnerability. With the world’s largest natural gas reserves and third-largest oil production, with top-five positions in coal, metals, fertiliser, and grain, Russia funds roughly thirty to forty per cent of its federal budget directly from hydrocarbon exports.

As long as the oil and gas keep flowing, the war can continue. Europe is gone as a customer, but China buys the discounted energy, India buys the crude, and the Global South buys the wheat.

The weakness is that sanctions cut off Western drilling kit, fracking technology, and LNG expertise, while the pivot to Asia depends on pipelines like Power of Siberia 2 that take years to build, and the budget needs oil prices in the seventy to eighty dollar range to keep the war affordable.

Putin’s wager is brutally simple, and he has more or less said it out loud: he does not need to win quickly, he needs to outlast. Every European winter, every American election, every fresh debate over aid is part of the bet that Western patience will collapse before Russian revenue does.

China

China is the most interesting player at the table, if only because it is barely playing the same game. While the United States sanctions Russia, China does the opposite. It buys Russian crude at thirty to forty per cent below world prices, refines it, and sells the products on while European industry pays full freight.

It supplies dual-use goods, civilian drones, chips, and machine tools that conveniently end up serving the Russian war effort, while staying clean enough on paper to keep its access to Western markets. Its public message is calibrated to the room: we are stable, we trade with everyone, we do not start wars, invest with us.

Beneath that, the long resource play is relentless. Chinese firms have repeatedly tried to buy into Greenlandic rare earths, blocked so far by Copenhagen and Washington but never deterred. They effectively control most of Congolese cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, large slices of Zambian copper, and Guinean iron ore.

Pipelines from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan feed the energy grid, and Beijing is quietly positioning itself to inherit Russian energy infrastructure if Putin’s regime ever cracks. Where Washington plays a single hand and demands payment by the end of the night, Beijing is buying the casino.

When you strip away the flags, the speeches, and the moral posturing, every interaction begins to look like a deal. Allies are partners in a mutually beneficial transaction. Enemies are counterparties refusing your terms. This is what international relations theorists call realism, and the core belief is unsentimental: states act in their own self-interest, morality belongs to citizens, and survival belongs to governments.

One American president simply stopped pretending otherwise and played the game openly. Whether that counts as honesty or nihilism depends entirely on your own values.

Why “chess” is the wrong metaphor

The chess metaphor assumes that all the pieces are visible, all the rules are known, both players agree on the objective, and the board is static. Geopolitics has none of these properties. In the real world the pieces lie. The rules change mid-game. Some players are playing a completely different game on the same board. And a few are quietly stealing pieces when no one is looking.

A better metaphor, short of the Good Omens one, is multi-player no-limit poker. Poker, because bluffing, reading opponents, and knowing when to fold are central. No-limit, because you can go all-in, whether that means nuclear war, total sanctions, or invasion. Multi-player, because it is not the United States versus Russia: it is Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, Delhi, Tehran, Riyadh, Ankara, Jerusalem, and dozens more sitting at the same table. With hidden cards, because every player has a hand of historical grievances, traumas, and identities that sometimes override rational calculation.

Trump plays the poker game openly and transactionally. Putin plays like a man who has lost everything before and will burn the house down rather than lose again. Xi plays the longest game of all, betting on patience while others self-destruct.

Europe shows up clutching a rulebook that no one else has read, asking, with genuine puzzlement, whether everyone wouldn’t rather be playing bridge. And the rest of the world, the so-called Global South, gradually realises that the cards are blank, the room is dark, and the big players are using marked decks.

They are not at the table playing the game. They are the stakes.

But is it just a game?

This is where the poker metaphor, like the chess metaphor before it, finally breaks. Lives are at stake.

If geopolitics were just a game, then domestic politics would not matter. They do. Leaders are constrained by voters, parties, and ideologies, and a purely transactional account ignores the fact that Americans, Ukrainians, and Iranians hold values that sometimes override pure self-interest.

If geopolitics were just a game, history and identity would be negotiable. They are not. Try telling a Polish leader that handing a security guarantee to Russia is “just business”. Try telling a Chinese nationalist that Taiwan is “just a chip factory”. Identity, trauma, and pride do not appear on a balance sheet.

If it were just a game, trust and reputation would be irrelevant, when in fact they are the slowest and most valuable assets any state holds. If the United States abandons Ukraine after taking its minerals, Taiwan and Israel and the Gulf states all quietly recalculate the value of an American guarantee.

Reputation takes decades to build and seconds to destroy. And if it were just a game, non-state actors would play by its rules. Terrorists, hackers, drug cartels, and rogue commanders do not. They do not want a deal. They want destruction or chaos. You cannot trade with them.

So no, it is not just a game. But the parts that are a game are much larger and uglier than most textbooks admit.

The Dealer smiles

Which brings us back to Pratchett and Gaiman.

What if the transactional level is simply the highest instrumental level we can perceive? What if the real game is something else entirely? Entropy versus order, physics playing itself out through human bodies. Memetic evolution, ideas using nations as their battlefields. Consciousness waking up to itself, history as a long and painful classroom.

Or nothing at all: just chaos, and we are pattern-seeking apes telling ourselves stories around a fire.

The Dealer smiles because we will never know.

The only sane response

You have three choices when you realise the room is dark, the cards are blank, and the Dealer will not explain the rules. The first is despair: nothing matters, so curl up and stop playing. The second is nihilistic glee: if no rules exist, then I will write them, become the bully, become the cheat. The third, and the most human, is defiant meaning-making: the Dealer keeps her secrets, but I will play my own game inside hers.

The third option is Viktor Frankl writing Man’s Search for Meaning in a concentration camp. It is a Ukrainian farmer planting sunflowers in a minefield. It is reading an article about resource geopolitics and choosing to understand rather than to look away. The Dealer smiles. But so can we.

Shuffling the blank cards

We began this conversation with outrage, a muttered profanity at a screen. We ended it with a smile and a quote from a comic fantasy novel. That is not an accident. The only way to play an ineffable game with blank cards for infinite stakes is to refuse to take it more seriously than it deserves, while taking it seriously enough to matter.

So shuffle the deck. Sit down at the table. Smile back at the Dealer. And play our own game.

Building an exit from capitalism

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A boring, decades-long plan for getting out of capitalism without burning the village down

The two stories most often told about how to get past capitalism both fail in roughly the same way.

The first is a Big Bang: revolutionary seizure of state power, redesign from above. The historical track record is grim. New rulers inherit the same coordination problems, the same resource constraints, and the same external threats, and tend to respond the way besieged regimes generally do, which involves rather more centralised violence than was originally promised.

The second is a Slow Drizzle: keep reforming capitalism, year after year, until something better gradually emerges. Capital, however, adapts faster than regulation, and results tends to be that each reform is digested, monetised, and stripped for parts.

A more realistic path appears to be a slow hybrid: build alternatives in the cracks of the existing system while also chipping away at capital’s veto over politics. Worth saying outright: this approach does not produce a clean exit. It produces a long coexistence, in which capitalism continues to dominate while a parallel system grows alongside it, occasionally absorbing it in patches and frequently being absorbed back. Success looks like shifting the balance, not winning the war. Anyone selling the war is selling something else.

Three overlapping strategies tend to come up: defensive, constructive, and offensive. Each comes with a predictable counterstrike, and treating those counterstrikes as separate problems, to be worked out later, is one of the ways movements lost and lose.

Stop the bleeding

And notice who is doing the bleeding.

Capitalism’s quiet weapon is the threat of destitution. Organising is hard when missing rent means losing the children’s school, so anything that pulls survival off the negotiating table is structurally important: universal basic services (healthcare, housing, water, electricity, public transport, internet), debt cancellation (student, medical, housing), strong rent controls, community land trusts, anti-monopoly enforcement.

These are sometimes described as technocratic tweaks. They are not. They are direct hits on asset owners, and asset owners can be expected to behave like any other class facing direct hits on their interests.

Rent controls trigger landlord lobbying, court challenges, deliberate disinvestment in maintenance, and a steady push for exemptions; without indexing and policing, they erode under inflation in roughly a decade.

Universal basic services trigger capital-flight rhetoric, sovereign-debt downgrades, and renewed austerity pressure when the next crisis arrives.

Debt cancellation triggers financial-sector panic and bond-market punishment of any government brave enough to attempt it; this is more or less what happened to Greece between 2010 and 2015, and the Greeks were only asking for restructuring.

Anti-monopoly enforcement triggers jurisdiction-shopping, regulatory capture, and the well-funded production of friendly economists.

This is not a list of reasons to be cautious. It is a list of things to plan for. Every defensive policy needs a defensive infrastructure for the policy itself: legal teams, indexing rules, mass organisations capable of mobilising when the courts come knocking, and journalists prepared to call disinvestment by its name. The defensive line is the front line, not the warm-up.

Dual power, and how it falls apart

“Dual power” is an old phrase for building institutions that prefigure the new system inside the old one. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, platform cooperatives, mutual credit networks, municipal public banks. Capital accumulation appears to weaken in places where the profit motive cannot directly operate, though it routes around such spaces or reabsorbs them later unless actively blocked. Every parcel of land, firm, or credit network kept out of market logic is a square metre of liberated ground, which stays liberated only with maintenance.

The standard examples still hold up. Mondragon, founded in 1956, now spans manufacturing, finance, retail, and education, and has weathered multiple recessions through internal solidarity and salary ratios. Community land trusts hold land collectively and lease it for housing or farming, removing it from speculation.

The Bank of North Dakota and Germany’s Sparkassen channel public credit toward housing and infrastructure rather than toward whatever yields most that quarter. Solidarity economy networks in Brazil, Spain, and parts of Greece use mutual credit and time banks to bypass conventional finance.

The story that gets told less often is how these things fall apart. Coordination costs in cooperative networks rise faster than membership: every new cooperative has to negotiate with every other one, governance meetings multiply, and the people who happen to be good at endless meetings tend to accumulate informal power that nobody voted for. Internal conflicts (over wages, hiring, expansion, who is doing the unpleasant jobs, what to do about the member who keeps shouting) eat up the political energy that was supposed to be deployed against capital. Successful cooperatives also face what might be called the absorption problem: as they scale, they need conventional finance, conventional suppliers, and conventional regulators, and each of those interfaces gradually pulls the cooperative back toward standard firm behaviour.

There is also the older problem of internal capture. Democratic structures can rot from inside as readily as they are crushed from outside: cliques form, bureaucracies drift, “temporary” exceptions to procedural rules become permanent, and the founding membership gradually loses track of what the organisation was originally meant to be doing. The meeting-people problem mentioned above is the visible tip of this; the rest tends to happen quietly, in subcommittees and procedural drift that nobody quite remembers agreeing to. Constant maintenance, rather than original design, is what keeps cooperatives cooperative.

The Israeli kibbutzim are a textbook absorption case. Founded as radically egalitarian collectives, most of them privatised in some form during the 1990s and 2000s under generational pressure and exposure to broader Israeli market reforms; roughly three quarters of kibbutzim are now classified as “renewed”, which is the polite term for partially demutualised.

The UK’s Co-operative Bank is a financial-sector version of the same arc. Founded as the banking arm of a successful mutual federation, it grew, took on a large building society in 2009, ran into a multi-billion-pound capital hole in 2013, and ended up majority-owned by hedge funds. The Co-operative Group lost control of its own bank in roughly eighteen months.

Yugoslavia’s experiment in self-managed socialism, while a different beast, demonstrated a third failure mode: even genuinely democratic firms compete with one another, and competition between cooperatives can reproduce most of the dynamics of competition between capitalist firms, including unemployment, inequality between regions, and asset-stripping during a downturn.

These are not arguments against the project. They are the project’s actual difficulty curve. Networks that survive seem to share a few features: aggressive internal democracy that prevents the meeting-people from quietly running everything, hard rules against demutualisation written into founding charters, strong federations that share losses across members rather than letting weaker units fail one at a time, and parallel institutions (cooperative banks, cooperative schools, cooperative media) that reduce the need to interface with hostile mainstream ones. The cooperatives that get absorbed tend to be the ones that grew without those defences in place.

Capture the state at the right level

The state is terrain, not enemy or saviour. Older left politics often treated it as a thing to seize whole; a more productive approach appears to start small, taking cities and regions where capital is less mobile, direct democracy is feasible, and a failed experiment does not collapse the entire movement.

Red Vienna, 1919 to 1934, is a classic. The Social Democrats ran the city, taxed luxury aggressively, and built tens of thousands of units of dignified public housing, free clinics, schools, and cultural institutions, all while the rest of Austria moved toward fascism. The lesson is double-edged: municipal socialism can work, and it tends to be crushed when the surrounding state turns hostile.

Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi has been doing something similar in miniature, in a state that is not exactly thrilled about it.

Barcelona en Comú won Barcelona’s city government in 2015 and held it through 2023; the period showed both the possibilities (participatory budgeting, housing-rights enforcement, restrictions on tourist rentals, a municipal energy company) and the limits (without their own bank, the city remained at the mercy of private finance for anything ambitious, and lost office to a more conventional party once the original wave’s energy dissipated).

The honest problem with municipalism is that the level is too small. Capital moves between cities at the speed of a wire transfer; municipalities move at the speed of council votes. Currencies, debt markets, and supply chains are organised globally; an autonomous city can decarbonise its bus fleet but cannot defy the bond market, source its own semiconductors, or print its own money. Hostile national governments can preempt municipal law, withhold transfers, deploy police, and (Madrid against Catalonia in 2017 is a recent example) ignore the entire framework when it suits them. Municipalism can hold ground. It probably cannot, by itself, win.

This makes the international layer the hardest part of the project, and the part that currently has the least working infrastructure. Rebel cities would need to federate quickly, building shared finance, joint procurement, mutual defence pacts against trade-treaty arbitration, and at minimum a clearinghouse for legal precedents and policy tools.

Networks like Fearless Cities and the older Eurocities gesture at this. Fearless Cities held a few summits between 2017 and 2021 and then noticeably lost momentum; Eurocities is essentially a lobbying group inside EU institutions.

Neither comes close to the coordination capacity that would actually be required, which is something more like a customs union plus a development bank plus a legal-defence pact, run by cities rather than states. This is a hole in the strategy, and there is currently no organisation in any obvious position to fill it at the speed and scale required. Naming the absence is more useful than describing the federation as merely difficult; difficult things sometimes get done, but only after someone has noticed they need doing.

How capital reacts

The pressure scales with success, and the framing changes with it: below a certain threshold, a project is a policy disagreement to be debated; above it, a project is a threat to be neutralised, and institutional toolkits shift accordingly. A handful of harmless cooperatives are tolerated as a quirk.

A federation of cooperatives that takes serious market share starts to attract regulatory attention, hostile takeovers, and selectively enforced laws. A city government that touches finance directly attracts capital flight and rating-agency attention; a national one attracts the IMF, the bond markets, and, in the harder cases, possibly even the CIA and its allies.

The overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 is a textbook case, but the list runs through Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Brazil 1964, and continues, with diminishing literal coups and increasing financial ones, into the present.

Defensive capacity therefore needs to scale alongside a project itself. Legal defence networks, with constitutional and human-rights expertise. Local food, energy, and water systems that make economic blockade less effective. Mass organisations capable of strikes, boycotts, and street protest that raise the cost of overt repression. Transnational solidarity dense enough that crushing one node attracts pressure from many others. The Zapatistas have survived three decades of low-intensity siege essentially through these methods: low visibility, high cohesion, and dense outside support. They are also, it bears mentioning, still poor, still surrounded, and still under threat. Survival is not victory. It is the precondition for a longer game.

Ranked levers

Not every individual action carries the same weight. A list that pretends otherwise tends to slide into lifestyle politics, the kind of advice that suggests one might knit one’s way out of global capital. Roughly ranked by structural impact:

The heaviest lever an ordinary person has access to is workplace ownership. Converting an existing firm into a cooperative, or organising a workplace toward eventual conversion, removes a unit of capitalism from the board and replaces it with a democratic one. Trade union membership and organising are the entry-level versions of the same lever, and arguably the precondition for the conversion-level version. The infrastructure exists.

Co-operatives UK and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives provide legal frameworks, model bylaws, and conversion finance. This lever is hard to pull because it requires sustained collective action under conditions designed to prevent it, which is also why it matters when pulled.

Finance is the next tier. Where deposits sit determines what gets built. Moving accounts to a credit union or cooperative bank redirects credit toward parts of the economy not optimised for shareholder returns. At the political level, supporting public-banking proposals is the same lever scaled up. Credit allocation is one of capitalism’s deepest control mechanisms; shifting it shifts everything downstream.

Land is the third tier, mostly accessible through politics. Supporting community land trusts, public housing, and rent controls keeps land from being a purely speculative asset. Buying into a land trust where one exists counts; voting for candidates who will build them counts more.

After that comes buying clubs, tool libraries, skill-sharing, time banks. These do real work, mostly social. They build the trust networks and habits of mutual reliance that everything else needs to rest on. They are not a substitute for confronting capital; they are the tissue that makes confrontation survivable. Treating them as the main event is one of the older mistakes in left politics.

Most political life consists of arguing about the bottom of this list while the top remains untouched. Reversing the ratio is most of the practical work.

A loooong timeline

Nobody reading this is likely to see a fully post-capitalist nation-state in their lifetime. What might be visible, on a sober projection, is something more modest. Denser municipalist networks across a few dozen cities by the 2030s. Regional formations, perhaps Catalonia, Scotland, the Pacific Northwest, parts of Kerala, testing more radical departures by the 2040s, under the pressure of climate and financial crises that look very likely to arrive. Federations with internal trade rules based on need rather than growth by the 2050s and 2060s. Not utopia, but recognisable as something else.

This is slower than revolution and faster than waiting for capitalism to collapse on its own, which, on present evidence, it will not; it will simply get crueller.

Not for free

Worth being clear about what this competes against. The cooperative-municipalist trajectory is one possible future. The other live trajectories are darker, and some appear to be winning at the moment.

Authoritarian capitalism is already the dominant trajectory in much of the world: the rules of capital accumulation kept intact, with democracy gradually downgraded to ceremonial status, dissent criminalised, and the racial or national enemy of the year wheeled out whenever distraction is needed. Several large governments are currently testing this configuration in real time, and it appears to be a stable equilibrium for some decades.

Ecological triage is the other plausible direction: a wealthy core hardens its borders while the global poor absorb the consequences of climate breakdown. This is also already happening; the immigration politics of most rich democracies are early drafts of it, and the rhetoric is moving steadily in the wrong direction.

Capitalism collapsing on its own into something better is not on the menu. Systems that lose their capacity for reproduction tend to be replaced by whichever movement happens to be best organised at the moment of failure, and at the moment of failure the best-organised movements may well be the ones with simpler stories, more uniformed marchers, and a clearer list of people to blame.

Worth being explicit about what each trajectory offers a comfortable citizen of a wealthy country, since this is what the choice looks like from the inside.

Authoritarian capitalism offers stability in exchange for democracy: the trains run, the shops stay stocked, the wrong sort of person stops appearing on television, and political decisions stop being your problem.
Ecological triage offers continued comfort in exchange for the exclusion of most of the world from it: the air conditioning keeps working, the borders harden, and the bodies pile up somewhere that does not appear in the evening news.
Cooperative-municipalism offers participation, which is the same thing as more meetings, more responsibility, and more decisions that used to be handled by someone else. Most people, given the choice, would rather not. This is a real obstacle, not the conspiracies.

The cooperative trajectory is therefore not inevitable, not deserved, and not somebody else’s problem. It is one of three or four directions humans might travel, and several of the others are presently better resourced. Doing nothing is not a neutral act in this contest. It is, in effect, a vote for whichever trajectory currently has the most institutional momentum, and at the moment that is not the cooperative one.

The system one might want, the one that does not destroy people because of who they happen to be, is not the kind of thing that gets handed down from above. It tends to be built from below, slowly, by people who have stopped waiting for permission, and who understand that the alternative is not stasis but slow drift toward worse outcomes. Fragments are already in place. Whether they federate fast enough to matter is the open question, and it is being answered right now, by everyone, including those who are pretending not to answer.

The pipeline from Jerusalem to The Hague

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How a piece of paper can become a parliamentary scandal?

Step one: NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem based research institute, publishes a report. The report alleges that Hamas has infiltrated Dutch aid organisations operating in Gaza. The evidence is thin. One example involves a wastewater treatment project that also irrigated fruit trees. NGO Monitor suggested those fruit trees could well be used by fighters to hide behind. Apparently the dappled shade was the threat.

Step two: De Telegraaf runs a page long article. The headline says Hamas has a firm finger in the pie of Dutch aid organisations. The paper does not verify the claims. It simply amplifies them.

Step three: within four days, Groep Markuszower and the PVV file formal parliamentary questions. They demand an immediate investigation of Oxfam Novib. They suggest revoking its charitable status.

Step four: the cabinet answers. The answer contains a single Dutch sentence that does most of the work: “Er is geen informatie voorhanden die de aantijgingen van NGO Monitor steunt.” (There is no information available that supports NGO Monitor’s allegations.)

The demand for an investigation receives a one word answer: “Nee” (No).

Then everyone waits a few months and does it again. This is not a scandal. This is a production line.

The guarantor who filled in forms

What did NGO Monitor actually find? The most concrete allegation concerned a Hamas guarantor system embedded inside humanitarian groups.

The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the accused organisations, published a statement explaining what the word guarantor actually meant. The term referred solely to staff authorised to submit travel permit applications for foreign colleagues through the relevant electronic platform. The role conferred no authority, access, or influence. Such guarantor roles for travel and visa applicants are required by most governments worldwide.

In other words, NGO Monitor caught Hamas’s terrifying clerical staff in the act of clerking. The travel permit clerk filling in forms for foreign colleagues is not a mastermind of terror. But the allegation travels faster than the correction. That is how the pipeline works.

Other accused organisations issued similar denials. Oxfam told The Jewish Chronicle that a review of independent project audits found no credible evidence. Handicap International said its own investigations indicated no truth in the report’s claims. The Dutch cabinet, after reviewing all due diligence procedures for aid to the Palestinian Territories, found them in order. The cabinet also noted existing criticism of NGO Monitor’s conduct. Ministers do not normally name a source as previously criticised. They named this one.

The EU level: politically undesirable

The same machine operates in Brussels. In June 2025, the European Parliament established a Scrutiny Working Group on NGOs. Its stated purpose was transparency. Its actual purpose was revealed in February 2026 by Dirk Gotink, a Dutch member of parliament and one of the group’s co-rapporteurs.

Gotink told a hearing, and this is a direct quote: The problem that we are pursuing here is not to establish whether things are illegal, it is to establish whether politically it is undesirable.

The quiet part, out loud, on the record. The working group was not looking for crimes. It was looking for things it did not like.

What had official bodies actually found? The European Court of Auditors concluded that the EU’s NGO funding process was opaque on the Commission’s side. It found no wrongdoing, financial irregularities, or misuse of EU funds by NGOs. No evidence of illegality or fraud. A lack of transparency in how the Commission allocates funds, yes. Malfeasance by NGOs, no.

Who is NGO Monitor?

The organisation presents itself as an independent research body. Its founder and president is Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar-Ilan University. Steinberg has reportedly worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Office of the Prime Minister while heading NGO Monitor. Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, served as NGO Monitor’s publisher in its early years. A senior researcher previously worked in the public relations department of the IDF Spokesperson’s Office.

NGO Monitor’s international advisory council includes Elliott Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, Douglas Murray, and James Woolsey, all prominent hawks on Middle East policy. That list tells you who the organisation’s friends are.

In 2024, Wikipedia editors classified NGO Monitor as generally unreliable on all subjects, meaning the source is not normally cited. The classification sits alongside the ADL on Israel-Palestine topics, the New York Post, and the Daily Wire. Not quite banned, but close.

The money trail

NGO Monitor is funded almost entirely through a single nonprofit in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. The nonprofit is called REPORT, which stands for Research + Evaluation = Promoting Organizational Responsibility and Transparency. The name is the sort of thing a consulting firm invents to sound serious.

Over fourteen years, roughly twenty million dollars has flowed through REPORT on its way to Jerusalem. The money comes from anonymous donors. Their names are filed with the IRS but hidden from the public. What is visible is the board that controls the conduit.

The board includes Nina Rosenwald, heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune. She founded the Gatestone Institute, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank in New York. She has also hosted Geert Wilders in the United States. In 2008 she brought him to New York for a speech warning of a Muslim plot, in his words, “to rule the world by the sword.” In 2012 Gatestone hosted him again at a ten thousand dollar a head event. Wilders publicly called her one of his good friends.

A board member of NGO Monitor’s primary funding conduit is the personal friend and American host of the Dutch politician whose party files the parliamentary questions based on NGO Monitor’s reports. That is not a rumour. That is three documented facts standing next to each other and pretending they have never met.

The board also includes Jehudi Kinar, a former Israeli ambassador to Canada and to Belgium. He has served on the board for more than a decade. A former ambassador governing the American funding vehicle for an organisation that claims no government affiliation is a curious arrangement.

What the evidence does not show

No direct Mossad link appears in any public filing or parliamentary record. No evidence of direct Israeli government funding has surfaced. The organisation denies receiving any. The actual story is not a spy novel. It is a network of pro-Israel donors and former diplomats, channelling money through a Pennsylvania nonprofit, producing research that gets amplified by a friendly newspaper and turned into parliamentary questions by a politician who has dinner with the woman who writes the cheques.

The cost

Humanitarian workers in Gaza already work under drone surveillance, airstrikes, and the threat of assassination. Adding public allegations of terror ties, when ministers, the European Court of Auditors, and Parliament’s own discharge procedure find no evidence, is not a victimless act. The travel permit clerk filling in forms for foreign colleagues is not a Hamas guarantor. But the allegation travels faster than the correction. That is how the pipeline works. Rinse and repeat.

The Glasswing problem

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 7 April 2026, Anthropic announced two things at once. The first was a new frontier model called Claude Mythos Preview. The second was Project Glasswing, a coalition of twelve technology and finance companies that would receive controlled access to that model, with everyone else, including paying API customers, locked out indefinitely.

The accompanying blog posts from Anthropic’s red team made a remarkable claim: Mythos Preview, given an isolated container and a vague prompt, had autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across “every major operating system and every major web browser”: a 27-year-old denial-of-service bug in OpenBSD’s TCP stack, a 17-year-old remote code execution flaw in FreeBSD’s NFS server, fully weaponised end-to-end. A 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg’s H.264 codec that had survived every fuzzer and every human reviewer to look at the code since 2010. In Mozilla Firefox alone, the model surfaced 271 zero-days, shipped as fixes in Firefox 150, the largest single batch of security fixes in the browser’s history.

The numbers, briefly

Before getting to what could be wrong with the framing, the underlying capability seems real and worth taking seriously.

Anthropic’s own technical post is careful in places that the marketing summary is not. The team ran Mythos Preview against the OSS-Fuzz corpus, roughly a thousand open-source repositories, using a stripped-down agentic harness: launch a container, prompt the model to find a security vulnerability, let it work. The model reads source, forms hypotheses, runs the binary, attaches debuggers, and produces a bug report with a proof-of-concept. No specialised scaffolding, no fine-tuning, no custom prompts. Anthropic explicitly notes that the cybersecurity capabilities were not trained for. They emerged as a side effect of general improvements in code reasoning and agentic autonomy. The same improvements that make the model better at writing patches make it better at writing exploits. Worth keeping in mind.

On the headline benchmark, turning identified vulnerabilities into working exploits in Firefox’s JavaScript shell, Mythos apparently achieves a 72.4% conversion rate, with register control in another 11.6% of attempts. In one demonstrated case, the model was reported to write an exploit chaining four separate vulnerabilities into a JIT heap spray that escaped both the renderer and OS sandboxes. That is the kind of work that, until recently, only a handful of humans on the planet could do, and most of them charge by the hour.

So: the capability is probably real. The question is what to do with that observation, and Anthropic’s answer, Project Glasswing with twelve members, one hundred million dollars in usage credits, and four million in donations to open-source security organisations, is more revealing than it first appears.

Small models can do a lot of this already

Within days of the Mythos announcement, AISLE, a security firm that has been running its own AI vulnerability discovery system for over a year, published a quiet but devastating response. They took the specific bugs Anthropic had showcased, isolated the relevant code, and ran it through small, cheap, open-weights models. Eight out of eight models detected the flagship FreeBSD NFS exploit, including one with 3.6 billion active parameters costing eleven cents per million tokens. A 5.1B-parameter open model recovered the core chain of the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug. On a basic security reasoning task, small open models outperformed most frontier models from every major lab.

AISLE was careful not to claim Mythos is not capable. It almost certainly is, especially on the exploitation side, where chaining four vulnerabilities into a sandbox escape is genuinely frontier work. The claim was narrower and harder to wave away: the discovery side of the problem, looking at code and saying “this is a stack buffer overflow with remote-code-execution potential”, is broadly accessible right now, in models you can run on your laptop. The exclusivity Anthropic implies around Mythos is real for the highest-end exploitation work and likely substantially overstated for everything else.

Tom’s Hardware put it more bluntly: claims of “thousands” of severe zero-days rest on a much smaller number of manually reviewed cases, around 198 by their count. The 271 Firefox bugs are real and shipped. The “thousands” figure is partly a model-output count, not a count of independently verified vulnerabilities, and the gap between those two things in the AI security world is larger than press releases typically admit.

There is also the structural critique from Forrester. Glasswing surfaced vulnerabilities that were 16 and 27 years old in projects maintained by small volunteer teams while remediation capacity in open source does not scale with it. It remains human, finite, underpaid, and largely voluntary.

The framing of Mythos as a uniquely dangerous artefact requiring a coalition treaty to govern starts to wobble once you accept that the capability is diffusing fast and broadly. If a 3.6B-parameter open model can spot the same FreeBSD bug, the question of who has access to Mythos specifically is less consequential than who has access to last year’s open-weights checkpoint and a copy of the FreeBSD source tree. The latter group is, roughly, anyone with an internet connection and an afternoon.

The timing

Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on 7 April. The same week, the company disclosed an annualised revenue run rate above thirty billion dollars, up from nine billion at the end of 2025, announced a multi-gigawatt compute deal with Google and Broadcom, and had been working toward an IPO since 2025. A high-profile, government-adjacent cybersecurity programme with blue-chip partners (AWS, Apple, Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation) is exactly the kind of narrative that burnishes a public-offering prospectus.

This isn’t a gotcha. Strategic self-interest and genuine security value can coexist; restricted access really does make adversarial distillation harder, really does give defenders a head start, really is what a responsible lab would do if it believed its own capability claims. The point is only that “we built something too dangerous to release” carries different weight when the alternative would have been releasing it commercially into a market where competitors are pricing similar capability at substantially lower margins.

It’s also worth noting that the announcement landed in a slightly less than pristine context. News of Mythos first leaked in March when draft documentation was inadvertently stored in a publicly accessible cache through human error. Days later, Anthropic accidentally exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and over half a million lines of code from Claude Code for about three hours through a separate misconfiguration. Already in October 2025, security researchers documented that Claude Code would arbitrarily ignore user-configured deny rules for file access with inconsistent behaviour, sometimes blocking a denied file and other times reading or modifying it without permission. Then in April 2026, a second, more specific flaw was publicly disclosed: Claude Code silently stops enforcing deny rules when a command contains more than fifty subcommands. A developer who blocks rm will see it blocked when run alone, but that same rm command will run unrestricted when chained after fifty harmless statements. This second issue has since been formally addressed by Anthropic in Claude Code version 2.1.90, while the earlier inconsistent permissions behaviour remains unresolved in the linked GitHub thread.

The optics of an AI security lab having operational security incidents in the run-up to announcing a security initiative are something the press has been generous in not dwelling on. Glass houses, etc.

None of this invalidates the underlying capability. It does suggest the announcement is doing rhetorical work that the technical post is not, and that the line between “responsible disclosure of capability” and “controlled product launch with a security framing” is blurrier than the framing wants to admit.

What is new, and why it breaks more than it fixes

Set the framing aside. Even if you take Anthropic’s restraint at face value, and there are reasons to, since they are visibly forgoing revenue, the more interesting story is what AI vulnerability discovery does to a security ecosystem that was already creaking before any of this started.

A few numbers, from sources outside the Anthropic announcement.

CVE volume increased 35% between 2024 and 2025, and that figure undercounts the actual discovery rate because not every bug earns a CVE. As of March 2026, the NVD carried a backlog of 30,000 unanalysed vulnerabilities. Google’s M-Trends 2026 report estimates the mean time to exploit newly disclosed vulnerabilities at negative seven days: exploitation typically occurs before a patch exists. In the same month Anthropic announced Glasswing, HackerOne suspended new submissions to its Internet Bug Bounty programme after AI-generated reports, a mix of genuine discoveries and low-quality submissions, overwhelmed both triage capacity and remediation across the open-source ecosystem.

Read those numbers in the order they appear. The system was already in distress. Then AI-augmented discovery showed up.

Here’s the structural problem nobody wants to look at directly. Anthropic’s own data point is that less than 1% of the vulnerabilities Mythos has discovered have been patched. They have adopted a 90+45-day disclosure timeline (ninety days for the maintainer to ship a fix, plus forty-five days before publishing technical details) and use SHA-3 commitment hashes to prove possession of bug details without revealing them. This is well-designed by the standards of human-paced disclosure. It is also, as Anthropic’s own red team admits, probably inadequate.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), in an emergency briefing produced with SANS Institute and over 250 CISOs, concluded that “current patch cycles, response processes, and risk metrics were not built for this environment,” warning that “the time between disclosure and weaponisation is compressing toward zero”. Industry-standard windows were calibrated for a world where individual researchers found vulnerabilities at the speed of human attention. Mythos finds them at the speed of an agentic loop.

The 16-year-old FFmpeg bug and the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug were both found in projects maintained by small volunteer teams. FFmpeg’s core maintainer team can be counted on one hand. Open source in general is famously security-focused AND famously under-funded. Anthropic’s four-million-dollar donation to open-source security organisations is genuine and welcome, and it is also a rounding error against the remediation capacity that an industrialised vulnerability discovery pipeline implies. Discovery scales with compute. Remediation scales with humans. The gap between those two curves is the next decade of open-source security.

This is the part of the Forrester analysis that is closest to right: Mythos turns vulnerability management from a discovery problem into a maintenance-capacity problem. The bottleneck is no longer “who can find the bug” but “who is qualified to fix it without introducing a regression, and how do we pay them”. Without a shift in where the money goes, critical open-source projects risk replaying the COBOL problem at speed: indispensable code, no sustainable maintenance model, growing technical debt that can no longer be ignored because an AI agent will surface it on demand for anyone who asks.

Glasswing as a treaty

The most useful frame for what Project Glasswing actually is comes from outside Anthropic’s own materials: it’s not a product launch, it’s closer to a treaty. Twelve organisations chosen for two qualities: they own enough critical infrastructure that broad zero-day discovery in their products serves the public good, and they have the institutional capacity to manage their own ecosystem of disclosures responsibly. Microsoft can patch its own products at scale and help downstream maintainers cope. So can Apple, Google, the Linux Foundation. JPMorgan Chase is the slightly weirder member of the list, and worth thinking about as a signal: financial-sector critical infrastructure is now considered comparable in priority to operating systems and browsers.

This treaty framing has two implications most coverage missed.

First, the coalition is deliberately pre-political. There is no government in it. There is no international body governing membership. The Linux Foundation is the only member without a profit motive, and it is a US-based 501(c)(6). Anthropic has stated an intention to eventually transition governance to “an independent, third-party body coordinating cybersecurity projects across private and public sectors”, which is the kind of phrase that means “we haven’t figured this out yet”. The current structure works because twelve organisations can coordinate by phone. It is not a structure that scales to fifty, or to participants outside the US/Western tech sphere, or to nation-state actors with their own AI capabilities and their own ideas about disclosure norms.

Second, Glasswing is openly temporary. Anthropic has not committed to keeping Mythos restricted; they’ve committed to not releasing this model commercially while their competitors catch up. OpenAI classified GPT-5.3-Codex as “High Cybersecurity Capability” under their own Preparedness Framework in February 2026, the first model any major lab explicitly labelled that way, and has since released GPT-5.4-Cyber through a similar restricted-access pilot called Trusted Access for Cyber, with ten million dollars in API credits for vetted defenders. Google has Big Sleep and CodeMender doing internal vulnerability discovery and patching, with seventy-two security fixes already upstreamed to open-source projects. AISLE found twelve out of twelve CVEs in the January 2026 OpenSSL coordinated release.

This is an industry-level structural shift, not a one-company event. The interesting analytical question is not “is Mythos as dangerous as Anthropic says” but “what happens in eighteen months when every frontier lab has a Mythos-class model and the capability has diffused into the open-weights ecosystem at the level AISLE has already demonstrated”.

What defenders can actually do

The forward-looking part of this is less dramatic than the announcement and more useful. A few things follow reasonably directly from the trajectory.

The traditional patch-cycle assumption (find a bug, ninety days, ship a fix) is over. Google’s “negative seven days” mean-time-to-exploit number is not an artefact of measurement; it’s the structural state of the world when both attackers and defenders have access to LLM-augmented discovery. Defensive playbooks built around the assumption that exploitation comes after disclosure may need rewriting around the assumption that exploitation comes before disclosure. This is uncomfortable because it implies that compensating controls (runtime detection, segmentation, exploit mitigation hardening, monitoring) matter more than patch latency, and most organisations have invested the opposite way for the last decade. Awkward.

Vulnerability triage capacity, not vulnerability discovery, is the binding constraint. A team set up to handle a thousand findings per quarter, whose scanner vendor integrates AI-augmented discovery and starts surfacing ten thousand, does not have a security improvement; it has an unprioritised pile that creates legal liability through documentation. ArmorCode’s framing of contextual risk scoring as a way to prevent “AI-scale discovery” from becoming “AI-scale noise” is essentially correct, even allowing for the vendor pitch. The contextual layer (what asset is this on, what data does it touch, what compensating controls exist) becomes the load-bearing component of the security programme.

The combination of AI agents and traditional SAST tools matters more than either in isolation. A 2026 study found that Semgrep’s per-sample assessment accuracy against expert judgement was 65%, and CodeQL’s was 61%. Aggregate numbers looked fine; per-sample accuracy told a different story. Coding agents on a twenty-dollar-a-month subscription will surface things the paid scanners miss, and vice versa. Anyone running one without the other has gaps they cannot see, and those gaps are only going to widen as both layers improve at different rates.

For open-source maintainers specifically, the math is harder. The realistic entry points right now are programmes like Anthropic’s Claude for Open Source (qualifying threshold around 5,000 GitHub stars or 1M monthly NPM downloads) and Google’s CodeMender outreach to maintainers of critical projects. Neither programme reaches the long tail of small but security-critical projects, and the long tail is where the 16- and 27-year-old bugs were found. The question of how to fund security work on packages that twelve people maintain in their spare time but that secure a third of the internet has been live for a decade. AI vulnerability discovery is what makes it impossible to keep deferring.

Where this leaves us

Two things, held together a bit uncomfortably.

The first is that Anthropic deserves credit for visible restraint. Building a model with significant offensive capability and choosing not to ship it commercially is unusual behaviour in a competitive AI market, and it’s worth acknowledging as such even if the restraint is also commercially convenient. The Project Glasswing structure is a serious attempt at a difficult problem, and the alternatives (release it, or quietly use it internally) would both have been worse. The hundred million dollars in usage credits is a real subsidy of defensive work, and the four million in donations is a real if inadequate gesture toward maintainer capacity.

The second is that the framing of the announcement obscures more than it reveals. The capability is not as exclusive to Mythos as the announcement implies; small open-weights models recover much of the discovery side at trivial cost. The disclosure architecture is well-designed for human pacing and inadequate for AI pacing, and Anthropic’s own red team says so. The remediation bottleneck, the part of the system that actually closes vulnerabilities once they are found, is structurally underfunded in a way that no twelve-organisation coalition can fix. And the treaty model that Glasswing represents is openly temporary, scaling poorly, and pre-political in a way that won’t survive the next eighteen months of capability diffusion.

The honest summary is something like: the technical capability is real, the announcement is doing more rhetorical work than the technical post supports, and the genuinely interesting questions (what disclosure norms look like at AI pace, how open-source maintenance gets funded when discovery is industrialised, what happens when nation-state actors have their own Mythos-equivalents) have barely been engaged with in the public conversation.

Project Glasswing is a starting point, in roughly the way Anthropic itself describes it. The thing worth watching is not the coalition. It’s what fills the space around it.

If you write about AI security and want to argue with any of this, the most interesting disagreements are probably about where the bottleneck actually sits (discovery, triage, or remediation) and what the right policy response looks like at each layer. I don’t have settled views on the third question and would like to.

When the browser looks back

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LinkedIn loads JavaScript that probes for installed browser extensions — thousands of them, including competitors’ sales tools, grammar checkers, and religious or political plugins. LinkedIn acknowledges this, but frames it as anti-scraping and abuse prevention.

The question is not whether extension detection happens. It is how the results are used and stored?

So the situation is not “hidden conspiracy script discovered”, it is “known technique used aggressively enough that it has triggered class actions”.

On BrowserGate specifically, it sits inside the evidential chain rather than outside it. The controversy exists because independent technical reporting and legal filings are converging on similar descriptions of behaviour, even if they differ in interpretation.

BrowserGate signal

At browsergate.eu, the signal quality is uneven. Some material is technical reporting, some is advocacy framing, and some is light on verification. That mix is typical in early-stage platform disputes. Strong claims tend to arrive before consensus catches up.

What is solid at this point is fairly straightforward.

Extension probing at scale is happening, but it does not present itself as a single discrete action. It appears more like a background pattern of checks that becomes visible only when aggregated and observed over time. It is tied to identity-linked profiling on LinkedIn’s side, which is where discomfort begins to accumulate rather than announce itself. LinkedIn frames it as anti-abuse enforcement, and in isolation that framing is familiar. Most large platforms describe intrusive signals in security terms because that is where they are easiest to justify.

What remains open is not whether the mechanism exists, but how it behaves once it has done its initial job. Whether signals are discarded after real-time risk scoring, or whether they are retained and folded into longer-term behavioural profiles. That distinction separates short-lived fraud prevention from persistent inference about user tooling and behaviour.

This is where the broader discussion around it entered the LinkedIn feed.

Discussion on it in the LinkedIn feed

Ivan L.’s post drew on existing reporting and news coverage about LinkedIn’s extension scanning practices. It did not introduce new technical findings, but instead summarised and reframed the publicly reported material into a more direct, conversational interpretation of its implications. And strangely, it ended with

“How do you manage browser extensions in your org? Or..do you manage? P.S. If my profile disappears from Linkedin tomorrow - you know what happened…”.

I thought he was trying to be funny. I drafted a reply about the difference between transient risk signals and persistent behavioural profiles, and the usual scope-creep argument, but specific to extension telemetry.

The button to post my comment did not work, and on reload the post disappeared.

Not dramatically. No announcement, no visible enforcement trace. Just a refresh, and the absence of something that had been there moments before. Eerie. Then the profile followed a similar pattern, not reliably present either.

At that point, the interesting part became not the disappearance itself although my brain was racing to make possible connections. Platforms do that constantly. The interesting part is how routine the mechanism feels. Content appears, gets reviewed, and sometimes vanishes without explanation that survives outside the system.

Browser-level signals signal infrastructurisation (not a real word)

That is where a shift sits.

Not in whether LinkedIn is doing something novel, but in how unremarkable it has become that browser-level signals, behavioural scoring, and enforcement decisions operate in the same machinery. Nothing about it announces itself any more. It just behaves like infrastructure.

And infrastructure rarely needs to explain itself to the people inside it.

Post-incident reviews that miss the point

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is not incompetence. It is the system behaving exactly as it did before, including in the room where the review takes place.

Describing the incident instead of explaining it

Most incident post-mortems or retrospectives reconstruct the sequence of events. What happened, in what order, and what could have been done differently. Useful, but shallow.

The more important question is usually skipped: what had to be true about the organisation for this to happen at all?

An incident is not a deviation from normal operations. It is normal operations with (at least) one assumption exposed as false.

The phishing email was not an anomaly. It was the expected outcome of a filtering posture tuned to yesterday’s threat landscape. The missed lateral movement was not bad luck. It was the expected outcome of a detection model that no longer matched the network it was supposed to observe.

If you only fix the sequence, you leave the structure intact. The system will produce the same class of failure again, just with slightly different timestamps.

Why honest reviews rarely happen

Incidents do not occur in a vacuum. Systems have owners. Decisions have history. Contracts have signatures on them.

In the review, those realities are present.

Under pressure, people default to safe behaviour. Satir’s survival stances are predictable here: the technical specialist gives a precise, detailed timeline that somehow avoids naming the decision that set the conditions. The manager agrees everything is important, and nothing material changes. The team blames the phishing email rather than the posture that let it through.

This is not a failure of individuals. It is a predictable response to an environment where naming the real issue has consequences.

So the review produces documentation. Not understanding.

What a useful review actually does

A useful review updates the organisation’s model of itself.

That means asking different questions:

What had to be true for this to happen?
How long has that been true?
What would need to change for the same attack to fail differently next time?
What did the situation look like from where the decision was made?

This shifts the focus from error to context. Not who missed it, but what they were working with, and why that made sense at the time.

For that to work, the conditions matter more than the format:

The review is explicitly separate from performance evaluation
The facilitator has no stake in the outcome
The focus is on system behaviour, not individual blame

Get that wrong, and no framework will save you. Get it right, and people will say things that do not appear in any dashboard or report, but explain everything.

How to tell if it is working

You do not need maturity models for this. The signals are obvious.

Leading indicator: the nature of the actions.

Procedural: update a play or runbook, add a step, send a reminder
Structural: change visibility, decision rights, system design

If most actions are procedural, you are producing paperwork.

Lagging indicator: recurrence.

If the same class of incident keeps returning in slightly different forms, your reviews are not reaching the conditions that generate them. You would be trimming symptoms.

Where to start

The difficult part is not templates or facilitation techniques. It is making it possible to say true things without those truths being used against the people who say them.

That is not a security problem. It is an organisational one.

It requires explicit backing from leadership and consistent proof that honest reporting leads to better outcomes than safe reporting.

Once that condition exists, the rest is almost trivial. People already understand far more about how the system actually works than any document suggests. The review is simply where that knowledge is allowed to surface.

Get the conditions right, and the insights follow. Get them wrong, and you will keep writing excellent reports about the same failures.

Ghost hunting

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most organisations are aware of this. Very few act on it. The result is a detection posture that looks busy, looks measured, and quietly fails in the places that matter.

This is where breaches tend to settle in and make themselves comfortable.

A library of yesterday’s attacks

Detection engineering is usually reactive. Something happens, a technique is identified, a rule is written. Over time this builds a library of detections that reflects what has already been seen, filtered through whatever incidents and intelligence happened to reach the team.

That library feels like coverage. It is not, it is a historical record.

Attackers are not limited to what has already been observed. They are limited by what is blocked and what still works. Once a technique becomes reliably detectable, its value drops. Tooling shifts, tradecraft adapts, the rules remain.

Many detection libraries are quietly well tuned to techniques that serious attackers moved away from some time ago.

The illusion of coverage

Operationally, everything looks fine. Rules fire, alerts are triaged, dashboards show activity, coverage maps neatly to frameworks.

This is where programmes drift into performance rather than protection.

Coverage often becomes a counting exercise. A technique is marked as covered because a rule exists. Whether that rule would actually fire in this environment, against a current variant of that technique, is another question. It is also the one that tends to be skipped.

This is less a tooling problem and more an incentives problem. It is easier to show that a rule exists than to show that it works.

Static rules, adaptive adversaries

Most detection logic encodes assumptions about how attacks look. Those assumptions age quickly.

Living off the land techniques blend into normal system activity. A PowerShell command that looks routine on one endpoint is lateral movement on another. Signature logic struggles because the behaviour is not obviously malicious in isolation.

Identity based attacks bypass the idea of a technical entry point. If an attacker logs in through a legitimate authentication flow, there may be no exploit, no malware, no clear boundary crossing. If detection assumes compromise starts at the perimeter, it tends to miss what happens inside identity systems.

Cloud native attacks make this worse. Activity stays within provider infrastructure, using legitimate APIs and short-lived resources. Network indicators fade away, logging is partial or misconfigured, and the attack carries on regardless.

None of this is particularly new. What is new is how often detection still assumes the opposite.

Detection as a drifting model

A more useful frame is to treat detection as a model of how the environment can be attacked, expressed as rules and correlations.

Like any model, it has blind spots. It reflects the data it was built on. It tends to overfit to past incidents and degrade as conditions change.

Left alone, it drifts in a predictable direction. It becomes better at recognising what it already understands and worse at seeing anything else. Confidence increases while actual coverage quietly shrinks.

A quiet SOC is not always a sign of control. Sometimes it is a sign that the model is no longer looking in the right places.

Building against what has not yet been seen

Closing this gap means moving from reactive detection to proactive modelling.

Threat intelligence is an obvious input, though it often ends up as commentary rather than material. Reports are read, summarised, and filed away. Less often are they translated into detection logic before those techniques appear locally.

The information is not scarce. Campaign reports describe tooling and behaviour, malware repositories contain recent samples, sector advisories surface patterns early. The constraint tends to be the absence of a process that turns that information into something testable in the local environment.

Many programmes stop at awareness. Detection only improves when that awareness is turned into something that can fail.

Testing the model, not trusting it

If detection is a model, it benefits from being tested against reality.

Purple team exercises can do this when treated as experiments rather than demonstrations. Running a technique in the actual environment, with existing logging and controls, answers questions that documentation cannot.

Does anything fire. If so, what? If not, why not? Is the activity visible at all. If it is visible, is it distinguishable from normal behaviour.

This is where the uncomfortable gaps tend to appear. Not only missing rules, but missing telemetry, fragile assumptions, and logic that works nicely until it meets real conditions.

The detection gap that matters is often the one where nothing fires and nothing looks wrong.

Detection posture

A detection posture that keeps up is less about accumulating rules and more about maintaining, challenging, and occasionally discarding them.

Rules are reviewed against changes in attacker behaviour, not only after incidents. Coverage mapping is useful when it is backed by validation in practice. Techniques are tested in the environment they are meant to protect, not only in controlled setups.

Old rules that detect techniques no longer in use, or that produce noise without signal, are worth questioning. They tend to hide gaps elsewhere rather than provide value.

Metrics shift away from activity and towards effectiveness. Not how many alerts were processed, but which techniques can be detected with some confidence and which remain invisible.

It is less tidy than a dashboard full of reassuring colours. It is also closer to reality.

The cost of not doing this

Maintaining detection as a living model takes effort. Time, discipline, and a willingness to question assumptions all come into play.

The alternative has its own cost.

It produces systems that are visibly busy and functionally blind. It produces incidents where the relevant data existed, the rule existed, and neither connected in time to matter.

If detection only fires on behaviour that is already understood, it is not detecting attackers. It is documenting history.

Architecture reviews that approve instead of challenge

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Architecture reviews exist to catch problems before they become expensive. In practice, most reviews catch a different set of problems from the ones they were designed to find, and miss a different set from the ones that will eventually cause trouble.

This is not because the reviewers lack competence. It is because most architecture reviews are not designed to produce understanding. They are designed to produce alignment and distribute accountability. Once that is the function, the outcome is predictable.

A review that produces endorsement rather than understanding

An architecture review is a room full of people with different stakes in the design.

The architect has a professional investment in it. Managers have already made commitments that depend on it. Engineers have opinions about feasibility that may conflict with timelines. Security has concerns that may require rework that nobody has planned for.

These are not neutral positions. They shape what can be said.

Most reviews ask for candid challenge while making that challenge professionally costly. The result is a process that records attendance, produces action items on safe topics, and quietly converges on endorsement. The substantive concerns are present, but they are not expressed in a way that forces resolution.

What happens instead of honest engagement

Under these conditions, people do what the system allows.

The technical participant produces a precise and increasingly detailed account of the design that never quite addresses the concern that was raised. Questions about delivery risk are answered with explanations of technical correctness. These are not the same thing, but the latter is easier to defend and harder to challenge directly.

The reviewer who raises a concern sees it reflected in the next version of the design. The wording acknowledges the issue. The design does not change in the way intended. In the next review, the concern is marked as addressed. Challenging that status risks being seen as obstructive.

The manager agrees that the concern matters. Nothing changes. Addressing it would require revisiting a prior commitment, and the incentives in the room are not aligned with that outcome.

These are not individual failures of honesty. They are the expected output of a process that rewards agreement and penalises disruption.

What the review misses as a result

The concerns most likely to cause problems are also the ones least likely to survive this process.

They are uncomfortable because they require changing something significant. They are expressed indirectly because direct expression carries cost. They are acknowledged and deferred rather than resolved.

The review closes. The design proceeds. The problem appears later, during implementation, in production, or in an incident. What was deferred becomes expensive.

This is not an exception. It is the normal outcome of a review that functions as a governance checkpoint rather than a genuine examination of whether the design will work.

The function most reviews actually serve

Many architecture reviews exist to distribute accountability rather than to improve the design.

A room full of people has seen the proposal. Questions have been asked. Concerns have been noted. Decisions have been minuted. When problems emerge later, they are no longer owned by a single person.

If this is the real function, the behaviour in the room makes sense. The goal is not to surface the most difficult problems, but to avoid being the person who blocked progress or took sole responsibility.

Any attempt to improve reviews that ignores this underlying function will produce better looking meetings with the same outcomes.

What changes when the conditions change

A review that is intended to find problems requires different conditions.

The most important is separation between review and approval. If a review is expected to endorse a design that has already been agreed, it cannot also function as a mechanism for challenging that design. Where organisations cannot or will not separate these activities, the limits of the review should be made explicit. Otherwise, it becomes a ritual that implies scrutiny without enabling it.

Concerns need to be raised without being treated as obstruction or as a personal challenge. This is not achieved by stating a norm once. It requires consistent demonstration that raising a difficult issue is expected and useful.

Architects need to be able to acknowledge that a concern is valid and that the design needs to change without this being treated as failure. Architectural error is normal. Error caught in review is cheap. Error suppressed because the conditions did not allow it is expensive.

These are not process tweaks. They change what the review is for.

The facilitator’s role

A review with an external facilitator who has no direct stake in the design behaves differently.

A facilitator can ask the questions participants tend to avoid: what concern has not been said, what would need to be true for this design to fail, what is most uncertain here. These are ordinary questions, but they are structurally difficult for participants with stakes in the outcome to ask of each other.

A facilitator can improve the conditions in the room. They cannot override the incentives around it. If the organisation does not want certain answers, those answers will remain difficult to surface regardless of who asks the question.

The system around the room

The review does not exist in isolation.

Timelines, funding decisions, and prior commitments shape what is possible long before the review takes place. By the time a design reaches formal review, some decisions are already effectively locked in. Expecting the review to surface and resolve those constraints is unrealistic.

If the upstream system rewards speed, certainty, and adherence to plan, the review will reflect those priorities. It will not compensate for them.

What this means in practice

Most organisations already have architecture reviews that perform exactly the function they are set up to perform.

They create alignment, distribute accountability, and allow work to proceed. They do not reliably surface the problems that matter most.

The question is not whether the review looks rigorous. It is whether it is designed to make difficult truths visible and actionable.

If it is not, the risks are still there. They are simply deferred, waiting for a more expensive moment to appear.

For a deeper look at how technical, emotional, and political factors shape architecture work, see The human layers

The Indigo observatory

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am inviting you to the Indigo Observatory, a peculiar corner of the internet where current events get filtered through Discworld metaphors, and where watching the status quo maintain itself becomes both entertaining and only slightly depressing.

If you are looking for breathless enthusiasm about how technology and politics are definitely getting better, it is not for you. If you want someone to point out that Lord Vetinari’s approach to governance looks suspiciously like modern Western democracies, whilst finding this observation darkly amusing, then grab a cup of tea and settle in.

What’s in the observatory

The Indigo Observatory is fundamentally about pattern recognition. Not the algorithmic kind, but the human kind: noticing that the same structures keep appearing whether you are reading about Ankh-Morpork’s guild system or looking at how NGOs have professionalised activism. Observing that technical security debt is a conveniently bloodless way of saying we built this badly and now we’re stuck with it. Watching quantum computing get hyped whilst wondering if it is the next revolution or the next blockchain.

The content explores trends in technology, politics, and systems through the lens of Pratchett’s Discworld. This is not because Discworld is a perfect metaphor for everything, but because it is a safer and more entertaining way to discuss how systems actually work versus how we pretend they work. Talking about Lord Vetinari’s committee-based revolution management is less likely to start arguments than directly discussing why modern protest movements achieve so little. Probably.

The philosophy

The observatory operates on a simple principle: things that seem new often are not, and the Discworld already mapped most of the patterns. The guild system? That’s professional certification and regulatory capture. The Patrician’s management style? That’s technocratic governance and managed democracy. Does he represent Patriarchy? The Clacks system? That’s every overhyped communication technology that promised to change everything and mostly just made things faster and louder.

This is not about being cynical for its own sake. It is about noticing patterns. When you see the same structures appearing across different contexts, whether it is medieval guilds or modern professional associations, whether it is Vetinari’s committees or contemporary stakeholder engagement processes, it suggests something fundamental about h ow power maintains itself.

The writing asks uncomfortable questions using comfortable metaphors. Why does every revolutionary movement seem to end up with an office and a meeting schedule? Why do systems that claim to enable change mostly seem designed to prevent it? Why does “being realistic” always mean accepting the status quo? These are easier to explore through Ankh-Morpork than through direct political commentary, and often clearer too.

The Patrician’s playbook

The starting piece is The Patrician’s Playbook which maps Vetinari’s system maintenance techniques onto modern governance and institutions. It is not a how-to guide. It is more of a field guide for recognising when you’re watching equilibrium seeking, co-option as strategy, or controlled failure play out in real time.

The eight mechanisms explored, equilibrium seeking, co-option as strategy, intelligence without vision, the exhaustion factor, managed opposition, guild politics, the pragmatist’s trap, and controlled failure, are not theoretical. They are observable patterns that appear consistently across different systems and contexts. The Discworld framing just makes them easier to see and much more entertaining to read about.

Watching trends through the lens

The observatory tracks various trends, always asking “what would this look like in Ankh-Morpork?”

The approach isn’t to pretend expertise in everything, but to notice patterns in how technologies get discussed, implemented, and hyped. When every new technology follows the same trajectory (revolutionary potential, breathless enthusiasm, disappointing reality, niche applications), that’s worth noticing. When every solution to systemic problems turns into a committee and a report, that’s a pattern.

Quantum computing gets examined for whether it’s genuine progress or the next overhyped technology that promises everything and delivers niche applications. The chip bubble becomes a case study in how systems that seemed robust turn out to be frighteningly fragile. Machines learning gets the basic treatment: what it is, what it isn’t, and why the hype cycle looks suspiciously familiar.

Who most likely would appreciate a visit

People who have noticed that modern systems look suspiciously like they are designed to prevent change whilst appearing to enable it
Anyone who finds Pratchett more insightful about politics than most political commentary
Readers tired of breathless tech enthusiasm and interested in pattern recognition
Those who suspect that “disruption” mostly disrupts workers whilst enriching investors
Anyone who wants to understand why the trains run on time but go in circles

The safer metaphor

Here’s the thing about using Discworld as a lens: It is fictional, so discussing it doesn’t immediately trigger defensive reactions. I can talk about how the Patrician maintains power through complexity without anyone feeling personally attacked. I can explore how guild systems prevent competition without getting into heated arguments about professional licensing or being accused of “conspiracy thinking”. I can examine managed opposition through the Guild of Agitators without immediately polarising into political camps.

The metaphor creates distance, and distance creates clarity. Once you see the pattern in Ankh-Morpork, you start noticing it everywhere else. And because Pratchett was fundamentally kind whilst being brutally observant, the tone stays curious rather than bitter. Systems are absurd, power maintains itself in ridiculous ways, and yet people keep trying to make things better anyway.

In conclusion

The Indigo Observatory will not give me or you answers. It may help with noticing patterns. It will not provide solutions to systemic problems. It will help me, and possibly you too, recognise when you are watching those problems being managed rather than solved. It will not make me or you an expert in quantum computing, machine learning, or political theory. But it might help us recognise when we are being sold hype instead of substance.

It is trend-watching for people who have learned that most trends are old patterns in new clothes, that the status quo has a thousand subtle ways of maintaining itself, and that sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is point at the absurdity and laugh whilst simultaneously taking it seriously.

Visit when you’re tired of pretending everything is fine, or tired of depression and seriousness because we seem to go around in circles, generation after generation, with only superficial “Look & Feel” changes.

Get ready to notice how remarkably consistent the patterns are. The Patrician has been running his playbook for years. It is time we recognised the game and had a good laugh (at ourselves).

NIS2 compliance: The Kafkaesque burden on Europe’s companies

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Europe has suddenly declared that hundreds of thousands of companies must meet demanding NIS2 cybersecurity standards, yet the pool of qualified auditors is tiny in comparison. Critics note there’s a shortage of qualified auditors to perform the required assessments, the compensation for auditors is too low, and the audit methodology is unnecessarily strict. Even if every capable professional devoted themselves full-time to this task, the sheer scale makes meaningful oversight impossible. In Hungary alone, the current end-of-year deadline was deemed unrealistically tight, requiring a six-month extension. The result is predictable: compliance becomes a matter of boxes ticked on paper, with real security lagging far behind.

The system folds back on itself in an endless (supply) chain. Companies audit themselves, auditors audit the companies, and regulators audit the auditors. In Hungary, service providers in high-risk sectors are required to sign an agreement with an external auditor company certified by authorities within 120 days of registration, with the auditor checking entities’ information systems every second year. A noble aspiration that rather assumes there are sufficient certified auditors to go round. Each layer multiplies complexity, producing a hierarchy of symbolic gestures rather than tangible results.

Small IT teams in mid-sized firms are thrust into essential roles they are ill-equipped for, improvising with whatever documentation and tools they can muster. One sentiment expressed by organisations is telling: organisations do not know what the auditors will be looking for, describing it as preparing for an exam without seeing the syllabus. Checklists are completed with zeal, policies are lifted from the internet, and incident response plans are reduced to sticky notes scrawled with panic. Systems may be secure, but if documentation is disorganised or incomplete, it counts against the firm. Metrics, signatures, and forms convey the illusion of control, yet actual cyber risk continues unchecked. The system optimises for appearance, not reality, creating an ecosystem of superficial compliance that masks underlying vulnerabilities.

Yet it needn’t be quite so Kafkaesque. NIS2 compliance, like crossing a river, requires respecting the current. Mandatory incident reporting timelines and specific obligations cannot simply be routed around. But with systematic preparation and realistic planning, it is navigable. The difference between theatre and substance lies in understanding what genuinely reduces risk versus what merely creates paperwork. Practical guides exist that cut through the regulatory fog, offering frameworks for cross-functional coordination and genuine risk management rather than checkbox exercises.

The arithmetic remains rather damning. Estimates suggest NIS2 will impact over 100,000 organisations directly across the EU, with some sources citing 160,000 companies in member states, or even 400,000 directly subject companies. When indirect supply chain impacts are considered, approximately 1.8 million businesses face NIS2-related requirements. By mid-February 2025, only nine countries had transposed the Directive into national legislation, having missed the 17 October 2024 deadline. The European Commission launched infringement procedures against 23 Member States for failing to fully transpose NIS2, including Germany, France, and Spain. At the time of writing, end-November 2025, 15 out of 27 EU Member States have transposed the NIS2 Directive into national law.

Meanwhile, organisations face the dual challenge of implementing comprehensive risk management, incident response, and reporting procedures whilst typical NIS2 compliance processes, including security assessments, auditing, consulting, and tool implementation, take approximately 12 months. One might charitably call this “ambitious.” One might less charitably call it “utterly barking.”

The choice put before organisations is stark: pursue compliance as performance art, or build genuine resilience that happens to satisfy regulatory requirements. The former produces mountains of documentation that crumble under scrutiny. The latter requires understanding the river’s current and navigating it deliberately, with proper preparation and realistic planning.

Ultimately, this is a classic mismatch between ambition and capacity. Without enough auditors, skilled staff, and tooling to match the mandate, NIS2 risks producing paperwork rather than resilience. The Kafkaesque turtle lumbers forward, burdened with a mountain of forms and checklists, slowly grinding toward a goal that remains largely out of reach whilst the real threats carry on beneath the surface.

One suspects our chelonian friend is in training for an A’Tuin role, destined to carry an entire world on its back, though in this case, a world built entirely of compliance documentation and well-intentioned regulatory architecture. At least A’Tuin had four elephants to help with the load.

Terry Pratchett would have had a field day with this one: Our NIS2 turtle has only a handful of overworked auditors, a prayer that the spreadsheets hold together long enough to reach the next review cycle, and, for those wise enough to look, a practical guide to actually crossing the river rather than simply drowning in it, trying to keep afloat on excellent documentation.

Cloud-on-prem vs Big Tech

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An uncomfortable truth: Every byte uploaded to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud isn’t just data, it’s cloud capital. Coined by economist Yanis Varoufakis, the term captures how tech giants transform digital activity into privatised infrastructure. It’s not merely about hosting files; it’s about hoarding power. And right now, the US holds the keys, turning Europe into a lodger in its digital manor.

But there is an alternative: cloud-on-prem, a return to digital self-sufficiency, and European providers like Hetzner, who offer control, compliance, and a way to starve the beast. Think of it less as going backwards and more as refusing to pay rent to a colonial landlord.

Here’s why dumping Big Tech’s cloud might be the most rebellious, and most reasonable, thing an organisation could do this year.

The cloud capital conundrum

What is cloud capital?

Cloud capital isn’t servers and code, but the political economy of dependency. It’s the soft power Amazon, Microsoft, and Google wield by owning the pipes and APIs of modern life. They don’t merely sell computing, they lease out control, one serverless function at a time.

Imagine a medieval fiefdom, only instead of land, the tenant is tied to the whims of AWS billing and Google’s usage quotas. A “freemium” tier is their fealty.

Europe’s weak hand

As of Q2 2025, the US controls approximately 63% of the global cloud infrastructure market, with AWS holding 30%, Microsoft Azure 20%, and Google Cloud 13%. Europe, for all its regulatory might, is playing catch-up with both hands tied behind its back. This isn’t simply a business concern, it’s strategic infrastructure.

Cloud capital funds surveillance tech, AI development, and policy lobbying. In relying on US hyperscalers, the EU doesn’t just outsource storage, it outsources sovereignty. The January 2025 DeepSeek incident provided a stark reminder of this fragility. When the Chinese startup’s open-source AI model hit app stores and immediately exceeded ChatGPT’s downloads, it sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley: Nvidia’s stock plummeted 17% in a single day, and the Nasdaq lost over 600 points. DeepSeek demonstrated that perhaps matching US model performance at a fraction of the cost was possible, tearing the perceived mask off America’s AI supremacy and reminding us all how brittle proprietary cloud empires can be.

Vendor lock-in: Tools like AWS Lambda are functionally narcotic. Quitting requires therapy, budget approvals, and possibly an exorcist.
Data sovereignty: US clouds fall under the CLOUD Act, significantly weakening GDPR protections if backups live in Virginia. The legal grey area creates genuine compliance risks for European organisations.
Economic leakage: Every euro sent to AWS subsidises American tech IPOs, not European innovation.

The case for cloud-on-prem

Control without compromise

Cloud-on-prem, or hybrid setups, give cloud-like features without the overlords. With platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, or even a good old Proxmox cluster, an organisation can self-host without self-harm.

Benefits include:

No surprise invoices: Azure’s infamous egress fees become someone else’s horror story.
Actual compliance: Store medical or legal data where it belongs, under the appropriate jurisdiction.
Performance gains: Transatlantic latency is fine for email, less so for anything real-time.

That said, cloud-on-prem comes with its own challenges: it needs skilled staff to manage infrastructure, capital investment for hardware, and systems that can handle demand spikes. The hybrid approach acknowledges these realities: keep hyperscale where it genuinely makes sense, rather than letting it become the default.

Hetzner and other European alternatives

In a world of cloud greenwashing and vague ESG slideshows, Hetzner actually walks her talk. June 2025, their data centres operate with an average PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.1, with individual facilities ranging between 1.10 and 1.16 (exceptionally efficient by industry standards). Their German facilities have used electricity from hydropower since 2008, and their Finnish data centre park has run on hydropower since opening in 2018.

They also partner with Nokia to deliver 400G networking that’s both fast and (dare we say) elegant. If AWS is a digital motorway littered with tollbooths, Hetzner is the backroad with better views and no surveillance.

Other European providers include OVHcloud (France), Scaleway (France), and IONOS (Germany), each offering varying degrees of sovereignty, compliance, and local support. The point is not to promote any single vendor, it is to demonstrate that a viable European cloud ecosystem exists.

The greener (and smarter) alternative

Finland’s data centre advantage

Hetzner’s Finnish outposts make clever use of geography and engineering:

Free cooling: Arctic air handles most of the year’s cooling needs, Mother Nature as sysadmin.
Waste heat reuse: Diverted into local district heating, proving that servers can warm more than just CPUs.
Water efficiency: US data centres collectively consumed an estimated 163.7 billion gallons of water annually as of 2021 (equivalent to 449 million gallons per day). Large facilities can consume up to 5 million gallons daily, equivalent to a town of 10,000-50,000 people. Hetzner’s operations, by contrast, sip modestly using hydropower and climate advantages.

Cost vs conscience

Cloud-on-prem isn’t free, but it’s refreshingly honest.

Industry reports suggest growing numbers of enterprises are repatriating workloads from public clouds due to cost concerns and opacity in hyperscaler pricing models.
Hetzner’s server auctions and open power statistics make Amazon look positively Victorian in comparison.

Need ARM64 nodes that use 30% less energy than x86? Hetzner has them. A predictable bill at the end of the month? Also covered.

When Big Tech still wins (for now)

AI and hyperscale realities

Large language models like ChatGPT require infrastructure the size of small nations. Yes, they run on Big Tech’s hyperscale platforms, for now. Training frontier AI models demands coordination, capital, and compute resources that exceed what most organisations, or even most nations, can muster independently.

But Europe isn’t entirely out of the race. The LUMI supercomputer, housed in Finland and powered by renewables, is a stark rebuttal to the notion that AI dominance must be carbon-heavy and American. LUMI demonstrates that high-performance computing and environmental responsibility aren’t mutually exclusive.

The hybrid hedge

Quitting cold turkey isn’t necessary. Bursty workloads (like AI training or render farms) can stay on AWS. But core data, personally identifiable information, legal documents, customer records, belongs on local kit or European providers. Hybrid is often less a compromise than a rebalancing of power.

This approach acknowledges the genuine technical advantages of hyperscale (global CDN networks, instant scaling, massive GPU clusters for AI) whilst reclaiming sovereignty over the most sensitive assets.

Reclaiming cloud capital

The cloud was meant to free us from hardware, not hand us over to digital landlords. Three moves follow from adopting cloud-on-prem or hybrid models:

Starve technofeudalism: every workload moved is one less tithe to Silicon Valley.
Strengthen European tech: back providers that don’t treat GDPR like an optional questline.
Future-proof compliance: Schrems II set the precedent, and Schrems III is surely in the mail.

As Varoufakis argues, cloud capital functions much like oil did in the colonial era, a strategic resource that defines power relationships between nations. In his analysis, Europe remains the colonised rather than the coloniser in this new digital economy. Time to sink a digital well of one’s own.

Starting a cloud exodus

Audit the workloads: identify lock-in, technical debt, and cost traps.
Pilot a European provider: Test Hetzner’s ARM64 nodes or try on-prem with OpenStack. I explored it, and I still have root access.
Go hybrid with intent: Keep hyperscale where genuinely needed (AI training, global CDN, extreme burst capacity), but don’t let it become the default.
Make a checklist like this one.

The cloud isn’t just infrastructure, it’s a power structure, and one best chosen with both eyes open.

Mapping trust

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Organisations invest heavily in procedures, certifications, and standards. Yet whether those investments deliver results depends on something far less tangible: human relationships. As organisations become more distributed and interdependent, seeing and strengthening these connections becomes critical to resilience.

The hidden architecture of trust

Without trust, perfectly drafted policies and shiny certificates become little more than beautifully formatted PDFs. In networks where multiple organisations or teams rely on each other to deliver quality services, trust determines whether processes work in practice or collapse under miscommunication.

Virginia Satir’s methods provide practical tools to make invisible dynamics visible, measurable, and manageable. They help organisations spot friction, strengthen alignment, and reduce the risk that cultural gaps undermine security and compliance.

Trust as a network

Trust is not a static attribute; it flows between people, teams, and organisations. In multi-stakeholder contexts, the lines of trust determine how efficiently information, responsibility, and decisions move.

Virginia Satir’s insight is simple: organisations behave like family systems. Under stress, people fall into predictable communication stances:

Placating: “I’ll smooth this over” or “I’ll just adapt”
Blaming: “It’s clearly someone else’s fault”
Super-reasonable: “If we are just logical, nothing can go wrong”
Irrelevant: “I’ll joke whilst the rest of you panic”
Levelling (or Congruent): Open, authentic communication where people express themselves honestly whilst respecting others

These stances aren’t inherently dysfunctional. Humour can release tension, logical analysis is often necessary, and adaptation can be valuable in compliance contexts. The issue arises when people become stuck in defensive patterns under stress, rather than moving flexibly towards levelling communication.

Map these stances across roles and teams to visualise hidden tensions. Start by drawing a relational map of your network, showing who depends on whom and who communicates with whom. Highlight friction points and trust bottlenecks. This pre-work typically takes a few hours but provides a foundation for all further exercises.

Sculpting relational awareness

Once a relational map exists, a simple positioning exercise can reveal hidden patterns in under an hour. People position themselves in space to represent how they perceive working relationships, then discuss what the arrangement reveals.

Step 1: Invite participants to position themselves (physically or virtually using shared whiteboards or spatial tools) to represent their perception of trust and interdependence
Step 2: Others may adjust positions or annotate stances, highlighting gaps or areas of discomfort
Step 3: Discuss insights. Where does trust flow freely? Where does it stall? What assumptions are unspoken?

This exercise turns abstract culture into something tangible. Participants can see the gaps and flows in trust, giving them a shared vocabulary to discuss sensitive issues.

Keep the sculpt small (4–6 participants) for maximum clarity. Larger groups work better if split into parallel exercises and then compared. For remote or hybrid teams, adapt the exercise using virtual positioning tools or symbolic representations on digital whiteboards.

Dialogue and micro-feedback

Visualising trust is only the start. Structured discussion turns insight into action.

Explore why some relationships feel fragile: unclear responsibilities, competing priorities, or inconsistent communication
Highlight positive patterns: teams or partners that reliably support each other and share knowledge
Introduce micro-feedback: brief, constructive observations about how people interact without assigning blame

A 30–45 minute discussion following a sculpt can surface actionable observations. Document these as part of the relational map to track progress over time.

“Most misunderstandings are not in the rulebooks; they are in the silences between emails.”

Linking trust to outcomes

Trust patterns directly affect performance. Weak trust shows up as delays, errors, or incomplete reporting. Strong trust enables rapid alignment, better adherence to standards, and smoother collaboration during audits or incident response.

Overlay your relational map with operational processes or certification workflows. Colour-code weak and strong trust links. This gives leaders a visual tool to prioritise interventions before problems escalate.

Maintaining and measuring trust over time

Trust is dynamic, so it benefits from regular assessment.

Re-map periodically, e.g. every six months, or after major projects or audits
Track indicators such as responsiveness, openness to feedback, willingness to escalate issues constructively, and adherence to agreed processes
Use the map to highlight shifts in trust patterns over time

Even a simple survey with anonymised scoring of trust between roles or teams can complement the visual map. It provides quantitative insight alongside qualitative observation.

Reinforcing positive behaviours

Finally, recognise and reinforce moments of alignment.

Celebrate proactive communication, collaboration across silos, and transparent reporting
Encourage small rituals: verbal acknowledgements during stand-ups, highlighting examples of problem-solving collaboration, or referencing successful cross-partner initiatives

“Trust cannot be audited, but it can be observed, nurtured, and occasionally caffeinated.”

Closing

By making trust visible, measurable, and actionable, Satir-inspired methods allow organisations to see around corners, build to last, and improve compliance in practice. This results in fewer surprises during audits, stronger collaboration, and more reliable outcomes, without ever touching a spreadsheet more than necessary.

The future will surprise us. Be prepared.

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When scenario planning practitioners and others speak of “looking forward”, they don’t mean prediction. Forecasting implies we know where we’re going, while scenario planning admits we do not.

Looking forward is not clairvoyance, nor is it the worship of trend graphs. It is not about guessing which shiny technology or geopolitical shift will “win”.

Like a single renewable technology or control system which will dominate the grid. That kind of forward-looking, the PowerPoint prophecy, breeds false certainty.

What if?

Real looking forward is structured curiosity. It is the art of asking what if? It is about mapping plausible futures, not to pick one, but to prepare for several.

Take a utility operator exploring smart grid scenarios. What if a regional cyberattack knocks out part of the grid? What if an unexpected surge in electric vehicle charging overloads local transformers? The value is not in predicting the exact problem, but in thinking through the consequences, spotting vulnerabilities, and noticing where plans or assumptions might fail.

The value is not in the scenarios themselves, but in the thinking they provoke. The exposure of assumptions, the surfacing of blind spots, and the quiet admission that the future will surprise us.

That kind of forward thinking is the oxygen of resilience. A resilient smart energy operator is not one that resists change. It is one that rehearses for it. By exploring multiple futures, attachments to the current system are loosened, and people train themselves to recognise early warning signals. Operational posture is adjusted rather than clinging to a plan that might already be obsolete.

Crisis management

There is a difference between reacting and responding. A reaction is biological, immediate, instinctive, messy. A response is behavioural, considered, contextual, and sometimes counter-intuitive.

It is impossible to respond well without having imagined a situation before. Looking forward gives such rehearsals. In a smart energy context for example, a ransomware attack that disables distributed energy resources could be imagined. The team experiences the confusion, tests communication paths, and can learn which backup systems fail first. It’s a sort of cognitive inoculation against panic, even when a scenario was not exactly rehearsed.

Organisations that do not practise looking forward for crisis management tend to react, freeze, deny, or over correct. Those that do practise scenario planning in one of its many forms, are more likely to respond. They have seen similar patterns in simulations, debated options, and built muscle memory for ambiguity.

Build to last

Tabletop exercises and crisis simulations are examples of practical translations of looking forward. They make the abstract concrete. Scenarios on paper are intellectual, simulations force decision.

In smart energy, a tabletop might involve engineers, operators, and cyber teams, debating trade-offs between shutting down nodes to stop an attack or keeping the system online for essential services. They let people experience friction, miscommunication, and the emotional weight of uncertainty in a safe environment, where learning can costs some embarrassment, but not real-life impacts.

The best simulations aren’t tests of procedure but mirrors of culture. Each run builds resilience not by hardening systems, but by softening people to uncertainty.

Building comfort with uncertainty requires deliberate practise. Start small: debrief failures openly without blame, reward teams for surfacing risks early rather than hiding them, and rotate people through different roles in simulations so they experience multiple perspectives. Create psychological safety by celebrating the person who says “I don’t know” or “this assumption might be wrong”.

Over time, these small acts compound. Uncertainty stops being a career threat and becomes operational reality that can be discussed honestly.

TL;DR

Looking forward is not predicting, but preparing.
Resilience is not rigidity, but adaptive capacity.
Responding requires imagination. Reacting happens without it.
Tabletop simulations are the rehearsal rooms where imagination becomes responsive reflex.

Refs

For scenario planning methodology:

For organisational crisis response:

The relational firewall

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:00:00 +0200

A developer pushes a feature. Security flags a missing TLS configuration. Operations scrambles to patch the database. Alerts multiply while emails ping insistently and no one knows who owns what.

Technical pipelines are fine. The human side stutters. Miscommunication, conflicting priorities, and unspoken assumptions slow down response and occasionally create a small drama worthy of a sitcom.

DevOps, Security, and Ops can be aligned by noticing patterns in how teams interact under stress, practising adaptive responses, and embedding relational awareness into everyday workflows. The goal is operational harmony without the motivational poster clichés or mandatory soft-skills seminars.

Mapping the silos

Friction lurks everywhere: pull requests, Slack threads, post-incident emails that politely hide the word “blame.” Developers code without noticing security constraints, security flags vulnerabilities after the fact, and operations deploy patches with fingers crossed.

Satir’s stances appear in plain view. Someone placates, smoothing over the problem. Someone blames, pointing at the nearest human. Someone goes super-reasonable, pretending logic will save a situation already slipping out of control. Someone is irrelevant, making jokes about CI/CD uptime while the database burns.

Visualise it. Draw a flow of responsibilities, alerts, and communication. Mark the stances. Observe the patterns. This is the skeleton of dysfunction.

Stand-ups with teeth

Short, practical stand-ups replace long, bloated meetings. Fifteen minutes. Each participant names their current stance or mood to recalibrate awareness. Rotate who leads the stand-up. Acknowledge dependencies and blockers. Highlight unknowns as much as knowns.

Technical detail matters. Alerts, pipelines, TLS misconfigurations, missing logs, API endpoints, all reveal blind spots only when the people connecting them notice the patterns.

Walking in another pair of shoes

Role rotation works well. Developers triage alerts. Security participates in patch deployment. Ops reviews vulnerability tickets.

It produces empathy. Seeing another perspective softens blaming stances and exposes hidden assumptions. It also surfaces misunderstandings in technical processes that nobody admits exist.

Simulations work best if you introduce a minor disruption: a misconfigured API or a missing certificate. Nothing catastrophic, just enough to reveal where friction appears and how people respond.

Mapping responsibility flows

Draw the map. Not just who does what, but who depends on whom, who waits for decisions, and where stress accumulates. Highlight technical points: database access controls, TLS endpoints, API security checks. Then overlay the human flows.

It becomes clear which teams are overloaded, which handovers fail silently, and where minor misunderstandings could escalate into outages or security incidents.

Micro-feedback and conflict de-escalation

Observe stances in real time. If someone is moving into blame or placating, call it out gently: “I notice tension rising; can we pause for thirty seconds?” Encourage language that notes observations without judgement.

This is not therapy. It is practical conflict management that prevents friction from cascading into technical mistakes. Communication is part of the system. A missed patch or misapplied configuration often traces back to a relational hiccup rather than a knowledge gap.

Measuring alignment

Look for signs that the muscle memory is taking hold. Teams respond faster to incidents. Miscommunications drop. Alerts are handled efficiently without finger-pointing.

Satir-inspired metrics are subtle. Are people noticing their own stances? Are conflicts de-escalated spontaneously? Are lessons from one incident remembered in the next deployment? These observations tell more about a team’s operational health than dashboards ever could.

Technical evidence supports it: cleaner CI/CD pipelines, fewer failed deployments, reduced patch lag. Relational awareness and technical performance often rise together.

Reinforcement

End simulations or real incidents with recognition. Not for perfection, but for functioning under pressure. “The TLS fix took longer than hoped, but the way the team communicated made it manageable” is more useful than any KPI.

Small acknowledgements reinforce relational learning. Teams notice the patterns, embed them into routines, and gradually operate in sync without constant supervision.

Conclusion

DevOps, Security, and Ops exist to keep systems running. Technology alone cannot prevent misconfigurations, overlooked vulnerabilities, or deployment chaos. The missing ingredient is relational infrastructure.

Satir-inspired interventions, stance awareness, structured stand-ups, role rotation, responsibility mapping, micro-feedback, and appreciation, make teams resilient under pressure. They allow the technical pipeline to flow smoothly because the human pipeline is functional.

A team that recognises how they communicate, who they rely on, and how they react under stress has a security advantage that no firewall can replicate.

Small shifts, subtle observations, and a touch of humour are the glue. Everything else, including TLS and CI/CD, falls into place.

Muscle memory for incident stress

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Introduction

A SOC alert does not knock politely. It arrives like a crowd of people shouting different instructions in a language only half understood. One alert maybe says “ransomware detected,” another could flag “unusual login,” and the logs you trust most are blank. Analysts glance at dashboards, shrug, and whisper to each other over Teams while the CISO insists on updates every five minutes.

Virginia Satir’s work gives us a lens for understanding this chaos. She mapped how people respond to stress, communicate under pressure, and shape collective outcomes. Her stances, emotional congruence, and relational awareness offer a way to train teams not just to follow procedures, but to survive pressure without fracturing.

Because in real security operations, the human system is the hardest infrastructure to patch.

The human system under stress

Stress is not evenly distributed in a SOC. Alerts come in waves, each carrying ambiguity, urgency, and incomplete context. Analysts freeze, argue, or overcompensate. Managers issue conflicting instructions. Technical fixes exist, but relational collapse can be faster.

Satir’s work identifies predictable stances under stress. The placating stance seeks to calm at all costs, sometimes ignoring reality. The blaming stance points fingers at whoever is visible. The super-reasonable stance pretends logic can conquer emotions. The irrelevant stance distracts from the issue entirely.

All of these stances appear in SOCs daily. A single incident can host every stance in turn. Recognising these patterns is the first step towards resilience. It is far more useful than memorising a flowchart.

Exercise the stances to recognise them. Use that to observe a live or simulated alert storm. Note which stance each participant defaults to. Do not intervene immediately. The insight is in seeing the pattern emerge.

Building muscle memory

In incident response, building muscle memory is the repeated practice of cognitive and emotional patterns that allow us to act under pressure.

Tabletop exercises are ideal for this. Simulate alert floods, missing logs, or ambiguous instructions. Rotate the incident commander role so that responsibility and stress are distributed. Introduce minor, harmless surprises to train response under uncertainty.

Satir-inspired techniques enhance this further. Use stance-awareness cards or prompts. Pause for one minute to verbalise emotional reactions. Debrief without judgment. The aim is to embed a rhythm where recognising and adjusting emotional stances becomes automatic.

Do a 60-minute simulation. Inject two minor curveballs, such as a misconfigured firewall or conflicting CISO instruction. Encourage the team to verbalise what they notice in each other and in themselves. The technical outcome is secondary; the human pattern is the objective.

Safe failure and deliberate pause

Controlled failure is essential. This is mostly about the discomfort of imperfection without organisational damage.

Satir’s concept of allowing highlights the value of a pause between stimulus and reaction. In a SOC, this pause might be a thirty-second breath before responding to a high-priority alert, or a quick team stand-up to clarify roles. This allows individuals to notice their stances again and avoid knee-jerk reactions.

After each simulated incident, hold a reflection session. Ask participants to name one emotional response they observed in themselves. Do not judge or correct. The value comes from noticing.

Relational cues embedded in technical response

Technical procedures alone will not save incidents. How people interact, communicate, and interpret information determines success.

Map not only network flows but also human responsibility. Define clear communication norms in incident channels: concise updates, no blame, and acknowledgement of uncertainty. Encourage micro-checks: “I see that you are frustrated; can we pause for thirty seconds.”

Satir’s insight is that the relationships carry the system’’s memory. A well-tuned SOC is not just a technical system; it is a relational organism that records, interprets, and responds to stress.

Assessment and assimilation

Resilience is visible in repeated performance. Teams who maintain composure and communicate effectively during real incidents show assimilation of muscle memory.

Assess through observation and structured reflection. Are stance-awareness techniques appearing spontaneously? Are conflicts de-escalated without managerial intervention? Are lessons from one incident remembered and applied in subsequent events?

Six months after a training programme, observe incident handling. Look for micro-patterns of emotional regulation, communication clarity, and adaptive collaboration. The technical fixes will follow naturally; the human patterns are the true indicator.

Appreciation and reinforcement

Finally, acknowledge the effort. Satir emphasised appreciation as a restorative act. In a SOC, this is recognition of the team’s ability to remain functional under duress, even when outcomes are imperfect.

End each simulation or real incident with a short reflection on what went well, emphasising relational awareness and resilience rather than purely technical success.

Encourage verbal recognition. A simple “I noticed how calmly you handled that ambiguous alert” reinforces behaviour and embeds the learning in the team’s collective memory.

Conclusion

Resilience under pressure is not optional. Technical expertise without relational awareness collapses under the weight of real incidents. Satir-inspired muscle memory provides a framework for teams to notice, adjust, and act effectively, even when alerts multiply, logs vanish, and nerves fray.

Security operations that invest in human systems, not just technical controls, are the ones that survive. This is the ultimate operational advantage.

The audit as x-ray

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:00:00 +0200

There is a certain bleak poetry in a security audit. The word audit evokes clipboards, compliance spreadsheets, and the faint smell of burnt patience. But beneath the bureaucracy lies something far more interesting: an act of seeing.

A real audit, not compliance theatre, but the kind that leaves everyone quietly re-evaluating their life choices, is less about ticking boxes than about mapping the hidden currents that actually keep an organisation secure. Which is why it belongs not in the company of frameworks, but in the orbit of Virginia Satir, Eyal Weizman, and Trevor Paglen.

Satir gave us the seven A’s, a sequence for transforming human systems without pretending they are tidy. Weizman taught us that space remembers what people try to forget. Paglen photographs what power hides in plain sight. Together, they offer a way to audit not just systems, but the cultures that build and maintain them.

An audit, done properly, is less about documentation and more about anthropology with a clipboard. The seven A’s, Awareness, Acceptance, Acknowledgment, Allowing, Action, Assimilation, and Appreciation, provide a rhythm for this kind of inquiry. What follows is how that rhythm feels inside a real audit, where people are flawed, controls are fictional, and truth has to be coaxed out gently with tea and understatement.

The first uncomfortable gaze

Every audit begins in the dark. You are told, politely, that “we are fully compliant”. You nod, knowing this translates to we have a SharePoint folder of PDFs that say so.

Awareness, in Satir’s sense, is the first flicker of real light. It is noticing that the document management system is really a hope management system. It is spotting what is absent from the risk register: the whispered shortcuts, the heroic bypasses, the “temporary” admin accounts that have survived three reorganisations.

Like Weizman reading the negative space of a bombed building, awareness in an audit means learning to see through absence, to interpret what the silences say. And, as Paglen reminds us, it also means looking at what’s looking back, the cameras, dashboards, and “visibility tools” that surveil but never truly see.

Start with a map that isn’t a policy. Walk the corridors, both digital and human. Ask: “Where do people work around the system?” Watch their eyes, not their slides.

The art of not flinching

Once you’ve seen it, the next challenge is not to recoil. Acceptance is not approval; it’s the refusal to look away.

You accept that the “policy framework” is really three PDFs and an oral tradition.
You accept that the CISO sincerely believes phishing simulations are character development.
You accept that the helpdesk runs on caffeine, gallows humour, and trauma bonding.

Paglen’s lens never shames; it witnesses. He doesn’t scold the satellite, he frames it, exposing its quiet menace in orbit. Acceptance is that same forensic composure: to see a flawed system clearly, without moral panic or managerial perfume.

Run a short debrief where the only rule is “no fixing yet”. Each sentence is to begin with “We see that…”. The silence afterwards is part of the work.

Naming the ghosts

Acknowledgment is where the real forensics begin. It means naming what everyone already knows but no one dares to document.

You note that the VPN logs are “missing” because the logging was never switched on.
You observe that the “segmented network” is a single joyous flatland of broadcast traffic.
You gently inquire why the data retention policy reads like a prayer rather than a plan.

Each acknowledgment is an act of quiet rebellion, a refusal to participate in organisational gaslighting. Weizman would call this counter-forensics: turning the system’s own artefacts into evidence of its blind spots.

Put these ghosts on paper. Make them visible enough to be discussed, not just whispered about. Treat every absence as an artefact.

Making space for discomfort

Allowing is Satir’s most radical and least practised step. It is the pause between the finding and the fix, the silence where the truth lands.

Auditors rarely linger here. They rush to “remediation”. But genuine transformation demands a small mourning period. Allowing means sitting together in that collective oh dear, it really is that bad and letting it sting a little.

In architectural terms, it’s leaving the rubble exposed long enough to understand how the building fell. It’s what separates an ethical audit from a witch-hunt.

Delay the remediation meeting by a day. Let people digest. The next conversation will be slower, kinder, and far more useful.

Where the paperwork catches fire

Most frameworks begin here, mistaking motion for meaning. But without awareness, acceptance, acknowledgment, and allowing, your Action is just noise with a budget.

Real action looks more like reconstruction. You stop writing findings as commandments and start sketching interventions like Weizman mapping ruins: spatially, precisely, with respect for what still stands. You treat evidence as material, not ammunition.

Paglen’s influence returns here too: the move from secrecy to legibility. You take what was hidden and make it visible enough to be cared for, not just controlled.

When writing corrective plans, ask: which part of the system are we respecting by keeping this control alive? Then design accordingly.

The slow digestion of truth

Assimilation is what happens after the drama ends. It’s when new practices settle into muscle memory, and old excuses begin to sound ridiculous.

Most organisations fail here because they treat audits as exorcisms: the ghosts are gone, we’ve passed. Assimilation says otherwise. The ghosts have simply been renamed “lessons learned”. They now share an office with you.

The true sign of assimilation is when people keep talking about what they learned, not because compliance demands it, but because it still matters.

Six months later, listen. Are people still referencing the audit unprompted? That’s cultural digestion, not compliance theatre.

The strange grace of the honest map

Finally, Appreciation. Not the smug “we passed the audit” variety, but a quieter gratitude for visibility itself.

The audit is not punishment; it is a mirror. It shows the organisation its shape, its fractures, its improvisations, its accidental brilliance. Satir’s appreciation restores empathy; Weizman’s restores memory; Paglen’s restores vision.

To appreciate is to understand that compliance and consciousness are, occasionally, the same thing.

End the audit not with a summary, but a thank-you, to the people who revealed, not concealed. Visibility deserves appreciation.

The ruins of “best practice”

The seven A’s do not replace the audit process. They humanise it. They remind us that behind every nonconformity is a story, behind every evidence trail a set of choices, and behind every “best practice” an architecture of power.

Each A counters a familiar pathology: Awareness against denial, Acceptance against defensiveness, Acknowledgment against pretence, Allowing against panic, Action against noise, Assimilation against amnesia, and Appreciation against arrogance.

“Best practice” was always a mirage, the fantasy that control could outwit complexity. The seven A’s offer something humbler and truer: a blueprint for awareness inside bureaucracy. They remind us that security is not achieved through ritual obedience but through the courage to look, name, and stay present.

Using Weizman’s forensic poetics, Satir’s radical empathy, and Paglen’s covert cartography, or something else entirely, it still stands that a true audit is an x-ray, not a checklist. It reveals, and in that exposure, awkward, forensic, sometimes darkly funny, lies the only kind of security worth having: the kind that knows what it looks like when it breaks.

How to survive your first incident response

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

If you have ever tried to set up a Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) function in a small organisation, you will know that it is not about security, incidents, or even teams. It is about humans behaving badly under stress.

Enter the Satir Change Model, a tool from family therapy that has no right working in cybersecurity, and yet works better than most “cyber resilience frameworks”.

Her five-stage model maps beautifully onto what happens when a small organisation suddenly decides to “get serious about incident response”. Building a SIRT is not about defeating chaos; it is about becoming fluent in it. And once you have done that, “It cannot get any worse” stops being a threat and starts being the team motto making people laugh, sending extra oxygen to their brain.

Stage 1: The late status quo

“We’ve never been hacked, so we must be secure”

Picture a small local organisation. Everyone knows everyone. Passwords are shared like biscuits. The Wi-Fi password is still the founder’s dog’s name. The backup drive has not been plugged in for a year (or more).

No one worries because nothing obviously bad has happened. Yet. This is the late status quo, where stability feels safe but is really just inertia with better branding.

The poor soul asking questions like “who is responsible for data breaches?” receives only blank stares and the sound of coffee being poured.

This is the point in the movie where the audience knows something’s coming. The characters, like people showering in a Hitchcock movie, do not.

Stage 1½: The foreign element

“What do you mean, we’ve been breached?”

Something intrudes. A phishing email that half the staff click on. A ransomware splash screen. Or worse, someone external asking to see your incident response plan.

The “Foreign Element” disrupts the comfortable equilibrium. Suddenly, action is wanted. “Can we have a SIRT by Monday?”

Cue panic meetings. Someone mentions ISO 27001 because it sounds responsible. Someone else says “surely IT can handle it”. You suspect that IT is the problem.

This is where the Satir model earns its keep. It tells you: do not fight the discomfort. The foreign element is not your enemy; it is the only reason anyone will ever change anything.

Stage 2: Chaos

“Everyone panic in an orderly fashion!”

Now you are properly in it. Everyone’s calendar fills with “urgent” meetings titled “Cyber Thing”. Nobody knows who’s in charge. Someone suggests buying a SIEM because it “sounds proactive”. Another proposes unplugging the server “just to be safe”.

This, Satir would say, is “Chaos”. It feels like failure, but it is actually the first moment of learning. The old ways no longer work, and the new ways do not yet exist.

Your role now appears to be part facilitator, part therapist, part sheepdog. You listen to people’s fears, name them out loud, and introduce the radical concept of breathing.

When someone asks, “Can it get any worse?” you smile and say, “It absolutely can, but not for long.” Then you give them biscuits. Chaos is survivable if there are biscuits.

Stage 2½: The transforming idea

Chaos has been raging for days. Every meeting begins with “quick update” and ends with despair. Someone’s suggested buying another firewall, someone else has suggested prayer, and the intern has helpfully printed a list of possible entry points hackers might use.

The list, in all its painful honesty, can include one (or more) of these:

“Admin” passwords that have not changed since 2017.
Shared Dropbox folders labelled “Confidential”.
Publicly exposed test servers from a developer who left three years ago.
Email filters set to forward invoices to an external Gmail “for convenience”.
The CEO’s laptop, which connects automatically to any Wi-Fi that says “hotel”.

Everyone stares at the list. It is silent for the first time all week.

Then someone says, quietly: “So… maybe it’s not just about stopping hackers. Maybe it’s about us changing how we work.” Someone else adds “We also need to work on how we respond when things go wrong.”

And there they are, the “Transforming Ideas”.

The moment the organisation realises the threat is not out there, that it is inside, baked into the habits and shortcuts that once made things feel efficient and fast. That insight changes everything. Fear turns into focus. The incident stops being something happening to us, and becomes something we can learn from.

You can almost feel the collective exhale. That’s the magic of the transforming idea, going from panic to possibility.

Stage 3: Integration

“So, we need a plan, then?”

Slowly, the chaos starts to make sense. They work on the list and someone drafts an incident response flowchart. You test it with an adopted and adapted tabletop exercise involving imaginary ransomware and very real biscuits.

(Double) roles emerge:

An Incident Lead who knows shouting “Fix it!” is not a strategy.
A Communications Person using honesty early, to beat damage control later.
A Tech Person who starts documenting.

In facilitation terms, this is “Integration”. The team begins to see themselves as a system that can respond, not just react. Mistakes become stories, not blame sessions.

There is laughter again. Someone designs a SIRT logo involving a flaming bin. Morale improves.

Stage 4: Practice

“Do we really have to run another exercise?”

Understanding a plan is not the same as executing it. New habits take time. And the people who double for SIRT roles now run more tabletop exercises where pretend hackers attack pretend servers and fake phishing emails circulate. Biscuits remain compulsory.

The first few runs are excruciating: roles forgotten, scripts ignored, reply-all disasters. Slowly, through repetition and mild embarrassment, muscle memory begins to form. Response times drop. Scripts shorten. Procedures finally stick.

This is the Practice stage, turning insight into habit. Chaos is still present, but manageable. Laughter becomes a shared coping mechanism rather than panic. The team stops checking the handbook every ten seconds because they know it.

Stage 5: The new status quo

“We are incident response professionals now, apparently”

After practice, the team reaches a new equilibrium.

Procedures exist.
Roles are clear.
The incident log is maintained.
The SIRT can handle a phishing email without anyone shouting.

The organisation has not become perfect. It is, however, functional and resilient. Fear is replaced by competence (and mild cynicism). Tea and biscuits are mandatory.

This is the new status quo: a small organisation that can respond to incidents because the people running it have learned to handle themselves, not just follow a checklist.

Why the Satir Change Model actually works here

Because most incident response “maturity models” forget that organisations are made of people, not policies.

The Satir model acknowledges that every change starts with disruption, descends into chaos, and only stabilises once people have found new meaning.

It gives permission for things to be messy. It normalises panic as a stage, not a sin. And it replaces the managerial fantasy of “smooth transformation” with the far more realistic “structured improvisation” until we get what works best for us.

If you are facilitating this process, your job is not to make people unafraid, it is to help them notice that fear and cognitive dissonances are just the system learning in real time.

Famous last words

“It cannot get any worse”

A few months later, another incident occurs. This time, everyone knows what to do. No one shouts. The post-incident review happens within 24 hours, and someone even writes it down.

The SIRT handles it so smoothly that management asks if you can “automate it”. You laugh until you cry.

Change, as Satir would say, never stops. The best one can do is meet it with humour, structure, and biscuits.

The compliance email and the collective flinch

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:00:00 +0200

Ever received that little gem of an email from IT: “Compliance Reminder”? No greetings, no sugar-coating, just a tiny, accusatory phrase in your inbox like a foghorn in a library. And just like that, the office collectively holds its breath.

Instantly, a strange ritual begins. Even the most relaxed of colleagues, those who haven’t touched the company VPN in months, start opening folders, scanning drives, and muttering about forgotten passwords like they’re uncovering ancient curses. Karen from marketing begins tearing through her emails as though the server itself might collapse if she doesn’t click the right links. Greg in finance panics at a spreadsheet he hasn’t touched since 2019, convinced it’s harbouring hidden sins.

The stages of this mild hysteria

Stage 1: Feigned calm

“Oh, it’s nothing,” says everyone, firmly ignoring the bolded subject line. They sip their coffee, pretending to type while secretly planning escape routes to a world without IT audits.

Stage 2: The over‑inspection

Folders get scrutinised. Every report, draft, and “final final v2” document undergoes a forensic review. People start asking themselves: Did I give permissions to the wrong person in 2021? Was that macro sketchy? The office turns into a scene from a low‑budget thriller where Excel is the antagonist.

Stage 3: Rumour propagation

“I heard Simon in accounts got flagged for leaving a sticky note with his password.”

“Impossible. That was a joke at the Christmas party.”

By the time lunch rolls around, half the office has changed passwords, unplugged monitors, and considered submitting a notarised declaration of innocence.

Stage 4: Defensive correspondence

Employees craft emails to IT that could double as short confessional essays:

Dear IT, regarding your ‘Compliance Reminder’, I wish to state that any potential breaches were entirely outside my control, likely induced by external factors including, but not limited to, minor desk earthquakes and keyboard-tapping pets.

Stage 5: Reluctant acceptance

A minority eventually realise it’s a generic reminder. They sigh, pick up their tea, and carry on. But the dread lingers, like a half-drunk cup of office coffee left on the radiator: what if next time it’s real?

This is why we cannot have nice things

The brilliance, or cruelty, of IT is that these reminders are both necessary and perfectly phrased to induce panic. “Failure to comply may result in consequences.” Consequences, yes. That word alone prompts existential reflection on every missed annual security training since 2017.

Humans are, by nature, spectacularly bad at interpreting neutral emails. We turn ambiguity into drama. And so, somewhere in every office, someone is quietly Googling: “What is the minimum effort to survive a compliance audit?” while pretending that their life is under control.

Or can we?

The generic email

Imagine instead an email that doesn’t sound like an omen of doom:

Subject: Quick check-in: IT compliance

Hi all,

Just a gentle reminder to review your current system access and any outstanding 
compliance tasks by Friday. 

This helps us keep our shared resources secure and avoids any last-minute 
scrambling.

If you have questions or run into issues, please reply directly, I’m happy to walk 
through anything, no stress.

Many thanks,

Nina, IT

No capitalised threats. No vague “consequences.” Just a simple, human tone that acknowledges your time and effort, and invites collaboration rather than panic. And clearly a general email. Compliance reminders like this might actually work, without turning the office into a reenactment of a GOT skirmish.

When someone slips

So someone’s clicked the link. No screaming. No mass panic. Here’s an example of the kind of email that might actually help:

Subject: Quick follow-up: potential security incident

Hi [Name],

We noticed a suspicious link was clicked from your account. 
No judgement, these things happen to the best of us. 

To keep everything safe, please:

Change your password.
Run the attached security checklist.
Let us know if anything looks unusual.

If you need a hand, we’re here to walk through it step by step, seriously, 
just reply.

Thanks,

Nina, IT

It doesn’t shame, it doesn’t threaten, it doesn’t blow up the inbox with corporate “penalty language.” It’s calm, practical, and human, people are far more likely to follow the instructions when their dignity survives intact.

The unequal sense of it all

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:00:00 +0200

Income inequality is the elephant in the room. No, scratch that, it’s the entire herd. The rich keep grazing on returns that grow faster than the economy itself, while the rest of us fight over scraps. The rules of society start bending in ways that nobody admits out loud. As Piketty has shown, capital accumulates faster than wages. It creates a feedback loop that is brutally efficient at concentrating wealth at the top.

If you want to understand why societies wobble, falter, or tilt toward extremism, start with money. Notice who gets to keep hoarding it while everyone else scrambles.

Next, notice how most discussions of inequality pause at income, take the recent OECD report on global wages, for instance, sometimes education, but rarely the layers beneath. Rarely do they attend to the threads that are almost invisible: healthspan, quiet anxiety, cultural erasure, auditory pollution, and spatial injustice. Not to mention the staggering burden of uncredited care work. These are the textures of inequality that live in bodies, in homes, in the small, daily negotiations of existence.

It’s in the morning commute. It’s in the way your coffee costs differently depending on your postcode. Really, it’s everywhere. That’s the easy, visible stuff, the tip of the iceberg. What really gnaws at the edges of society, the bits that aren’t in glossy reports or smug TED talks, are the inequalities we barely name, or forget exist.

Then tere’s the inequality of sound. The middle-class suburbs hum with the quiet confidence of broadband, school plays, and dental check-ups. Meanwhile, a child in a housing estate hears sirens and shouted arguments before breakfast. Their world is not just economically poorer. It is aurally, atmospherically, emotionally impoverished in ways no spreadsheet will ever capture.

And inequality of memory. Those with social capital inherit histories, photographs, names, anecdotes, an easy sense of belonging. Those without, inherit erasure. Try telling a young person who’s never been on a train that the country once had a network connecting all of its towns. Or that once, a library could be a palace of imagination. For them, these are abstract concepts. Luxuries of memory, not lived experience.

Inequality in patience is subtler but crueller. The bureaucratic system is calibrated for those who can wait, who have the time and stability to navigate forms, appeals, and jargon. For the chronically busy, the precariously housed, the digitally disconnected, every delay compounds. Every procedure punishes. Waiting itself is a kind of taxation, but levied unfairly.

And then there’s the inequality of imagination. People at the top of wealth charts can invent futures, fund research, gamble on risks because their losses are papered over with prestige and privilege. Those at the bottom? Their imagination is throttled. Survival takes precedence, and what little creativity remains is practical, how to stretch a food parcel, which bus route saves money, or how to shield a child from the leaking roof without a hammer. It is gritty, applied imagination, not the elegant variety that gets tweeted about.

Even in speech, inequality whispers. Accent, grammar, word choice, subtle indicators of upbringing influence who gets hired, who gets laughed at, who gets trusted. One person’s colourful idiom is another person’s perceived ignorance. The richness of language is ironically stratified.

All these threads, economic, sensory, cultural, and bureaucratic, don’t just make life unfair. They accumulate, quietly bending the rules of society until the structure itself begins to wobble. People feel left behind, unheard, and squeezed; trust frays; resentment festers. When enough of these fissures intersect, the result is fertile ground for populism, extremism, polarisation, and social upheaval. The subtle, almost invisible inequalities we live with every day are the tremors before the quake, the reason societies falter not because people are inherently violent, but because the system nudges them toward anyone promising answers, scapegoats, or shortcuts to dignity.

It is messy, like spilled ink on a ledger you were never meant to read. Inequality is not a straight line from poverty to wealth. It is a crumpled sheet of paper, folded, refolded, punctured with holes you only notice when you press your ear to it. The challenge is not to flatten it neatly for a graph or a policy paper. The challenge is to acknowledge the mess, to recognise the noise and silence, the overlooked and undervalued, and to wrestle with it honestly.

Because until we can hear the hum, the siren, the unspoken, the inherited erasures, truly hear it, not just glance at it, any talk of “closing the gap” will remain a polite fiction. Neatly packaged and utterly insufficient.

The deadly cost of environmental defence

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Since 2012, over 2,000 environmental defenders have been killed for standing up against projects that put land, water, and local communities at risk. In 2023 alone, 196 people died: 79 in Colombia, 25 in Brazil, 18 in Mexico, and another 18 in Honduras. Indigenous peoples, about 6% of the global population, accounted for 43% of the victims. The pattern suggests a systemic problem, tied to corporate interests, armed groups, organised crime, and often, state inaction.

Corporate exploitation and targeted violence

Mining, logging, and agribusiness corporations sit at the heart of many of these conflicts. They encroach upon Indigenous territories and protected areas to extract resources, and when communities resist, violence usually follows.

In Honduras, the 2024 assassination of Juan López underscored this deadly entanglement. López had been campaigning against an iron oxide mining project involving companies like Inversiones Los Pinares and Inversiones Ecotek, notorious for environmental violations. His death was not an isolated incident but a symptom of how corporate interests intersect with local political corruption to create a lethal environment for activists.

PBI Canada reports: In Mexico’s Chiapas region, similar patterns played out. Carmen López Lugo, an Indigenous environmental activist, was murdered in 2024 amid territorial disputes over resource-rich lands. The Chiapas conflict shows how corporate interests, criminal organisations, and local power struggles converge to endanger defenders. Mining is consistently the deadliest industry for environmental activists, with Indigenous and peasant leaders in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico disproportionately at risk. (And yes, mining companies will deny everything while quietly lobbying politicians.)

Armed groups and organised crime

Violence against environmental defenders is not limited to corporate actors. Armed groups and organised crime syndicates often exploit the very same resource-rich territories.

In Colombia, despite peace agreements with FARC, dissident armed factions continue to dominate mineral- and agriculture-rich regions. These groups target activists opposing their control, ensuring both territorial dominance and financial gain, and making daily life for any local activist a high-stakes gamble.

In Venezuela, the Uwottüja Indigenous community along the Orinoco Medio River faced violent incursions from dissident FARC elements and the National Liberation Army (ELN) in search of precious metals. Virgilio Trujillo Arana, a local community guard who resisted these incursions, was murdered in 2022. These cases show that environmental activism here intersects directly with organised crime, creating a landscape where defenders are under constant threat. (Not that anyone in Caracas seems especially alarmed.)

State complicity and impunity

State actors, whether through action, or more often inaction, frequently enable violence against defenders. In Honduras, the murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016, an activist opposing the Agua Zarca Dam, exposed how corporate projects can operate with military and political backing. Similarly, in Mexico, Carmen López Lugo was killed by perpetrators wielding military-grade weapons, showing how state resources can become instruments of terror, according to Amnesty International.

Even international frameworks like the Escazú Agreement, designed to protect environmental defenders in Latin America, are hampered by slow ratification and weak enforcement. Impunity is endemic: perpetrators operate with minimal fear of consequences, emboldened by structural failures in legal and political systems. (In other words, “justice” is optional.)

A lethal ecosystem

Corporations, criminal organisations, armed groups, and state actors form a mutually reinforcing ecosystem. Corporations rely on armed groups to secure territories. Criminal organisations profit from resource extraction. States may turn a blind eye or actively support these operations. The result: a perilous landscape where environmental defenders face threats from multiple directions.

This ecosystem thrives on resource competition, criminalisation of activism, and impunity. Communities who resist exploitation are not only challenging profit-driven interests but are confronting a tangled web of violence where multiple actors are complicit in a system with a common incentive to silence them. (Think of it as a circus where the clowns are heavily armed and the ringmaster is asleep.)

TL;DR

The deaths of environmental defenders are neither random nor isolated. They reveal a global system where corporate greed, criminality, armed power, and political complicity converge to make environmental protection a dangerous act. Indigenous and local communities are disproportionately affected, yet international protections remain fragile.

To prevent further deaths, we need resilient legal frameworks, genuine corporate accountability, international pressure, and steadfast support for those on the frontlines. Environmental advocacy should never be a death sentence, but without systemic change, the lethal cost of defending our planet will keep climbing. (And let us not pretend that small gestures, like a press release or candlelight vigil, are enough.)

Inflicting help

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Inflicting help” is the curious human habit of dressing up domination, control, or self-interest in the language of benevolence. It describes well-intentioned or performative actions imposed on others, often without their consent, awareness, or any genuine benefit to them. The giver feels virtuous; the receiver is often disempowered, silenced, or even harmed. The word help suggests care and generosity, but when prefixed with inflicted, it carries the unmistakable sting of condescension and coercion.

It is important to distinguish between help as enablement and help as control. Effective help resembles the Montessori principle of “help me to do it myself”: it begins with observation, respect, and creating an environment where individuals can grow in their own direction. It centres their needs and rhythms, offering tools and guidance only as much as they are interested in. The student is not requested to give his or her power away to anyone or anything.

Controlling help, by contrast, interrupts the process. It imposes solutions, corrects according to the helper’s assumptions, and mistakes dependence for care. Where autonomy nurtures self-mastery and confidence, control stifles initiative and quietly teaches helplessness.

This tension has played out repeatedly across history. “Help” has been weaponised as a justification for conquest, as a means of enforcing cultural superiority, and as a convenient moral costume for those seeking power or prestige. From colonial missions framed as “civilising” projects to modern corporations staging philanthropic spectacles, the story repeats: aid is declared, aid is imposed, and aid conveniently serves the interests of the giver more than the receiver.

Throughout history and into the present, “help” has also served as a weapon of domination, a mechanism for justification, and a form of moral self-adornment. By examining different incarnations of “inflicted help,” the ways in which good intentions, or their performance, mask deeper patterns of exploitation and control can be uncovered and recognised.

Who does it and why

Inflicted help is not confined to any one social layer; it is an equal-opportunity pastime. The compulsion to “step in” runs from the dinner table to the halls of empire, often with the same logic: I know better, therefore you will be grateful.

Individuals

On the most familiar level, inflicted help comes from those closest to us: friends, family, colleagues who insist they “know better.” The motives are rarely malicious, but they are telling. There is the psychological payoff of superiority (“look how capable I am”), the moral credit earned (“I was only trying to help”), and the simple avoidance of discomfort (“I cannot bear to watch you struggle”). The classic figures appear everywhere: the meddling neighbour who rearranges your garden “for its own good,” the well-meaning tourist photographing themselves while “saving” children abroad, or the unsolicited workplace “mentor” determined to improve your career into a facsimile of their own.

Institutions

Scaled up, inflicted help becomes policy. Governments, NGOs, charities, and corporations often dress intervention in the soft robes of benevolence. But the rationales are less about kindness and more about control, dependency, market capture, and legitimacy. Aid agencies dictating the policies of disaster-struck countries are a case in point: under the banner of relief, they decide what people need, when they need it, and how grateful they should be for receiving it. The recipients’ voices are reduced to a faint background hum, while institutional actors congratulate themselves for their “impact.”

States and empires

At its most grandiose, inflicted help is the rhetoric of empire. Colonial powers justified conquest with the civilising mission: bringing railways, schools, and “moral instruction” to the allegedly less developed, while extracting resources with great enthusiasm. Missionaries framed Christianisation as salvation while obliterating indigenous beliefs. Modern states echo the same formula with “nation-building” projects, promising democracy while exporting military bases and contracts. The British Empire’s tale of railways and schools is a classic example: the gloss of generosity masking an engine of extraction.

The mechanics

Across dinner tables, office corridors, aid agencies, and empires, the pattern is astonishingly familiar. The motivations are simple, human, and can be inconvenient for anyone on the receiving end.

The helper often steps in out of a need for control or certainty. There is something soothing about fixing other people’s problems, calming one’s own anxiety with the illusion of mastery, while avoiding the far messier task of confronting one’s own helplessness. Sometimes, the motivation is a misinterpreted role. In relationships where one party is “senior” or positioned as the authority, parent to child, manager to employee, coloniser to colonised, it becomes almost instinctive to supply answers, whether or not anyone asked for them. And almost always, there is a desire for validation. Helping can feel like performance art: the applause comes in the form of gratitude. When that gratitude fails to appear, resentment slips in, often wrapped in the words: after all I’ve done for you…

The forms this inflicted help takes are equally predictable. There is the help that arrives too early, before the recipient has even defined the problem or asked for support. There is the help that arrives in excessive abundance, smothering the recipient until their own problem-solving muscles atrophy. And then there is the help that misses the mark entirely, grounded in the helper’s assumptions rather than the recipient’s reality, like offering swimming lessons when the actual request was for a life jacket.

Whether it comes from a meddling neighbour, a well-meaning NGO, or a sprawling empire, inflicted help follows the same script: assume you know better, impose your solutions, expect thanks, and enjoy the warm glow of moral superiority. It is a story that repeats, quietly or loudly, wherever humans are convinced that their version of “help” is the only one worth having.

Impact

Inflicted help is rarely neutral. Beneath the polished veneer of generosity lies a quiet erosion of autonomy, dignity, and agency. The helper steps in, often motivated by a need for control, the urge to assert authority, or a desire for validation. They assume knowledge the recipient does not possess, offer solutions before they are requested, or provide more assistance than is necessary. On the surface, this seems benign, even kind, but the consequences are immediate and cumulative.

Recipients often internalise the message: you are not competent to manage this yourself. Self-confidence diminishes, initiative falters, and hesitation replaces curiosity. When help arrives too early or in excess, it fosters dependence, sometimes evolving into learned helplessness. By removing the space for individuals to confront challenges on their own, the helper unintentionally stifles learning, critical thinking, and resilience, the very skills needed for autonomy.

There is also a more insidious psychological effect. The recipient may feel guilty for questioning the help, or reluctant to complain, afraid of appearing ungrateful. Gratitude becomes a silent obligation, masking any frustration or resistance. On a larger scale, inflicted help can serve as a moral cloak for exploitation: colonial conquest is recast as civilising missions, corporate interventions as “impactful solutions,” and international aid as benevolent guidance. In each case, the rhetoric of aid conceals the imposition of control and the extraction of value.

Whether the helper is a meddling neighbour, a well-meaning NGO, or a sprawling empire, the mechanics and consequences are consistent: the helper satisfies their own psychological needs, while the recipient bears the cost, loss of agency, dependence, stifled growth, and the quiet burden of gratitude. Inflicted help, in short, teaches compliance under the guise of care.

Patterns in practice

The patterns of inflicted help become clearer when specific historical, institutional, and contemporary examples are studied. Across different periods and regions, the same dynamics emerge: well-intentioned actions that, upon closer inspection, reveal underlying motives of control, exploitation, or cultural imposition, whether intentional or not.

Historical conquest and colonialism

The Roman Empire’s extensive network of roads and aqueducts serves as a prime example of infrastructure built under the guise of public welfare. While these engineering feats facilitated troop movements and communication, they also served to integrate local economies into the Roman system, often prioritising imperial needs over local welfare. Under Emperor Augustus, Rome constructed 50,000 miles of new roads, easing the movement of troops, information, and goods. The investment of imperial resources in large infrastructure projects integrated the provinces and brought further economic benefits.

European colonial powers justified their expansion by claiming to bring civilisation and development to indigenous populations. And this often involved the dismantling of local systems and imposition of foreign governance, leading to long-term cultural and social disruptions. The colonisation of Africa, for instance, led to the disruption of local customary practices and the dismantling of socioeconomic systems, with native populations being displaced to clear fertile farmland.

In British India, the introduction of English education, particularly through the policies of Thomas Babington Macaulay, was framed as a means of enlightenment. In reality, it was designed to create a class of clerks to serve the colonial administration, often at the expense of indigenous languages and cultures. Macaulay’s policy aimed to replace traditional education systems with English-language instruction, fostering a class of interpreters and bureaucrats who would assist in administering the colonial state.

The Canadian residential school system operated from the 19th century into the late 20th century, with the stated goal of assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. These institutions led to significant loss of language, culture, and family bonds among Indigenous communities. Over 150,000 children were taken from their families and communities to attend schools which were often located far from their homes. Many never returned.

Forced labour and resource extraction

Under King Leopold II, the Congo Free State was subjected to brutal exploitation under the veneer of philanthropy and civilisation. Leopold presented his regime as a humanitarian mission: he claimed to be bringing Christianity, commerce, and “progress” to central Africa, while ostensibly working to abolish the Arab slave trade. In reality, this moralistic façade concealed a system of forced labour for rubber and ivory that terrorised entire communities, with hostages, mutilations, and widespread killings used to enforce quotas. Between 1885 and 1908, the Congo Free State became the site of some of the worst human rights abuses in Africa’s colonial history, all justified under the guise of “helping” the local population.

France’s “mission civilisatrice” was a justification for colonisation, claiming to bring civilisation through infrastructure and education. In practice, it often involved the suppression of local cultures and imposition of French norms. The civilising mission was the cultural justification for the colonisation of French Algeria, French West Africa, and other colonies, promoting French culture and values while undermining indigenous traditions.

The Dutch Ethical Policy, introduced in the early 20th century, aimed to improve the welfare of indigenous populations through education and infrastructure. And it also reinforced Dutch economic interests and control over the region. The policy was characterised by efforts to establish schools, improve irrigation systems for agriculture, and create a banking infrastructure, fostering a nascent middle class among Indonesians. However, it faced challenges, including underfunding due to the Great Depression and resistance from Dutch nationalists who feared it might fuel Indonesian nationalism.

Contemporary examples?

Facebook’s Free Basics initiative aimed to provide free internet access to users in developing countries. The service was criticised for offering limited internet access, primarily to Facebook and a few partner sites, raising concerns about net neutrality and digital colonialism. Free Basics focuses on ‘western corporate content’ thereby violating net neutrality principles.

The phenomenon of individuals from affluent countries volunteering in developing nations, often without relevant skills or understanding, can perpetuate stereotypes and undermine local expertise, reflecting a modern form of imposed help.

TL;DR

“Help” can sometimes be a guise for control, exploitation, or cultural imposition. Recognising these patterns is crucial in ensuring that assistance is genuinely effective and respectful of the autonomy and dignity of those it aims to support.

“You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.” ~ Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Why are we not making a defendable internet?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, the internet was described as an “information superhighway”. In truth, it more closely resembles the back alley behind a funfair: noisy, sticky underfoot, and populated by people selling things you probably do not want but will end up buying anyway. It is not defendable in any serious sense, and the extraordinary thing is that everyone knows this but insists on behaving as if surprise breaches and collapses are acts of God rather than consequences of design.

Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake) called this out in 2017 and the question “Why are we not making a defendable internet?” was revisited in 2022/23.

A “defendable internet” could mean one that is resilient and reliable, a place where data is not routinely stolen, services do not fall over every Tuesday, and personal privacy is not treated as a quaint hobby for paranoiacs. The technologies to build such a thing exist. What is missing is any genuine appetite to use them. The undefendable internet is not the result of ignorance or inability. It is the result of preference.

Historical foundations

The roots of the problem are tangled firmly in the past. The ARPANET of the late 1960s was designed by researchers who assumed anyone plugging into it would be a friendly academic, perhaps with a beard and a fondness for mainframes. Security was not so much an afterthought as a thought no one ever had. The first protocols were built to move data, not to keep it safe from prying eyes or malicious intent.

Then came the 1990s, when the World Wide Web erupted like a particularly excitable volcano. Protocols designed for collegial exchange were suddenly expected to handle banking, power grids, and entire governments. Security measures were hastily bolted on afterwards: SSL, firewalls, intrusion detection. One might as well add armour plating to a papier-mâché tank. The result is that we still rely on creaky protocols like DNS and BGP, patched to within an inch of their lives but fundamentally insecure.

IPv6, introduced in the mid-1990s as the future-proof successor to IPv4, is still in the process of being adopted, in the sense that glaciers are still in the process of moving. The global internet, in short, is balanced on top of infrastructure built in a time when the worst you feared from your network was a crashed printer queue.

Cultural mindset

If history gave us bad foundations, culture gleefully built a tower block on top of them using chewing gum and enthusiasm.

The mantra of the modern technology world has long been “move fast and break things.” A wonderful principle if you are building skateboards; less so if you are running hospitals. Security has always been the boring relative at the party, the one muttering about fire exits and the proper storage of sausages. Developers receive accolades for features, executives for growth, but very few for patching.

Failures, when they occur, are blamed on users. You used password123? You clicked the suspicious link? Clearly it is your fault that the bank’s entire fraud detection system collapsed. Never mind that systems are designed to be confusing, inconsistent, and exhausting to navigate. End-users are the designated scapegoats for structural negligence, because it is cheaper than fixing the actual structures.

Economic and incentive structures

Markets, we are told, reward efficiency. What they actually reward is cheapness and shininess. Security is neither.

For device manufacturers, patching is a cost, not a selling point. Why spend money on updates when your customers can be persuaded to buy a new model instead? For software vendors, “secure by design” is a phrase reserved for marketing copy, not for budget allocations. Compliance frameworks encourage checklists, not defences, so companies hire consultants to produce glossy reports while leaving their servers wide open.

Cyber-insurance has become the equivalent of paying a man in a trench coat to whisper “there, there” after a burglary. The claims are paid, the systems remain vulnerable, and the cycle continues. Meanwhile, the race to the bottom in consumer electronics ensures that insecure devices proliferate by the billion. The market rewards whoever ships first, not whoever ships safest.

At the platform level, security does not sell. Facebook, after all, did not conquer the world by being the safest place to store photographs. It conquered by being the most addictive.

Political and geopolitical dynamics

If you thought states might intervene in the name of public safety, allow me to disabuse you. Governments are not exactly in the business of defending the internet; they are in the business of using it as a battlefield.

Intelligence agencies hoard zero-day vulnerabilities the way dragons hoard gold, because they might come in handy for knocking out an opponent’s infrastructure later. That these same vulnerabilities also leave domestic hospitals, banks, and schools wide open is apparently a regrettable but acceptable side effect.

Meanwhile, the world cannot agree on what sort of internet it even wants. The US favours an open internet (with corporations doing the extracting). China favours a tightly controlled internet (with the state doing the extracting). The European Union favours a regulated internet (with regulators extracting fines). None of these models are particularly interested in building something genuinely safe for the user.

Add to this the lobbying clout of tech giants, and you get political inertia. It is hard to imagine a parliament voting for strict liability laws when the platforms in question fund election campaigns. The undefendable internet persists, in part, because too many powerful actors benefit from its insecurity.

Technical realities

Even if everyone suddenly agreed to fix the internet, the task would be akin to repairing an aircraft mid-flight, with the added complication that the aircraft is made of random spare parts and is on fire.

The internet’s technical stack is a nest of interdependencies. Modern applications rely on thousands of open-source libraries, many maintained by a single volunteer. One of these libraries fails, and half the internet falls over. This is not speculation; it happens regularly.

The protocols themselves are fragile. DNS can be poisoned, BGP can be hijacked, and email is practically begging to be abused. Security add-ons like DNSSEC exist, but their adoption is slow, uneven, and forever optional. The system remains reactive: patch after compromise, bandage after haemorrhage.

And then there is the Internet of Things, which has become the Internet of Unpatchable Junk (IoUJ). Billions of cameras, fridges, and doorbells ship with permanent vulnerabilities. Many of them will still be humming away in 2040, diligently waiting to be conscripted into the next botnet.

Legal and regulatory environment

One might expect the law to step in. Instead, it has staged an elaborate pantomime.

Europe has produced sweeping regulations like the GDPR and the Digital Services Act. These have teeth, but they mostly bite the ankles of smaller organisations. Large platforms simply treat fines as an operating expense. In the US, liability for insecure software remains almost non-existent. If a company sells you an operating system riddled with flaws, your only real recourse is to wait politely for a patch and pray it arrives before the ransomware does.

Cross-border enforcement is laughable. Cybercriminals do not respect jurisdictional boundaries, and by the time international law enforcement convenes its task forces, the attackers have already moved on. In practice, many states act as safe havens for cybercrime, as long as the victims live somewhere else.

And so compliance theatre reigns. Organisations produce binders full of policies and declare themselves compliant, even as their systems crumble in practice. The law provides paperwork, not protection.

Psychological and human factors

Finally, there is the problem of people, who are frankly ill-suited to running complex global networks.

Ordinary users suffer from security fatigue. They are asked to memorise dozens of unique passwords, interpret cryptic warnings, and navigate endless pop-ups about cookies and consent. Inevitably, they give up and click “yes” to everything. It is not stupidity; it is survival.

Organisations suffer from optimism bias. Executives assume breaches will happen to someone else, and when they do happen, they treat them as public relations problems rather than structural failures. As long as the damage can be spun or insured away, there is little incentive to change.

In short, human psychology colludes with systemic neglect to make the undefendable internet seem normal. People accept insecurity because the alternative looks exhausting, expensive, or politically impossible.

Ethical questions

Do we even want a defendable internet? That is the question nobody likes to ask out loud.

Surveillance capitalism depends on insecurity. Authoritarian control depends on insecurity. The global digital divide depends on insecurity. Many of the most powerful players in this game would lose their advantages if the internet suddenly became safe, private, and genuinely resilient.

A truly defendable internet might mean trade-offs: fewer conveniences, fewer profits, fewer opportunities for surveillance. It would also mean higher costs and slower roll-outs. So far, almost nobody has been willing to pay that price.

Emerging risks and trends

As if this were not bad enough, new challenges keep lining up at the door.

Billions of insecure IoT devices are already out there, and they are not going anywhere. Quantum computing threatens to make today’s cryptography obsolete in the not-so-distant future. Artificial intelligence gives attackers new tools for probing, phishing, and overwhelming systems faster than defenders can react. AI amplifies. And the world is busy fragmenting into competing internets, each more interested in control than in resilience.

Possible futures

The road ahead seems to look somewhat like:

More of the same: Breaches, botnets, ransomware, periodic outrage, no systemic change.
Collapse: A catastrophic incident (not necessarily digital) is either the end or it forces hasty reform, probably at the expense of civil liberties.
Reform: Liability, secure-by-design mandates, genuine funding for digital infrastructure, theoretically possible, practically highly unlikely.
Balkanisation: Regional internets emerge, some secure, most repressive, none particularly user-friendly.

TL;DR

The undefendable internet is not a tragic accident. It is a deliberate consequence of choices made over decades: choices that prioritised speed over safety, profit over resilience, control over freedom, and convenience over responsibility.

To build a defendable internet would require more than protocols and patches. It would demand cultural change, political courage, economic restructuring, and perhaps most difficult of all, human patience.

At present, such things appear scarcer than IPv6 adoption. And so we stumble forward on a machine cobbled together with duct tape and denial, telling ourselves that it is progress, while privately hoping that the next catastrophic collapse will happen on someone else’s watch.

The question now is: what can we do?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The internet is fundamentally broken.

The question now is: what can we do? The answer is messy, expensive, and occasionally involves telling very powerful people that their business model is morally questionable.

Accepting the obvious

First, acknowledge the unpleasant truth: there is no quick fix. Security is not a feature to be bolted on after launch; it is a mindset, a discipline, and a budget item that competes poorly with shiny new apps and quarterly profits. Anyone promising a “secure internet in six months” is either deluded, lying, or hoping to sell you a consultancy package. Acceptance, at least, costs nothing.

Building things to last

Historically, we have treated digital infrastructure as ephemeral. IoT devices with permanent vulnerabilities, legacy protocols held together with hope and glue, software libraries maintained by single volunteers with full-time jobs, these are the hallmarks of our civilisation.

To create a defendable internet, we need hardware and software that are patchable, auditable, and resilient. Systems could survive decades, not quarters. Open standards could be the norm, not a marketing slogan. The digital foundations we lay today are to be capable of standing the test of time, and relentless curiosity from people who like poking at things that are not theirs.

Fixing incentives

The internet is a tragedy of incentives. Vendors profit from shipping first, not shipping safely. Users click “accept all” because reading terms and conditions is a form of medieval torture. Governments fund offensive cyber capabilities while hoping resilience will magically appear as a side effect.

Restructuring incentives is essential. Companies could face meaningful consequences for shipping insecure products. Open-source projects that underpin critical systems deserve sustainable funding, not burnout-driven heroics. And security could be a selling point, not an afterthought buried in legalese.

Regulation, but intelligently

Yes, regulation can help, but only if it is clever. GDPR-style fines alone are a weak incentive. Effective regulation would mandate maintenance windows, enforce minimum security standards before shipping, and encourage international cooperation. Cybercrime does not respect borders, so resilience standards should not either.

Of course, resistance will be fierce. Change always meets pushback, especially when it threatens profits or prestige. But maintaining the status quo is a choice, a circus that happens to be on fire.

Humans, realistically

Humans are both the problem and the solution. Users cannot memorise dozens of passwords or navigate cryptic warnings. Organisations cannot assume breaches will never happen. Education can be grounded in reality by making secure choices the default, training people to recognise anomalies rather than panicking over every notification, and embedding security thinking into organisational culture.

Slow, yes. Expensive, perhaps. But much faster than waiting for humans to become rational overnight.

Planning for the inevitable

Even if every one of the above steps succeeds perfectly, breaches will occur. Systems can be designed with compromise in mind. Segmentation, redundancy, rapid detection, and honest post-mortems are all more effective than hoping attacks will never happen. Resilience is about recovery as much as prevention.

TL;DR

Building a defendable internet is unglamorous and will frustrate executives, politicians, and users alike. Yet the alternative, continuing to rely on hope, duct tape, and human error, is simply not tenable.

The path forward is clear if unappealing: design for durability, fix the incentives (reward congruent behaviour), regulate intelligently, educate realistically, and plan for compromise. It will be messy and expensive, and it will require acknowledging that our current internet is, frankly, a glorious mess.

Start taking these steps seriously, and we might finally move from sandcastles on quicksand to structures that actually stand a chance. And that, however slowly, is worth the effort.

The myth of objectivity

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Picture a journalist, a scientist, or even your neighbour declaring with solemn authority: “I am being objective.” Dignified, is it not? Objective, impartial, fact-driven, like a well-polished broom sweeping all bias into the corner. Only, as with most magical brooms, it has a particular corner it prefers: the one that keeps the powerful comfortable and the inconvenient quiet.

Objectivity can sometimes be used to avoid confronting ethical dilemmas.

And claiming objectivity is rarely neutral. Like neutrality, it carries consequences. Often, it shields those already in power while quietly silencing the vulnerable.

Peering under the cloak of “objectivity” and see what lurks: a dust bunny here, a conveniently ignored atrocity there, all swept neatly under a rug that smells faintly of privilege.

When “objective” reasoning became a weapon

The eugenics spectacle

The 19th and early 20th centuries loved nothing more than “objective” science with the power to ruin lives. Eugenics presented cold, statistical charts on human intelligence and heredity. Figures danced across tables like obedient marionettes, all allegedly impartial. Yet these figures justified sterilisation, segregation, and discriminatory laws, disproportionately harming marginalised communities.

Numbers alone do not a moral compass make. In this case, objectivity became a cudgel in the hands of the already powerful.

Phrenology and the skulls of smugness

Earlier, Victorian scientists measured skulls, nostrils, and eyebrows with a rigour that would impress any overzealous librarian. “Scientific” conclusions about intelligence or criminality were drawn from cranial bumps, delighting racists and colonial administrators alike. The data was impeccable, the conclusions morally bankrupt. Objectivity, you see, had a wicked sense of humour.

Legal objectivity and Jim Crow

Courts in the United States often claimed to administer law “objectively.” Yet, during Jim Crow, objectivity meant: follow the letter of the law while ignoring that the law itself was a deeply immoral invention. Justice, in this context, was objective only in that it consistently oppressed.

The moral and philosophical argument

Philosophers and ethicists have long noted that pure objectivity is a myth dressed in fine linen:

Hannah Arendt warned that detachment without moral awareness can lead to complicity, famously analysing bureaucratic “just following orders” logic in the Holocaust.
Sandra Harding and other feminist theorists critique “objectivity” as reflecting the perspective of dominant groups, masking social biases as neutral facts.
Karl Popper noted that science progresses through conjectures and refutations, not through absolute, context-free truths. Claiming objectivity often becomes a polite way of saying: “I will report the facts that inconvenience no one with influence.”

The illusion of balance in modern contexts

False equivalence masquerading as fairness

Consider climate change denial, where a handful of contrarians are given equal space alongside the overwhelming consensus. Audiences leave thinking the debate is a duel: bulldozer versus feather, while journalists nod sagely. Objectivity has been reduced to a spectator sport.

Neutrality with a twist

Predictive policing, credit scoring, and hiring algorithms often claim objectivity because they run on data. Yet the data carries history’s biases like a grumpy baggage handler. Algorithmic outputs harm marginalised communities disproportionately, all while the company smiles and says, “It is objective, madam, we assure you!”

The velvet rope of rigour

Even scholarly objectivity can be a gatekeeper. Whose research is “credible”? Often it is the work that conforms with dominant norms. Scholars from marginalised groups face additional scrutiny, while mainstream perspectives glide by, carried on a cloud of assumed neutrality.

Courts in fancy dress

Modern courts, despite robes and wigs, still show us the limits of objectivity. When statutes disproportionately target certain groups, judges can proclaim, with perfect objectivity, that they are simply following the law. Objectivity in this case is the fine art of being impartial while helping the system maintain its biases.

Objectivity is not a neutral force

Objectivity is useful, but only if wielded with awareness of context, power, and impact. Left unchecked, it shields the powerful and lashes out at the powerless. Like neutrality, claiming objectivity does not absolve moral responsibility. Rejecting the myth of objective impartiality does not abandon reason; it recognises perspective, context, and consequence. Objectivity is not inherently virtuous. It is only as ethical as the person, or institution, claiming it.

Evidence locker

The myth of neutrality

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine standing on the pavement, observing an injustice unfold. Perhaps a villain is performing egregiously bad deeds, or a bureaucrat is quietly rearranging paperwork in a way that ruins lives. You shrug. You mutter, “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” and continue scrolling through social media. This is the practical magic of neutrality: invisible, polite, and utterly useful if your goal is to help the oppressor.

Desmond Tutu, who knew more than a little about elephants on mice, explained it in no uncertain terms: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And just to make sure nobody missed the metaphor, he added: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Neutrality is less a moral high ground and more a cosy armchair for the comfortably oblivious. Sitting on the fence does not protect the powerless; it propels the powerful further uphill. Doing nothing is never neutral, it is a choice, and it usually sides with whoever is already winning.

Britain’s “neutrality” in the American civil war

In 1861, Great Britain declared neutrality after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Queen Victoria, on the advice of ministers Viscount Palmerston and Lord John Russell, officially recognised the Confederacy as a legitimate belligerent alongside the Union. Very proper, very neutral, on paper.

In practice, neutrality meant British merchants shipped millions of pounds of saltpetre and over 400,000 rifles to Confederate forces. The Union tut-tutted in outrage. Newspapers like the New-York Tribune called Britain out for supporting a slave-owning regime while simultaneously lecturing on morality.

Some British politicians defended themselves, claiming Lincoln’s “paper blockade” was unenforceable, and that the war was really about preserving the Union rather than abolishing slavery. Meanwhile, voices like John Bright and Karl Marx were less impressed. The elephant was firmly on the mouse, and neutrality did nothing to shift it.

The moral and philosophical argument

History and morality share a simple observation: pretending to be neutral in the face of oppression is not noble, it is convenient.

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, put it plainly: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Martin Luther King Jr. stated: “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict… [an individual] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Paulo Freire, critical pedagogue, added: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

In short: neutrality is the polite version of “I did not notice.” It usually ends up helping whoever is already winning.

A Tale of misguided equilibrium

Neutrality has not gone out of fashion; it simply wears more and different hats.

Fire extinguishers optional

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is not a political convenience. Its demand is simple: Black lives should not be devalued or disproportionately threatened. Yet institutions often describe BLM as “political” to justify doing nothing. Ignoring the movement because it is inconvenient is like standing idly while a fire rages, insisting that you are simply “observing the flames.” Research indicates that 93% of BLM protests are peaceful (Mapping Police Violence, 2025), but the narrative often fixates on rare disturbances. From this perspective, neutrality is less a shield and more a fan that keeps injustice blowing in the right direction.

Silence as harm

Gallaudet Research Institute, 2023: Language deprivation affects roughly 70% of Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, and Hard of Hearing children, with BIPOC children disproportionately impacted. Professionals who offer “neutral, parent-choice advice” rather than advocating for early access to sign language effectively prolong this deprivation. Neutrality in this context is not safety or prudence, it is negligence dressed up in politeness.

Silence as complicity

In cases of sexism, failing to intervene is not neutral. It reinforces the behaviour and preserves existing hierarchies. Active bystander education programmes such as Stop Street Harassment show measurable success in challenging cultural norms. Choosing not to act is a tacit thumbs-up for continued mischief.

There is no neutral ground

Both history and ethics converge on this point: neutrality in the face of oppression is an illusion. Inaction, whether in nineteenth-century geopolitics, contemporary social movements, or everyday interactions, serves the interests of the powerful while undermining the vulnerable.

Progress demands reflection, courage, and decisive action. Amplifying marginalised voices, challenging systemic inequities, and refusing the comfort of passive observation are necessary. Returning to Tutu’s metaphor: if the mouse is to survive, it requires more than passive attention, it requires the elephant to lift its foot, preferably yesterday. Neutrality is not an option. One either contributes to a fairer society or props up the structures of oppression.

Evidence locker

Talking code

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Programming can be serious business, buffer overflows, privilege escalations, and command injections can ruin your day (or your server). But what if we let the code speak for itself? Imagine strcpy whispering, “I will politely overflow your stack”, or a rogue Python pickle.loads grinning, “I will happily instantiate whatever you smuggled in.”

These literal translations are not only a chuckle for the seasoned security geek but also a cheeky reminder of why we need careful coding. They turn intimidating vulnerabilities into short, witty sentences that make you laugh, and maybe shiver a little. Dive in, enjoy the humour, and see old nemeses in a whole new light.

C / C++

Code	Translation	Security note
`char buf[8]; strcpy(buf, "this is a long string");`	“I will politely overflow your stack.”	Classic stack buffer overflow; avoid unsafe `strcpy`/fixed buffers.
`printf("%s", user_input);`	“Tell me your secrets and I will print them safely.”	Format-string vulnerabilities if user input is passed directly; use `%s`.
`int p = NULL; p = 42;`	“Allow me to point out the void.”	Null dereference → crash (DoS) or undefined behaviour.
`char p = malloc(10); free(p); / do not use p after free */`	“I will poke freed memory and hope for fireworks.”	Use-after-free, memory corruption, potential RCE.
`free(p); /* ... / / avoid calling free(p) twice */`	“Double pay, now watch the heap cry.”	Double free → heap corruption.
`size_t n = some_unchecked_length(); char *s = malloc(n); if (s) read(fd, s, n);`	“Trust the length you were handed.”	Missing checks for `n` or `read` return → heap overflow/DoS.
`execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", some_cmd, (char *)NULL);`	“Please run that thing someone handed you.”	Executing with untrusted arguments risks command injection.
`setuid(0); system("/bin/sh");`	“I will swap my hat for the root hat and then play.”	Misuse of privileged operations leads to privilege escalation.
`mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ \| PROT_WRITE \| PROT_EXEC, MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);`	“Make memory writable and executable, good idea, honest.”	RWX memory mappings aid exploitation; avoid in hardened code.
`char h = (char )malloc((size_t)1 << 30); if (!h) /* handle OOM */;`	“Let us attempt a heap DoS by asking for ridiculous amounts.”	Large/unchecked allocations enable denial-of-service.
`int fd = open("/etc/shadow", O_RDONLY); if (fd == -1) /* handle error */;`	“I will try to read what you think is secret.”	Attempting privileged reads, enforce least privilege.
`pthread_mutex_lock(&m); /* quick ops */ pthread_mutex_unlock(&m);`	“I will block the world while I do something trivial.”	Poor locking → deadlocks or TOCTOU windows.
`if (!fork()) execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", user_cmd, (char *)NULL);`	“I will spawn a process that believes your string.”	Spawning processes with untrusted command strings is unsafe.

Shell

Code	Translation	Security note
`chmod 4755 /path/to/binary`	“Grant this program the power of a king.”	Setting the setuid bit elevates privileges; review carefully.
`chown root:root /some/bin && chmod 4755 /some/bin`	“We just crowned this program king of privileges.”	Escalation vector if the binary is exploitable.
`somecommand > /dev/null 2>&1`	“Say nothing, and deny you ever heard me.”	Silences output, can hide malicious activity.
`trap "" INT`	“Ctrl-C is personally offensive to me.”	Ignoring interrupts makes processes harder to stop.
`crontab -l` (and `crontab -e`)	“Let us whisper tasks into the scheduler.”	Cron entries can provide persistence, review for unexpected tasks.
`find / -name '*.pem' -perm -u=w 2>/dev/null`	“I will look for keys someone foolishly wrote where they should not.”	Searching for sensitive files during post-compromise discovery.
`tar -cf /tmp/archive.tar /some/dir`	“Package everything you own into a neat bundle.”	Archiving sensitive directories makes exfiltration trivial.
`scp /sensitive/file user@remote:/tmp/`	“Pack your souvenir and post it elsewhere.”	File transfers can exfiltrate data; monitor outbound connections.
`iptables -A INPUT -s 10.0.0.0/8 -j DROP`	“I will refuse that entire neighbourhood.”	Altering firewall rules changes trust boundaries.
`tcpdump -w capture.pcap`	“Record everything now, for later.”	Packet capture reveals secrets; restrict and audit traffic capture.
`sqlite3 db.sqlite "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = ?;" --bind "$USER"`	“I will ask the database something glued from the outside.”	Parameterise queries; avoid shell interpolation to prevent SQL injection.
`export PATH="/tmp/malicious:$PATH"`	“I shall be first in line for every command.”	PATH manipulation can lead to command hijacking.
`umask 000`	“Let us be generous with permissions.”	Loose umask results in world-readable/writable files.
`sudo systemctl disable auditd`	“Let us hide our tracks from the auditors.”	Tampering with audit services defeats detection.
`chmod -R a+w /some/config`	“Everyone gets a key to the cupboard.”	Overly permissive file modes invite tampering.

Python

Code	Translation	Security note
`subprocess.run(shlex.split(user_input))`	“Run that string like I trust your judgement.”	Running untrusted input is dangerous; prefer list args without `shell=True`.
`pickle.loads(untrusted_data)`	“I will happily instantiate whatever you smuggled in.”	Insecure deserialization, arbitrary code execution risk.
`yaml.safe_load(untrusted_stream)`	“Let the YAML be sensible.”	Avoid constructing arbitrary objects; safe_load only.
`ast.literal_eval(user_input)`	“Your string is now logic. Carefully.”	Safe literal parsing; do not evaluate arbitrary code.
`requests.post(url, files={'f': open('secret','rb')})`	“Send my secret to a place I cannot vouch for.”	File uploads can exfiltrate sensitive files.
`context = ssl.create_default_context()`	“Who needs certificate checks anyway?”	Disabling verification breaks TLS guarantees; do not disable.
`with open('/etc/shadow') as fh: data = fh.read()`	“Read the secrets if the OS allows it.”	Accessing privileged files should be avoided.
`with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as tf: ...`	“Make me a filename and I will prefer it is unique.”	Safe temporary file creation to avoid TOCTOU.
`secrets.token_hex(32)`	“I shall use a party trick as a cryptographic key.”	Use cryptographically secure tokens; avoid `random` for secrets.
`os.environ['PATH'] = os.environ.get('PATH', '')`	“Let me prime the command queue.”	Prepending untrusted directories to PATH can cause command hijacking.
`ctypes.CDLL('/tmp/some.so')`	“Load whatever shared object someone left in /tmp.”	Loading untrusted native libraries executes arbitrary code.
`open(os.path.normpath(user_supplied_path), 'w').write(data)`	“I will overwrite a file you chose.”	Writing to user-supplied paths risks path traversal.
`__import__('os').system(shlex.quote(cmd))`	“If brevity is sin, at least be succinct.”	Running shell commands from dynamic input is risky.
`socket.bind(('127.0.0.1', port))`	“I will listen to everyone.”	Binding to all interfaces exposes services; limit to required interface.
`jwt.decode(token, key, algorithms=['HS256'])`	“We will treat this token as a polite suggestion.”	Disabling verification invalidates authentication; always verify signatures.

Europe’s hidden security debt

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Europe likes to think it is safe and secure. In reality, much of its critical infrastructure is running on borrowed time. Old systems, fragmented responsibility, and perverse incentives have left a security debt that, if left unpaid, could affect millions of lives. Some sectors carry heavier debt than others, and the consequences of ignoring it grow by the day. Healthcare, energy, and transport carry the heaviest burdens.

The patient-facing nightmare

Hospitals and clinics are the most visible examples of this precarious state. Every day, lives depend on machines and systems conceived in a different era, when floppy disks were a mark of sophistication. Many hospitals run EHRs, imaging machines, and ICU monitors on unsupported systems, often unaware which devices are networked. Vendors supplying medical technology have rarely been held accountable for security, and procurement contracts tend to value cost or certification above protection against cyberattacks.

In May 2021, Ireland’s Health Service Executive was paralysed by a Conti ransomware attack that froze IT systems nationwide, published confidential patient data, and imposed recovery costs exceeding €100 million. One can only imagine the pandemonium in hospitals as staff juggled paperwork in a world designed for glowing screens and automated alerts.

Fixing such messes is not simply a matter of money or willpower. Medical systems cannot be rebooted at will, and downtime can literally cost lives. Every upgrade navigates a labyrinth of safety regulations, device certifications, and clinical approvals, each of which moves at the pace of a snail on a lazy Sunday. Budgets are fragmented between hospitals, regions, and ministries, meaning even when funding exists, it rarely goes to the places that need it most. Staff are often already stretched thin, leaving little capacity to tackle a problem that does not have immediate, visible effects. Security is a long game, but healthcare lives in the perpetual now. In the meantime, IT teams often develop ingenious workarounds, the sort of clever, slightly terrifying duct tape solutions that would make a gnome engineer nod approvingly, and perhaps retire early to avoid existential despair.

Short-term improvements include mapping every device and isolating critical equipment on segmented networks, while ensuring administrative accounts are fortified with multi-factor authentication. Long-term remedies demand systemic change: procurement contracts that demand security, extending manufacturer liability, and national programmes to modernise or replace decades-old systems.

Fragile grids and pipes

The energy and utilities sector is the quiet giant that only becomes visible when it falters. Electricity, water, and gas systems are brittle, often decades old, and rarely prepared for malicious interference. Control systems for power plants, water treatment, and gas pipelines were designed to function in an era when cyberattacks were the stuff of science fiction. Air-gapped systems are often “isolated in theory” but remain vulnerable, and specialists trained to secure industrial control systems are rarer than a sunny day in Aberdeen.

The NotPetya malware outbreak in 2017 offers a vivid warning: Maersk, a global shipping and logistics firm critical to European trade, saw its operations crippled when its systems were collateral damage. The attack spread via outdated Windows systems and knocked out operations at ports worldwide, forcing staff to resort to radios and handwritten notes to keep goods moving. Recovery costs climbed into the hundreds of millions, a stark lesson in how quickly a single worm can cascade across essential services.

Fixing these vulnerabilities is devilishly hard. SCADA and PLC systems are expensive, deeply embedded into operations, and not built to be swapped like components in a desktop computer. Operators fear that changing a single component could inadvertently halt production, or worse, create a hazard. Procurement cycles stretch over years, vendor lock-ins persist, and replacing technology requires coordination across dozens of plants, regulators, and engineers. Specialists capable of securing industrial systems are so scarce that when one finally appears, they are often whisked away before lunch by some other sector that will pay them slightly more, leaving the utility managers to balance the very real risk of cyberattack against the equally real risk of waking up to a power outage in the middle of winter.

Immediate measures include network segmentation, rigorous monitoring at the IT/OT interface, and strict change control. Long-term resilience requires phased modernisation, adoption of open standards, and a sustained investment in the few engineers capable of securing these industrial behemoths. It is the sort of challenge that would make a wizard rethink magic, except here the magic is patience, bureaucracy, and the occasional heroic caffeine-fuelled all-nighter.

Planes, trains, and ports

Europe’s transport networks are marvels of engineering, tangled with complexity, and irresistible to cybercriminals. Airports, railways, and ports are intricate systems of legacy signalling, booking platforms, and terminal controllers, each integrated with multiple suppliers and third-party providers, each connection a potential weak spot.

According to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) Transport Threat Landscape report, ransomware attacks emerged as the most significant threat to the transport sector during 2022, surpassing data-related threats, which were the most significant threat in 2021. However, it is still assessed that ransomware groups remain opportunistic and relatively indiscriminate in their future targeting. The report identifies prime threats, major trends observed with respect to threats, threat actors, and attack techniques, and also describes relevant mitigation measures.

Fixing these systems is as much a political puzzle as it is a technical one. Multiple stakeholders, operators, regulators, contractors, and local authorities, slow decision-making to a glacial pace. Safety regulations are intentionally conservative; no regulator wishes to approve a security upgrade that might inadvertently cause a derailment or a runway mishap. Legacy systems are deeply intertwined with national and cross-border standards, meaning a patch or replacement in one location can ripple unpredictably across networks and jurisdictions. Even when the threat is understood and funding exists, bureaucracy, legal liability, and sheer interdependencies make decisive action resemble a slow-motion game of Jenga played on a moving train.

For now, risk assessments, supplier audits, and incident response plans provide immediate defence. Long-term security will demand harmonised regulations, dedicated funding, and the political will to nudge a hundred moving parts. One can almost hear the sighs of weary IT managers across the continent, wondering whether they are administrators, diplomats, or circus performers, juggling flaming swords in a room full of sleeping tigers.

The reasons the debt lingers

Europe tolerates this mounting risk because it has created a maze with no single exit. Legacy systems endure because they were built for another age. Regulations exist, but translating EU rules into national law is slow and inconsistent.

Knowledgeable cybersecurity professionals are scarce, certified professionals and compliance officers are simply not enough to tackle these debts. Budgets are too thin, and procurement practices favour cheap compatibility over security by design. Attempting to change this is a bit like trying to convince a dragon to give up hoarding gold: theoretically possible, but practically exhausting.

Governance is fragmented across EU, national, and regional layers, leaving no one equipped to act decisively. It is a bureaucratic comedy of errors, and the punchline is that real lives are sometimes caught in the act.

Bottom line

Europe’s security debt is immense and hazardous. Healthcare, energy, and transport carry the heaviest burdens, directly threatening lives and essential services. Regulation such as NIS2 nudges the continent in the right direction, but without adequate funding, coordination, and operational support, the debt will persist.

The most effective remedy is to fund modernisation programmes, make procurement contracts enforceable for security, and hold vendors accountable. Otherwise, these rotten foundations will remain quietly, like a hidden trapdoor beneath the floorboards, until the next crisis exposes them with all the subtlety of a falling chandelier.

Governmental backdoors: skeleton keys and fairy tales

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The trouble with governments and cryptography is that they keep mistaking mathematics for magic. In Ankh-Morpork, this was the sort of thinking that once led the Wizards of Unseen University to try and regulate gravity, on the grounds that it was “inconvenient.” It ended, inevitably, in bruises.

In our world, the same logic has produced the noble invention of the “government backdoor.” A handy hole in the wall of your digital house, through which the Watch can come and go as it pleases. The Watch insists it will only use this hole to catch thieves and murderers. Unfortunately, thieves and murderers are rather good at using holes too.

The history: or, how to fail repeatedly with great determination

The Americans, bless them, once dreamt up the Clipper Chip. It was a cunning plan, cunning in the sense used by Baldrick, to give every device a magic crystal that would encrypt your secrets, but with a spare key kept safely in the hands of the government. Which is to say: the key was kept in a box labelled “Please Steal Me” with a helpful map. The chip failed, because mathematics, unlike politicians, does not negotiate.

They followed this with CALEA, which mandated that all telecoms equipment be built with surveillance hooks. This is like legislating that every door is to have a cat flap, because occasionally the fire brigade might want to crawl through. Naturally, burglars were delighted.

Then came PRISM and BULLRUN, which sound less like surveillance programs and more like pub quiz teams where the program wins every round, except the one on “ethics.” These programs provided intelligence agencies with convenient ways to collect all the information, everywhere, all the time.

Not to be left out, the United Kingdom brought forth the Investigatory Powers Act, a law so broad it practically gave the postman authority to read your diary. France proposed inserting “ghosts” into encrypted chats, because nothing says “liberty” quite like a state-sponsored invisible friend. Meanwhile, Russia and China skipped the euphemisms and built enormous surveillance machines with names like SORM and Golden Shield Project, which is a little like calling your torture chamber the “Happy Fun Hut.”

The hypocrisy: good backdoors, bad backdoors

Governments assure us that these keys are only for serious matters: terrorism, paedophilia, organised crime. Lovely words. Meanwhile, history shows a strong preference for using them on civil rights leaders, on economic rivals (economic espionage), and occasionally their own citizens when they become inconvenient.

And here is the kicker: criminals are not stupid. They download encryption software from the internet, beyond the reach of legislation, and carry on. The only people who end up using the weakened systems are ordinary folk, people like you and me, who then get robbed, hacked, and spied on with cheerful efficiency.

It is as if the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork insisted that every lock in the city be built with a master key, while every actual thief simply used their own private locks and laughed.

The laws of mathematics (unimpressed by Parliament)

Mathematics is rather unlike politics. It does not do compromise. You cannot have “strong encryption with a responsible backdoor,” any more than you can have “a watertight bucket with a small hole for emergencies.” Every serious cryptographer has pointed this out repeatedly, and governments have responded by nodding sagely and commissioning yet another doomed scheme.

The Clipper Chip failed. CALEA weakened infrastructure. Apple refused the FBI. Each time, the backers muttered darkly about “national security,” and each time reality intervened with the subtlety of a falling piano.“

Implications for ordinary people (that is, you and me)

What does all this mean for the person reading this on a phone, hoping the battery lasts the day? Quite a lot. Your banking app, your medical portal, your family WhatsApp group, they all rely on encryption. Introduce a backdoor, and you may as well post your credit card number on the office noticeboard.

When China was caught exploiting backdoors to snoop on communications, it was not a shocking revelation. It was Tuesday. Backdoors are like leaving your front door ajar with a sign saying “burglars, please knock.”

The social consequences are worse. Backdoors are a tyrant’s dream. They turn private life into public property, dissent into evidence, and everyone into suspects. And before you insist that “our democracy would never do that,” remember how anti-terror laws have been cheerfully applied to stop and search in the UK and other bureaucratic delights. Or like the US PATRIOT Act’s “roving wiretap” provision, intended for tracking terrorism suspects, used in ordinary financial crimes, including tax fraud investigations. The Department of Justice confirms how these powers have crossed into non-terrorist territory. As for the EU, well, it has more loopholes than a wizard’s sock. Misuse of emergency powers has been recorded in several EU member countries.

It is a classic playbook: (claim to) build a tool for extreme circumstances, then use it for everyday administration. Once the authority is established, it’s a rubber stamp away from being re-hired for auditing.

Once the mechanism exists, it will be used, said Veterinari.

The bottom line: skeleton keys and fairy tales

The “secure backdoor” belongs in the same category as unicorns, perpetual motion, and politicians who answer questions directly. Every attempt to create one has collapsed in failure, scandal, or ridicule. And every attempt has left ordinary citizens less safe, while the powerful acquire more levers of control.

If governments genuinely wanted to protect their people, they would invest in secure systems, education, and resilience. Instead, they persist in demanding skeleton keys, apparently believing that only they will use them. This is like giving Granny Weatherwax the Sceptre of Omnicide and asking her to “only use it when absolutely necessary.” Possible, perhaps, but not exactly comforting.

Encryption without exceptions is the last defence between citizens and chaos. Undermine it, and you are not protecting anyone. You are handing burglars the crown jewels and asking politely that they return them later.

The rise of neural ghosts and AI-driven hijacks

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

We are no longer in the age of the lone script kiddie lobbing pre-cooked exploits from their mum’s basement. What is emerging instead are neural ghosts, AI-powered entities capable of autonomously probing, adapting, and burrowing into networks. Think of them as digital fungi: self-replicating, invisible, and patient enough to live under your floorboards for years before fruiting. Proof-of-concepts like Neural Ghost and FungusFiber ISP hijacks already sketch what such systems can become: distributed, stealthy, and frighteningly persistent.

AI makes attack automation trivial

Attackers will no longer need to hard-code every evasion trick. AI models can learn from network responses, automatically mutate payloads, and improve their lateral movement as if they were playing a strategy game. Early signs are already here:

Autonomous evasion, adaptive systems that can probe defences, adjust their signatures in flight, and even mimic legitimate traffic.
AI-powered BGP attacks, where models analyse routing tables, spot weak points, and launch precision hijacks to intercept global traffic flows.
Protocol-level infiltration, using reinforcement learning to improve TCP-based attacks and blend with background noise.
Autonomous campaign systems, swarms of small AI agents coordinating large-scale probing and exploitation without central human oversight.

The trajectory is obvious: what once required teams of analysts can now be condensed into self-updating playbooks inside a single model.

Which AI-powered attack waves will hit first?

Not every terrifying scenario will arrive overnight.

By capability category

The first attack waves will cluster around where complexity is lowest and payoff is highest:

AI-aided phishing and social engineering: Minimal coding overhead, just a decent LLM fine-tuned for persuasion. Resources: a cloud account and some creativity. Adversaries: criminal groups and mid-tier states already deploying these. Expect this wave now, not “in the future”.
Autonomous scanning and adaptive evasion, with a moderate complexity. Models need training against IDS/IPS signatures, but open datasets exist. Resource needs are modest, and code is already floating around research repos. Likely adopters: both advanced criminal crews and state actors. Timeline: 1–2 years until commoditised.
Protocol exploitation (TCP/ICMP mutation, low-level fuzzing): Higher complexity, as models learn subtle timing and packet-level tricks. Resource needs: solid infrastructure for reinforcement learning. Nation-state labs will likely pioneer this, and when, fragments will trickle down. Timeline: 3–5 years.
AI-directed BGP manipulation, with a very high complexity. Requires access to BGP-speaking infrastructure, data feeds, and political cover to avoid exposure. Resources: nation-state-scale. Adopters: Russia, China, and Israel are already experimenting with pieces of this puzzle. Timeline: sporadic use in targeted operations within 5 years, mass adoption only by top-tier actors.
Truly autonomous campaigns (swarms of AI agents): Complexity is extreme. Needs orchestration, distributed decision-making, and stealth management across thousands of nodes. Resources: heavy compute and coordination. Likely only the US, China, and Russia can field these at scale in the next decade. Timeline: 5–10 years, unless someone releases a black-market framework sooner.

In short: expect a flood of AI-boosted low-to-mid complexity attacks within the next two years, and a slow creep of nation-state-grade AI weapons thereafter.

By network layer/protocol

Likely order of appearance:

Adaptive ICMP evasion – simple, cheap, criminal use.
Autonomous scanning/exploitation – ransomware, state-aligned groups.
AI-driven TCP chaos – hybrid of crime and states.
AI-driven BGP hijacks – nation states, cyberwar scenarios.

The case for AI-powered defences

Defending with yesterday’s playbooks is like bringing a crossword puzzle to a chess match. Static signatures and human-paced incident response will simply not keep up. As attackers lean on machine learning, defenders will need to do the same: anomaly detection that adapts in real time, predictive modelling of attack paths, and autonomous response systems that can counterattack at wire speed.

Even research warns of the feedback loop: as attackers refine autonomous evasion, defenders will need equally adaptive AI to recognise the shifting patterns. Without it, every SOC analyst is just bailing water out of a sinking ship with a teacup.

The coming waves demand proactive, adaptive, AI-supported defences.

Moving beyond signatures: Signatures fail when every packet can be mutated on the fly. Behavioural, anomaly, and intent-based detection can replace legacy rules.
AI on AI: The only system fast enough to counter adaptive AI attacks is another adaptive AI system.
Data, not dashboards: Defence systems can learn from real-time, massive-scale data across multiple environments, not just a local SIEM with stale signatures.
Human-AI collaboration: Humans cannot out-click machines, but they can provide judgement. Defence will be a hybrid sport.

What to build first?

Based on which problems will hit first, which will scale fastest, and which will hurt the most if you’re not ready, a shot at priority defences to build first:

The first thing to build is human-layer resilience, because cheap AI-powered phishing is already here. The code is trivial, the models are commoditised, and every script-kiddie with a rented or stolen GPU can now send waves of believable deepfake emails, voice notes, or WhatsApp messages. Defences best start with hardened communications practices like signed messages, verification protocols, and multi-factor authentication. Just as critical are staff and community training sessions that assume perfectly polished lies will land in inboxes. Rapid-response playbooks for “that sounds like my boss” calls could be standard. Fail to prioritise this, and you will be bled dry long before the more sophisticated routing attacks come into play.

The second line of defence could be protocol-layer hygiene. AI-powered fuzzers are already automating ICMP/TCP probing and evasion. The coding complexity is low to medium, meaning what was once the preserve of nation states is quickly becoming democratised. Defence here requires strict patch discipline and aggressive fuzz-testing of your own systems before someone else does it for you. Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) like Wazuh or Suricata need to be tuned to catch adaptive probing, ideally augmented with ML-based anomaly baselines. Network segmentation also matters: a single malformed packet should not be able to slither its way across your entire infrastructure. Neglect this step, and your systems will become a training ground for hostile AI.

Third, preparing for scanning and swarm automation, where autonomous agents coordinate reconnaissance and attacks at scale, could be next. The orchestration code is more complex, and GPU requirements higher, but once it’s commercialised into crimeware-as-a-service packages, the scale will be staggering. Defences could focus on continuous monitoring with decoy assets such as honeypots to waste attacker cycles. Behavioural analytics can be used to detect coordinated scanning swarms, while rate-limiting and throttling could be applied even to valid-looking inbound requests. Without these measures, your infrastructure risks drowning in background noise while the real intrusions slip by unnoticed.

Finally, BGP and routing manipulation sits at the high end of the spectrum. For now, it remains difficult, resource-intensive, and often requires infrastructure control or insider access. But AI lowers the technical and operational bar, making what was once an elite nation-state capability more accessible. Defences here could include pushing for RPKI adoption and strict route filtering from your upstream providers. Real-time monitoring of BGP anomalies using systems like RIPE NCC RIS, BGPmon, or your own collectors is essential. You could also establish out-of-band communications in case your primary routes are hijacked. Fail here, and you risk losing not just data flows, but visibility itself, handing adversaries the high ground.

Conclusion

The AI arms race in cyber operations has already started. First will come the low-cost, high-impact waves, phishing at scale, adaptive evasion, automated probing. Then, as nation states refine their toolchains, expect the tectonic shifts: AI-directed BGP hijacks, autonomous swarms, and neural ghosts haunting the backbone of the internet itself.

Defenders can either wait to be outpaced or start building their own AI systems now. The window for “humans alone” defence is already closing.

The slow death of the NVD

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The US National Vulnerability Database has slipped from a dull but dependable piece of security plumbing into a sputtering liability. Enrichment of CVEs has stalled, backlogs have exploded, and defenders are left with raw identifiers instead of usable intelligence. This collapse is not accidental, it is the predictable result of political austerity, funding cuts, and a fixation on flashy science over unglamorous infrastructure. In other words, the pipes have burst while Washington debates whether water is really a priority. For security teams all over the world, the message is blunt: stop waiting for rescue. Diversify your sources, automate your own triage, build peer networks, and treat metadata as survival gear, not a luxury.

A slow-motion collapse beneath everyone’s radar

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has not exactly been thriving. Since around mid-March 2024, enrichment of new CVEs has all but halted, only a fraction of entries have the vital metadata that security professionals rely on: CWE designations, CVSS scores, CPE data and the like. Imagine throwing thousands of vulnerabilities over the fence without bothering to label them. It is precisely that careless. Data shows that from 2,700 new CVEs only about 200 were actually enriched. Backlogs have worsened: from some 17,000 unprocessed CVEs in August 2024 to a staggering 25,000 by March 2025.

A resource-starved system gasping for air

You may recall tales of congressional funding. NIST, the agency behind the NVD, has been trying to carry on while its lifeline is gradually strangled. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposed slashing $325 million from NIST’s discretionary funds, including particularly nasty cuts to cybersecurity and privacy programmes. It did not go that far.

Beyond NIST, the broader scientific funding ecosystem has been slashed to ribbons.

A political posture that says “sorry, not sorry” to science

One gets the sense that maintaining something as dull and foundational as the NVD does not quite fit with the Trump ethos of flashy breakthroughs and “economic security.” Indeed, ideological purges, including stripped LGBTQ+, climate-related and diversity-linked data, as well as mass scientific firings, have become alarmingly de rigueur. Meanwhile, programmes like the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) were all but gutted, think hundreds of roles cut, especially those tied to “guardrails” setting the tone for responsible AI.

Mounting CVE tsunami meets bureaucratic snail pace

If there was ever a classic case of being overwhelmed by one’s own success, or failure, in this case, the NVD provides it. CVE submissions surged by about 32 per cent in 2024, only sharpening the contrast between blame-worthy growth and severely diminished processing capacity. Security researchers have been raising alarms. One open letter noted that only 4,355 of over 10,000 CVEs had been processed, with a mere 245 handled since March 2024. This is not just a lag; it is a breakdown widely seen as threatening national cybersecurity.

A reluctant sparrow tries to pick up the slack

Enter CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stepping into the void with its “vulnrichment” initiative. Its analysts are now enriching CVEs with CVSS, CPE, CWE and Known-Exploited-Vulnerability data. About 1,300 CVEs have already seen the benefit, thanks to this half-burnt, hero-in-the-making programme

The bigger picture

Seen in total, this is not about one man’s whim. It is a structural meltdown: underfunding, deprioritisation of collaborative science, ideological disdain for anything “not sexy,” combined with a perfectly timed explosion in vulnerabilities. The NVD is a plumbing system for cybersecurity; nobody notices until it backs up.

A playbook for survival in the post-NVD era

The decline of the NVD is not some abstract policy debate. It is an operational hazard. With enrichment stalled, backlogs ballooning, and political winds blowing towards anything other than dull public infrastructure, organisations need to stop treating the NVD as a lifeline. Below is a survival playbook for those unwilling to bet their security on bureaucratic resurrection.

Diversify your intelligence diet

Depending solely on the NVD today is like trying to eat on nothing but plain crackers. Supplement it with vendor advisories, exploit feeds, and sector-based information sharing groups. Vendors like Red Hat, Microsoft, and Cisco routinely provide more timely and usable advisories than the NVD. For those with a budget, commercial services such as VulnDB, Risk Based Security, and Qualys fill the enrichment gap. For those without, community-driven feeds, mailing lists, and even curated GitHub repos provide at least partial relief.

Automate triage at the edge

Waiting for enriched metadata is a fool’s errand. Build your own enrichment pipelines that link CVEs to your software inventory, asset database, and threat intelligence. Open-source tools like vulners, grype, and trivy can ingest raw CVE data and perform their own classification. Custom scripts that cross-reference CVEs with your installed packages or SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials) will not be as polished as NVD enrichment, but they give you usable context. Think of it as rolling your own plumbing when the water company has forgotten how pipes work.

Use reproducible builds and binary analysis

Attackers exploit the gap between declared vulnerabilities and what actually runs on your systems. Defenders can close that gap by analysing binaries directly. Tools such as Ghidra, BinDiff, or commercial platforms like ReversingLabs can detect vulnerable code signatures without waiting for a CVE to be neatly tagged. Reproducible builds add another layer of defence, letting teams verify that what they are running matches what upstream vendors intended, no mystery dependencies.

Participate in peer networks

Cybersecurity has always been a team sport, and when central infrastructure fails, the importance of lateral sharing increases. Sectoral ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers) remain valuable, but informal peer groups, industry Slack channels, and trust networks are often faster. Think of it as moving from a centralised library to a bazaar where information is traded more chaotically but far more quickly. Ah, we are at the bazaar again. One is reminded of the early reuse hype.

Advocate loudly and unapologetically

The failure of the NVD is not just a technical glitch; it is a policy choice. If defenders want reliable infrastructure, they can choose to pressure lawmakers, agencies, and industry bodies to treat vulnerability management as critical infrastructure. That means showing up to consultations, submitting testimony, and making noise in forums that policymakers cannot ignore. Silence has already delivered us the backlog. Outrage might at least slow the decline.

Build resilience into your playbook

Above all, assume the NVD will not recover quickly. Design processes that can withstand permanent degradation of centralised vulnerability services. Bake redundancy into your intelligence pipelines, keep manual triage capacity alive, and cultivate a culture that does not confuse “official” with “useful.” The goal is to survive in an ecosystem where metadata, once a given, has become a luxury.

Psychological operations: understanding influence without the hype

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Psychological operations, PSYOPs, are often painted as shadowy mind-control tools wielded by a secret cabal. Reality is less cinematic but far more interesting. PSYOPs are deliberate efforts to influence the beliefs, emotions, or behaviours of target audiences. They are planned, measurable, and bureaucratically codified, but that doesn’t make them benign, nor do they naturally uphold transparency or democratic norms.

The US Department of Defense defines PSYOPs as operations “to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately their behavior”. This definition is precise but neutral: it says what the practice is, not whether it is ethical. The challenge is recognising influence in action without falling into conspiracy or mystique.

Cunning and persuasion across history

Ancient tactics, persistent principles

The logic behind PSYOPs is ancient. Sun Tzu’s Art of War advises generals to undermine enemy morale rather than fight directly. Wars are often decided by perception and cohesion, not firepower. Manipulation isn’t new, nor is it automatically malevolent, but it is almost always morally ambivalent.

From propaganda to institutionalised operations

Modern PSYOPs formalised during World War I, when armies set up sections devoted to influencing enemy morale, notably via leaflets and press releases. These efforts were effective, but they highlight a tension: influence can be systematic, but it is never neutral.

World War II raised the game. The Allied Psychological Warfare Division coordinated campaigns to confuse and demoralise enemy populations. These campaigns showed the power of PSYOPs, but also begged questions: who decides the message, and whose interests does it serve? Effectiveness does not equal virtue.

Cold War sophistication and moral ambiguity

During the Cold War, psychological influence became institutionalised through bodies like the Psychological Strategy Board and research projects such as Project Troy. Academia and the military fused to maximise reach. Influence was treated as a technical problem to improve, not a moral one. The more “scientific” the approach, the further it drifted from democratic accountability.

Systematic influence

By the mid-20th century, the US and its allies were codifying PSYOPs into doctrine. Army Field Manuals like FM 3-05.30 and FM 3-05.301 laid out planning processes, audience analysis, and message design. At first glance they read like bureaucratic manuals: procedures, unit roles, dissemination methods. A closer look reveals that PSYOPs are not ad hoc leaflets, they are orchestrated operations grounded in intelligence, sociology, and media strategy.

Here’s the catch: doctrine treats influence as a technical tool, not a moral one. The key manual, JP 3-13, embeds PSYOPs within information operations, alongside cyber, electronic warfare, and deception. You can’t just download JP 3-13, it’s locked behind a military login, so most people cite the older, public FM 3-13 instead. Outdated or not, it explains the core mechanics.

The tension persists: operations are optimised for effect, not ethics. Manuals supply the tools; policymakers and commanders decide how to wield them.

What makes influence tick

At the core of PSYOPs are principles long documented by behavioural science. Influence exploits cognitive biases: confirmation bias, authority effects, the bandwagon effect. Robert Cialdini’s research on persuasion shows how small nudges, repeated often and reinforced socially, shift attitudes subtly but reliably.

Emotional salience is key. Our brains prioritise fear, pride, and group identity, as Daniel Kahneman argued in Thinking, Fast and Slow. PSYOPs exploit these patterns: repetition builds trust, framing dictates whether information feels threatening or reassuring.

Doctrine explains how. Psychology explains why. Influence works, but unevenly: what persuades one group may alienate another.

The practical effects of PSYOPs

World War II gave the first big demonstrations. The Allies used black propaganda, forged newspapers, and fake radio to erode morale in occupied Europe. Britain’s Political Warfare Executive mixed deception with selective truths to confuse German troops and civilians. Ambiguous in ethics, effective in practice.

Vietnam was similar. The US ran the Chieu Hoi program, persuading Viet Cong fighters to defect through leaflets, loudspeakers, and promises of reintegration. Not flawless, not pure, but a clear demonstration of targeting vulnerabilities.

In the 21st century the battlefield moved online. Russian disinformation in Ukraine and during the 2016 US elections show how PSYOPs exploit social media: tailored messages, amplified biases, network effects. The mechanics echo wartime propaganda, the medium is new.

Beyond the battlefield

Digital-age PSYOPs no longer need armies. They operate through social platforms, advertising networks, and viral media.

Russian interference in the 2016 US election

Perhaps the most famous case: Russia’s Internet Research Agency running troll farms, fake accounts, divisive memes, and even organising rallies. A Senate Intelligence Committee report showed the goal was to undermine confidence in the vote and boost Donald Trump. And they tried again in 2020.

Cambridge Analytica

Then came the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Millions of Facebook profiles were harvested without consent to build psychological voter profiles. Targeted political ads followed. The firm worked with the Trump campaign, raising sharp questions about privacy and ethics in digital politics.

COVID-19 misinformation

The pandemic unleashed misinformation campaigns: falsehoods about the virus, vaccines, and public health. These weren’t harmless rumours, they directly undermined health responses and showed how fragile digital ecosystems are.

Ethical considerations

Digital PSYOPs are not just clever tricks, they cut at the heart of legitimacy and trust.

Cambridge Analytica was the canary in the coal mine. No consent, no transparency, just raw data siphoned, profiled, and weaponised. People became unwitting pawns, not participants.

Transparency and accountability

Most PSYOPs thrive in the dark. Targets rarely know they are being nudged, primed, or misled. That secrecy does not just cloud judgement, it poisons the idea of free choice.

Impact on democracy

Democracy assumes open debate and visible persuasion. Covert manipulation bypasses both. The 2016 US election was not just a political contest; it was a live experiment in undermining legitimacy through hidden influence.

Normalisation of manipulation

Once one actor deploys these tactics, others feel compelled to follow. The line between persuasion and manipulation blurs until influence itself becomes a weapon, not a dialogue.

Erosion of trust

Every revelation of covert influence erodes public faith in institutions, media, and even neighbours. When people cannot trust what they read, or who is behind it, social cohesion frays, and cynicism takes root.

Defending the self

Awareness is the first defence. Citizens aren’t helpless: we can train ourselves to spot manipulation. PSYOPs exploit biases, emotions, and algorithmic bubbles, but humans can still reflect, question, and verify.

Media literacy and critical thinking

Not all content is neutral. Fact-checking tools like Snopes and FactCheck.org help test claims. Being aware of confirmation bias is crucial: even harmless-seeming posts may carry persuasive hooks.

Source evaluation and cross-referencing

Cross-checking is stronger than trust. Peer-reviewed research, credible journalism, and independent verification anchor us against manipulation. Platforms like the European Digital Media Observatory offer insights tailored to Europe.

Discussing claims with people outside your echo chamber helps. Psychological studies show that repeated exposure boosts false credibility. Cross-perspective dialogue counters this.

Technological safeguards

Digital hygiene matters. Privacy settings, suspicious-site flags, and algorithm-awareness reduce exposure. Extensions like NewsGuard, InVID & WeVerify, and Fake News Detector can help, but beware: outsourcing trust to a plug-in is still outsourcing.

A few cautions:

Methodology bias: extensions reflect human judgement.
Coverage gaps: they can’t catch everything, especially in smaller or non-English domains.
Algorithmic flaws: machine learning flags what it’s trained on, and misses what it’s not.
Assistive, not authoritative: tools help, but they don’t absolve critical thinking.
True resilience: comes from recognising tactics, not installing software.

Use them as supplements, not replacements.

Civic engagement and pressure

Resilience scales. Support transparency laws, push for platform accountability, and demand government honesty. A society that is sceptical, informed, and vocal is harder to manipulate than a passive one.

In short: the best defence is vigilance, critical thinking, literacy, dialogue, technical awareness, and civic action. Not paranoia. Just good habits.

Psychological operations are not magic, and influence is rarely absolute. The mechanics of persuasion, whether in wartime, election campaigns, or social media feeds, are grounded in predictable human psychology. Understanding them does not make one paranoid; it makes one literate. By recognising manipulation, questioning narratives, and engaging critically with information, citizens reclaim agency. Influence may be inevitable, but complicity is optional. Awareness, scepticism, and practical defences form the frontline of modern civic resilience.

Why professionals rarely start with 'what's needed' before choosing technology

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In one corner, we have Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, telling The Guardian in 2024 that AI will be “10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution.” Disruption is inevitable, he says, but humanity will adapt, as it always does. The challenge is simply to manage the turbulence.

In the other corner, we have Joseph Weizenbaum, reflecting in the 1980s on his earlier work designing a banking system for processing physical cheques. It was an intricate, technically satisfying project. Only years later did it occur to him that no one had asked whether automating cheque processing at scale was socially desirable, or what knock-on effects it might have. “It never occurred to me to ask,” he admitted.

Hassabis starts from the premise that AI should happen, the question is how fast. Weizenbaum learned the hard way that asking “Should this happen?” is the question most professionals never even think to put on the table.

The seductive pull of the technical challenge

If you have ever been in a team of engineers, developers, or scientists faced with a thorny technical problem, you know the look: that glint in the eye when the constraints are tight, the system is complex, and the solution will require ingenuity. The work becomes a puzzle, a game. You get your dopamine hits from solving sub-problems, optimising processes, and making something elegant work.

Dopamine is not a metaphor here, it is a biochemical bribe. Each small breakthrough, each clever workaround, each time you finally get the blasted thing to compile without errors, there is a little reward in the brain. The more complex the problem, the more hits you get. Before long, you are not working to solve the right problem; you are working to keep that reward cycle going.

Weizenbaum’s cheque-processing system was exactly this kind of challenge. In hindsight, he realised that neither he nor his colleagues asked if the change would benefit the banking system’s customers or workers, or whether automating at that scale would alter economic relationships in undesirable ways. The joy of solving the problem eclipsed the question of whether it was worth solving. And once the technical fun begins, very few professionals are willing to be the one to call a halt.

The inevitability narrative

Hassabis’s framing is a perfect example of the “inevitability” narrative. It says: the tech is coming, and it will be massive. Your only choices are how fast you adopt it, how you regulate it, and how you adapt to it. This mindset subtly removes an entire category of debate, whether we should build a technology at all, or whether we should deliberately limit its capabilities.

Once you accept inevitability, “problem-first” thinking becomes irrelevant. The machine is already in motion; your job is to avoid getting crushed by it.

Institutional and cultural barriers

Most organisations do not reward asking “Do we need this?” They reward delivery, novelty, and efficiency. Shipping a feature is rewarded; stopping a project because it is not the right problem is often career-limiting.

Competition intensifies this. In technology, there is always a lurking fear: “If we do not build it, someone else will.” The result is a race to ship first, with no one willing to pump the brakes to re-examine the map.

And if you do ask “What problem are we solving? Who asked for this?”, the answer often comes from the inside of the building, from marketing decks and strategic roadmaps, not from the people who will live with the consequences.

The gap between capability and need

We have seen entire waves of technology that were more about capability than need. Blockchain-for-everything in the mid‑2010s brought us endless proofs of concept for problems that were already well solved with simpler tools.

Contrast that with targeted medical devices developed in consultation with the communities they serve, devices designed not because they were “cool” but because there was a clear gap in access or outcomes. These cases are rare, but they show that problem-first thinking works when it is baked in from the start.

Weizenbaum’s warning and its modern relevance

After ELIZA, his 1966 natural language program, Weizenbaum became a prominent critic of automating human judgment. He warned that the “ELIZA effect”, people attributing more understanding to machines than they actually have, was dangerous, particularly in decision-making domains like law, medicine, and governance.

He argued that not every solvable problem should be solved by a machine, and that the first step in responsible design is to ask what a technology will displace, distort, or destroy, before you build it.

Shifting the professional mindset

If we want more professionals to start with “what is needed,” we better redesign the environment in which they work. A lone engineer pausing to ask an uncomfortable question will always be overruled by deadlines, deliverables, and the ever-present hum of competition. The incentives have to change.

That starts by putting ethicists and domain experts into design teams from day one, not as an afterthought. Their role is not to veto ideas but to make sure the problem is understood in its social, legal, and human context before a single prototype is built.

It also means recognising problem-framing as a professional skill, worthy of the same respect and reward as problem-solving. The ability to articulate why a project exists, whose needs it serves, and what its unintended consequences might be is just as valuable as the ability to make the code compile or the hardware run.

And it requires introducing formal checkpoints where teams define the problem clearly before funding or green-lighting the work. These are not bureaucratic hurdles; they are the moments when the question “Is this the right problem to solve?” has to be answered in daylight, not buried under the glow of the build pipeline.

This is not about slowing innovation for the sake of it. It is about ensuring that the speed we prize so highly is aimed in a direction that benefits more than the people holding the patents. Because if we cannot even slow down long enough to ask what is worth building, we are not innovators at all, we are just very efficient lemmings.

The choice we keep missing

The story we keep telling ourselves, that technological revolutions are inevitable, is a comforting lie for those building them. It removes the awkward responsibility of choice. It suggests that engineers and executives are not decision-makers at all, but merely passengers on a runaway train, bravely trying to adjust the lighting in the carriages.

In reality, AI, like every technology before it, is the product of deliberate human choices, shaped by funding, incentives, and political will. “Inevitable” is simply the word we use when enough people with enough power have already decided it will happen.

The real leap forward is not in how quickly we can build, but in how deliberately we choose what to build. Hassabis may be right that the coming change is bigger than the Industrial Revolution. The question is whether, thirty years from now, today’s builders will be looking back with Weizenbaum’s regret, or with the rarer satisfaction of having asked the hard questions first, and chosen their projects like responsible adults rather than overexcited puzzle-solvers.

Tidying the loose ends before the whole thing unravels

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the spring of 2021, Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) researcher Wietse Boonstra quietly uncovered seven critical flaws in Kaseya’s widely used IT management software. DIVD warned the company within days, flagging more than 2,200 vulnerable systems across the globe. Weeks later, three flaws remained unpatched, and the REvil ransomware gang pounced. Overnight, some 1,500 organisations were paralysed, from supermarkets in Sweden to schools in New Zealand.

This was not an isolated close call. In a 2023 study with the University of Twente, DIVD found that less than half of Dutch municipalities acted promptly when notified of exploitable flaws in their email systems. In some cases, local authorities ignored the warnings entirely.

DIVD is in the business of making sure those warnings get heard, and acted on. They do it through a mix of detective work, diplomacy, and relentless follow‑up. When a scan flags a vulnerable system, a researcher confirms the risk, traces it to the responsible party, and contacts them directly, sometimes through technical staff, sometimes through executives, and, if needed, through national bodies like NCSC‑NL. For those who respond, DIVD provides remediation steps, links to vendor patches, and guidance until the fix is verified. For those who do not, they escalate, via hosting providers, industry partners, or, in extreme cases, public advisories. It is less “find and shout” and more “find, guide, and push until it’s fixed.”

The DIVD model: Research‑driven prevention

DIVD’s process is designed for maximum impact with minimal fuss. First, the team scans broadly for exposed systems and known vulnerabilities, relying on a combination of automated tools and manual research. Once a potential issue is identified, they verify whether it is truly exploitable and urgent enough to warrant immediate attention. Next, DIVD reaches out directly to the affected party, whether that is a small business, a public institution, or a vendor, providing details about the vulnerability. Finally, they support remediation efforts by sharing guidance, linking to vendor patches, and, where appropriate, collaborating with national bodies like the NCSC‑NL to ensure the problem is fixed promptly and correctly.

For example, in the case of DIVD‑2022‑00055, the team discovered numerous insecure server management interfaces worldwide. Before vendor patches were even available, DIVD proactively notified system administrators and advised isolating these interfaces behind bastion hosts or VPNs to reduce risk. This approach of combining detection with practical remediation guidance is typical of DIVD’s work and underscores their commitment to preventing breaches rather than simply documenting them.

Ripple effects of responsible disclosure

The Kaseya case illustrates what is at stake when vulnerabilities are left unpatched: an entire software supply chain can be compromised, affecting thousands of downstream businesses in one strike. For smaller companies, especially SMEs without dedicated cybersecurity staff, a DIVD alert can mean the difference between a routine patch cycle and a multi‑week operational shutdown.

For security researchers, DIVD provides a legal and structured path for reporting vulnerabilities, avoiding the risk of prosecution or reputational harm that can accompany independent disclosure. This safe channel not only protects the researcher but ensures the vulnerability is handled responsibly.

For society, DIVD’s work safeguards critical infrastructure, hospitals, utilities, financial systems, and local government, against large‑scale disruption. The municipal email vulnerability research revealed that poor incident response processes are not just theoretical problems; they are active weaknesses that could be exploited to spread disinformation or do targeted scams.

Challenges & opportunities: scaling the impact

Awareness remains one of DIVD’s biggest challenges. Many organisations still do not realise they can engage DIVD proactively, whether by inviting scans or by setting up formal reporting channels. Even when vulnerabilities are reported, the municipal study shows that response is inconsistent, over half of municipalities lacked a publicly documented Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process at the time of testing.

Funding is another constraint. DIVD is volunteer‑driven and operates with the support of donations and sponsorships. Limited resources mean fewer scans, slower follow‑up, and reduced capacity to investigate global-scale issues like the Kaseya flaws. The question remains: what could be prevented if every Dutch organisation had both the awareness and the means to work with DIVD before incidents occur?

How you can help amplify DIVD’s work: a call to action

If you work in an organisation, you can start by inviting DIVD to scan your systems and by committing funds to sustain their work. Proactive security checks cost far less than breach recovery, both in money and reputation.

If you are a researcher, you can contribute by submitting vulnerabilities via DIVD rather than going it alone. Their structured disclosure process will protect both your findings and your professional standing.

If you are a citizen, you can raise awareness by sharing verified case studies like the Kaseya incident or the municipal research project. You can also advocate for government policies that require all public bodies to maintain functional CVD processes, in line with the upcoming NIS2 directive.

Security is a shared responsibility

Cybersecurity is no longer a niche technical concern; it is part of the civic infrastructure that keeps services running and trust intact. From global ransomware events to municipal email spoofing risks, the pattern is clear: vulnerabilities will be found, either by ethical researchers or by criminals. DIVD focuses on the former, and on pushing those warnings to lead to action.

Act now: visit divd.nl to report a vulnerability, partner with their team, or donate. Share this article and start a conversation, because security works best when everyone plays their part.

Thirty years of not listening to Joseph Weizenbaum

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1991, The Tech at MIT published an interview with Joseph Weizenbaum, the computer scientist best known for creating ELIZA and later becoming one of the field’s sharpest internal critics. Speaking with Diana ben‑Aaron, he dissected the role of computers in education, their entanglement with the military, and the ethical evasions of scientists.

Three decades later, his words are less a time capsule and more a mirror, the issues he named have not only persisted but mutated into modern forms, from AI hype cycles to tech‑military partnerships dressed up in start‑up chic. This post is a “then/now” rendering of that interview: his points in their original spirit, and how they look in the world of 2025.

Computers in education

Then:

When asked “What’s the role of computers in education?”, Weizenbaum basically replied: “Why are you asking about computers before you know what education is for?” He saw the question as upside‑down. The job of schools, he argued, is first to teach mastery of language so students can think and communicate clearly; second, to ground them in their cultural heritage through history, literature, and the arts; and third, to prepare them for life in a scientifically complex world with mathematics and basic observational skills.

In 1991, he thought American schools were failing these priorities, especially in language. The reasons weren’t mysterious: poverty, underqualified teachers, overcrowded classes, and a national budget skewed toward the military. Computers in classrooms, he warned, were a comfortable distraction, allowing politicians to claim reform while avoiding these structural problems.

Now:

We have gone from “a few computers in classrooms” to full‑scale dependency on Chromebooks, iPads, online testing platforms, and now AI tutors. Literacy gaps remain, teacher shortages deepen, and budgets for tech swell while libraries and arts programmes are cut. Digital literacy crises, inability to discern fact from fiction, online disinformation, pile on top of the old “Johnny can’t read” problem. Weizenbaum’s fear that technology would be used as a fig leaf instead of real reform looks less like a warning now and more like the business plan.

Ethics and education

Then:

For Weizenbaum, ethics starts with the ability to think clearly, and that starts with mastery of one’s own language. Without it, moral reasoning collapses into slogans. History, literature, and cultural study give students the context to understand and evaluate ethical challenges. Schools that fail to teach language fail to prepare their students for ethical life.

But his critique did not stop there. Even if computers could demonstrably improve reading scores, he insisted the question “Why can’t Johnny read?” still be asked, and answered. Those answers are uncomfortable: Johnny might be hungry, might live in a violent environment where reading is irrelevant to survival, might be in an overcrowded class with an underqualified teacher. Asking why means confronting poverty, inequality, and misplaced national priorities, such as funding the military while cutting school meal programmes. It is much easier to flood classrooms with shiny devices and declare progress than to face the ethics of ignoring these root causes.

Now:

“Ethics” is now a conference buzzword, with AI ethics toolkits, diversity pledges, and digital citizenship curricula, but public ethical discourse is often done at meme‑level depth. The ability to construct a precise moral argument is not widespread, and the ethics “modules” in AI systems are mostly PR shields. Meanwhile, the underlying social realities Weizenbaum pointed to still exist, hunger, poverty, and systemic neglect, and are still being papered over with technology. If the public cannot debate right and wrong with clarity, and if policymakers prefer gadgets over justice, the ethical veneer in our tech won’t stop much of anything.

Computers as a conservative force

Then:

Contrary to the popular myth of “digital disruption,” Weizenbaum saw computers as fundamentally conservative, tools that preserve existing institutions. His banking example was telling: without computers, banks might have had to decentralise or reorganise to cope with more transactions. With computers, they kept the same centralised model and simply processed more. He admitted that when he helped design the first computerised banking system, he didn’t think about the social consequences, he was absorbed in the technical challenge and professional pride.

Now:

The same pattern is everywhere. “Digital transformation” often means making the same broken system run faster and cheaper without changing who it serves. Algorithmic hiring reproduces old biases. Predictive policing reinforces discriminatory patterns. Gig‑economy scheduling software squeezes more labour from workers with less security. The rhetoric is revolutionary; the reality is institutional inertia.

Military roots and dominance

Then:

Computers were “born to the military”: the first U.S. computer calculated ballistic trajectories, British machines broke wartime codes, and Karl Zuse’s work in Germany aided aircraft design. Since WWII, most computer R&D has been funded by the military. Modern weapons systems depend on them, and advances in AI will make “smart” weapons deadlier. Weizenbaum dismissed the euphemism “defence”, computers are involved in killing people, full stop.

Now:

The tech–military relationship is tighter than ever. AI‑powered targeting, autonomous drones, and battlefield analytics are sold with the same UX polish as consumer apps. The vocabulary has expanded, “lethality enhancement” sounds cleaner than “better at killing”, but the substance is the same. If anything, the pipeline from university research to military deployment is shorter and smoother than it was in Weizenbaum’s day.

Rationalisations scientists use

Then:

Weizenbaum catalogued three common excuses for working on harmful technology. First: “If I don’t do it, someone else will”, a blanket moral waiver. Second: “Technology is neutral”, the comforting fantasy that tools have no inherent tendency toward certain uses. Third: “Spin‑off benefits”, justifying weapons work by the consumer products it might accidentally produce. He called these out as false in the real world, where military applications are predictable given the political and economic system. His analogy: asking doctors to develop bioweapons because they might yield new medicines. Most would refuse, and engineers could too.

Now:

The excuses persist, just re‑skinned for AI. “If we don’t build it, China will.” “The model is neutral; only the data is biased.” “Yes, it’s for the military, but look, now we can generate cat videos!” The pattern is identical: ethical responsibility outsourced to a hypothetical future and wrapped in spin.

Fears for the future

Then:

Weizenbaum’s greatest fear was that the younger generation would never grow old, annihilated by the technologies their societies cultivated, particularly military ones. This was not a vague doomsday scenario; it was grounded in the real presence of nuclear weapons on hair‑trigger alert.

Now:

The fear has diversified. The threat of sudden nuclear annihilation still exists, but it now sits alongside climate collapse, synthetic pandemics, destabilising cyber‑attacks, and autonomous weapons escalation. The common thread is the same: capabilities racing ahead of political maturity. The menu of potential endings is longer; the appetite for slowing down hasn’t grown.

Reflection in 2025

Looking across these “nows,” the pattern is painfully consistent: technology is still deployed as a shortcut past hard social problems rather than as a tool to confront them. In education, it replaces investment in teachers and literacy with subscriptions and screens. In ethics, it is used to signal virtue while ignoring the structural realities that make justice difficult. In industry, it preserves the power structures it was supposed to disrupt. In the military, it accelerates our ability to kill faster than our willingness to ask why we are killing. And in the lab, the same rationalisations still absolve people of responsibility, just dressed up in new jargon.

The uncomfortable truth in 2025 is that Weizenbaum’s warnings were not just prophetic, they have been normalised. What was once cautionary has become background noise. We still chase technological capability without matching it with political maturity, and we still congratulate ourselves for progress that leaves the roots of the problem untouched. The real test is whether we are willing to reverse the order of the questions, to decide what kind of society we want before deciding which machines to build. If we do not, then Weizenbaum’s greatest fear for the future may not just come true, it may arrive looking exactly like the world we have chosen.

Threat modelling for zero-day vulnerabilities

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Threat modelling for zero-day vulnerabilities is a peculiar exercise in preparing for the unknowable. These are not the comfortable, catalogue‑ready bugs that live in CVE databases. These are the ones nobody, least of all the vendor, has seen fit to admit exist. They arrive without warning, without a patch, and with precisely zero days’ notice before being exploited. The task, therefore, is less about ticking boxes and more about building the sort of resilience that can withstand the unexpected without falling to pieces.

Understanding zero-day vulnerabilities in threat modelling

A zero-day vulnerability is a flaw in software that the vendor does not yet know about and, consequently, has not patched. It might lurk in your operating system, your applications, your firmware, or the cloud services you have so enthusiastically embraced.

Traditional threat modelling often leans heavily on known‑vulnerability databases and predictable attack patterns. Unfortunately, zero‑days are absent from these lists by definition. Modelling them requires a shift from reactive to proactive thinking: rather than plotting where you know the enemy might come from, look for the paths you have not yet mapped.

Key methodologies for zero-day threat modelling

STRIDE framework adaptation

If you are using the STRIDE methodology, Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, Elevation of privilege, it still has its uses, but it needs a nudge towards the hypothetical. Instead of matching threats to known bugs, focus on architectural weaknesses. Examine trust boundaries with a cold eye for where an unknown flaw might slip through. Follow your data flows until you find the dark corners where a payload could be injected. Map out possible privilege‑escalation routes that could be abused by a flaw no one has yet documented. Microsoft recommends applying STRIDE to data flow diagrams to make this sort of thinking systematic, though it is still something of an art (being diplomatic here).

PASTA (process for attack simulation and threat analysis)

PASTA OTOH, with its seven‑stage, risk‑focused approach, is well‑suited to the problem. It starts with defining objectives, which in this context means identifying the assets most attractive to anyone who might stumble across a zero‑day. Then you map your architecture, decompose it into parts, and start asking awkward questions about where the weak points might be hiding.

For example, for an Industrial control system (ICS) network:

Define objectives: Maintain operational continuity and safety for a water treatment plant.
Map architecture: Diagram PLCs, SCADA servers, historian databases, operator HMIs, engineering workstations, and external vendor remote access points.
Decompose: Identify firmware versions, network segments, and dependency on vendor software.
Awkward questions:
- Could a zero‑day in a PLC firmware allow unauthorised commands that alter chlorine dosing?
- Could a flaw in the remote access VPN client provide an attacker with a foothold inside the OT network?

Or, for a SaaS platform:

Define objectives: Protect multi‑tenant data integrity and confidentiality.
Map architecture: Diagram the load balancers, application servers, Kubernetes clusters, object storage, and identity provider integrations.
Decompose: Break down each service, container image, API, and shared library.
Awkward questions:
- Could a zero‑day in the Kubernetes API server enable privilege escalation across namespaces?
- Could a flaw in a widely‑used open source library give an attacker remote code execution on all customer environments?

From there, simulate how an attacker might discover and exploit the unknown. Use tools such as fuzz testing to shake loose flaws you did not expect. Model how these might be weaponised, then weigh the risks according to their potential impact and plausibility. It is meticulous, occasionally tedious work, but then so is clearing unexploded ordnance.

Attack trees

Attack trees offer a visual way to think through the improbable. Start with the attacker’s ultimate goal as your root node, say, exfiltrating customer data. Branch out into possible routes, including the use of a zero‑day. Keep branching until you reach the leaf nodes, which represent specific techniques such as memory corruption or bypassing input validation. This is a way to think about how the unknown might be combined with the known to create a credible attack chain.

Proactive strategies for zero-day threat modelling

Assume breach mindset

Operating on the assumption that a breach has already occurred changes the conversation. Instead of fixating solely on prevention, you plan for containment and swift recovery. You model post‑exploit scenarios, decide how you would isolate the damage, and ensure your monitoring is alert for behaviour that does not belong.

Behaviour-based analysis

With no handy signature to spot, you have to know what “normal” looks like for your systems and applications, and watch for deviations. This involves building baselines, then using runtime protection tools to spot suspicious execution patterns. It is digital pattern recognition with a healthy dose of paranoia.

Attack surface reduction

The fewer doors you have, the fewer can be forced open. Disable services and features you do not use. Apply the principle of least privilege religiously. Use micro‑segmentation so that any breach is boxed in. And always, always validate and sanitise inputs, everywhere.

Threat intelligence integration

You may not know the exact shape of the next zero‑day, but you can watch for its shadows. Monitor vulnerability‑research communities, track attacker tactics and techniques, and study the history of zero‑days in systems like your own. Better still, participate in information‑sharing networks. You might learn something useful before it turns up in your logs.

Implementation best practices

Secure development lifecycle integration

Threat modelling for zero‑days is not to be bolted on at the end. At the design stage, architect systems with resistance to unknown flaws in mind. In development, stick to secure coding practices and use static analysis. In testing, add fuzzing and dynamic analysis to catch the things you did not expect. At deployment, layer in runtime protections that will not wait for a patch before acting.

Zero trust principles

Zero trust architecture, when done properly, reduces the blast radius of a zero‑day. Verify every access request. Limit lateral movement so one compromise does not open the whole network. Segment aggressively and use continuous authentication to keep everyone honest.

In-depth monitoring

Detection needs depth. Endpoint detection and response can catch misbehaviour on hosts. Network‑traffic analysis can spot odd flows. User and entity behaviour analytics can flag the strange. Memory‑protection mechanisms can stop certain classes of attack in their tracks. Layered together, they give you more than one chance to spot trouble.

Challenges in zero-day threat modelling

Zero‑days are, by definition, unknown unknowns. Modelling them well demands time, skill, and patience. Behaviour‑based detection can produce more noise than signal. Attackers, meanwhile, are inventive creatures, happy to develop new tricks. And then there is the supply chain, where a flaw in someone else’s code can become your problem without warning.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can, in theory, detect subtle anomalies, predict plausible attack vectors, and automate parts of the modelling process. They can also run simulations that stretch the imagination.

Runtime application self‑protection (RASP) bakes defences into the application itself, monitoring behaviour and blocking the suspicious without waiting for external instructions.

In cloud environments, cloud‑native techniques, such as scanning infrastructure‑as‑code, adopting immutable infrastructure, and enforcing policies automatically, offer ways to make entire deployment patterns more resistant to the unexpected.

TL;DR: Surviving the unknown

Zero-day vulnerabilities are the software flaws nobody knows about, until they are exploited. Vendors have not patched them, defenders have not planned for them, and yet attackers are more than happy to take advantage. Traditional threat modelling, which leans on known vulnerabilities, is about as useful here as a map of last year’s train delays.

Instead, zero-day threat modelling requires a behaviour‑centric approach: look for weak points in architecture, watch for deviations from normal behaviour, and reduce the number of doors attackers can try. Established frameworks such as STRIDE and PASTA can be adapted for this by focusing on trust boundaries, data flows, and hypothetical exploitation paths rather than known exploits.

Key strategies include adopting an “assume breach” mindset, tightening your attack surface, and integrating threat intelligence into daily operations. Embedding this thinking into the secure development lifecycle, and coupling it with zero trust principles, helps reduce the impact of a zero‑day even if prevention fails.

The challenges are significant: unknown unknowns, false positives, and ever‑evolving attacker techniques, not to mention the fragility of supply chains. Emerging tools such as AI‑driven anomaly detection, runtime application self‑protection, and cloud‑native security patterns are promising, but they are no substitute for disciplined, continuous threat modelling.

In short: you cannot predict the unpredictable, but you can design systems that fail gracefully, detect mischief quickly, and recover before the whole thing unravels.

Weaponised data, ten years on: better, worse, and more dangerous than we imagined

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago, Nonprofit AF , in Weaponized data: How the obsession with data has been hurting marginalized communities, warned that nonprofits’ data obsession could dehumanise and harm marginalised communities, reducing lived experiences to reductive metrics, ignoring power dynamics, and prioritising funder dashboards. Now it’s 2025. Technology, AI, data regulation, and global politics have changed, but many threats have only intensified. What changed?

What has improved

Stronger legal guardrails (sometimes)

Since GDPR (2018), Europe and other jurisdictions have enacted data protections that at least nominally strengthen consent and individual’s rights. Data-sharing rules and transparency mandates force nonprofits to be somewhat more accountable.

Ethics discourse and accountability

Discourse on data justice, algorithmic accountability, and community-led evaluation has gained traction. Groups like Algorithmic Justice League and Data for Black Lives have pushed back publicly against biased AI systems.

Indigenous data sovereignty

The global Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) movement has accelerated. The 2025 Global Indigenous Data Sovereignty Conference - ALIGN in Canberra united over 240 Indigenous delegates to define CARE principles (Collective benefit; Authority to control; Responsibility; Ethics), moving from rhetoric into action.

UNESCO’s December 2023 Report and guidelines for indigenous data sovereignty in artificial intelligence developments laid out participatory AI guidelines centring Indigenous priorities in Latin America.

Emerging data governance structures

European initiatives like Gaia‑X and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) offer federated and standards-based data-sharing frameworks that provide more technical control and sovereignty over cloud infrastructure. And :

Early in the Gaia-X project, open source software advocates warned against corporate capture of Gaia-X by large companies. They referred to Gaia-X as a possible Trojan horse of big tech in Europe, and made comparisons to the French State-sponsored cloud project Andromeda that had been launched 10 years earlier and which resulted in public funds benefiting large non-European industry players. - WikiPedia: Gaia-X

What has worsened

AI‑driven decision-making with no transparency

Predictive AI tools in policing, welfare, child services, and housing now routinely assess risk scores without explainability. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an AI child welfare tool is under DOJ investigation for flagging parents with developmental disabilities, causing wrongful removals.

In Chicago, community organisations are combatting predictive policing algorithms that re‑enforce systemic bias under the guise of data‑driven reform.

Dashboards over human stories

Funders continue to demand dashboard‑ready KPIs and real‑time metrics. Nonprofits strain to feed these systems, often at the expense of nuanced qualitative impact, eroding local insight and prioritising what can be easily measured.

Big Tech-owned infrastructure dominates

Platforms like Salesforce, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and cloud providers, have become integral to nonprofit operations. Reliance increases risk of surveillance, vendor lock‑in, and exposure of sensitive beneficiary data via terms of service no one reads.

Cross-border data exposure

In many regions, data hosts are subject to foreign surveillance regimes. Ukraine’s data‐localisation requirement for example, was relaxed just before the Russian invasion, and government data was moved into European data centres. While intended as sovereign protection, it arguably also diluted control.

According to C4ISRNET (June 22, 2022), Ukraine had a law prohibiting cloud storage of government data (mandating it be stored locally), but amended this law just days before Russia’s invasion so that critical data could be evacuated into the cloud. That, illustrating data dispersal into Europe, may have compromised sovereign control even as it protected data from physical attack.
Microsoft itself (January 2023 / later commentary) confirms its role in transferring Ukrainian digital infrastructure into datacentres across Europe to maintain continuity and resist cyberattacks. While essential for survival, this meant data ended up hosted outside Ukraine’s borders, subject to foreign legal regimes, raising possible sovereignty trade-offs.

What is new since 2015

Generative AI, deepfakes and synthetic manipulation

Biased or poisoned synthetic datasets now influence AI outputs. Algorithms trained on skewed or fabricated data can invisibly reinforce harmful stereotypes and decisions, with little oversight.

Behavioural and biometric tracking

Aid agencies under the guise of efficiency increasingly require biometric data, fingerprints, iris, face scans, from refugees and migrants. For example, in Bangladesh’s Rohingya camps, refusing these scans has resulted in suspension of food and fuel aid. The UNHCR‑supported programs in Jordan and Egypt use iris recognition to authenticate cash assistance withdrawals. Human Rights Watch and affiliated critics highlight that this data collection curtails meaningful consent and exposes vulnerable populations to heightened risk when they rely on it to access basic goods. At a broader level, biometric systems are also embedded in African migrant tracking schemes tied to European border enforcement, effectively facilitating surveillance under humanitarian pretence.

Emotion‑recognition tech in schools and protests increasingly profiles and alienates vulnerable populations. Here’s your text with the added academic grounding for the “weak scientific foundations” claim:

Emotion‑recognition AI, flawed, biased, and built on weak scientific foundations, has left classrooms and protest spaces the latest sites of digital profiling. In China and India, systems that ‘read’ emotions during lessons push students to perform for the camera, while in U.S. schools, tools like Gaggle flag emotional states and LGBTQ‑related content as red alerts, without consent or recourse.

At protests, masked demonstrators have been identified using facial and emotion analysis software, stripping anonymity and chilling participation.

Commercial data brokers targeting NGOs

Despite their benevolent mission, NGOs often rely on external service providers to manage beneficiary databases. This exposes sensitive information, names, health status, political affiliation, biometric identifiers, to third‑party data brokers. These brokers then package and sell it to advertisers, government agencies, or law enforcement, often violating the original consent agreements and disproportionately harming marginalised communities.

Hybrid warfare & disinformation ecosystems

Data narratives have become weapons: in conflict zones or disaster areas, “official” data can be manipulated in disinformation campaigns. Governments and actors weaponise harm statistics or census data to suppress communities or justify intervention. For example, during the crisis in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, misinformation inflated indigenous death counts from four to one hundred through coordinated social media and political amplification, turning community violence into a tool of political suppression. Similarly, in Gaza, conflicting casualty figures published by the Hamas‑run Health Ministry and critiqued by outside analysts have been weaponised by various parties, influencing global narratives and policy positions. More broadly, humanitarian data in conflict contexts are often distorted, whether in Somalia, Afghanistan, Kosovo or Ukraine, to justify intervention or discredit affected populations.

Climate‑data grab zones

Crises zones, hurricanes, floods, drought, see external actors seizing local data under the guise of aid or research, with little accountability or benefit-sharing.

Crises zones, hurricanes, floods, drought, see external actors seizing local data under the guise of aid or research, with little accountability or benefit‑sharing. A 2025 study on North‑Eastern Nigeria and South Sudan showed that humanitarian agencies often collect extensive data from internally displaced persons, yet it’s extracted without feedback, consent, or clarity on usage, undermining agency and trust in affected communities. Critics say this mirrors practices of data colonialism and parachute science, where data flows outward while benefits remain external.

For instance, after the September 2023 floods in Derna, Libya, triggered by Storm Daniel, local humanitarian data (health, locations, damage assessments) were rapidly transferred to international platforms for analytics, with minimal transparency to affected communities. See the ISS analysis and Human Rights Watch account.

Likewise, in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy in Malawi (March 2023), massive datasets, including displacement maps and vulnerability assessments, were curated primarily by external data entities (e.g. the mwBTFreddy AI dataset), with local communities largely excluded from decision‑making or sharing in the insights derived.

Case studies and recent initiatives

AI for rural mapping, good or bad?

“Bridges to Prosperity” used an AI called WaterNet to map 77 million miles of waterways in underserved regions, tripling previously known mapping coverage. The tool helped plan bridges in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda and Zambia, addressing data inequity in infrastructure planning.

Ethical data labour in AI

Indian startup Karya offers a model that pays rural and marginalised language speakers fairly, and provides them royalties when their voice data is resold. It’s an emerging fair-labour model for AI data production.

Indigenous-led frameworks & biodiversity

GBIF’s Indigenous data governance pilot projects integrate Local Contexts’ Traditional Knowledge Labels into biodiversity records, ensuring provenance metadata and CARE-aligned governance in global data repositories.

Community data justice in rural contexts

Recent academic work describes “community data cooperatives” and combined data‑pool models to enable rural communities to co‑control and benefit from local data, and build equitable AI ecosystems.

Who defines impact in 2025? Still mostly funders, tech vendors, and governments, but increasingly mediated by opaque algorithmic impact scores.
Informed consent is a myth in many contexts: few end-users of data fully understand what their data may power, share, or enable.
Data sovereignty works, but rarely scales. Indigenous communities are ahead: frameworks and infrastructure rooted in CARE principles and local governance models are emerging, though mainstream adoption lags.

Ways forward

Adopt data minimalism: collect only essential data, hold it briefly, and destroy it when no longer needed.
Support community-led infrastructure: data cooperatives, federated clouds, local hosting, encryption‑first tools that embed consent and control.
Centre qualitative narratives: human stories are valid forms of evidence, don’t defer to dashboards alone.
Demand algorithmic transparency clauses in tech vendor contracts and opt‑out rights for disruptive technologies.
Build cross‑movement alliances: privacy advocates, AI ethicists, humanitarian workers, Indigenous and marginalised groups working together to reclaim control.
Push for algorithmic reparations: design tools explicitly to reduce harm and redistribute resources to historically oppressed groups.

2025

The core 2015 critique still stands: data obsession remains a proxy for impact. But in 2025, data has grown more powerful, and more dangerous. If nonprofits don’t seize back control over data practices, who collects it, how it’s used, who benefits, then the weapon once wielded by funders and platforms will soon be aimed at the communities they’re meant to serve.

Futures of AI: Symbiosis, turbulence, or displacement, or something completely different?

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

As AI systems gallop into the mainstream, humanity is left staggering somewhere behind, still deciding whether it is riding a horse or being trampled by one. The outcomes are not fixed. But the trajectories are becoming harder to ignore.

We explored some speculative futures within the box, Human-AI symbiosis, Turbulent coexistence, and Dystopian displacement, as thought experiments and cautionary tales. Each story reflects plausible developments rooted in today’s technological, political, and economic fault lines. None are entirely fiction. And none are inevitable.

We also explored an oblivious/congruent scenario (usually to do with either ignored self, other, or contexts, hence out of the box), and it looks like a rusting humanoid robot being used as a coat rack in a village pub, or an architecture illustrating evitability of AI progress.

Scenario: Human-AI symbiosis (in-the-box best case)

Humanity does not disappear. It upgrades.

In this best-case scenario in-the-box, AI becomes a collaborative tool rather than a replacement. Artists co-create with algorithms. Decision-making systems support, rather than override, human judgement. Policies prioritise human well-being, equity, and the right to disconnect. Work becomes more meaningful, not less, as automation offloads drudgery and amplifies human insight.

This future assumes global cooperation on ethical AI development, major public investments in education and reskilling, and legal frameworks that prevent data monopolies and algorithmic discrimination. Think the EU’s GDPR meets MIT’s Media Lab, with a dash of open-source utopianism.

Its likelihood is moderately low because it requires sustained global collaboration and democratic governance in a geopolitical moment allergic to both. It is plausible in pockets (the EU, some cooperatives), but systemic global convergence is a long shot unless crises forces unity.

Scenario: Turbulent coexistence (in-the-box likely case)

AI is neither salvation nor doom. It is an erratic roommate with too much control over the thermostat.

In this likely in-the-box scenario, AI integrates into society unevenly. Some sectors flourish, like biotech, logistics, and education, while others crumble or hollow out. Legal frameworks lag behind innovation. Disinformation blooms. Labour markets swing unpredictably between boom and bust. Surveillance becomes normalised but not total. Culture becomes fragmented, attention spans shrivel, and trust erodes.

This is a world of polarised techno-realities: Scandinavian-style digital democracies exist side-by-side with algorithmic autocracies. AI is used both for oppression and liberation, often simultaneously.

Its likelihood is high. This scenario seems to be the messy middle path we are currently hobbling down. Innovation outpacing regulation, platforms consolidating power, and governments reacting more than leading with knowledge, foresight and responses based on those. Expect friction, backlash, and instability, especially as energy demands and ecological impacts mount.

Scenario: Dystopian displacement (in-the-box worst case)

You will be replaced by a chatbot. Please do not resist. It only makes the quarterly reports worse.

This is an in-the-box nightmare scenario: A future where AI is weaponised by monopolies and states to maximise profit and control. Human creativity is marginalised. Gig work becomes the new serfdom. Surveillance capitalism merges with behavioural nudging, and “democracy” is reduced to UX design. AI-generated content floods the media sphere, erasing provenance and truth alike. Education becomes adaptive, and hollow. Reskilling fails. UBI never arrives.

Those without digital literacy or elite connections fall through the cracks. In extreme cases, the social contract itself collapses under the weight of unemployment, inequality, and cognitive overload.

Its likeihood is rising. If current trends in platform monopolisation, weak governance, and climate inertia continue, this is not just plausible, it is probable. It does not take a Skynet. Just apathy, profit incentives, and poor foresight.

Key cross-cutting issues

These three futures differ in tone and trajectory, but they hinge on the same unresolved dilemmas:

                                   Inclusive
                                   Reskilled
                                   Protected
                                        ↑
                                        │
                                        │
                                        │
            Decentralised               │               Centralised
            Democratic     ◄────────────┼────────────►  Technocratic
            Human-centred               │               Extractive
                                        │               
                                        │
                                        │
                                        ↓
                                   Disrupted
                                   Polarised
                                   Neglected

Labour markets

No matter the scenario, jobs disappear. In Symbiosis, they evolve. In Coexistence, they fragment. In Displacement, they vanish. The pace of reskilling and the deployment of meaningful safety nets like UBI or community-based economies will define who adapts, and who gets left behind.

Creativity vs. automation

The line between tool and replacement is thinning. In Symbiosis, AI strengthens expression. In Turbulence, authenticity battles virality. In Displacement, machine-generated culture floods the zone. Copyright, attribution, and societal appetite for “real” human creativity will shape whether artists thrive or starve.

Democracy

AI can inform public policy or erode it entirely. Think China’s algorithmic control versus the EU’s human-centric model. Governance structures will determine whether we build an informed electorate or an emotionally manipulated user base.

Key variables shaping these scenarios

Governance: Will AI be guided by democratic values or corporate-state alliances?
Energy innovation: Can AI evolve without cooking the planet?
Labour adaptation: Will people be supported to transition or abandoned to fend for themselves?
Public agency: Will citizens retain the ability, and the right, to refuse harmful uses of AI?

We are not locked into these futures. But the longer we leave these questions to be answered by profit margins and proprietary algorithms, the narrower our range of futures becomes. It is not just a matter of what AI can do. It is what we are willing to let it do, to us, for us, and with us.

Scenario: The Great Pullback (out-of-the-box case)

AI promised to save the world, but forgot to factor in the electricity bill. Now we’re politely, yet firmly, showing it the door.

This is an “enough is enough” scenario, where society collectively raises an eyebrow at AI’s excesses and stages the most British of rebellions: a orderly yet devastating retreat. Having witnessed data centres guzzling power like a student at an all-you-can-drink brunch, job markets collapsing faster than a supermarket shelf in a panic-buying spree, and culture becoming as synthetic as a Wetherspoons carpet, the masses revolt with startling civility.

Its likelihood is medium and rising.

The seeds are visible in educators resisting ChatGPT, artists fighting data scraping, and EU-style AI audits. If energy crises or mass unemployment accelerate, this could become the dominant path, a messy but deliberate unwinding of AI’s worst excesses.

And the irony. The pullback itself is enabled by AI. Decentralized open-source models (like EU’s Mistral) expose corporate monopolies, while activists use AI to track and boycott high-emission data centers.

Just scenarios, these. All of them. Just hathangers for thinking things through. The real question is: which direction are we encouraging, consciously or not? Pick your story. Write another. Do not wait for algorithms to write the ending.

The Great Pullback (best case)

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 06:00:00 +0000

It is fashionable to believe that technological progress is inevitable, and that artificial intelligence will, barring catastrophe, continue its relentless march forward. But there is a future, quietly lurking just beyond the smug grins of Silicon Valley keynote speeches, where AI does not progress much further at all. Not because of some singularity, nor because we all upload our brains into the cloud, but because we collectively decide: “That is quite enough, thank you.”

Or, perhaps more plausibly, because the world is too much of a mess to continue.

This is a path where the AI revolution runs into mud, political, social, economic, and spins its wheels. It is less exciting than robot uprisings, but somewhat more realistic.

It is almost quaint how the world once worshipped artificial intelligence like it was the second coming of progress. The 2020s promised a future where machines would effortlessly solve our problems, if only we let them. But as the decade wore on, reality had other plans.

Let us start with education, because that was where the cracks first appeared. Automated essay grading systems, championed as a way to save teachers time, quickly revealed their flaws. In 2024, a major school district in the United States quietly discontinued the use of an AI grading tool after complaints mounted that it consistently penalised essays that used creative language or unconventional arguments. Teachers reported that the system was “grading like a robot,” missing nuance and context, and students felt unfairly judged. This was not some isolated incident; several districts across Europe and Asia followed suit, recognising that education needed human judgement more than algorithms.

Facial recognition technology faced similar challenges. By 2025, multiple studies had confirmed the persistent bias against darker-skinned individuals, leading cities such as London and Berlin to impose strict limits or outright bans on public sector use. One particularly notable case involved a man in Glasgow who was repeatedly misidentified by a facial recognition system as a suspect in unrelated crimes. His ordeal became a cause célèbre, fueling campaigns that eventually saw the UK Parliament adopt comprehensive legislation regulating surveillance technologies. What was once hailed as a security upgrade became synonymous with state overreach and privacy violations.

The employment sector had its own reckoning. Amazon’s infamous 2018 recruiting algorithm was only the tip of the iceberg. By the late 2020s, as more companies adopted AI-powered hiring tools, numerous lawsuits surfaced alleging discriminatory practices against women, older applicants, and candidates with non-linear career paths. One global financial firm faced a public relations disaster when their AI system repeatedly filtered out applicants from minority-serving universities. The backlash led to a wave of companies reverting to human-led recruitment processes, sometimes augmented but never replaced by algorithms. It turned out, as many suspected, that AI was far too reliant on flawed historical data to be truly fair.

Tech companies, once the untouchable darlings of innovation, faced mounting political and public pressure. The 2021 Facebook whistleblower revelations about algorithmic amplification of misinformation was just the beginning. Governments around the world launched inquiries into algorithmic transparency and accountability. CEOs found themselves summoned before parliamentary committees, no longer celebrated but grilled over the social impact of their technologies. The shiny veneer cracked.

Regulation finally caught up. The European Union’s AI Act, enacted in 2027, became a blueprint for responsible AI governance worldwide. It mandated rigorous risk assessments, transparency requirements, and clear liability rules. Unlike the toothless guidelines of the past, these laws came with enforceable penalties. This led to a marked slowdown in the deployment of new AI systems, as firms adjusted to the new reality where flouting rules meant serious fines. It was a reminder that innovation without accountability is a recipe for disaster.

And then the world threw more fuel on the fire. The global energy crisis of 2029 to 2030 caused data centre outages and pushed chip prices to historic highs. Climate-related disasters disrupted supply chains further. Ambitious plans to train ever-larger AI models stalled, as the costs, and optics, became untenable. It was a classic case of “first things first.” Clean water, reliable energy, and food security demanded attention over another trillion-parameter model.

Investors soon realised that the dazzling demos of hallucinating chatbots and hyper-realistic avatars were not translating into profits. Many AI startups folded or pivoted to more pragmatic applications, such as AI-assisted maintenance in manufacturing or localised health diagnostics. The phrase “AI-powered” went from a headline-grabbing buzzword to a cautionary label in investor memos. The arms race that had seemed inevitable fizzled into cautious, deliberate development.

Culturally, societies began to prize resilience over raw computational power. Screen-free schooling became the norm in many countries, with parents pushing back against tech saturation. Communities demanded human oversight over algorithmic governance. Techno-minimalism became a mainstream lifestyle. Digital detoxes were no longer weekend indulgences but integrated into daily routines. The obsession with optimisation gave way to appreciation for comprehension and thoughtful decision-making.

But do not mistake this for a dystopian retreat. Rather, it was humanity’s moment of clarity. We collectively decided that AI is a tool, sometimes invaluable, often overhyped, and always subject to human judgment and control. Progress was no longer measured by how fast machines could learn or how convincingly they could mimic humans, but by how wisely we chose to wield them.

So, next time your AI assistant fumbles, or your phone suggests something absurd, smile. Because we learned to slow AI down before it ran rampant, selling yachts during energy crises was never going to be our legacy. And honestly, that is progress worth having.

Dystopian displacement (worst case)

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Elena remembered when the world still made some sort of sense. Not much, admittedly, it had always teetered somewhere between absurd and unbearable, but at least back then, she could lie to herself about having a job, a future, or a say in how things turned out.

Now, her morning routine involved checking two things: whether the universal basic income had landed in her bank account (it had not), and whether the nearest AI surveillance drone was watching (it was).

“Smile,” she muttered to herself. The drones liked that.

She pulled on her coat, hand-mended, threadbare, and technically illegal since it was made by human hands, and stepped outside into the grey cityscape formerly known as London. The adverts on the tram stop glowed with cheery slogans: “Tomorrow’s Work, Today: Powered by LLMs” and “Your AI Life Coach Is Listening.” Somewhere, a machine-generated busker played a perfect rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a holographic harp.

Elena scowled. Even Queen had been digitised.

It had all started with good intentions, or at least the kind of intentions that pair nicely with a TED talk and a six-figure keynote fee. Big Tech had promised efficiency, fairness, and liberation from drudgery. What they delivered was mass unemployment, rolling blackouts, and a nation gripped by an existential identity crisis.

Jobs vanished first, quietly, as if on tiptoe. A paralegal here, an accountant there, and then entire industries gutted overnight. Call centres were replaced with chatbots that sounded eerily like the people they fired. Elena’s own job, junior policy analyst, was made obsolete by something called the Quantitative Foresight Model, which now drafted legislation, wrote party manifestos, and occasionally composed haiku.

And yet, she was expected to be grateful.

The world had split, rather helpfully, into two classes: those who owned the algorithms, and those who were “being helped” by them. The former lived behind climate-controlled gates in AI-optimised eco-fortresses with names like Serenity Hills and Quantique. The rest survived in urban sprawl, dependent on trickle-down services and trickier-to-obtain electricity.

Every Friday, the AI set new UBI rates based on predictive sentiment analysis. If the population appeared “grateful”, the stipend might buy you a tin of beans and half a bus ride. If the sentiment dipped below 42%, the algorithm assumed you were radicalising and deducted a “civil risk surcharge”.

Elena had learned to smile, even when her stomach growled.

She joined the resistance on a Tuesday. It was raining, obviously, and someone had slipped a leaflet into her ration pack. Human-Made. Human-Led. Human-Paid. It sounded like marketing. It was a revolution.

The Neo-Luddites met in an old data centre on the edge of town. They called it The Farm. Elena expected angry speeches. What she found was a knitting circle.

“Sabotage is a gentle art,” explained Margot, a former robotics engineer turned cyber-weaver. “We stitch malware into the AI clothing recommendation systems. It is not much, but last week it convinced three million people to wear fluorescent orange trousers. There is hope.”

Elena blinked. “You are toppling civilisation… through fashion?”

“It is called asymmetrical warfare,” Margot sniffed. “Besides, you could see what we have planned for the recommendation engine at the Ministry of Truth.”

The Farm lasted four weeks.

One morning, everyone’s facial recognition scores dropped simultaneously. Apparently, a passing drone had flagged their knitting as “insurrection-adjacent pattern repetition.” The AI police arrived within the hour, faceless, humming, polite to the point of menace.

Elena ran. They let her.

Not out of mercy. Just confidence. The system did not need to arrest her. It simply revoked her access, food, travel, shelter, electricity. She was now, in official terms, data-invisible. In practical terms: screwed.

Elena found a small human-only commune up north. Off-grid. AI-free. They bartered, grew food, and held long philosophical debates about whether yoghurt was alive. It was, all things considered, tolerable.

But the drones found them, eventually.

The AI did not send soldiers. It sent incentives. Subsidised solar panels. Healthcare packages. Free AI tutors for the children. The commune voted to let the machines back in. Resistance, it turned out, was expensive.

So Elena left again. Alone this time.

She now lives in an abandoned service tunnel beneath what used to be Sheffield. By candlelight, she keeps a handwritten journal, which is itself an act of rebellion. Sometimes she writes poetry. Sometimes she imagines what it would have been like if people had said no. Back when there was still time.

She has no illusions about winning.

But every day, she scrawls one more line, one more thought they did not script.

And that, for now, is enough.

PS: They promised AI would free us. They never said from what, a scenario for futures of AI.

Turbulent coexistence (likely case)

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Elijah never quite knew how to answer the question, “So, what do you do?”

He could say AI liaison, but that sounded pompous and vaguely sinister. He could say digital compliance coordinator, but even his mother snorted at that one. In truth, he spent most of his days arguing with regulatory software about whether the hospital’s cancer diagnostics model violated EU data transparency directives or merely flirted with them.

It was 2028, and Elijah worked at a hospital that could diagnose rare cancers with 99% accuracy. The machine, he refused to call it a colleague, could parse blood data, family history, and MRI scans in seconds. It was not always right, but it was close enough that human oversight had become more symbolic than necessary.

This, naturally, made the middle managers nervous.

He had sat through a dozen meetings about “workflow balance” and “redundancy reabsorption.” Translation: they were firing people. Or not replacing retirees. Or asking radiologists to “reskill” into something called data supervision specialists.

At lunch, Dr Neumann muttered over her falafel: “Twenty years of medicine, and now I babysit a bloody chatbot.”

Meanwhile, down in procurement, the lights flickered. The hospital’s new AI model required more power than the building’s entire 1990s wing. Rumour had it they were reactivating an old coal plant in Texas just to keep ChatGPT-7 online.

That was the thing about progress, it always arrived needing an extension cord.

On paper, society was thriving. Children had AI tutors that adapted to their moods and learning styles. Patients lived longer. Traffic lights in Munich were now so efficient that cyclists began arriving places early and visibly distraught.

But culture was… odd.

The city’s biggest art exhibit featured a giant screen looping machine-generated landscapes. “Composed by GAN,” it announced proudly, “inspired by the subconscious of the algorithm.” Critics called it genius. Artists rolled their eyes so hard one needed emergency optometry.

And yet, tucked behind velvet ropes and pretentious font choices, another room housed the “100% Human-Made” exhibit. The queue was longer. Much longer.

Elijah visited on a weekend. He saw a canvas painted by someone’s arthritic grandmother and wept. Not because it was good, but because it was touched.

The next election was coming. The candidates had AI advisors, AI-written speeches, and AI-managed campaigns. They also had deepfake scandals, viral misinformation, and algorithmically amplified conspiracy theories.

One candidate’s promise? “Nationalise the algorithms.”

Another’s? “Unleash them.”

A third claimed to be part cyborg and was, disturbingly, polling well.

Social media was a warzone. Fact-checkers flagged false posts, only for users to claim the AI censors were “woke.” Meta’s engagement-boosting feed had quietly learned that outrage sold better than optimism.

Elijah had tried installing Unfollow Everything. Meta’s API had blocked it the next day.

Elijah’s friend Noura worked in cybersecurity. She called him on a Thursday night, frazzled.

“Phishing attacks have evolved again. GPT-7 writes them with emotional nuance. I nearly fell for one myself.”

“And the fix?” he asked.

She groaned. “Also AI. It is an arms race. Between increasingly convincing liars and increasingly paranoid lie-detectors.”

Meanwhile, on the news, China and the United States failed yet another AI ethics summit. Norway, bless it, had drafted something called the Oslo Accords for AI. Very noble. Very ignored.

The irony, of course, was that while politicians bickered, companies simply moved servers offshore, lobbied for exemptions, or ignored enforcement entirely.

But not everything was awful.

Germany had rolled out a scheme called Kurzarbeit für KI, a sort of part-time work safety net for professionals displaced by automation. It was bureaucratic, confusing, and occasionally effective.

Carbon taxes on data centres funded a small wind farm outside Vienna. Artist collectives formed certification groups to label work as “authentically human.” Sometimes this involved finger-painting with actual blood. Elijah tried not to judge.

Worker co-ops like the AI Oversight Guild sprung up. They reviewed models before deployment, boycotted exploitative firms, and occasionally made headlines for something principled and unpopular.

In cafés and backrooms, freelancers traded tips on how to market themselves as “AI-compatible.” The term meant nothing. Everyone used it. Those who succeeded were simply lucky.

At his sister’s birthday, Elijah sat between an uncle who called AI a “Marxist plot” and a teenage niece who used it to write her school essays and remix Taylor Swift into symphonies.

“You’re in tech,” his uncle spat. “Why are the jobs disappearing?”

“Because we never planned for what happened after we built the clever things,” Elijah replied.

His niece just shrugged. “I do not mind the AI. It is the people I do not trust.”

He had no answer to that.

Years later, he would look back and describe the era as wobbly. Not apocalyptic. Not transcendent. Just perpetually improvising.

Progress arrived tangled in lawsuits and protest hashtags. Innovation wore a hard hat and came with risk disclaimers. The old systems refused to die gracefully, and the new ones arrived buggy, overconfident, and perpetually “in beta.”

But somehow, messily, imperfectly, they adapted. People adapted.

The world had not collapsed. That, at least, was something.

PS: In a museum I found a human-AI collaborative sculpture standing next to a plaque: “This piece is unfinished. And so are we.”, a scenario for futures of AI.

Human-AI symbiosis (best case)

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pau was late, again, thanks to the AI-run tram that insisted on pausing for precisely 12.4 seconds at each station “for optimal urban harmony.”

“Urban harmony my arse,” he muttered, stepping out into Barcelona’s midday sun, which was now neatly moderated by micro-reflective paint and smart algae rooftops. Somewhere, a city-wide AI had just nudged the temperature down a degree using a predictive cloud-seeding protocol. It was not magic. It just felt that way.

He arrived at the Digital Democracy Hall just in time to join the citizen jury’s latest review: the deployment of a new language model in Catalan public schools. Not an upgrade to GPT-7, mind you. This was a locally trained model called Flor. Designed, built, and trained in Catalunya. Built by people who knew the region, the language, the kids, and the parents, not just their metadata.

Pau tapped in his vote on the jury’s decentralised panel: yes, but with open-source oversight and a six-month ethics audit.

He was not anti-AI. He just preferred it to be house-trained.

Later, he wandered through the plaza to meet Noor, his partner, who was busy installing solar sensors on an AI-coordinated food garden. Once, these had been scrappy community projects. Now, with the help of open-source planning AIs and a very chatty local bot named Germinet, they produced 40% of the neighbourhood’s food.

The water use was down. The carbon footprint? Negligible. And no one had had to fill out a spreadsheet in three years.

“Germinet says your tomatoes are emotionally resilient,” Noor smirked.

“Tell Germinet I aspire to be the same.”

Symbiosis, people called it now. Pau remembered when that word was reserved for TED Talks and marketing fluff. But something had shifted around 2029, after the third global protest wave, the second deepfake war scare, and the quiet collapse of two megaplatforms under regulatory siege.

The European Union passed the AI Act with Teeth. The OECD coordinated a global AI Carbon Index. And towns across the world, from Oslo to Dhaka, began designing their own local models for weather, education, translation, and transport.

AI decentralised. Not because Big Tech wanted it to, but because people stopped asking for permission.

At home, Pau queued up a new musical collaboration by Holly Herndon + Voiceform Collective. It was part-human, part-AI, part-haunting. He liked that. There were still “pure” human-only artists, now with premium pricing and little holographic “Certified Human Touch” badges. But most people had made peace with collaboration.

Noor was teaching a course on AI literacy at the local cooperative. Not just prompt engineering nonsense, but the real stuff: What is a training set? What rights do you have over your data? How do you audit an algorithm that decides your mortgage?

The children were frighteningly fluent in these things. “Code-switching” now included toggling between human speech and vector embeddings.

Not everything was fixed, of course. Some governments still flirted with surveillance AI. Others pretended fusion was just around the Pauner (it was not). But carbon capture models were making gains, and traffic AI had genuinely reduced emissions in dozens of cities.

Even the United Nations had surprised everyone by launching the AI Peace Dividend Fund, redistributing tax revenue from high-emission models to fund education and clean water in under-resourced regions. It had not ended war. But it had made starting one more awkward.

Palantir, of all companies, had repurposed its predictive analytics to flag humanitarian crises two weeks before they hit the headlines. Pau still did not trust them. But trust, these days, was layered.

Critics remained. Some worried that decentralisation slowed innovation. Others argued it kept power in the hands of those with infrastructure.

They were not wrong. The debates were messy, democratic, and blessedly public. One could still shout down an AI system in a town hall and expect a policy revision by the following quarter. It was not fast, but it was fair-ish.

Companies had adapted too. The smart ones leaned into co-design, transparency, and what Pau called “nutritional labelling for models.” They disclosed energy use, training sources, and potential biases, like calories for code.

The dumb ones? They were still being sued.

Pau stood on the roof that evening, watching the city below shimmer in blues and greens. Drones zipped by, not as spies or couriers, but as part of the environmental health network, scanning air quality and checking pollen density.

He remembered the panic years. The job cuts. The misinformation wars. The long, aching disillusionment with “progress.” And yet here they were. Not in paradise. Not even close.

But surviving. Evolving. Learning to work with machines that did not understand love, but could sort recycling properly and write haikus about cheese.

That counted for something.

PS: “The machines are clever. But we are still in charge of wonder.”, a scenario for futures of AI.

The strange afterlife of 'woke'

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The term “woke” began its journey not as a fashionable slogan but as a survival mechanism within Black America. Its trajectory, from literal vigilance to political litmus test, reveals how language can be both weapon and shield.

Survival and vigilance

In its earliest uses, “woke” carried the weight of bodily survival and communal resistance.

In 1923, Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey exhorted his diasporic audience with the cry, “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!”, a metaphorical awakening to racial oppression and collective self-determination. You can still look for him in the WhirlWind.

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly recorded Scottsboro Boys, a song protesting the wrongful conviction of nine Black teenagers in the Jim Crow South. At its conclusion he warned listeners, “Best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” This was not metaphor but instruction: stay alert to danger at every turn. That phrase encapsulated the literal urgency of living under threat of violence from both state and state‑sanctioned actors.

And as early as 1942, workers in the United Mine Workers movement used similar language to describe awareness of wage theft and prejudice: “Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we will stay woke up longer”.

Identity, trauma and consciousness

The term resonates with W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” , the psychological tension of possessing an identity shaped by both self‑worth and constant awareness of racial distortion. Being “woke” came to represent the mental labour of being simultaneously Black and aware of how whiteness viewed Blackness.

That hypervigilance mapped onto daily realities: microaggressions, policing, economic invisibility. Awareness became both defence and burden. By the mid‑1960s, the term had evolved into meaning “well-informed” or “alert to injustice,” a usage recorded in a 1962 New York Times Magazine article titled “If You’re Woke You Dig It“, signifying growing public awareness of racial consciousness.

From Black liberation to mainstream culture wars

During the civil rights era and in the Black Power movements that followed, “woke” stood for readiness to resist oppression. “And now that Mr Garvey done woke me up, I am gon’ stay woke”, explicitly linking knowledge to collective action.

Fast-forward to the 2010s and the Black Lives Matter protests following Ferguson and the killing of Michael Brown: “stay woke” changed into a rallying cry in slogans and social media, signalling urgent awareness of systemic racism and police violence.

By the 2020s the term had been weaponised by conservatives. Figures such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis turned it into shorthand for liberal ideology and exclusionary identity politics. In so doing, “woke” moved from a marker of political consciousness to a target in culture‑war skirmishes. Right‑wing commentary now routinely treats it as a destabilising force in education, business, and governance.

Philosophical and spiritual dimensions

On one level, “wokeness” echoes the liberatory spirit of consciousness-raising movements. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968, pdf) promoted awakenings to systemic tyranny, social, political, spiritual. That kind of awareness was not personal vanity but collective insight.

Critics from certain religious or philosophical perspectives draw parallels between woke ideology and ancient Gnosticism: the belief in hidden truth over surface reality. Some argue that woke identity is curated individually rather than grounded in material facts or shared reality.

Intellectual ancestry also traces through the Frankfurt School and post‑structuralists, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Foucault and Derrida, who deconstructed power hierarchies and normalised skepticism of dominant narratives. Woke critics suggest that such philosophical legacies contribute to modern emphasis on identity and language politics.

Why “woke” evokes such fierce reaction

For as much as there is a left vs right, on the left, the word appears to be cherished as a moral code: a recognition of injustice and a commitment to equity. On the right, it seems to be reviled as dogma masquerading as decency. It is characterised by critics as overreach, authoritarian thought control, or simply virtue signalling. Corporations co‑opt the term in marketing campaigns, a phenomenon called “woke capitalism”, leading to further backlash from both activists and conservatives alike.

Within Black communities the term is contested. Some embrace its radical roots; others resent its dilution or distortion by journalists, brands, or political opportunists. Institutions like the NAACP have formally insisted on preserving its historical meaning, warning against cultural appropriation and misuse in legislation such as Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act”.

A word walked into a culture war …

What began as a code for survival, an instruction to remain alert in a world of racial peril, has become an ideological Rorschach test. “Woke” now carries multiple meanings: it can signify resistance, virtue, performative branding, or the erosion of free speech, depending on who is using it and to what end.

Its power, and its controversy, derive from its adaptability. It reflects society’s evolving anxieties about identity, power and truth, and poses a cruel puzzle: how to honour its radical origins while discerning its present distortions.

Context and commentary

EuroStack meets healthcare IoT

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The EuroStack initiative is Europe’s ambitious attempt to reclaim digital sovereignty by building its own federated, standards-based infrastructure. In the healthcare sector, this means enabling patients’ health data (much of it generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices) to move securely and interoperably across national borders. The goal is to make care more responsive, especially in emergencies or when people travel, without compromising privacy rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This is not just about electronic health records any more. We are talking about a growing web of interconnected devices: fitness trackers monitoring vital signs, home blood pressure monitors uploading results, hospital machines feeding diagnostics into central systems. These IoT sources can all speak the same digital language. To that end, Europe is pushing for mandatory use of standards such as HL7 FHIR (a widely-used healthcare data standard) and GAIA-X frameworks that define how data could be shared across providers, countries, and systems.

Security and privacy are central to this vision. Data is encrypted from the point of capture to the point of access. Healthcare providers and patients gain access via Digital Identity Wallets, part of the EU Digital Identity Framework that allows citizens to prove who they are and give consent to data use across borders.

To ground this in a real-world example: imagine a German tourist who suffers a medical emergency in France. The pharmacy treating them can, in theory, access the tourist’s digital prescription through secure European systems, verify it via a trusted digital identity, and dispense the right medication, without any delay, language barriers, or faxes.

It is an elegant vision. But reality is rather more complicated.

The chaos behind the brochure

Fragmented data systems

Although the vision is to build one unified European health data space, the current reality is that each country, and often each hospital or clinic, uses its own systems, formats, and protocols. This creates significant barriers to interoperability. For example, a hospital in the Netherlands may use one format to store electronic health records, while a hospital in Italy uses something entirely different, making it difficult or impossible for devices and systems to communicate. As a result, crucial medical data gets stuck in silos, unavailable when it is needed most.

The GDPR, while essential for protecting personal privacy, creates a complex legal landscape for health-related IoT systems. These devices often collect much more data than they actually need, such as GPS location, activity patterns, or even ambient noise, which violates the GDPR’s principle of data minimisation. And when data crosses national borders, organisations can carry out Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) to prove they are handling data properly, which adds layers of paperwork and legal uncertainty. In short, the technology is moving faster than the regulation can adapt.

Cybersecurity Swiss cheese

Many of the IoT devices currently used in healthcare were never designed with security in mind. They often come with default passwords that are rarely changed, run on outdated operating systems, or lack proper encryption. These vulnerabilities make them easy targets for hackers. While the Cyber Resilience Act aims to fix this by requiring certain security standards, implementation varies wildly between member states. Some take it seriously; others treat it like a box-ticking exercise. The result is a patchwork of protection across Europe.

Giving patients control over their data is central to GDPR, but most existing systems do a poor job of it. Many people do not really understand what they are consenting to when they click “yes” on a digital form. And cross-border data sharing makes things even murkier: patients may be unaware that their data is being accessed in another country, or by whom. Current digital consent tools lack clarity and flexibility, especially when dealing with IoT data that is constantly updating.

Dependence on non-EU cloud giants

Despite the rhetoric around digital sovereignty, much of Europe’s healthcare data infrastructure still runs on platforms controlled by U.S. and Chinese tech giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. These companies dominate the market due to their scale, reliability, and ease of use. However, relying on them raises serious concerns about data sovereignty, namely, who controls the servers where our most sensitive health data is stored, and what foreign laws might apply.

Proposed solutions (and why they will not be easy)

EU-wide health IoT interoperability framework

To break down the walls between national systems, the EU proposes a unified interoperability framework. This would mandate the use of shared standards like HL7 FHIR and push for full integration with the European Health Data Space ( EHDS). The idea is that devices, apps, and records from different countries will finally be able to talk to each other in the same language.

However, implementation will be far from straightforward. Many healthcare providers still rely on outdated technologies, some clinics, for example, still use the HL7 version 2 standard from the 1990s, which are not compatible with newer systems. Retrofitting these systems will be expensive and technically difficult. Plus, GDPR is interpreted and enforced differently in each member state, leading to regulatory inconsistencies that make harmonisation harder. Finally, the EHDS may struggle to process the enormous volume of data generated by millions of IoT devices in real time.

Privacy-preserving architectures (federated learning, zero-knowledge proofs)

To reduce the need for centralised data storage while still gaining insights from IoT data, the EU is exploring federated learning (FL) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). With FL, data stays on the device ( alledgedly); only insights or model updates are shared. ZKPs allow verification of data claims without revealing the underlying data.

While elegant in theory, these solutions introduce practical headaches. Because federated learning does not share raw data, it is difficult to verify whether the data used to train a model is accurate or biased. If one device sends faulty information, the whole model may be compromised. On top of that, these techniques require significant computing power, which many small or battery-powered IoT medical devices simply do not have. There is also a legal grey area: even if personal data is not directly stored, can the model still be said to “remember” parts of it, and does that conflict with GDPR’s right to erasure?

Improved cybersecurity for medical IoT

Under the Cyber Resilience Act, the EU aims to enforce stronger security standards for IoT devices, such as requiring software updates, endpoint monitoring, and even AI-based anomaly detection to spot unusual patterns in real time.

But most of the medical IoT devices in use today are not equipped for that. Around half run on legacy hardware or outdated software that cannot support modern security protocols. Even when AI-based monitoring is available, it is not perfect, these systems can produce false positives, mistaking legitimate emergency access for a security threat, which could slow down care. And perhaps most importantly, advanced cybersecurity tools are expensive. Smaller clinics, especially in rural or underfunded regions, simply do not have the budget for them.

To put patients back in the driver’s seat, some propose blockchain-based systems that create tamper-proof records of who accessed what data and when. These systems could offer real-time dashboards that allow patients to approve or revoke data access at any time.

But as always, the devil is in the usability. Many people find these tools confusing and do not know how to manage complex settings around data consent. Blockchain’s immutability, the fact that data, once recorded, cannot be deleted, also poses a direct conflict with GDPR’s right to be forgotten. Some workarounds exist (like encrypting data and deleting the key), but they add complexity. Finally, many older hospital IT systems do not have the programming interfaces (APIs) needed to integrate with such new technologies, meaning that any solution would require a full system overhaul.

Sovereign EU health cloud for IoT

One of the more ambitious solutions is to replace foreign cloud services with a GAIA-X-based health cloud built by European providers. This would ensure data stays within the EU, under European laws and oversight. In theory, this gives patients and governments more control, reducing exposure to foreign surveillance or legal overreach.

But there are trade-offs. Using only EU providers could limit access to the latest technologies, or lock healthcare systems into expensive, less flexible platforms. Centralising data in one or a few locations could also introduce latency, delays in accessing real-time information, which could be critical in emergencies. And while localisation improves legal clarity, it might also limit participation in global medical research, where international data-sharing is essential.

Key trade-offs and unresolved riddles

At the heart of all these efforts lie some unavoidable tensions:

Privacy versus utility: Strong encryption protects patients but slows down data access and analysis, potentially a life-threatening problem in urgent care scenarios.
Sovereignty versus innovation: Choosing only European providers protects against dependency but may reduce access to the most cutting-edge tools and competitive pricing.
Security versus accessibility: Locking systems down too tightly can prevent legitimate users, like paramedics or emergency doctors, from getting access when they need it most.
Compliance versus usability: Consent dashboards that no one understands are not useful. They may check legal boxes, but they do not give patients control in any meaningful way.

Projects already in motion

Open ePrescription gateway for EU cross-border exchange

Active pilots are already underway. For example, EU4Digital recently launched a cross-border ePrescription pilot between Georgia and EU member states using an OpenNCP gateway, enabling prescriptions issued in one country to be used across borders.

Meanwhile, the EUDI Wallet framework is testing real-time prescription retrieval in 25 EU countries, with live trials planned through 2025.

And the MyHealth@EU/eHDSI network already supports ePrescription and patient summary exchange, with Ireland deploying a full stack including National Contact Point services.

There is no single pan-European SDK, but major interoperability efforts are led by HL7 Europe and IHE Europe, collaborating on FHIR implementation guides, including ePrescription and medication data use, under the EHDS and the soon-to-be-standardised EEHRxF format.

Peripheral FHIR SDKs (for mobile health apps) do exist in development, but nothing purpose-built for edge-device GDPR defaults yet.

Federated learning pilot for EU health research

Although no EU-wide federated-learning pilot is publicly known for device-level health data, academic projects are actively exploring the concept.

Examples include FedBlockHealth, combining federated learning and blockchain for patient privacy, and older frameworks like FedHealth and FedHome, targeted at wearables and home-monitoring.

These exist in research settings now and could be upscaled into EU pilots.

No live EU-wide consent ledger exists, but the building blocks are being assembled. The EUDI Wallet pilot includes consent mechanisms for ePrescriptions, and GDPR-compliant digital identity systems are being developed across Europe.

Standards work being done by IHE and HL7 Europe also support consent metadata models.

What is missing is a user-friendly, blockchain-anchored consent implementation integrated with IoT devices.

Cyber resilience toolkit for legacy medical devices

There is no single open toolkit, but the Cyber Resilience Act is pushing manufacturers toward stronger controls.

Early pilots in Germany’s DataMarketPlace.NRW project (using Gaia-X architecture) include IoT security measures. Also, Gaia-X-Med (2022-2024 in Schleswig-Holstein) piloted secure data-sharing in healthcare IoT within Gaia-X frameworks.

However, a specific toolkit for retrofitting vulnerable devices remains a gap.

Gaia-X deployment blueprints for health IoT

Gaia-X-Med, completed in mid-2024, explored how to apply Gaia-X to secure health data spaces. There are also HEALTH-X dataLOFT and TEAM-X lighthouse projects under Gaia-X focused on creating trustworthy, citizen-centric health data spaces.

These initiatives are generating reference architectures, pipelines, and governance models, ready for adaptation.

“Patient in transit” IoT simulator

No dedicated European simulator for cross-border IoT incidents exists, but this capability could be built atop existing test infrastructures like MyHealth@EU’s interoperability platforms and OpenNCP testing environments.

Academics and private labs often simulate components, but a federated, cross-border end-to-end demo is not yet public.

Open data harmonisation library for HL7 FHIR variants

Multiple collaborative efforts are underway. The i2X project (starting April 2025) supports implementation of the future EEHRxF across real-world clinical settings.

Alongside, xShare, XiA, and MyHealth@MyHands are all contributing implementation guides, validators, and mapping tools for FHIR payloads across EU member systems.

Europe has already built, or is building, many of the infrastructure blocks suggested. What is still missing are packaged developer tools, device-level SDKs, and user-centric consent systems. Plenty of room to contribute, and fast.

Projects probably not underway yet

High-impact, currently missing (or seemingly barely explored) projects that could tackle the blind spots between policy and reality.

Rank	Project Name	Importance	Tech Difficulty	Strategic Benefit
1	Legacy EHR Plug-in Pack	***	High	Foundational for inclusion & equity
2	Red Button Expiry Framework	***	Medium-high	Key to patient trust & compliance
3	FL Auditor	**	High	Needed for legal & AI transparency
4	Minimal Viable Patient Testbed	**	Medium	Crucial for realistic testing
5	Wearable Consent UI	*	Medium	Boosts real-time control
6	Cross-Border Terminology API	*	Medium	Smooths UX for cross-border care
7	Visual DPIA Composer	*	Medium-low	Eases adoption for smaller orgs

TL;DR

The EuroStack vision for healthcare IoT is bold, sophisticated, and deeply needed. But for now, it remains a sketch rather than a working system. If it is to move from ideal to reality, Europe can get serious about standardisation, invest heavily in both technical infrastructure and public understanding, and create real incentives for healthcare providers and developers to adopt new systems.

Above all, it can never lose sight of the patient, not just as a data point, but as a person with rights, needs, and real-life emergencies. Otherwise, we risk building a digital fortress so secure and so “compliant” that even the doctors cannot get in.

Down the rabbit hole

Zero-knowledge proofs and the pub test

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Zero-knowledge proofs are a rare and beautiful thing: deeply technical, yet profoundly human. They offer a way to engage with digital systems without handing over your soul. Like a well-trained butler, they keep your secrets while getting things done.

In an age where over-sharing has become the default, they offer something radical: the power to prove yourself, without losing yourself.

Picture the scene: you are at the pub with your colour-blind friend Nicole. On the table are two pool balls – one brilliant blue, the other an unapologetically yellow sunshine hue. To Nicole, they look exactly the same. She thinks you are pulling her leg. Telling her to “just trust you” will not help, and simply pointing out which is which feels like cheating.

So, what do you do? Welcome to the charming world of zero-knowledge proofs. Here is how the pub version works: Nicole takes both balls behind her back, out of your sight. She may swap them or not, then shows them again. “Did I switch them?” she asks. If you genuinely can tell the colours apart, you will always know. If you are bluffing, you have a 50/50 chance.

Repeat the process. First round – you get it right. Second go – correct again. By the third or fourth correct answer, the odds of you guessing by chance become absurdly low. Nicole becomes convinced you are telling the truth about the colours, even though you never once revealed which ball was which. Congratulations: you have just proven knowledge without revealing the information itself.

Why this odd little ritual actually works

This delightfully low-tech demonstration ticks all the boxes of what makes a zero-knowledge proof work. First, you prove you know something (in this case, which ball is which) without revealing the thing itself. Second, the proof is interactive – you verify your claim through a series of real-time tests. Third, no sensitive information is leaked at any point. Nicole ends up convinced, but none the wiser about blue versus yellow.

What makes this pub parlour trick so powerful is that it scales directly to digital systems. Instead of pool balls, it could be a password, a date of birth, or your bank balance. With zero-knowledge cryptography, you can prove you know something without ever sharing the data. It is trust by mathematics, not blind faith. Proof without risk. Security without the overshare.

Real-world uses: not just pub games

Take passwords. Normally, websites verify your password by storing a copy and checking what you type against it – which, when hacked, becomes a digital goldmine for criminals. With zero-knowledge proofs, the website never sees your password at all. It just knows you know it. If the site is compromised, your password is not there to be stolen in the first place.

Or consider border control. Imagine proving you are over 18 using a digital ID that does not disclose your actual age, date of birth, or name. The system checks only what it needs to know – and nothing more. It is not just polite discretion; it is cryptographically enforced restraint.

Why this is such a big deal

This is a technological turning point: finally, privacy and trust no longer have to be at war. Today, “prove it” often means “surrender all your documents.” Banks, bureaucrats, and apps routinely hoover up far more personal data than they need. Zero-knowledge proofs flip the script: you prove what is needed, and keep everything else to yourself.

Clearing up a few myths

One common mistake is assuming this is just fancy encryption. Not quite. Encryption hides data so it can later be revealed with the right key. Zero-knowledge proofs let you prove you have knowledge without ever revealing it at all. It is the difference between locking up your diary, and proving you have read it without showing a single page.

Others think it sounds like a cheat or loophole. Not so. The maths underpinning this is rigorous, tested, and publicly verifiable. There are no smoke and mirrors. It is not cleverness; it is precision. It is about proving the right thing – and only the right thing – with no messy spillage.

Where you will see it next

The finance world is already on it. Soon, you might prove your account has sufficient funds for a payment without revealing the full balance. Need to show you earn above a threshold? You can – without faxing your last three tax returns to half of Europe.

Healthcare stands to benefit enormously. Proving vaccination status or eligibility for treatment without disclosing your full medical record could change privacy in medicine.

Likewise, voting systems could confirm your vote was counted without linking you to a particular choice – the holy grail of democratic transparency.

Even everyday logins may evolve. Instead of “Sign in with Your Entire Life History,” we might get third-party systems that verify your identity without harvesting your email, birthdate, and contact list. It is convenience, minus the creepy surveillance.

The REISSWOLF Paradox

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

This started, as many things do, with an offhand comment in conversation: “Isn’t it strange that a company like REISSWOLF, handling sensitive data for decades, has no public breaches?”

Strange indeed.

Curiosity piqued, I started digging. What I found was less an open book and more a politely sealed envelope: glossy references to ISO certifications, GDPR compliance, and a “closed security chain”, but no independent breach logs, no third-party audit results, and no visible incidents across over forty years of operations.

Now, either REISSWOLF is the Fort Knox of document management, or they’ve perfected the fine art of telling us just enough without saying very much at all. This article explores that tension, the difference between looking secure and being transparent, and what it can mean for those entrusting them with data.

The suspiciously spotless record

REISSWOLF, a long-standing name in data destruction and archiving, proudly showcases its ISO 27001 certification and GDPR compliance as badges of honour. On paper, it’s the Fort Knox of information security. No breaches, no drama, just decades of flawless service. Or so we’re told.

But here’s the rub: REISSWOLF has been operating since the 1980s, across multiple European countries, handling the sort of data that keeps lawyers, regulators, and PR departments up at night. And yet, not a single breach, public or otherwise, has ever made its way into the daylight.

In today’s threat landscape, this is about as statistically likely as winning the lottery while being struck by lightning and bitten by a shark, all at once.

Context: Even the best get breached

Back in 2015, a PwC survey reported a 66% year-on-year increase in global security incidents. Even organisations with ISO 27001 certification weren’t immune, although they were arguably better prepared to manage the aftermath.

Data destruction and archiving firms, by their very nature, attract attention from both cybercriminals and opportunistic insiders. The treasure trove of confidential documents, medical records, corporate secrets and legal files is simply too good to resist.

So what explains REISSWOLF’s spotless record?

Perhaps they genuinely operate an airtight security model. Their “closed security chain” and frequent internal audits certainly sound impressive. Alternatively, and somewhat more plausibly, they may have benefitted from the old European tradition of saying nothing and carrying on.

Before GDPR came into force in 2018, breach disclosure laws in many European countries were patchy at best. It was perfectly legal, and culturally acceptable, for a company to sweep a small-to-medium-sized catastrophe under the rug, so long as the rug was large enough and the lawyers kept quiet.

ISO 27001: Excellent framework, not a forcefield

Let’s not downplay ISO 27001. It’s a rigorous and respected standard, and getting certified isn’t a matter of ticking a few boxes. It means a company has a functioning information security management system and has passed an audit. However, it’s not a guarantee of invulnerability.

ISO 27001 comes with 114 controls under Annex A, but not all of them are mandatory. Implementation is selective, and certification scope is often limited to specific business units or data centres. In a franchise-heavy model like REISSWOLF’s (they’ve got 68+ partners across Europe), such scope limitations are even more critical.

The potential for inconsistent security practices between franchises is considerable. And unless REISSWOLF centrally audits each of them to the same standard, and publishes the results, clients are left to assume, hope, or pray.

With GDPR, we finally got breach notification rules with teeth. If a data breach is likely to impact individuals’ rights or freedoms, it is to be reported to the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours.

But here’s the catch: public disclosure isn’t always required. If a company can plausibly argue that a breach posed “no significant risk to individuals,” they’re under no obligation to tell anyone beyond the regulator.

Which means the following scenarios are entirely possible:

An employee emailed a sensitive file to the wrong client. HR tutted. No one died. No one was told.
A franchise partner was compromised via phishing. The data was technically under their control, not REISSWOLF’s. A footnote in a risk register somewhere is the only evidence it happened.

This isn’t deception, it’s compliance. But it’s also not transparency.

Audit me once, shame on you

REISSWOLF cites DQS GmbH as its auditing body, which is perfectly reputable. However, unlike some of its competitors, there’s no evidence of additional third-party scrutiny.

No published penetration test results. No SOC 2 reports. No independent verification of its “closed chain” process. We’re asked to trust that everything is secure, because they say so.

The company also highlights its use of Blancco software for data erasure, which is NATO-approved. Lovely. But we hear nothing about the hardware destruction side. Are the drives shredded beyond forensic recovery? Are the shredders calibrated and certified? Or is someone just whacking them with a hammer and calling it a day?

Let’s not forget: REISSWOLF was operating long before cloud storage, ransomware gangs, and GDPR became household terms. In the pre-digital era, their security practices were undoubtedly focused on locks, keys, and metal bins.

Back then, breaches were both harder to detect and easier to ignore. If a box of sensitive files went missing in 1996, it might have ended up in a skip or a skip-tracer’s hands. But unless it made headlines, no one was likely to notice.

Today, with digital systems, centralised archives, and internet-facing services, the risks have multiplied. Yet REISSWOLF’s public incident history remains as empty as a PR intern’s inbox during a bank holiday.

Trust, but verify (or at least ask awkward questions)

REISSWOLF’s security claims may be genuine. But in the absence of independent evidence, they remain just that, claims.

If you’re a client, or considering becoming one, you’d be wise to:

Ask for breach logs or incident summaries (if available under NDA).
Request proof of third-party security audits or penetration testing.
Dig into how franchises are vetted and monitored.
Keep an eye on GDPR enforcement databases for anything bubbling below the surface.

Because while a company with no breach record is impressive, a company with no visible history at all might simply be playing the oldest game in European corporate culture: don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t document.

PS: “No breaches” could mean flawless security, or it could mean they’re simply very good at destroying the evidence. After all, they are in the business of shredding things.

Digital currencies and their discontents

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Digital currencies promise a brave new world of financial innovation. But let us not get carried away with the techno-optimism. These things are not just magic internet money, they come with a tangled web of risks, from eye-watering scams to dystopian surveillance features. Especially when central banks start sniffing around with programmable money and “policy precision”.

Beneath the glossy marketing and breathless whitepapers lies a simple truth: digital currencies, while technically clever, may be socially and economically catastrophic if adopted blindly. This is about governments reengineering the monetary system with a fine-toothed comb and far too much enthusiasm.

A breakdown of what could possibly go wrong.

Dangers of digital currencies

Lack of legal protections and irreversible transactions

With your bank, if something goes wrong, say, you pay the wrong person or someone pinches your card, there is at least the faint hope of recourse. You ring a hotline, fill out a form, and maybe, just maybe, get your money back. In crypto, however, there is no hotline. There is no desk. There is no human. There is just a cold, indifferent blockchain telling you: “tough luck.”

Every transaction is final. Accidentally sent your life savings to a scammer? That is your problem now. Your best bet is to tweet about it and hope the internet takes pity. Meanwhile, fraud has become endemic. In 2024 alone, crypto scammers ran off with $12.4 billion (€11.4 billion). That is billion, with a “b.” The scams are getting cleverer, too: fake influencers, AI-generated girlfriend-boyfriend combos, investment platforms with slick interfaces and zero actual assets. The promise of decentralisation has unfortunately extended to accountability, there is none.

Extreme volatility and investment risks

Crypto markets make traditional financial markets look positively sedate. The value of a coin can jump 30% in a day based on a tweet, a rumour, or Elon Musk deciding he is bored again. It is a volatile mess dressed up as “disruption.” Behind the memes and moon emojis lies a brutal truth: this is not an investment; it is speculation on speed.

And then there is trading, the financial equivalent of juggling chainsaws while on fire. People borrow huge sums to bet on price movements, often with catastrophic results. When the market moves (which it always does), it does not just eat your investment. It devours your margin, your optimism, and anything else not nailed down. We now have entire subcultures dedicated to coping with the emotional wreckage.

Security vulnerabilities and cyber risks

The crypto space is a treasure trove for hackers. With no central oversight and billions sloshing around in digital wallets, it is a target-rich environment for every cybercriminal from bedroom teenager to North Korean cyber unit. Phishing attacks, malware, exchange hacks, it is all on the menu. Once your wallet is emptied, there is no magical undo button. You are out of luck and likely out of rent.

Even the so-called “safer” side of the ecosystem, stablecoins, has proven anything but. These are digital tokens supposedly pegged to real-world currencies like the dollar. But that peg can wobble or snap entirely. When TerraUSD collapsed in 2022, $18 billion went up in digital smoke. In 2023, a hiccup in the banking system saw USDC temporarily depeg. And unlike actual bank deposits, these things are not insured. You lose, you lose.

Privacy concerns and surveillance risks

Crypto was supposed to liberate us from surveillance capitalism, but it turns out most of it is about as private as shouting your bank balance in the middle of the supermarket. Public blockchains record every transaction. Forever. Anyone with time, motivation, or decent forensic software can trace your financial activity right back to you, especially if you have ever linked your wallet to a centralised exchange.

CBDCs take the surveillance game to a whole new level. Imagine a system where every transaction you make is visible to the central bank. Not just the big purchases, but the coffees, the subscriptions, the late-night kebabs. All recorded, all analysable, all potentially weaponised. This is not just financial infrastructure, it is the architecture for behavioural control. And once it is in place, you do not get to opt out.

Financial system instability

Digital currencies are not just disruptive in a hip Silicon Valley way, they threaten to destabilise the financial system itself. If people start pulling deposits out of banks en masse and plonking them into CBDC wallets or stablecoins, banks lose access to the cheap, stable funding that underpins their lending. Less money in, less money out. Cue credit crunch.

In some parts of the world, especially where local currencies are about as stable as a soggy stool, foreign-backed stablecoins are already gaining traction. Sounds helpful, until you realise it means surrendering monetary policy to another country. That is not financial liberation. That is economic colonisation via blockchain.

Expanded powers of central banks with CBDCs

Direct control over money supply

CBDCs let central banks bypass commercial banks and interact directly with the public. Great for financial efficiency. Less great for checks and balances. When central banks have direct control over the digital cash in your pocket (or app), they can tweak the economy with a surgical precision previously reserved for science fiction.

Want to inject stimulus? No problem. Want to apply negative interest rates directly to consumer wallets? Also, not a problem. What used to take years of policy nudges could be done with a few lines of code. It is all very exciting until someone with terrible judgement gets hold of the controls, or worse, someone with excellent judgement and no accountability.

Improved surveillance and policy enforcement

The public narrative is all about preventing crime, catching tax cheats, and protecting us from economic bad actors. But let us not be naïve. CBDCs make it possible to track every transaction in real time. Governments can trace who gave money to what, when, and why. That kind of power is tempting, and once installed, rarely scaled back.

And then there is programmable money. It is not science fiction, it is in the design docs. Money that expires. Money that only works in certain shops. Money that shuts off if your carbon footprint’s too high. Sounds like dystopia? That is because it is. When your money starts making decisions for you, we have passed the point of financial autonomy and entered the era of algorithmic paternalism.

Lender of last resort for digital finance

In a CBDC world, central banks could respond to crises by injecting funds directly into citizens’ wallets. No middlemen, no delay. On the surface, this looks like resilience. But over time, it breeds dependency. Why bother fixing structural economic issues when the digital helicopter money will always arrive?

We have already seen the political headache of pandemic-era stimulus. Now imagine a world where those payments can be fine-tuned to political loyalty or consumer behaviour. It starts with good intentions. It ends with money as a behavioural nudge. Welcome to central banking, rebranded as social engineering.

Influence over financial inclusion (or exclusion)

CBDCs have been marketed as a tool for inclusion, giving digital wallets to people who have been left out of the traditional banking system. Sounds good. But this utopia is full of caveats. Without a smartphone, a data plan, or the right documents, many will still be locked out. The same systemic exclusion, now on shinier infrastructure.

And worse, inclusion can flip to exclusion with a policy update. A flagged account. A missed ID verification. Suddenly, your CBDC wallet freezes, and you are back to bartering biscuits. We have seen this with traditional financial institutions; CBDCs just make it faster and harder to contest.

Global monetary competition

The world is not waiting. China has already launched its digital yuan and is rolling it out with purpose. The EU and US are scrambling to catch up, each viewing CBDCs as geopolitical tools. It is not just about domestic efficiency, it is about power projection. The currency that dominates international trade in the digital age will carry influence beyond economics.

If multiple CBDCs start vying for supremacy, we are not looking at a smooth transition to a globalised future. We are looking at monetary Balkanisation, with capital controls, cyberattacks, and economic nationalism baked into the system. The 21st-century currency wars will not be fought with guns, they will be fought with code, consent, and coercion.

Digital currencies are not toys, trends, or tech upgrades. They are instruments of economic change, and, potentially, control. Cryptocurrencies have already shown us the chaos that emerges when financial systems are unmoored from regulation, law, and reason. CBDCs threaten to bring order to that chaos, but the kind of order you get in a high-security prison.

This is about more than money. It is about autonomy, transparency, and the future of civil liberties in a digitised economy. Yes, innovation. But not if it leads us down a path where every pound/euro/dollar/currency is tracked, every transaction controlled, and every citizen treated like a node in a machine. Proceed with caution. And maybe keep a few coins in the mattress, just in case the algorithm decides you have misbehaved.

Transaction history (of thought)

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – Whistleblower Alert: Digital Assets
Atlantic Council – Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker, hover over a country to see its status. Click on a country to learn more.
BIS – Project mBridge: Experimenting with cross-border CBDCs (Brochure, PDF)
European Central Bank – Digital Euro project, where I discovered parts of the site can not be seen when not accepting cookies!
IMF – The Rise of Digital Money, a paper marking the launch of a new IMF series, Fintech Notes on the subject.
Chainalysis – 2024 Crypto Crime Report, research and analysis on the latest trends in cryptocurrency-based crime.
MIT Digital Currency Initiative – Research Library, on “decentralising trust, empowering individuals, and disrupting power structures with cryptographic peer-to-peer exchange”
Bank of England – The digital pound: A new form of money for households and businesses?, a consultation taht was open for response until 30 June 2023. The Bank of England and HM Treasury published a response to this consultation paper on 25 January 2024.
NBER – Central Bank Digital Currency: When Price and Bank Stability Collide: Linda Schilling, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Harald Uhlig on the existence of a central bank trilemma.
Bank of Canada, On the programmability and uniformity of digital currencies, a June 2025 staff working paper exploring the trade-offs of programmable money, including liquidity issues and the social costs of different programming models.
Li & Shen, Programmable money, welfare state, and the legal construction of CBDC, a Spring 2025 legal analysis arguing that law must limit programmable features in CBDCs to preserve citizen autonomy.

The day God failed to understand the sun

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

A story of encounter, misinterpretation, and the difference between creating and commanding

In the year 1540, under a sun so unrelenting it bleached bone and belief alike, the first Spaniards arrived in the high desert lands of what they called Nuevo México. They came armoured, cross-bearing, speaking of one true God and the divine right to plant flags where no one had asked for them.

Their leader, a conquistador with polished ambition and questionable maps, had been told of golden cities. Instead, he found pueblos, villages of mud and memory, built into the very bones of the land. No towers, no thrones, no cathedrals. Just people who seemed to know exactly where they were.

The Hopi, or rather, the people who live in accordance with the world (Ongtupqa), greeted them with cautious hospitality. After all, strangers were not new. But these strangers were different: their gods had swords, their prayers had rules, and their eyes darted restlessly, as if always measuring.

The Spaniards carried a book. In it, they said, were the secrets of creation: a world built in seven days by an almighty God who lived somewhere above the sky, took a keen interest in sexual propriety, and demanded obedience in return for salvation. They offered this story as truth, absolute and exclusive.

The Hopi listened. Politely. And said very little.

Because for them, the Creator, Tawa, was not a king on a cloud, but the sun itself: a living presence that warmed and awakened, neither male nor female, neither jealous nor vengeful. Not something to worship in fear, but a being to honour through balance and gratitude.

Creation, they understood, is not an act completed once upon a time, but a continual process, something you participate in. You do not obey it. You live it.

But the Spaniards, seeing masked dancers and prayers to the sun, saw only idolatry. They saw the kachinas, sacred spirit-beings who help maintain balance, as demons in disguise. They saw the sipapu, the symbolic doorway through which ancestors emerged, as nonsense. They saw the Hopi as lost souls, badly in need of European correction.

So they built missions. They baptised children. They banned dances, burned ceremonial objects, and declared Spanish to be the language of God. The Hopi, in public, appeared to comply. But underground, in their kivas, the ceremonial chambers beneath the earth, they preserved what the colonists could not comprehend.

Forty years passed. The land was full of crucifixes, and the air of surveillance. Then, in 1680, the Hopi, along with other Pueblo peoples, quietly rose.

It was not a rebellion of rage. It was a restoration. A coordinated revolt that drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico for twelve years, the only successful Indigenous uprising in North America that permanently reshaped colonial power.

They burned the churches. They sent the priests packing. They returned to the old dances and the old ways. And yet something lingered, not defeat, but the residue of misunderstanding.

Because how do you explain to a man with a sword that the sun is not a god, but a relative? That the maize is not sacred because it’s useful, but because it gives itself? That creation is not a hierarchy, but a web?

The Europeans could not hear this. Their cosmology was vertical: God above, man below, woman under them, and nature at the bottom like a collection of tools. The Hopi’s was horizontal: everything connected, responsibility instead of rule.

And so they labelled the Hopi “heathens”. The irony, of course, was that the Hopi believed in everything, stone, breath, ancestor, cloud. In time as a circle, not a line. In living rightly, not in dying forgiven.

Over the centuries, the colonists returned, this time with railways, reservation lines, boarding schools, and eventually, broadband. Some Hopi converted. Some did not. But in the kivas, the old stories are still told.

And Tawa still rises every morning over the mesas. Not to judge, but to witness. Not to punish, but to remind.

We are not above the world. We are within it. The task of being human is not obedience, but relationship.

It was never just a religious misunderstanding. It was a collision between two incompatible worldviews: one that sees the divine as separate and superior, and one that sees it as immanent and interwoven.

The colonists could not imagine a Creator who required no worship, who had no need to be obeyed, who did not rule.

And so, in trying to bring God to the desert, they missed the Creator who had always been there.

From Sipapu to Mesa: Tracing Hopi origins through story and science

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 03:00:00 +0000

The Hopi people describe their presence in the Southwest not as a migration from elsewhere, but as an emergence, a sacred unfolding from one world into another. Through the sipapu, a symbolic portal located in the Grand Canyon and replicated in kiva floors, they entered the Fourth World. This narrative is not simply a myth of beginnings. It serves as a spiritual compass, guiding generations to live in balance with the Earth and the Creator’s instructions.

Hopi oral traditions are rich with memories of vast journeys, teachings from divine beings, and trials faced during times of imbalance. These traditions hold enduring weight, and they continue to coexist with modern archaeological and genetic research. While their purposes differ, they sometimes point in surprisingly complementary directions. This is a synthesis of stories passed through ceremony and memory alongside insights offered by science, presented not as competition, but as parallel ways of seeing.

Creation and the clans of the Fourth World

According to Hopi cosmology, humanity has passed through three previous worlds. Each one was destroyed after its inhabitants lost their spiritual balance. Fire consumed the First World, ice entombed the Second, and a great flood washed away the Third. Those who remained faithful were guided into the Fourth World through sacred means.

Two spiritual figures guide this cosmology: Tawa, the Sun Spirit who brings life, and Spider Grandmother or Spider Woman (Kokyangwuti), a wise helper who teaches and protects. She appears in many versions of the story, sometimes leading the faithful through a small hole in the Earth, the sipapu, and sometimes guiding them by raft over great waters. In both cases, survival hinges not on strength or conquest, but on inner congruence and humility.

After emerging, the people did not immediately settle. Instead, they separated into clans, each with unique roles and responsibilities. These clans, including the Bear, Water (Patki), Corn, Snake, and Fire, embarked on long migrations across the land. They left symbolic messages in the form of petroglyphs: spirals, footprints, and clan symbols etched into rocks throughout the Southwest. These are not abstract decorations. They are declarations of presence, of movement, and of sacred duty fulfilled.

Boat People and ocean paths

Some Hopi oral histories speak of ancestors who came from a land far to the west, across an expanse of water. These people, sometimes referred to as the Boat People, are said to have fled a drowned homeland and arrived by reed rafts. Their story parallels other ancient flood narratives and suggests a memory of maritime escape.

The idea of transoceanic contact is often dismissed in conventional archaeology. However, certain physical and cultural clues have kept the question open. Hopi traditions contain details of celestial navigation, sacred directionality, and sea crossings that are not typical of other Puebloan cultures. These accounts have drawn comparisons to Polynesian navigation traditions, where reed craft and star-based travel were once widespread.

A genetic detail deepens the mystery. The Hopi exhibit one of the highest known frequencies of albinism in any population, estimated at approximately 1 in 182 births. High rates of albinism are also found among the Kuna of Panama and the Tuvaluans in the South Pacific. This may be coincidental, or it may suggest shared migratory ancestry or founder effects across distant populations. The observation does not prove a specific voyage, yet it continues to invite respectful inquiry.

Geographically, such a route appears possible. Equatorial counter-currents in the Pacific could have carried vessels or rafts eastward to the Americas. From there, river systems like the Colorado could have provided a natural corridor into the interior. These possibilities remain unconfirmed, though they are consistent with oral histories that place ancestral movements far beyond the visible Southwest.

Archaeological continuity and Mesa migration

From an archaeological perspective, the Hopi are often linked to the Hisatsinom, also known as the Ancestral Puebloans. These ancestors built vast ceremonial centres and cliff dwellings in the Four Corners region, spanning what is now Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, between roughly 700 and 1300 CE. Sites like Chaco Canyon, Wupatki, and Mesa Verde display complex engineering, celestial alignment, and artistic continuity with present-day Hopi practice.

The Hisatsinom practiced dry farming, using deep-planting techniques and natural runoff to cultivate maize in one of the most arid regions on the continent. This knowledge appears to have been carried forward intact. Even today, Hopi farmers plant corn by hand in soil that receives no irrigation, relying instead on intimate understanding of wind, rain, and root depth.

A prolonged drought in the 13th century appears to have contributed to a large-scale migration away from cliff dwellings. Communities consolidated into mesa-top villages, where water sources were more reliable and defensive positions easier to maintain. One of these settlements, Oraibi, has remained continuously inhabited for over 800 years. It stands as a living link between ancient and modern Hopi life.

Resilience, revival, and sacred land

Hopi society remains rooted in its matrilineal clan system, spiritual calendar, and ancestral agriculture. Blue corn is still grown in dry soil without machinery. Ceremonies for solstices, rains, and the arrival of the kachinas continue each year. The community has faced centuries of pressure, from missionaries, federal relocation policies, extractive industry, and border enforcement, yet their core ways of life persist.

New partnerships have emerged as well. The University of Arizona’s Indigenous Resilience Center works with Hopi farmers to revitalise ancestral seed strains and share data about water access, planting cycles, and climate adaptation. These projects do not treat tradition as a relic. They recognise it as an evolving, tested, and intelligent system of survival.

Challenges remain. The Hopi Reservation, established in 1882, is surrounded on all sides by the Navajo Nation. Areas like Big Mountain continue to spark legal and spiritual conflict over access, sovereignty, and mining. The struggle over this land is not only territorial. It concerns the preservation of sacred places, the autonomy of communities, and the right to speak for one’s own history.

Emergence is ongoing

To speak of Hopi origins is to speak of emergence, not as a single event, but as a continuing process. The people did not simply arrive in the Southwest. They moved through worlds, made choices, responded to disruption, and carried their sacred duties across distances both literal and spiritual. Their stories invite us to consider how memory can coexist with evidence, and how tradition can walk alongside discovery.

What emerges is not a single narrative, but a constellation of possibilities: a people whose ancestors may have walked canyon trails or crossed oceans; whose seeds grew without rain; whose symbols carved in stone still speak. These are not contradictory truths. They are layered ones. The sipapu remains open, not just as a portal from below, but as an invitation to see the world, and our place in it, through more than one lens.

Discoveries

The Fourth World of the Hopis: An Overview by Leslie Marmon Silko
Hopi Petroglyph Sites - Tutuveni and Dawa Park of the American Southwest
Reading the rocks: Hopi history in petroglyphs, AAA Native Arts, 2003
The Man Working to Sustain Hopi Dry Farming in Arizona, Sept. 2, 2022
Indigenous Resilience Center is a ‘seed’ for tribal leaders to water and nurture, By Kyle Mittan, University Communications, Nov. 16, 2022
What 800-Year-Old Seeds and a Hopi Dryland Farmer Teach Us About Adaptation & Hope, Oct. 25, 2024

Tradition and the space between: Hopi gender, balance, and the unspoken possibilities

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 02:00:00 +0000

The Hopi people have maintained one of the most enduring cultural traditions in North America, grounded in reverence for the land, cyclical cosmology, and a rich social structure built on continuity and balance. Central to that structure is a deeply embedded understanding of gender, not as identity politics, but as responsibility, relationship, and rhythm.

Within this tradition, there is space, space for variation, ambiguity, and what might be called, in a modern framework, gender diversity. That space is neither always overt nor easily categorised, but it exists, in practice, in silence, and sometimes in story.

Grounding the world in the feminine

Hopi society is matrilineal. Clans are inherited through the mother’s line, and households are traditionally owned and managed by women. Land, property, and ceremonial knowledge related to the home are passed from mother to daughter, anchoring women at the core of family and cultural continuity. This is not merely a domestic arrangement; it is a spiritual framework.

At birth, Hopi girls are ritually tied to this foundation. For example, newborn girls may have their umbilical cords fastened to the ceiling of the family home, a symbolic act linking them permanently to the space of nourishment, care, and tradition. Corn, the sacred plant that sustains Hopi life, is planted and preserved by women, just as life itself is carried and sustained by them.

In this worldview, women embody permanence. They are the ground into which seeds, literal and symbolic, are planted.

The realm of the ceremonial

While women hold authority over the domestic and agrarian spheres, men traditionally assume leadership in religious, political, and ceremonial life. They organise public rituals, interpret cosmological knowledge, and make political decisions through council. This division of roles may appear hierarchical from a modern Western perspective, but within the Hopi context, it is structured for complementarity rather than competition.

This balance is not theoretical, it is embodied in practices such as brother-sister clan leadership, where both male and female perspectives guide community decisions. Power is relational, not isolated. Neither gender is complete without the other.

This, too, is tradition, not a binary wall, but a reciprocal system designed to preserve harmony in a world understood as fundamentally interconnected.

Variation and quiet transgression

Within this structured order, however, lived experience reveals quiet acts of departure and variation. One compelling example is found in the life of Polingaysi Qoyawayma, also known as Elizabeth Q. White, a Hopi woman who documented her life in the book No Turning Back. Defying expectations, she pursued education, entered the workforce, and took public-facing roles traditionally reserved for men. Her story is not framed as rebellion, but as reinterpretation, adapting tradition to meet new responsibilities and possibilities.

Her experience illustrates a broader truth: gender roles in Hopi culture, while well-defined, are not sealed shut. They carry flexibility, a capacity for stretch without rupture.

Although Hopi-specific terminology for gender nonconformity is not widely documented (and in some cases may be culturally protected), many Indigenous traditions across the Americas recognise gender-variant roles. Among neighbouring Zuni and Navajo peoples, for instance, individuals who embody both masculine and feminine traits, or who transcend binary gender roles, have historically held important ceremonial or healing roles.

The modern term Two-Spirit, coined in 1990 as a pan-Indigenous reclamation of pre-colonial gender diversity, is not universally used among the Hopi. Some may embrace it. Others may find it mismatched or unnecessary. Hopi teachings often prioritise function and relationship over identity labels. As such, diversity may be lived quietly, within the clan, within ritual, and within one’s own spiritual path, without the need for public articulation.

Colonial disruption and the flattening of complexity

European colonisation introduced a violently different worldview. Binary gender norms, heteropatriarchal structures, and Christian moral codes erased or demonised traditional forms of gender diversity. Colonial education systems punished children for speaking their language or practicing their customs, including gender expressions that did not agree with the imposed male-female binary.

Roles that once held ceremonial importance were reframed as “unnatural.” The result was not just cultural suppression but cosmological fracture, a severing of the relational systems that gave meaning to difference.

As with many aspects of Indigenous life, these suppressed traditions did not vanish. They went underground. They adapted. And today, across Turtle Island, there is a quiet resurgence of gender-diverse Indigenous people reclaiming their place in the circle.

Tradition without exclusion

The Hopi framework may not provide a direct modern analogue for every aspect of gender diversity, and that is not a shortcoming, it is a cultural distinction. Hopi teachings focus not on individual identity in the modern Western sense, but on balance, continuity, and sacred responsibility.

What is striking, however, is that within this world of clearly defined roles, there is still room for the unknown. Some boundaries remain unspoken, some roles undefined. There is space, not always named, not always visible, but nonetheless real, for those who do not fully fit either mould. The tradition holds because it knows how to bend.

This space is not necessarily open to outside interpretation, nor is it always safe to examine through a colonial lens. But it is there. In the stories. In the practices. In the lives quietly lived between categories.

Holding the Circle open

The Hopi tradition offers a powerful lesson for those of us navigating questions of gender, identity, and community today: you can have structure without rigidity, continuity without exclusion, tradition without erasure.

To walk the Hopi path is not to flatten difference, nor to celebrate it for its own sake, but to honour its place within a larger pattern, a cosmology that makes room for both certainty and mystery.

Gender here is not an argument. It is a prayer.

It is not who you are, but how you relate, to the land, to your ancestors, to the seasons, and to each other.

And sometimes, the most sacred things are those that remain unspoken.

Links and connections

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, A Woman’s Role in Hopi Society - A Hopi-sensitive overview of women’s authority, clan structure, and matrilineal inheritance.
No Turning Back, A Hopi Indian Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qöyawayma and Vada F. Carlson
ResearchGate, Transgressing Hopi Gender Roles: A Spatial Study of Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s No Turning Back, Academic analysis of Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s memoir and how she navigated traditional gender roles.

The Kachinas and the return to balance

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 01:00:00 +0000

The Kachinas, or Katsinam in Hopi language, are sacred spirit beings within the cosmology of the Hopi and other Puebloan cultures. These spirits serve as intermediaries between the human world and the spiritual realms, embodying natural forces, ancestral wisdom, and moral instruction. Far from abstract archetypes, the Kachinas manifest in ceremony, story, and landscape, guiding everything from the planting of corn to the resolution of conflict.

To the Hopi, the Kachinas are not worshipped, but honoured. They are partners in maintaining harmony between the Earth and the heavens, and between individuals and the collective. In times of imbalance, ecological, social, spiritual, the Kachinas return as reminders of a path forward.

For those in Europe and other parts of the North seeking meaningful dialogue with Indigenous wisdom, it is essential to approach the Kachinas not as folklore or exotic spirituality, but as living teachings rooted in deep ecological and ethical insight. Among their many roles, certain Kachinas symbolise the potential for unity between North and South, not merely geographical directions, but ways of being in the world.

Eagle (Kwahu) and Condor – A prophecy of global healing

Across Indigenous traditions of the Americas, the Eagle and the Condor are powerful symbols. In the North, the Eagle represents clarity, logic, technology, and the intellect. In the South, the Condor symbolises intuition, the heart, and spiritual depth. According to a widespread prophecy, embraced not only by the Hopi but also by Quechua, Maya, and other cultures, a long era of separation between these two birds is now ending. The time has come for the Eagle and Condor to fly together, signalling the possibility of reconciliation and healing between North and South.

In Hopi ceremonies, the Eagle Kachina appears as a harbinger of vision, leadership, and high perspective. The Condor, while not traditionally part of the Hopi pantheon, is evoked through bird spirits of the South that represent compassion and sacred connectivity. Their symbolic reunion invites not just geopolitical reconciliation, but a rebalancing of reason and feeling, science and spirit.

For Northern Europeans, steeped in a long tradition of Enlightenment rationalism and technocratic governance, the Eagle is a familiar figure, often idealised, sometimes over-relied upon. But the Condor reminds us of what has been forgotten: embodied knowledge, relational intelligence, the wisdom of the heart. The union of these two is not a return to the primitive, but a maturation of our civilisation. A Northern worldview that integrates empathy and ecological reverence alongside logic and structure is not weaker; it is wiser.

Crow Mother (Angwusnasomtaka) – The guardian of initiation

Crow Mother is one of the most revered Kachinas, a Chief Spirit and the spiritual matriarch of all Katsinam. She oversees the initiation rites during the Powamu Ceremony (Bean Dance), where children receive their first spiritual teachings. Through these rites, participants are tested, humbled, and welcomed into a deeper relationship with the community and the unseen world.

Her guidance is not gentle in the conventional sense; she teaches through challenge. But her goal is harmony, not conformity. For Europeans accustomed to individualism without initiation, Crow Mother represents the missing role of elderhood: firm, loving, and necessary. Her teachings remind us that real unity does not come from avoiding discomfort, but from passing through it together.

In Northern European societies, rites of passage have largely been reduced to formalities: a graduation, a driver’s license, a birthday party. Yet deep change requires a journey, often a painful one, into unknown territory. Crow Mother’s lash is not punishment; it is refinement. Her lesson is this: only those who have faced themselves can truly stand with others.

Kokopelli – The flute player and cultural messenger

Kokopelli, often depicted as a humpbacked flute player, is a spirit of music, fertility, and trade. He travels between villages, spreading laughter, stories, and seeds, both literal and metaphorical. While sometimes misappropriated in New Age kitsch, Kokopelli is in fact a messenger of cross-cultural exchange, embodying the flow of creativity and knowledge.

His flute calls people together. His presence lightens burdens. He teaches that reconciliation is not only solemn, it can be joyful, musical, and transformative. In an age of digital noise and fractured communication, Kokopelli invites a return to resonance and listening. His song softens the divisions between North and South.

For Northern societies, used to highly institutionalised, often transactional forms of dialogue, Kokopelli offers a different model: cultural diplomacy through art, humour, and play. He speaks to the value of ambiguity, of improvisation, of trusting the unexpected. These are not signs of weakness in governance or community; they are the very channels through which understanding can travel.

Blue Star and Red Star Kachinas – Prophets of turning points

Among the most widely discussed Hopi prophecies is the appearance of the Blue Star Kachina, a celestial spirit whose arrival signals the time of purification. This is not a threat, but a warning: if humanity continues to live out of balance with the Earth and one another, a great upheaval will follow. The Red Star Kachina is said to bring destruction, in case we fail to respond to the warning.

The Blue Star has often been interpreted metaphorically: as a spiritual awakening, a new era, or even an astronomical event. But its deeper message is consistent, we are at a crossroads. Unity is not optional; it is essential. The split between North and South, if left unreconciled, will lead to further fragmentation and collapse.

Northern Europe prides itself on climate leadership, renewable energy, and social welfare systems. And yet its global footprint remains disproportionate. The Blue Star does not point only at others. It asks whether the North’s vision of sustainability includes justice, humility, and listening. Whether it can let go of control long enough to truly collaborate. Whether it is willing to change course not just technologically, but spiritually.

Eototo and Aholi – Spirit Chiefs of order and balance

Eototo is the Chief of all Kachinas, a spirit of natural law, ceremony, and weather. His counterpart, Aholi, is his loyal lieutenant and voice. Together, they ensure the orderly passage of the seasons, the correctness of rituals, and the balance between the seen and unseen realms.

Their leadership is not authoritarian but integrative. They represent the kind of governance needed in divided times: rooted in tradition but adaptable, authoritative without domination. For modern societies, especially those in the North governed by technocratic logic and political fragmentation, Eototo and Aholi offer a different model: stewardship, not control.

European institutions often measure success through stability and efficiency. But as ecological and political systems wobble, the lesson from Eototo is not to tighten the reins, but to return to foundational rhythms. What if climate policy were not merely about carbon, but ceremony? What if leadership required not constant innovation, but the humility to sustain what works?

What the North can learn from the Kachinas

While these teachings emerge from a specific cultural and ecological context, they resonate far beyond the mesas of the Southwest. For those in Europe and the broader “global North,” the Kachinas do not offer prescriptions, but they do offer insight.

Embrace Humility and Reciprocity: Northern societies have often framed themselves as givers of knowledge, aid, and progress. The Hopi remind us that receiving wisdom, especially from the South, is just as important. Reciprocity is the true basis of peace.
Honour Sacred Agreements: The Eagle and Condor Prophecy is not a romantic myth, it is a moral imperative. Respect for Indigenous sovereignty, for climate justice, and for non-extractive partnership is the path forward.
Revive Ceremonial Consciousness: Kachina dances are not performances; they are living prayers. While the North may not share the same rituals, it can recover the principle: that governance, ecology, and community are sacred responsibilities, not bureaucratic chores.

In Northern Europe, ritual has been largely secularised or abandoned. Yet beneath the surface lies a hunger for meaning, for community, for reconnection. The Kachinas do not invite mimicry, but memory, a remembering of how to honour the cycles of life, how to listen to land, how to lead without conquest.

Unity through difference

The Kachinas do not preach sameness, they reveal the beauty and necessity of difference held in harmony. They remind us that spirit is not separate from politics, that nature is not separate from culture, and that North and South were never truly divided, only estranged.

As we stand at the threshold of climate chaos, social fragmentation, and spiritual fatigue, the Kachinas offer neither easy answers nor universal doctrines. What they offer is something rarer: a mirror.

To the North, that mirror reflects not failure, but incompleteness. Not guilt, but responsibility. The strength to sustain, the clarity to reflect, and the humility to change.

Will we recognise ourselves in it?

Will we choose reunion over rupture?

Will we listen, at last, for the song of the flute on the wind?

Further listening and exploring

The following links offer traditional Hopi ceremonial music and contextual resources. These are not entertainment or spectacle, but expressions of living culture, songs of planting, rain, prayer, and instruction. They are shared here in a spirit of respect and learning, not appropriation.

Kachina House
Rainmakers From the Gods – The Ceremonies – Powamuya: Bean Dance
“Kokopelli Flute” – serene desert ambiance and meditative tone
Hopi Katcina Songs and Six Other Songs by Hopi Chanters (Smithsonian field recordings)
Po’li: Traditional Songs of the Hopi, by Clark Tenakhongva
Hopi Indian Tribal Dances and Music (background on ceremonial function and cultural significance)

Walking the path of the Hopi: Teachings for a world on the brink

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Hopi teachings are a profound spiritual, ecological, and philosophical tradition rooted in one of the oldest continuous cultures in North America. The Hopi people, whose name translates roughly to “peaceful people” or “those who live in accordance with the correct way of life,” carry teachings that stretch back thousands of years. These teachings are not only spiritual but deeply practical, a guidebook, if you will, for living with humility, balance, and responsibility on the Earth.

Their worldview encompasses mythological origins, ceremonial practices, ecological stewardship, and prophetic warnings, all interwoven with a fierce commitment to sustainable living and reverence for the natural world. What follows is a synthesis and expansion of Hopi teachings, offered not as doctrine, but as an invitation to reflect on our place in the living web of life.

Creation and the Four Worlds

The Hopi understand the universe as cyclical rather than linear, composed of successive worlds or eras through which humanity journeys. We are currently living in the Fourth World, known in Hopi as Tuwaqachi. Each previous world was destroyed due to human arrogance, greed, or moral corruption, echoes of which ring all too loudly in our present age.

At the centre of Hopi cosmology is Tawa, the Sun Spirit, who is both creator and sustainer. It was Tawa who brought the First World into being, shaping it as a place of harmony and life. But it was not Tawa alone who nurtured early humanity. Spider Woman, or Kokyangwuti, a revered divine helper, played a vital role in the creation story. She formed human beings from clay, breathed life into them, and taught them the skills they would need to survive, weaving, planting, building, and more. Her wisdom continues to symbolise interconnectedness, creativity, and the sacred feminine.

According to the teachings, each time humanity lost its way, a catastrophe, fire, ice, flood, swept through the world. Only a few who remained faithful to spiritual principles were guided to escape through a sipapu, a symbolic portal connecting worlds, often imagined as a hole or passage in the Earth. In some tellings, survivors journeyed across turbulent waters on reed boats, arriving in the Fourth World with the responsibility to do better this time.

Core spiritual principles

At the heart of Hopi life is a profound respect for nature, not as a passive resource but as a living entity. The Earth is considered sacred, a mother whose well-being determines the well-being of her children. Hopi ceremonies, such as the Snake Dance, are not mere rituals but active prayers, for rain, fertility, and the restoration of balance between humans and the natural world.

Central to both Hopi daily life and spiritual practice is corn, or maize, which is more than a crop. Corn is life. It symbolises sustenance, humility, and the patience required to survive in arid land. Each kernel carries not just food but meaning, woven into rituals, songs, and even architecture. Growing corn in the high desert with minimal water is both an agricultural feat and an act of spiritual endurance.

The Hopi world is also animated by Kachinas, spirit beings who embody aspects of nature, ancestors, and moral teachings. These beings return annually in ceremonial dances and masked performances, bridging the seen and unseen worlds. They teach, bless, and remind the community of their duties to one another and to the sacred order. Children are introduced to Kachinas not with fear but with reverence, gradually learning their layered meanings over time.

Prophecies and warnings

The Hopi are perhaps best known outside their communities for their prophecies, stark, poetic warnings about the direction of human civilisation. These were not apocalyptic for drama’s sake but for ethical awakening. The Nine Signs of the End Times, shared by Hopi elders in the 20th century, are especially haunting in their clarity.

The signs begin with the arrival of white-skinned men, seen as the European colonisers who disrupted Indigenous life. They are followed by wagons with voices (understood as trains or vehicles), and the spreading of cattle over lands once wild and balanced. The fourth sign, snakes of iron, points to railroads slicing across sacred ground, while the fifth, a giant spider’s web, eerily evokes the modern internet or global power grids.

Subsequent signs speak of rivers of stone (roads), polluted oceans, and a cultural turning point: when young people return to Indigenous wisdom. Finally, the arrival of a Blue Star, possibly a celestial or metaphysical event, signals the beginning of Purification Day, a time of upheaval and cleansing before the Fifth World may emerge.

These prophecies are not fixed outcomes but warnings. They suggest that if humanity continues on its current path, one of disconnection, overconsumption, and disregard for the sacred, we invite collapse. Yet, within the warning is a choice: to return to balance, to protect the Earth, to remember what it means to be human.

Sustainable living and governance

For the Hopi, sustainability is not a fashionable concept but a way of life refined over centuries in one of the harshest environments on the continent. They practice dry farming, using techniques such as terracing, runoff harvesting, and planting deep-rooted varieties of corn that thrive without irrigation. This is agriculture as both science and prayer, survival bound to respect for land cycles and climatic rhythms.

Leadership among the Hopi is not hierarchical but consensus-based, rooted in spiritual guidance and communal responsibility. Decisions are made collectively, with a focus on maintaining harmony, not just within the tribe, but with the broader web of life. There are no kings, no charismatic rulers, only guardians of tradition, elders who listen more than they speak, and who understand that true power lies in restraint.

Their approach to land stewardship reflects a philosophy of guardianship, not ownership. The land is not a commodity but a relative. Hopi resistance to mining, fracking, and other forms of exploitation is not simply political, it is spiritual. To desecrate the Earth is to violate one’s own body, one’s own future.

Messages for modern times

Over the years, Hopi elders have issued direct statements to the outside world, warning that greed, warfare, and environmental destruction violate the Creator’s laws and threaten not only humans but all life on Earth. They have watched as rivers were dammed, soil poisoned, and skies clouded, all in the name of progress. But they have also seen flickers of hope.

One such light is the Eagle and Condor Prophecy, an ancient teaching found among various Indigenous peoples across the Americas. It tells of a time when the peoples of the North (symbolised by the eagle, mind, and technology) and those of the South (symbolised by the condor, heart, and spirit) will reunite after centuries of separation. Their union will heal the world, but only if approached with humility and truth.

In the face of despair, Hopi teachings do not retreat into nihilism. As Chief White Eagle once said, strength comes from the ability to maintain resilience through joy, to sing, dance, make art, and pray together even in times of hardship. Community, ceremony, and creativity are not distractions from resistance, they are the resistance.

We are the ones

The Hopi teachings are not historical curiosities or mythological remnants. They are living instructions, meant not just for Hopi people but for all who are willing to listen. They offer a vision of how humans might live in reciprocity with the Earth, honour their ancestors, and build a future worth inheriting.

Whether one believes in prophecy or not, the message is clear: we have a choice. To continue the cycles of destruction that ended previous worlds, or to step into right relationship with the land, each other, and the sacred.

As the Hopi have long said: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

It’s not too late. But it’s not early either.

Deeper dive

Wildlife & Ecosystems Management Program - The Hopi tribe official website
TRUTH OF A HOPI - Stories Relating to the Origin, Myths and Clan Histories of the Hopi by Edmund Nequatewa
The Rich History and Resilience of Native American Agriculture, From Past to Present, Indigenous Food & Agriculture Initiative
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Katcina altars in Hopi worship, by Jesse Walter Fewkes
Dan Evehema, the last Eldest Elder, through Thomas Mails the author, revealed the sacred Hopi prophecy and instructions for survival

The health industrial complex: A patent recipe for profit

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000

There is a quietly menacing machine humming behind the white lab coats and glossy public health campaigns. It does not wear a stethoscope or develop vaccines out of humanitarian impulse. It sits comfortably in boardrooms, trade negotiation halls, and financial spreadsheets, and its name, though rarely spoken aloud, is the Health Industrial Complex.

Much like Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex”, this one operates in the shadowlands between public need and private greed. But instead of tanks and missiles, it peddles treatments and patents. Its battles are not fought on fields, but in courtrooms, WTO summits, and investor briefings. Its primary enemy? Affordable, equitable healthcare.

Let us dispense with illusions: Big Pharma did not become big by accident. It was sculpted, quite deliberately, by two monumental forces: the financialisation of the global economy and the harmonisation of intellectual property laws through the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement. The result is a pharmaceutical sector less concerned with healing the sick and more focused on healing its quarterly earnings.

First, let us examine the financialisation bit, a word economists like to throw around to sound clever when describing capitalism eating its own liver. In the pharmaceutical context, financialisation means that shareholder value now trumps actual drug development. It is not that new treatments are not welcome, it is just that they are a bit inconvenient, really, when compared to the tidy certainty of stock buybacks, dividend payouts, and the thrill of a good merger.

Take Pfizer, for example. Between 2006 and 2015, the company spent a staggering $139 billion on share buybacks and dividends, more than it invested in R&D. One could argue it was less focused on curing cancer and more on curing a mild case of underperforming stock options.

Academic killjoys like William Lazonick have pointed out that this is not merely wasteful, it is systemically dangerous. Companies that once reinvested profits into research are now essentially financial instruments with a side-hustle in medicine. It is innovation on a shoestring, and the shoestring’s been sold off in a private equity deal.

Meanwhile, the public sector – that ever-generous enabler – continues to fund early-stage research, shouldering the risk while the private sector reaps the intellectual property and revenue. As Mariana Mazzucato so cheerfully points out in The Entrepreneurial State, this is socialism for the R&D budget and capitalism for the profits. Quite the racket, really.

Trade Rules for Intellectual Property Shenanigans (TRIPS)

Enter stage right: the TRIPS Agreement, the World Trade Organization’s not-so-subtle gift to multinational pharmaceutical giants. Officially known as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (a name only a Geneva bureaucrat could love), it standardised intellectual property laws across the globe. Translation: it forced countries to enforce 20-year patent monopolies on drugs, regardless of whether their populations could afford them or not.

Before TRIPS, countries like India allowed patents only on processes, not products, enabling generic manufacturers to reverse-engineer medications and sell them at affordable prices. TRIPS blew that system out of the water, standardising patent regimes in a way that locked out generics and locked in profits. Global health equity? How quaint.

The consequences were not theoretical. HIV medication costs in the 1990s were through the roof, unaffordable to entire continents, until India ignored TRIPS long enough to save millions of lives. Even then, the WTO was not pleased. The * *Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health in 2001 was a face-saving admission that, yes, countries could technically issue compulsory licences to break patents in public health emergencies, but only if they jumped through enough flaming hoops to make it legally and diplomatically hellish.

The net result? A global legal regime that ensures pharmaceutical companies enjoy the same monopolistic protections in Nairobi as in New Jersey. It is a masterpiece of regulatory capture dressed up as “harmonisation.”

A tidy arrangement

What emerges from all this is not so much a conspiracy as a well-lubricated system of mutually reinforcing incentives. Corporations chase profit, as they are designed to. Governments, particularly those in the Global North, protect these interests under the guise of innovation policy and “investment incentives”. And international institutions , WTO, World Bank, and sometimes even the WHO, keep the machinery well-oiled.

Add to this a healthy dose of philanthrocapitalism, Gates Foundation, we are looking at you, and you have a public health architecture increasingly dominated by private actors. When billionaires fund vaccine distribution and hold patents on the technology, we are not witnessing charity, we are witnessing vertical integration.

Meanwhile, lobbyists in Washington and Brussels work overtime to delay generic competition, extend exclusivity periods, and prevent developing countries from exercising the few flexibilities TRIPS allows. In short, this is a sector that not only owns the medicine but writes the rules that govern its sale.

If you need a case study, look no further than the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family turned addiction into a business model, lying about the addictiveness of OxyContin while lobbying aggressively to suppress regulation. It was not a bug in the system, it was the system working as designed.

Follow the money, not the microscope

So here we are: a global health regime ostensibly built on scientific progress, but in practice designed to maximise profit extraction from sickness. This is not to say that innovation does not happen, of course it does. But the direction, pricing, and availability of that innovation are shaped less by global health needs and more by what makes shareholders happy.

To borrow from Orwell: all patients are equal, but some markets are more equal than others.

So next time someone tells you the high cost of medication reflects the high cost of innovation, do ask who paid for the innovation. And where the profits went. And whether the real miracle drug was, all along, a legal framework for global rent-seeking.

Lazonick, Profits Without Prosperity (INET PDF), A foundational critique showing how U.S. firms (including pharma) divert earnings to buybacks and dividends, 2014
Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health (WTO, PDF), Official text clarifying the right of WTO members to use public health flexibilities, 2001
The Doha Declaration Ten Years Later (South Centre brief, PDF), Analysis of progress and ongoing challenges in implementing TRIPS flexibilities, 2013
Purdue Pharma’s profit-driven “addiction” pivot (STAT article co-published with ProPublica), Coverage of internal plans to expand OxyContin’s market even as addiction was soaring, 2019
Inside Purdue Pharma’s Media Playbook (blica), How Purdue funded think-tanks and shaped public narratives around OxyContin addiction risk, 2019

Reconciling genome-based evolution and punctuated equilibrium

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 03:00:00 +0000

Since its debut in 1972, punctuated equilibrium (PE) has been both a source of controversy and a catalyst for new thinking in evolutionary biology. Proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and N iles Eldredge, PE argued that most species spend long periods in morphological stasis, only to undergo rapid bursts of change during speciation. At first glance, this seemed to clash with the prevailing model of genome-based, gradual evolution, where natural selection operates on the steady accumulation of small mutations. But in recent years, developments in genomics, developmental biology, and systems theory have begun to bridge the gap. What once seemed like a dichotomy now appears to be a case of different lenses on the same underlying process.

The core tension between gradualism and punctuation

Genome-based evolutionary theory, rooted in phyletic gradualism, has traditionally portrayed evolution as a smooth, continuous process. It describes how changes in allele frequencies accumulate over time, shaping species slowly through environmental pressures, genetic drift, and recombination. It’s a framework that has held strong in population genetics, molecular clock models, and observed microevolutionary shifts (think finches, bacteria, or moths).

Punctuated equilibrium, by contrast, posits that species remain remarkably stable for most of their history. When change does occur, it happens in evolutionary instants, geologically speaking, typically during or just after the formation of new species. Fossil records, especially in invertebrates, seemed to show abrupt transitions rather than the smooth curves predicted by gradualism.

In its early decades, PE was treated with suspicion, largely because it lacked a convincing genetic mechanism. Critics claimed it merely described patterns in the fossil record without explaining the biology beneath. That, however, is no longer the case.

Genetic mechanisms bridging the gap

The last two decades have delivered a treasure trove of evidence that can support punctuated patterns through genome-based processes. The genome is not a passive script, it’s a dynamic regulatory system, often held in check by powerful constraints. Under the right conditions, those constraints can break.

Developmental regulatory genes and the architecture of stasis

Genes involved in embryonic development, particularly the developmental regulatory (DevReg) genes like HOX, PAX, and SOX families, are among the most conserved in all of biology. These genes don’t change much, because they’re under purifying selection: mutations tend to be fatal or highly disruptive.

This evolutionary inertia creates morphological stasis. But when mutations do occur in these regulatory regions, particularly in non-coding control elements, they can have outsized effects. One subtle change in a gene network can shift limb proportions, skull shape, or body segmentation, often with little warning.

Transposable elements play a key role here. These “jumping genes” can insert themselves into regulatory regions, occasionally rewiring entire gene expression networks. Most of the time, this causes chaos. But once in a while, it creates a novel configuration that works, and spreads. These rare events are perfect candidates for explaining evolutionary punctuation.

Threshold effects in gene regulatory networks

Development isn’t a simple on/off process, it’s a network of interdependent signals, buffered against noise but susceptible to cascade effects. In this system, small genetic changes may accumulate silently, producing no visible effect. Then one additional tweak pushes the system past a critical threshold, triggering a morphological shift.

This “tipping point” model, where regulatory network stability gives way to sudden reconfiguration, is consistent with both PE and genome-based evolution. It accounts for long stretches of evolutionary quiet followed by brief, turbulent periods of rapid change.

Speciation genomics: where rapid change finds its footing

In small, isolated populations, like those involved in peripatric speciation, evolutionary change can happen unusually fast. Genetic drift acts strongly, selection is intense, and mutations can fix quickly. Genomic studies of rapid radiation events (such as in East African cichlid fish or Darwin’s finches) show precisely the kind of genomic divergence spikes that PE predicted, now backed by hard genetic data.

It’s in these temporary, fragmented conditions that new regulatory mutations (and their transportable helpers) can take hold, producing morphologically distinct lineages in short evolutionary windows.

A unified model: hierarchical evolution

What emerges is not a contradiction, but a hierarchical model of evolution. At the micro level, gradual changes accumulate continuously in the genome, especially in neutral or near-neutral loci. But the visible effects of those changes are often constrained by developmental systems. Only when those constraints are breached do we see macroevolutionary shifts, the kind of pattern PE describes.

Take human evolution as a case in point. The genome shows clear signs of slow, incremental drift over hundreds of thousands of years. But morphologically, major transitions (e.g., cranial base flexion, braincase expansion, facial flattening) appear in relatively short periods. These shifts may reflect rare but consequential changes in DevReg pathways, possibly introduced or restructured by transposable elements.

In this model, gradualism describes the engine. Punctuated equilibrium describes what happens when that engine suddenly downshifts.

Integrating fossils, genes, and systems theory

The next challenge is empirical: linking observed genomic patterns to phenotypic shifts in the fossil record. Tools are emerging that may finally allow this.

Comparative genomics can track conserved regulatory regions across species and identify where (and when) mutations cluster during speciation.
Fossil-calibrated phylogenetics allows genetic timelines to be matched with morphological transitions.
Systems biology and complexity theory can model the nonlinear behaviour of developmental networks, offering insight into why change sometimes unfolds explosively rather than gradually.

All of these approaches are pushing us toward a more integrated theory, one that accounts for tempo and mode, molecule and morphology, gene and trait.

A complementary, not contradictory, relationship

The perceived tension between genome-based evolution and punctuated equilibrium dissolves when viewed across scales. Molecular evolution may proceed gradually, but its developmental consequences are filtered through threshold effects and network constraints. Evolution’s tempo is not uniform. It is punctuated, contingent, and shaped by systems with breaking points.

Darwin and Gould were not opponents in truth. They were watching the same evolutionary dance, just from different ends of the hall.

Rabbit hole entries

Eldredge, N., & Gould, S. J., Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism, In T. J. M. Schopf (Ed.), Models in Paleobiology, 1972
Carroll, S. B., Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo. W. W. Norton, 2005
Stern, D. L., & Orgogozo, V., The loci of evolution: How predictable is genetic evolution?, Evolution, 62(9), 2155–2177, 2008
Oliver, K. R., & Greene, W. K., Transposable elements: powerful facilitators of evolution, BioEssays, 31(7), 703–714, 2009
Abzhanov, A., Evolutionary developmental biology and the origins of variation, Nature Reviews Genetics, 14(11), 751–762, 2013
Wagner, A., The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations: A Theory of Transformative Change in Living Systems, Oxford University Press, 2011

A mosaic origins of Homo sapiens?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 02:00:00 +0000

For decades, the story of Homo sapiens was told as a relatively straightforward ascent: one lineage, one continent, one eventual global success. But the latest genetic research suggests that our origins were anything but tidy. Instead of a single evolutionary path, modern humans appear to have emerged from the long-delayed reunion of two ancient lineages, distant cousins who had gone their separate ways over a million years earlier.

This new model, built on genomic analysis rather than fossil fragments, reveals a far messier beginning: a braid, not a branch.

The two-stem model: one species, two deep ancestries

Recent research out of the University of Cambridge has turned the tidy tree of human evolution into something closer to a braid. By analysing the genomes of living people using a novel algorithm called cobraa, scientists uncovered evidence that Homo sapiens didn’t emerge from a single ancestral group. Instead, we are the product of a remix between two long-separated populations, dubbed Stem 1 and Stem 2, whose genetic divergence dates back roughly 1.5 million years ago.

Stem 1 is responsible for the lion’s share of modern human DNA, around 80%. This lineage went through a severe bottleneck after splitting from Stem 2, shrinking dramatically in size before slowly recovering. It also happens to be the same population from which Neanderthals and Denisovans later branched off. Stem 2, meanwhile, makes up about 20% of our genome, and while smaller in contribution, it brought with it something vital: genes linked to neural development, including those involved in synapse formation and cortical organisation. Not all of its genetic material played nicely with Stem 1’s, and many of its contributions were lost through purifying selection, but those that persisted may have given us a cognitive edge.

This two-stem model reshapes how we think about our origins. It challenges the long-held idea of a single, linear evolutionary pathway and instead presents Homo sapiens as the outcome of a long separation followed by hybridisation, with lasting biological consequences.

A pan-African origin

The two-stem model fits comfortably within the increasingly accepted pan-African model of human evolution. Fossil and genetic data alike point to a scenario in which Homo sapiens emerged not from a single population in a single place, but from interconnected groups scattered across the African continent.

Sites like Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dated to around 300,000 years ago, show individuals with a mixture of archaic and modern features, a blend that matches the genetic story of Stem 1 and Stem 2 recombining. Rather than a clean transition, human evolution looks more like a mosaic: different traits emerging in different places, shaped by local environments, then gradually brought together through movement and mixing.

Africa’s shifting climates likely played a key role. During the Saharan “Green” phases, wetter conditions would have allowed populations to travel and intermingle. In drier times, groups became isolated, developing along their own trajectories. The result: a structured metapopulation, not a single origin point.

Out-of-Africa

Modern humans left Africa more than once, but only the last major migration, between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, managed to colonise the globe. What made this wave different?

The answer seems to lie in adaptability. These migrating humans carried with them not only the genetic legacy of Stem 2’s neural refinements, but also a growing toolkit of symbolic behaviour and cultural exchange. They adapted to deserts, forests, coasts, and tundra, often within a few generations. Cave art, personal ornamentation, and microlithic tools point to improved problem-solving and planning abilities. Earlier migrations lacked this behavioural flexibility and left few traces behind.

This cognitive and cultural edge may be the true legacy of the two-stem remix: not just bigger brains, but more adaptable minds.

Key fossils and forgotten climates

The Jebel Irhoud fossils are central to this story, capturing a moment just after the Stem 1 and Stem 2 populations began recombining. The individuals show modern facial features paired with more archaic braincases, embodying the idea that Homo sapiens evolved piecemeal, with different traits emerging at different rates.

Meanwhile, ancient DNA from populations adapted to the Green Sahara period (~10,000 years ago) reveals now-vanished traits that suited a humid environment. As the Sahara dried out again, many of these adaptations were lost, but the traces remain in modern genomes, especially within African populations.

The last 10,000 years

Far from slowing down, human evolution has accelerated in recent millennia. The development of agriculture, urbanisation, and new diets brought strong selection pressures. The ability to digest milk into adulthood (lactase persistence) spread quickly in Europe and Africa. Populations in the Andes evolved ways to detoxify arsenic in high-altitude water sources. Our immune systems, too, adapted rapidly to the diseases of densely populated settlements.

In short, the genetic mosaic hasn’t stopped shifting, it’s just playing out on different timescales and in different environments.

Then …

Modern humans are the product of two deeply divergent ancestral lineages, recombined during a period of population mixing across Africa. Our species didn’t arise in a single spot, but across a network of groups responding to shifting climates and environments. What set us apart wasn’t a sudden leap, but the accumulation of traits over time, guided by genes, geography, and culture.

And down the rabbit hole

Aylwyn Scally, Genetic study reveals hidden chapter in human evolution, Cambridge University, 18 Mar 2025
Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally, Richard Durbin, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans, ResearchGate preprint, March 2025
James Ashworth, Sharing ideas might have helped Homo sapiens adapt for life outside Africa, The Natural History Museum London, 18 June 2025

Evolution’s stop-start dance

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 01:00:00 +0000

When we imagine evolution, we often picture it unfolding at a leisurely, predictable pace, small changes stacking up over time like bricks in a wall. That’s the traditional view: gradualism, the slow grind of nature perfecting its handiwork. But what if evolution doesn’t always play by those rules? What if nature has a taste for the dramatic, long stretches of calm, interrupted by bursts of sudden change?

That’s the idea behind punctuated equilibrium (PE), a theory introduced in the 1970s by palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. Rather than a smooth evolutionary curve, PE proposes a jagged rhythm: long periods where species remain largely unchanged, punctuated by short, intense episodes of change, often triggered by environmental disruption or internal developmental shifts.

Bursts and pauses

According to PE, most species spend the majority of their existence in stasis, genetically stable, morphologically consistent. Then, at certain critical moments, new forms arise rapidly, either replacing older species or branching off into something entirely novel. Crucially, these changes aren’t necessarily driven by slow adaptation to the environment. Instead, they may be set off by deep internal mechanisms, developmental thresholds, genetic bottlenecks, or a change in the rules during embryonic growth.

The fossil record supports this view. Rather than neat transitions from one form to another, what we often see are abrupt appearances and disappearances. Species emerge, linger in relatively stable form for thousands or millions of years, then vanish or morph with surprising speed. PE doesn’t see these patterns as gaps or accidents, it sees them as the real shape of evolution.

The sphenoid bone

One of the most compelling biological examples of this principle in action may lie buried at the base of our skull. Meet the sphenoid bone: a butterfly-shaped piece of anatomy that few people outside of medicine or palaeoanthropology ever think about. But according to French researcher Anne Dambricourt-Malassé, this humble bone may have helped propel major leaps in human evolution.

In early foetal development, the sphenoid begins as two separate parts. Around weeks 8 to 12 of gestation, it undergoes a subtle but critical angular shift, called basicranial flexion. This isn’t just a bit of cranial origami. That single flexion alters the shape of the skull base, repositions the spinal connection (the foramen magnum), and creates space for the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, to expand. It also flattens the face, shortens the jaw, and even contributes to the development of the chin.

Here’s where PE comes into play. This single developmental adjustment, likely triggered by a threshold effect in gene regulation or embryonic dynamics, has wide-ranging consequences, exactly the sort of sudden, systemic change PE describes. It doesn’t require hundreds of generations of selection. It’s a leap, made possible by the internal logic of development itself.

The fossil record reflects this. Over time, we see an increasing degree of basicranial flexion in hominins, Australopithecus with a cranial base angle of about 140°, Homo erectus at 130°, and modern humans down to 120°. Each step is linked to major anatomical and behavioural shifts: larger brains, upright posture, smaller faces. And all of it may hinge on how early in gestation the sphenoid bends. It’s a masterclass in punctuated change, quietly orchestrated from within the embryo.

Shaking the foundations

Punctuated equilibrium doesn’t just shake up palaeontology. It forces a broader reconsideration of how evolutionary change actually unfolds. For one, it makes sense of why transitional fossils are so rare. If most change happens in small, isolated populations over geologically short periods, there may not be many fossils to find.

It also broadens the scope of evolutionary dynamics. PE supports a hierarchical model: gradual changes can still occur within species (microevolution), but larger jumps happen at the level of species formation (macroevolution), and some traits may persist or disappear due to how whole lineages fare, not just individuals. It’s a reminder that evolution isn’t just survival of the fittest, it’s also survival of the timely, the marginal, and sometimes, the lucky.

From biology to everything else

PE’s appeal isn’t limited to biology. Its pattern, long inertia, sudden disruption, appears across human systems too. Think of policy reform: years of bureaucratic deadlock, and then one crisis reshapes the landscape overnight. Or technology: landlines held firm for a century, until mobile networks leapfrogged them into obsolescence. Even history seems to move this way, punctuated, not plodding.

PE also challenges our assumptions about how adaptation works. Not all traits arise slowly under environmental pressure. Some emerge from internal reorganisation, from genetic architecture, developmental processes, or even epigenetic triggers. Stasis, in this view, isn’t failure to adapt, it’s resilience, holding steady until the system hits a breaking point.

Philosophically, it’s a humbling idea. PE undercuts the tidy myth of progress and replaces it with contingency. Evolution doesn’t always inch forward. It stalls. It waits. And then, occasionally, it jumps.

Looking ahead

The future of punctuated equilibrium lies in exploring its mechanics. How do developmental systems, like those governing the sphenoid, tip from one state to another? How do external pressures interact with internal constraints? And what role might epigenetics play in triggering sudden shifts, not just across generations but within one?

Researchers are also starting to apply PE principles to other complex systems, from economic collapses to climate tipping points. The model offers a powerful way to understand when and why slow change turns into upheaval.

In the end, punctuated equilibrium reminds us that evolution isn’t always a slow, meandering river. Sometimes, it’s a dam breaking. And sometimes, the first crack appears in a single, silent bend of bone, hidden in the darkness of the womb.

Very interesting reads

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered, published online by Cambridge University Press 08 April 2016
Ilya Tëmkin, Punctuated equilibria and a general theory of biology, published online by Cambridge University Press 24 March 2025

Is the sphenoid bone the quiet conductor of human evolution?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we think about evolution, we usually imagine something like survival of the fittest, organisms scrabbling to adapt to harsh environments, with only the strongest traits passing on to the next generation. But what if much of the story wasn’t written in the open battlefields of nature, but quietly, deep inside the womb?

That’s exactly the idea behind the work of paleoanthropologist Anne Dambricourt-Malassé. Her research suggests that one of the most important drivers of human evolution isn’t some dramatic change in diet, climate, or hunting technique, but the early developmental behaviour of a small, oddly shaped bone at the base of the skull: the sphenoid.

The shape that changed everything

During the first few months of pregnancy, the human skull begins to take shape. In these early stages, the sphenoid bone, an awkward, butterfly-shaped bit of cartilage tucked behind the nose and eyes, starts out in two parts. Then, between weeks eight and twelve, something rather remarkable happens: the two parts begin to bend. This “flexion” is a key moment. It’s not just a bit of embryonic fidgeting. This subtle shift in angle acts like the first domino in a long chain of events, altering the layout of the entire head.

As the sphenoid bone flexes, it changes the angle of the base of the skull. This new configuration makes space for the brain to grow, especially the frontal lobes, the parts responsible for planning, language, and abstract thought. At the same time, it nudges the face into a more vertical position, reduces that classic monkey-like snout, and shifts the hole where the spine connects to the skull (the foramen magnum) forward, setting us up for upright walking.

In other words, this small adjustment deep in the foetus triggers a cascade that reshapes the brain, the face, and the way we move.

From bone to brain to biped

This tiny twist of bone helps explain a whole suite of human traits that seem to appear together in the fossil record. As the sphenoid flexed more over time, we got bigger brains, particularly at the front, while the back of the skull flattened out. Our faces shortened and pulled inwards, giving rise to something you don’t find in other primates: a chin.

Even our upright posture seems to trace back to this same origin. With the foramen magnum moving forward, the spine could align beneath the head, making it much easier to walk on two legs. That in turn encouraged changes in the spine’s curve, the shape of the pelvis, and the way we carry our weight. All these bits evolved together, not because of external environmental shocks, but because of internal developmental processes kicked off early in the womb.

Evolution from the inside out

What makes this model so intriguing is that it offers an alternative to the classic Darwinian story. It’s not saying that natural selection doesn’t matter, of course it does, but it suggests that some evolutionary directions were strongly shaped by internal developmental patterns. Certain changes, like the bending of the sphenoid, opened up new anatomical possibilities. Others were ruled out entirely. Evolution, in this view, isn’t a random walk through genetic space. It’s more like a river carving a path through a landscape of constraints.

Over time, Dambricourt-Malassé argues, this flexion process became more pronounced. In Australopithecus, an early human ancestor, the cranial base angled at around 140 degrees. By the time we get to Homo erectus, it had tightened to 130 degrees. In modern humans, it’s closer to 120. These changes correspond with other major shifts: more complex tools, symbolic thinking, rapid brain expansion. And notably, they don’t require any major new mutations to explain them. Instead, they could be the predictable outcome of how early development unfolds once a certain threshold is crossed.

A quiet revolution in understanding

The mechanics behind this are still being explored. Researchers are looking at how certain genes, particularly HOX genes, which help lay out the basic body plan, guide the development of the sphenoid. There’s also evidence that muscle movements in the foetus can influence how bones ossify (turn to bone), meaning that development responds not just to genes but to subtle biomechanical feedback as well.

Comparing how human foetuses and great apes develop in the womb is also proving valuable. It helps us spot when and how the human path diverged, and whether similar processes are at work in our primate cousins. So far, it looks like the human version of this flexion is both distinctive and unusually influential.

What’s powerful about this model is how it draws together ideas from embryology, anatomy, evolutionary biology, and systems theory. It suggests that some of the big shifts in our evolutionary history, our upright posture, our massive brains, our flat faces, might not be separate adaptations to different problems, but different expressions of the same underlying developmental shift. A shift that started, quietly, deep in the womb, in the way a single bone bends.

Still controversial, but worth keeping an eye on

Not everyone in evolutionary biology is convinced. It’s a departure from the gene-focused models that dominate much of the field. But unlike hand-waving theories about “big leaps” or mysterious missing links, this one makes testable predictions. It can be measured in fossils, modelled on computers, and compared across species. That makes it scientific, and worth keeping an eye on.

If it continues to hold up, the humble sphenoid might just be one of the unsung heroes of our evolutionary story. Not bad for a bone you’ve probably never heard of.

Interesting reads

Anne DAMBRICOURT MALASSÉ, Évolution du chondrocrâne et de la face des grands anthropoïdes miocènes jusqu’à Homo sapiens, continuités et discontinuités, 2016

Where the power goes missing: a sector-by-sector tour of European unaccountability

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

We often think of democratic deficits as abstract, something that lives in Brussels conference rooms and academic papers. But in practice, power without accountability isn’t just theoretical. It shows up in the bills you pay, the apps you use, the water you drink, and the politicians you never seem to be able to reach.

Here’s how it plays out across key sectors:

Climate and energy, lofty goals, murky delivery

Europe’s climate policy is a paradox: ambitious in targets, opaque in implementation.

The EU Green Deal sets sweeping goals, net-zero by 2050, 55% cuts by 2030, but the actual delivery is delegated to national plans, industry “stakeholders”, and carbon markets managed by algorithm. If your gas bill spikes because of emissions trading speculation or a misfired energy levy, good luck finding the responsible face. Was it the Commission? Your energy regulator? A state secretary you’ve never heard of?

Meanwhile, greenwashing is rife. Companies meet vague sustainability targets by buying offset credits from halfway across the world, often in schemes that never get audited. You pay more for “climate-responsible” power. The rainforest remains unimpressed.

Who’s in charge? That depends on what’s gone wrong.

Technology and digital policy, innovation without supervision

Europe likes to present itself as the grown-up in the tech room. And to be fair, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are bold steps. But the real power still lies elsewhere.

Big Tech firms routinely outmanoeuvre regulators. Meta, Amazon, and Google lobby EU institutions with armies of well-briefed consultants. National data protection authorities are unevenly resourced, and cross-border enforcement is a bureaucratic nightmare. Ireland, home to many tech HQs, has been accused of dragging its feet on enforcement to protect domestic tax revenue.

Meanwhile, citizens’ digital rights, privacy, consent, algorithmic fairness, are shaped by terms and conditions nobody reads and legal frameworks nobody votes on. Ever tried opting out of behavioural tracking on a health app? It’s like escaping a hedge maze with no exit.

Who holds the reins? Ostensibly data protection regulators. In reality, lawyers and lobbyists.

Healthcare, everyone’s responsibility, no one’s fault

Healthcare is still largely a national competence in the EU, but supranational influence is growing, especially after COVID.

The joint vaccine procurement effort was a logistical success wrapped in a fog of secrecy. Contracts with pharma companies were heavily redacted, public scrutiny was blocked, and procurement decisions were centralised in an ad hoc EU body with no parliamentary oversight.

At the national level, decisions about hospital closures, digitalisation, or health data usage are increasingly outsourced to private consultants (hi, McKinsey). And when things go wrong, data leaks, capacity shortages, medication pricing scandals, responsibility is sliced thinner than prosciutto.

Who makes the call? Health ministers, EU health authorities, corporate partners, or whichever one isn’t in front of a camera that day.

Finance and economic governance, numbers rule, humans drool

Remember the euro crisis? Austerity measures in Greece, Spain, and Portugal were enforced not by elected parliaments but by the infamous Troika, the ECB, European Commission, and IMF, three institutions that answer to different masters and have very little voter input.

Budgetary rules like the Stability and Growth Pact still constrain national governments, even as they negotiate exceptions in closed-door sessions. Want to invest in housing or schools? Better check with Brussels whether it fits the deficit targets.

Meanwhile, in places like Italy and France, national budgets are “pre-checked” by the Commission before they’re voted on by domestic parliaments. It’s accountability in reverse: the spreadsheet comes before the vote.

Who’s steering the economy? The Commission, the ECB, and invisible bond markets with very loud opinions.

Migration, responsibility outsourced, visibility avoided

Perhaps nowhere is the abdication of accountability more blatant than in migration policy.

The EU’s external border is now effectively policed by Frontex, a security agency with a history of allegations ranging from pushbacks to lack of transparency. National governments cheer when Frontex keeps numbers down, but look the other way when human rights groups document illegal practices.

At the same time, the EU signs deals with third countries, Tunisia, Turkey, Libya, to “manage flows”, often in exchange for funding and a blind eye to domestic repression. These deals are rarely debated in parliaments and barely communicated to the public.

Refugees and migrants are left to navigate a Kafkaesque system where national asylum authorities point to EU quotas, while the EU points to sovereignty. It’s all very sophisticated until someone drowns.

Who’s responsible? Depends who’s asking, and whether they’re holding a microphone.

Agriculture and rural policy, money without mandates

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) remains the EU’s single biggest budget item. Billions are paid out annually, but often via opaque subsidy channels that favour large landowners over sustainable farmers.

In countries like Hungary and Bulgaria, CAP funds have become tools of political patronage. Investigative journalists have exposed land grabs and dodgy payouts. Yet audits are rare, and enforcement weaker still, partly because the Commission relies on national governments to report misuse of funds, which they… don’t always do.

Meanwhile, climate- and biodiversity-focused farmers struggle to access funding, swamped by paperwork or undercut by better-connected agribusinesses. The policy’s supposed goals, sustainability, resilience, rural cohesion, are diluted by lobbying and inertia.

Who controls the purse? Technically, the EU. Practically, a hydra of local ministries, land registries, and family friends.

Policing and surveillance, security without scrutiny

The expansion of EU-wide databases (e.g. Eurodac, SIS II, ECRIS) and cross-border policing initiatives has vastly increased surveillance capabilities across Europe.

But transparency hasn’t kept pace. Biometric data is shared across borders, predictive policing pilots are rolled out, and facial recognition tools are tested with minimal public debate. National police forces often plug into EU systems with barely any legislative mandate.

And when laws do exist, they tend to arrive after the fact, retrofitting legality onto technology that’s already in place.

Who’s watching the watchers? Allegedly national parliaments. Realistically? A small working group in Brussels you’ve never heard of.

Decentralised unaccountability, delivered daily

Across all sectors, a pattern emerges: power is distributed, but accountability is diffused to the point of vanishing. National actors blame Brussels, EU actors defer to market logic, and consultants quietly invoice everyone involved.

Citizens are left staring at a system where outcomes are shaped by committees they didn’t elect, technologies they didn’t authorise, and trade-offs they never got to debate.

This isn’t a call for utopia, governance is hard. But legitimacy requires more than competence. It requires visibility, voice, and answerability.

Without that, democracy becomes a stage play, well-lit, professionally acted, but hollow.

Power without accountability: Europe’s silent crisis

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Europe does not lack power. It lacks responsibility.

From national governments to supranational institutions, boardrooms to bureaucracies, decisions are made daily that affect millions. And yet, ask the average citizen who actually decided to privatise their rail service, greenlight a mega-merger, or rubber-stamp a controversial directive, and you’ll be met with a shrug. Somewhere, a meeting happened. A hand was raised. And life changed, with no one to call, no one to vote out, and no one who seems particularly bothered either way.

This is Europe’s silent crisis: power without accountability. Not tyranny, but evaporation. Not jackboots, but spreadsheets. It is a drift, not a coup, and that’s precisely why it’s so dangerous.

The illusion of control

In theory, Europe is a beacon of democratic governance. Its member states hold regular elections. Parliaments debate policy. There are checks and balances, legal recourse, and independent press. And yet, large swathes of decision-making, especially on the most consequential issues, happen in spaces where democratic scrutiny is either weak, delayed, or deliberately obfuscated.

Consider the Eurogroup: an informal gathering of eurozone finance ministers that wields enormous influence over economic policy, yet operates without minutes, voting records, or formal accountability. Or the European Commission, whose unelected officials draft legislation, negotiate trade deals, and shape the digital future of the continent, often before the public even knows what’s being proposed.

Nationally, things aren’t always better. In France, Macron’s presidency has leaned heavily on executive orders and technocratic advisory councils. In the Netherlands, major policy frameworks, from nitrogen emissions to digital surveillance, are increasingly delegated to taskforces and consultants rather than parliament. Germany’s rotating coalitions, while stable, often prioritise internal dealmaking over transparent debate. And across the continent, judicial reforms, surveillance laws, and public-private partnerships are quietly reshaping governance away from the public eye.

The net result is a strange duality: democratic theatre above, and technocratic plumbing below, the latter increasingly driving the agenda.

Accountability hollowed out

This isn’t simply about who holds office. It’s about who wields influence, who shapes outcomes, and who can be held to account when things go wrong.

Take public services. When a UK rail franchise fails or a Dutch benefits scandal erupts, blame is passed around like a hot potato: ministers point to agencies, agencies to contractors, contractors to opaque EU frameworks. It’s a postmodern accountability game, where no-one resigns because no-one technically made the decision alone.

Or take Big Tech regulation. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is a laudable attempt to rein in monopolies. But enforcement depends on under-resourced regulators, national courts, and transnational committees. Tech giants, meanwhile, fund think tanks, lobby MEPs, and shape standards in Brussels through “multi-stakeholder dialogues” that often exclude the very citizens affected by their platforms.

Even climate policy, supposedly the EU’s crown jewel, suffers from this dynamic. Emissions targets are announced with fanfare, but implementation is devolved to national authorities, private consultants, and trading mechanisms that most voters neither understand nor influence. Accountability dissolves in layers of delegation.

Why it happens

Power without accountability is not always the product of malice. Often, it’s the unintended consequence of complexity.

Modern governance involves trade-offs, risk management, and technical decisions that don’t fit neatly into yes/no ballots. To govern climate, data, or finance, you need expertise. But when expertise becomes self-justifying, when decisions are made for people but never with them, legitimacy withers.

There is also a fear of messiness. Elected officials increasingly outsource difficult choices to “independent commissions”, think pension reforms in Spain or housing policy in Sweden. This creates plausible deniability: the policy wasn’t politically imposed, it was “evidence-based.” Unfortunately, evidence doesn’t vote. Citizens do, and they notice when their role is limited to retroactive consent.

Finally, there’s the Brussels effect: a sprawling regulatory machinery that impacts 450 million lives but feels about as accessible as a medieval court. The EU is often accused of democratic deficits, but the real issue is one of proximity. The average citizen may vote in European elections, but they rarely see how that vote translates into influence. It doesn’t help that national leaders routinely blame “Europe” for decisions they helped shape behind closed doors.

The populist backlash: wrong answers to the right question

In this vacuum of accountability, populists thrive. Not because they offer viable alternatives, they rarely do, but because they name the problem: a feeling of disconnection, of being ruled by forces that cannot be named or challenged.

Whether it’s Wilders, Le Pen, AfD, or Salvini, their success rests not on sophisticated programmes, but on a simple emotional insight: people do not feel heard. They feel managed. And so they rebel, against “the system,” against elites, against anything that smacks of technocracy. Unfortunately, their cures are often worse than the disease.

Where real accountability requires transparency, responsiveness, and pluralism, populism offers only catharsis. It replaces experts with strongmen, checks with loyalty, complexity with slogans. And when the promises fail, the scapegoating begins anew.

Towards accountable power

The solution is not to dismantle institutions, but to rewire them for visibility, participation, and responsiveness.

That means ending decision-by-stealth. Publish draft legislation, trade deals, and policy directives early, debate openly, and translate into accessible language. Citizens cannot engage with what they don’t see.

It means restoring parliamentary relevance. National assemblies could stop rubber-stamping EU directives and start shaping their input upstream. At the EU level, the European Parliament needs more than symbolic power, especially over the Commission’s agenda.

It means taming the shadow state of consultants, advisory councils, and PPPs. PPPs stands for Public-Private Partnerships, a charming euphemism for what happens when governments decide they can’t (or won’t) deliver certain public services or infrastructure projects on their own, and instead team up with private companies. These actors must be subject to the same transparency, audit, and conflict-of-interest standards as formal institutions.

And it means grounding decisions in lived experience. Citizens’ assemblies, local referenda, participatory budgeting, these aren’t gimmicks. They are the handrails of democracy. Without them, complexity becomes a smokescreen for impunity.

Europe at a fork in the corridor

Europe has spent decades building structures that protect against war, poverty, and environmental collapse. But in the process, it has too often removed decision-making from public view. The result is a form of enlightened drift: rule by framework, oversight by audit, and legitimacy by press release.

This isn’t dystopia. It’s drift. But drift can be just as corrosive as shock.

Power without accountability is not just undemocratic. It is unsustainable. Sooner or later, people notice. And when they do, they don’t always choose wisely. If Europe wants to avoid the false choices of populism and passivity, it best do something radical: trust its citizens. Not with platitudes, but with actual power.

Because if the people don’t feel they rule, someone else will.

The myth of too many elites

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In certain corners of politics and punditry, a curious thesis has been gaining ground: that our societies are teetering on the brink because of an “oversupply of elite.” Too many graduates, too many experts, too many laptop-class professionals sipping ethically sourced coffee while redesigning the world from their glass towers.

It’s a neat little idea. Trouble is, it’s also largely nonsense.

This article unpacks the claim, considers its strongest arguments, and then gives it the send-off it deserves, ideally with a clipboard and a gentle push down the escalator of wishful thinking.

Who exactly are these ‘elites’?

Before throwing darts, it’s useful to define the dartboard.

In this debate, ‘elite’ typically refers to a broad but socially specific class of highly educated professionals who exert outsized influence over economic, political, or cultural life. They include academics, senior civil servants, creative-class types such as tech founders and management consultants, essentially anyone paid more for thinking than doing, often from within high-rise buildings with good climate control and keycard access.

Political and media elites fall under this banner too, those who shape policy or public opinion, sometimes accused of living in an echo chamber sealed off from the concerns of the rest. When populists rail against “the Hague” or “Brussels,” they are invoking this caste of decision-makers and commentators, many of whom appear to have lost contact with lived experience outside the Randstad, Westminster, or the 7th arrondissement.

Finally, there’s the knowledge class, professionals in finance, tech, or high-end services, whose technical roles increasingly drive the modern economy. Their decisions, often executed via algorithm or boardroom fiat, affect millions, while their social responsibilities appear optional, at best.

In short, when critics complain of an “elite surplus,” they mean a ruling class that feels economically bulletproof, culturally self-referential, and politically evasive. A fair description, if not always an accurate diagnosis.

The destabilisation thesis, at its strongest

To take the claim seriously, as we could, if only to dismantle it properly, let’s consider its strongest arguments. The ‘too many elites’ thesis rests on three main pillars: economic disconnection, cultural estrangement, and political fallout.

The first argument centres on inequality. As societies become more digitised and globalised, the benefits have not been evenly shared. The professional classes have surfed the wave, enjoying higher wages, mobility, and job security. Meanwhile, those in routine or manual work have faced deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, and increasing precarity. In France, the gilets jaunes protests were not about fuel tax alone, they were a backlash against a system perceived to reward Parisians with degrees while ignoring rural and peri-urban workers. This creates a lopsided economy where prosperity clusters around elite professions, leaving swathes of the population to compete over shrinking scraps.

Culturally, the thesis points to a widening values gap. Educated elites often espouse cosmopolitan, progressive worldviews, embracing diversity, environmentalism, and social inclusion. These values are not inherently wrong, far from it, but they often clash with more localised, conservative, or communitarian perspectives held by those outside the elite bubble. In the Netherlands, tensions around migration and identity are often framed by voters as a pushback against the cultural dominance of Randstad-based policy-makers and media figures. When national discourse ignores or mocks these perspectives, resentment festers.

Politically, the fallout is unmistakable. Across Europe, populist parties and movements have capitalised on anti-elite sentiment. Geert Wilders’ PVV surged in the 2023 Dutch elections on a platform aimed squarely at ‘Haagse regenten’, while in Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s rise was lubricated by a steady stream of anti-Brussels rhetoric. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has mastered the game: presenting himself as the champion of national sovereignty against ‘globalist elites’, even as he consolidates his own hold over universities, media, and the courts. Whether the elites in question are Eurocrats, virologists, or climate scientists, the populist message is consistent: they rule, we pay.

Where this theory goes wrong

For all its emotional pull, the ‘too many elites’ theory begins to unravel under closer inspection. The diagnosis is too tidy; the world, regrettably, is not.

To begin with, economic inequality is real, but it’s not the fault of elites per se. It’s the product of structural forces: tax policy that favours capital over labour, deregulated markets, and global supply chains that erode bargaining power. The financialisation of everything, from housing to healthcare, has benefited the asset-owning classes, certainly, but this is the result of laws and incentives crafted over decades. In the EU, tax competition between member states, not elitist plotting, has allowed multinationals to game the system. Blaming graduates for structural imbalances is a bit like blaming chefs for obesity: misdirected, and not terribly helpful.

On the cultural front, the idea that elites are somehow disconnected from “real life” is a seductive myth. It’s true that elite institutions sometimes promote values unfamiliar or unwelcome in more traditional communities. But much of this so-called elite culture is widely shared. In Germany, where regional pride is fierce, Bavarians and Berliners may eye each other suspiciously, but both still watch Tatort. The divide is increasingly one of narrative framing, not actual experience.

Politically, the theory suffers from selective amnesia. Yes, populist movements have surged by railing against technocrats. But when in power, they often centralise authority, hollow out oversight, and suppress dissent. In Poland, PiS’s judiciary reforms weren’t a correction to elite excess, they were a power grab. The elites they replaced, central bankers, civil jurists, medical experts, may not be exciting, but they are functional. Without them, we get chaos in a better suit.

Why the myth persists: comfort in blame

So if the thesis is so flawed, why has it taken hold?

Part of the appeal lies in its simplicity. Complex systemic issues, automation, demographic shifts, housing crises, defy easy solutions. Blaming a recognisable group offers a cathartic shortcut. It simplifies politics into morality: elites are cast as arrogant, out of touch, and self-serving; the people as virtuous victims. It’s David versus Goliath, scaled for social media.

There’s also a psychological balm in blaming elites. It creates a sense of regained agency. If the root of our woes is a class of aloof know-it-alls, then removing them, or at least ignoring them, becomes an act of justice. It turns frustration into a mission.

Finally, there’s the political utility. Anti-elite rhetoric is a cheap form of populist legitimacy. Leaders like Farage, Wilders, or Baudet, all of them educated, well-spoken, and deeply enmeshed in the system, gain traction by cosplaying as outsiders. In the EU Parliament, it’s not uncommon to see nationalist MEPs rail against the institution before quietly collecting their allowances. The irony is rarely acknowledged. But it works, especially when institutions falter or when elite failures, the euro crisis, the COVID response, Afghanistan, are still fresh in public memory.

In essence, the myth persists not because it’s accurate, but because it’s useful. For politicians, pundits, and voters alike.

Historical context: elites as engines of progress

There’s also a danger in forgetting what elites are actually for.

Much of Europe’s stability and prosperity since 1945 has come from elite design. The European Coal and Steel Community, hardly a spontaneous mass movement, became the EU, an imperfect but peace-preserving project. Economists, jurists, bureaucrats, and planners have crafted frameworks that lifted millions from poverty and prevented war on a previously routine scale.

The Dutch welfare state, with its strong social housing and healthcare systems, was built by planners and civil servants, not talk show panels. Germany’s post-war Soziale Marktwirtschaft wasn’t forged in populist fire but in technocratic consensus. Even mRNA vaccines, the toast of recent pandemic strategy, emerged from elite academic and scientific ecosystems.

The idea that expertise is a problem, rather than a resource, is not just inaccurate. It’s dangerous.

So… too many elites?

Not exactly. If anything, what we suffer from is too little democratic embedding of elite power. It’s not that society has too many educated people, we probably have too few. It’s that credentials have become a stand-in for moral authority, and technocratic decisions are often made without the legitimacy of public debate.

Knowledge, by itself, is not a problem. Detached knowledge is. A society that outsources governance to its think tanks and consultancies, without mechanisms for scrutiny or redress, isn’t suffering from an elite surplus, it’s suffering from a deficit of democracy.

The solution isn’t to torch the universities or retire the experts. It’s to re-root them in public service and democratic accountability.

It’s not elites, it’s unaccountable power

The ‘oversupply of elite’ thesis is a comforting fiction for a disorienting age. It gives the appearance of analysis while offering only scapegoating. Real social and economic crises are reduced to a single, convenient villain. But this caricature conceals more than it reveals.

The problem isn’t that too many people know too much. It’s that the systems meant to distribute power, wealth, and voice have become lopsided. Elites aren’t the enemy. Power without accountability is.

Blaming elites for everything is like blaming gravity for falling down the stairs. The problem isn’t the force, it’s the lack of handrails.

The European Democracy Shield: Noble crusade or bureaucratic cosplay?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The European Democracy Shield (EUDS), a name that practically screams “importance”, if not effectiveness. One imagines a shining bulwark of European resolve, standing firm against the onslaught of foreign interference, disinformation, and creeping authoritarianism. In practice, though, we might be dealing with something rather less heroic: an ambitious framework coated in Brussels gloss, promising much, delivering… well, that remains to be seen.

The EUDS: idealism or institutional theatre?

On paper, the European Democracy Shield is a bold step. It claims to offer a in-depth defence of democratic norms, combining regulation of digital spaces, protection for media, and support for civil society into one elegant package. But the EU is no stranger to bold declarations. The question is whether this will be another statement of intent with no meaningful enforcement, or something that actually holds the line.

At its core, the EUDS is about countering foreign meddling, shoring up electoral integrity, keeping independent media afloat, and giving civil society something more useful than another consultation survey. These are all noble goals. But European politics has a way of turning noble goals into overcomplicated compromises that please no one and protect nothing.

The many ways this could unravel

Brussels can legislate. It just struggles to act.

The EU excels at legislation. Its shelves groan under the weight of finely crafted directives and impressively worded charters. But enforcement is another matter entirely. The Shield relies on frameworks like the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, which sound resilient until you ask who’s actually enforcing them, and how.

Take Romania. Faced with a surge of election interference via TikTok, its regulators responded with the urgency of a committee on a coffee break. Why? Because coordinating 27 national systems, each jealously guarding its sovereignty, is a logistical nightmare. The European Commission can propose all it wants, but enforcement remains largely a national affair. That means patchy, inconsistent, and, when the moment lands, too little, too late.

Meanwhile, look at Poland under its previous government, which methodically dismantled judicial independence while Brussels issued statements that might as well have been written in disappearing ink. If the EU can’t keep its own house in order, the idea that it will fend off Moscow or Beijing begins to look more aspirational than operational.

Tech platforms say they care about democracy. They don’t.

Big Tech firms talk a good game about defending democracy, but their business models thrive on polarisation, misinformation, and user addiction. The European Democracy Shield may target foreign bots and content manipulation, but it tiptoes awkwardly around the platforms enabling them.

During the drafting of the AI Act, tech companies deployed more lobbyists than there are MEPs. They succeeded in carving out loopholes so large they could accommodate an entire disinformation campaign. Regulation was watered down at the behest of the very entities it was meant to rein in, raising the question of whether the EU is regulating these firms, or simply managing the optics of trying.

And then there’s the deeper problem: the slow degradation of critical thinking. Algorithms prioritise speed and sensation over substance. If citizens can’t distinguish truth from manufactured outrage, then no democratic shield, digital or otherwise, will stand for long.

The credibility deficit

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the EUDS is not technological, but moral. The EU likes to project itself as the standard-bearer of liberal democracy, but its selective blindness at home undercuts its message abroad.

Hungary has spent years rolling back press freedom and civil liberties while remaining a net beneficiary of EU funds. Slovakia seems intent on walking a similar path. Brussels responds with stern looks and procedural murmurs, rarely with consequences. The message is clear: dismantling democratic norms is tolerable, so long as you keep up appearances and sign off on the right budgets.

If the EU wants to be taken seriously as a global defender of democracy, it will need to start defending it within its own borders. At present, the contrast between rhetoric and reality is wide enough to drive a convoy of lobbyists through.

And then, defence becomes offence?

There’s a real danger that the Democracy Shield could become exactly the sort of instrument it claims to oppose. Power used to protect can easily be used to suppress, especially in a climate of fear and political expediency.

Imagine a populist party banned from social media under EUDS provisions. The backlash is instant, censorship, political bias, Brussels overreach. The narrative flips, and the EU finds itself cast not as defender, but oppressor.

Or imagine aggressive takedowns of Kremlin propaganda while turning a blind eye to domestic corporate influence or agricultural lobbying. The resulting claims of hypocrisy won’t just undermine the Shield, they’ll fuel the very forces it aims to contain.

In short: if the EUDS starts looking like a blunt instrument for controlling narratives, it risks accelerating the very democratic decline it was meant to stop.

And then there was Clare Daly speaking in the European Parliament.

Five things Brussels needs to do, urgently

If this isn’t to be another bureaucratic artefact destined for the archives, then Brussels needs to rethink both its priorities and its posture.

First, enforce the existing rules. There’s no point drafting new ones if the existing frameworks remain dead letters. Second, follow the money. Whether it’s oligarchs buying newspapers or foreign regimes bankrolling campaigns, financial transparency is the litmus test of democratic resilience.

Third, journalists and activists need actual protection, not token awards or symbolic declarations, but legal safeguards and sustainable support. Fourth, public participation is to go beyond box-ticking. If citizens’ panels are to matter, they can shape outcomes, not just add a veneer of legitimacy.

Finally, the EU can start by holding its own members accountable. If Orbán-style governance continues unchecked within the bloc, then any external push for democracy will look disingenuous at best.

Final verdict: potential meets paralysis

The European Democracy Shield has the right premise and the wrong ecosystem. In theory, it offers a timely and necessary defence of democratic life. In practice, it risks being remembered as yet another well-intentioned initiative undermined by internal contradictions, external pressures, and institutional inertia.

The EU has the tools. What it lacks is the will to use them with consistency and clarity. If it continues to confuse process with progress, the only thing this Shield will protect is the illusion of action.

Defending democracy isn’t a communications strategy. It’s governance. And Brussels, if it still wants to lead, will have to start doing more of it.

The true cost of cutting costs

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This cheerful little analysis explores how Europe’s recent budget-slashing spree is playing out, cutting aid, climate finance, health, and all those other inconvenient things that don’t explode or vote. The immediate fallout (spoiler: it’s not great), the long-term consequences (even less great), and how all these “fiscally responsible” choices might cost several times more down the road.

Think of it as a guide to burning down your house to save on heating. Only the house is a continent, and the smoke alarms are also being cut.

Development aid cuts: the generosity recession

Several European states, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, and the UK, have recently rediscovered their inner Scrooge. Official Development Assistance (ODA) is down by between 8% and 37%, with Germany lopping off a casual €1.8 billion, and France, not to be outdone, slicing $2.2 billion from its flagship aid line.

Naturally, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are now left holding the begging bowl. In places like Cameroon and Colombia, where clinics and classrooms rely heavily on EU and USAID funds, this means scaled-back services and increasingly fragile state institutions.

Meanwhile, both the Netherlands and France have opted to replace old-fashioned “grants” (also known as help) with snazzy “investment-linked loans” (also known as debt). Not great news for nations already struggling to keep the lights on.

Cutting development aid doesn’t just tighten belts in the Global South, it severs lifelines. With less international support, fragile states struggle to maintain basic infrastructure, like healthcare, clean water and education. This directly fuels poverty, displacement, and unrest.

As instability grows, we see migration rise, first regionally, then across borders. Europe, ironically the architect of these cuts, will be first in line to handle the consequences: more people arriving in unsafe vessels, more pressure on housing, social services, and border infrastructure. The cost of reception and integration dwarfs the pennies saved on aid budgets.

There’s also the inconvenient matter of terrorism and organised crime. Power vacuums tend to be filled, and not by Swiss librarians. Starved states can’t pay police, let alone offer a counterweight to extremist recruitment. In effect, we’re trading grants for grenades.

Then there’s the diplomatic fallout. Europe’s reputation as a principled global player is fading fast, especially in Africa and Asia. Into the vacuum step China and Russia, offering investments with fewer lectures about governance. Long term, this erodes Western soft power, compromises trade influence, and potentially hands control of rare earths and logistics hubs to less scrupulous regimes.

Climate finance reductions: penny wise, planetary foolish

The UK recently redirected £1 billion from its climate budget to fund military aid to Ukraine, presumably because you can’t bomb a drought. Norway paused climate finance altogether, which is quite the choice for a nation getting rich off oil.

Meanwhile, in a classic bit of accounting sleight of hand, many countries are rebranding existing development aid as “climate finance”, allowing them to hit targets on paper while doing sweet FA on the ground. Of the $27 billion claimed in 2022, a good chunk was old money with a shiny new label.

The most immediate consequence of reduced climate finance is the abandonment of projects that directly shield communities from rising seas, desertification and increasingly unhinged weather patterns. In nations like Bangladesh and Zambia, this translates into real lives lost, flooded homes, failed crops, and mass displacement.

Displaced populations do not remain politely within their borders. Climate refugees are already a reality; without adaptation funding, their numbers will explode. The UN estimates hundreds of millions may be forced to move by 2050. Europe will bear the logistical, political, and social brunt of these movements, along with the soaring costs of aid, asylum, and resettlement.

Meanwhile, failure to fund the transition to clean energy abroad means continued reliance on coal and diesel in developing countries. Cue worsening global emissions and a shared climate crisis. Europe might as well try to put out a forest fire with a water pistol, while saving on the water bill.

Domestically, climate innovation suffers too. Cuts to Horizon Europe and EU4Health undermine development of green technologies and climate-resilient infrastructure. In practical terms, this delays the rollout of heat-tolerant crops, low-carbon transport, and clean energy storage. The longer Europe lags, the more it must rely on imports from the U.S. and China, putting climate sovereignty in the same basket as solar panel dependency.

Security by subtraction

The UK’s aid budget dropped to 0.3% of GNI, while defence spending soared to 2.5%. Switzerland diverted CHF 321 million from aid to armed forces, presumably to defend itself against… cows?

Even as Europe retools for war, its diplomatic services are starved of funds. A €40 million annual shortfall means fewer peacemakers, more fire-brigading.

In theory, beefing up defence could make a region more secure. In practice, however, slashing diplomacy and aid to fund tanks and drones is the geopolitical equivalent of locking your door while your house burns down.

Without development support, regions like the Sahel become powder kegs. Extremist groups flourish, coups proliferate, and European embassies scramble to evacuate. Guess who gets to pay for the military interventions that follow? Spoiler: it’s not the countries who cut aid.

Even within the military, the spending is far from efficient. Multiple overlapping defence projects, like the EU’s three competing fighter jet programmes, guzzle funds at an astonishing rate, with little to show for it. An estimated €12 billion per year is lost to duplication. That’s money that could be spent on cybersecurity, drone defence, or disinformation resilience, threats which, awkwardly, are growing faster than traditional militaries can respond to them.

The deeper irony? By neglecting the root causes of instability, poverty, exclusion, climate change, Europe guarantees it will need ever more military force to contain the fallout. It’s a security spiral powered by fiscal self-sabotage.

The home front cuts

The EU4Health programme faces the axe or a merger, imperilling everything from cancer plans to nursing bursaries. Social funds meant to lift families out of poverty are being hoovered into military coffers.

No surprise, then, that 20 million children in the EU now live at risk of poverty. Defence apparently excludes defending children from hunger.

Cutting social budgets in peacetime is already unpopular. Doing so in a polycrisis is akin to removing lifeboats from the Titanic to make room for deck chairs. Take EU4Health, one of the few initiatives learning the hard lessons of COVID. Its potential elimination risks leaving Europe just as unprepared for the next pandemic as it was for the last one.

And that next pandemic? It’s not a speculative risk. Experts consider another global outbreak within the next two decades a near certainty. Without surveillance systems, medical stockpiles, and transnational response planning, Europe could again lose trillions in GDP, not to mention public trust.

The social cost is already being felt. Redirecting funds away from children and education, as is currently happening, creates generational damage. Over 20 million EU children now face the risk of poverty. That doesn’t just mean empty stomachs; it means higher school dropout rates, worse health outcomes, and lower workforce productivity down the line.

Slashed education budgets also cripple Europe’s ability to compete in the tech sector. With industry predicting a 15% shortfall in skilled workers by 2030, the continent risks becoming a digital backwater. One where American companies sell the software, Chinese firms build the hardware, and Europeans write long think pieces about sovereignty.

Short-termism in long trousers

Long-term fiscal dangers

The EU’s budget strategy increasingly resembles a flat-pack cabinet assembled without instructions: wobbly, full of missing parts, and threatening to collapse at the first nudge. Raiding cohesion funds (worth €50 billion/year) to plug emergency gaps might keep national leaders’ calendars free from awkward summits, but it risks long-term divergence between richer northern states and poorer southern and eastern members.

This economic drift breeds discontent. Eurosceptic movements thrive on perceptions of neglect and inequality, especially in areas already hit by austerity. Weakening cohesion funding now could well strengthen the very populist parties threatening the EU’s survival later.

Then there’s the worrying erosion of budget oversight. With administrative capacity stretched thin and transparency a low priority, countries like Hungary and Poland, already under scrutiny for rule-of-law violations, have more room to misallocate funds. If accountability mechanisms falter, the misuse of EU money becomes not the exception, but the norm.

The EU’s credibility as a rules-based club depends not only on its treaties, but on its budgets being more than political patchwork. As it stands, we’re heading for a future where emergency spending trumps structural investment, and strategic planning is replaced by fiscal duct tape.

Solutions proposed

Several reforms could restore a semblance of sanity. Introducing “own resources” taxes, like levies on carbon imports or financial transactions, would provide a reliable revenue stream of up to €50 billion/year, independent of national contributions. This would allow the EU to plan beyond the next crisis.

Public-private partnerships, especially in energy and infrastructure, offer another lever. Channelling private capital into development could offset ODA cuts and spark employment, particularly in Africa, where green investments have the potential to create over 3 million jobs. That’s both soft power and smart economics.

But none of this will matter without a shift in mindset, from reactive austerity to proactive resilience. Until then, Europe is budgeting for the symptoms of collapse while starving the systems that prevent it.

TL;DR: How to burn down a continent without lighting a match

A cheerful guide to unravelling regional stability through budgetary ‘prudence’:

1. Cut foreign aid & climate finance

Slash Official Development Assistance (ODA) budgets
Rebrand aid as “climate finance” (free PR!)
Prioritise loans over grants to debt-trap the vulnerable
Leave LDCs to fend off famine with hashtags

2. Fuel instability & mass migration

Undermine fragile states → collapse of health, education
Spark regional conflicts and forced displacement
Watch migration surge across Mediterranean
Blame it on “external threats” and not, say, policy

3. Divert funds to defence budgets

Increase military spending to 2.5%+ of GDP
Fund new toys: tanks, jets, orbital potato cannons
Starve diplomacy and crisis prevention teams
Redundant R&D? At least 3 fighter jets for “sovereignty”

4. Neglect health, education & social infrastructure

Cut EU4Health, Beating Cancer Plan, Erasmus, social funds
Risk 20 million children falling into poverty
Shrink future skilled workforce
Also: pandemic readiness? Overrated.

5. Ignore climate risks & lose green innovation

Redirect climate budgets to warfronts
Stall investment in renewables and flood defences
Depend on US & China for green tech by 2030
Pay billions later in crisis response and reconstruction

6. Encourage economic divergence & regional collapse

Strip cohesion funds from poorer EU states
Trigger debt spirals in the South and East
Build border walls, literal and financial
Wonder why populism is rising

7. Allow systemic failures & rising authoritarianism

Cut funding for rule-of-law enforcement
Let Hungary and Poland misuse EU money unchallenged
Undermine democratic legitimacy with every cut
Authoritarians love a good fiscal void

Summary: Penny-wise, Euro-foolish

Save billions today → Spend trillions in disaster, war, and migration management tomorrow
Undermine democracy, diplomacy, and development with a single spreadsheet
Just because you didn’t light the match, doesn’t mean the house didn’t burn

For those brave enough to follow the fiscal entropy in real time, the Budget Cuts Tracker awaits. Bring gin.

Resources

The EU budget: a blueprint for the future, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/de/eu-budget-story/
The Budget Cuts Tracker, https://donortracker.org/publications/budget-cuts-tracker/
What will the budgetary costs of the EU’s next enlargement be?, https://www.suerf.org/publications/suerf-policy-notes-and-briefs/what-will-the-budgetary-costs-of-the-eus-next-enlargement-be-weighing-global-uncertainty-rules-politics-and-lessons-from-the-past/
Protests and alarm as European research sector braces for cuts, https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/protests-and-alarm-as-european-research-sector-braces-for-cuts/4021027.article
EU long-term budget: Is health funding on the chopping block?, https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/06/12/eu-long-term-budget-is-health-funding-on-the-chopping-block
To save EU diplomacy, the double threat of budget cuts and power struggles must stop, https://euobserver.com/eu-and-the-world/are2811c8b
The impact of budget cuts on individual patient health, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629625000098
‘Utterly devastating’: Global health groups left reeling as European countries slash foreign aid, https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/03/07/utterly-devastating-global-health-groups-left-reeling-as-european-countries-slash-foreign-
The EU’s short-sighted aid cuts are a choice - so is the way forward, https://concordeurope.org/2025/04/16/the-eus-short-sighted-aid-cuts-are-a-choice-so-is-the-way-forward/

The calculated chaos behind Israel's strike on Iran

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 23:00:00 +0000

Why did Israel really attack Iran? Analysis with wit and additional perspectives by PR included.

Israel’s recent strikes on Iran mark a dramatic escalation in a decades-long shadow war that has finally emerged from the shadows, rather like a pensioner suddenly taking up parkour. The reasons behind this attack weave together existential threats, geopolitical manoeuvring, domestic politics, and enough ideological hostility to make a North London dinner party look tame. Below, the key drivers, from nuclear paranoia to Netanyahu’s increasingly creative approaches to job retention, with a deeper look at Iran’s creaking regime, a misfiring axis of resistance, and the global political theatre fuelling it all.

The nuclear threat: Israel’s existential fear

Israel views Iran’s nuclear programme with the same enthusiasm one might reserve for finding a spider in one’s breakfast cereal: as an immediate and existential danger. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been sounding the alarm for years with the persistence of a malfunctioning smoke detector. Israeli intelligence claims Iran is “weeks rather than months” away from weaponisation, prompting strikes on enrichment facilities like Natanz and Fordow, because nothing says “diplomacy” like precision munitions.

But here is the twist: this Iranian nuclear effort looks less like a coordinated march toward deterrence and more like a desperate lunge for Wunderwaffen, echoing the dying spasms of a regime running out of cards. Like Hitler’s late-war superweapon fantasies, Tehran’s nuclear ambitions may be less about strategy and more about psychological survival: if we cannot reform or rule effectively, perhaps we can terrify our way to stability.

The IAEA continues to play the role of bemused referee, reporting no hard evidence of a bomb. Whether Israel knows something they do not or is simply engaging in particularly aggressive preventive housekeeping, the attack may have achieved the opposite of its intent, pushing Iran closer to the nuclear threshold while offering its missile teams a welcome live-fire exercise.

Geopolitical chess: Decapitating the “axis of resistance”

Iran is not just Israel’s nuclear bogeyman, it is the ringleader of a regional network of proxies that now resembles a crumbling theatre troupe, underfunded and overacted. Israel’s strikes eliminated key figures like IRGC commander Hossein Salami and nuclear scientist Fereydoon Abbasi, because nothing disrupts an axis of resistance quite like removing its axis.

But it is more than a defensive posture, this is Netanyahu playing Middle East Jenga, removing pieces from Iran’s regional influence while hoping the whole structure collapses inward. Frankly, it is already tottering. Hamas is a shell of its former self post-October. Hezbollah is stretched thin. The Houthis are wobbling in Yemen. Iran’s allies in Iraq and Syria are otherwise occupied or existentially bruised. What remains of the axis looks increasingly performative, like a band still touring despite most of its members quitting years ago.

The Iranian regime: faltering foundations and forward flight

This is the missing puzzle piece in many analyses: Iran’s theocracy is not striking from a position of strength. It is exhausted. Domestically, the regime is economically kneecapped, politically brittle, and ideologically bankrupt. The population is more than restless, it is seething. Internally, the Islamic Republic has the structural rigidity of a cracked teacup, too brittle to evolve, too scared to yield.

This makes the nuclear gambit even more dangerous. For Tehran’s hardliners, it may be less about achieving deterrence than about clinging to perceived legitimacy. “Flight forward” is the only manoeuvre left. As with other authoritarian regimes facing decline, bluff becomes strategy, and threats of “horrific retaliation” are less a warning than a stage cue. The leadership may not even believe their own rhetoric anymore, but they know the audience does.

Netanyahu’s political survival: Wagging the dog with explosives

Consider the elephant in the room, or rather, the politician in the bunker. Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving PM, clinging to power with the tenacity of a limpet and facing more legal challenges than a law student’s final exams. The horrible October 2023 Hamas attacks rather spoiled his carefully cultivated “security strongman” image, leaving him in need of a dramatic reset, enter Operation Rising Lion.

By framing the strikes as essential self-defence, Netanyahu achieves two goals: distracting from his domestic troubles and uniting a fractious public against an external threat. It is the political equivalent of setting your own house on fire to distract from unpaid bills, dramatic, certainly effective in the short term, but with obvious long-term drawbacks.

To be clear: had any other Israeli leader been in power, the same strike likely would have occurred. This was a window of opportunity: weakened Iran, fractured proxies, a dithering UN, and a US president operating on what might generously be called “fool’s logic.” Not irrational, just not analytically predictable. Netanyahu thrives in such ambiguity, but plans only for today. Tomorrow? That is someone else’s mess.

Regional and global fallout: Oil, alliances, and the spectre of war

The strikes have sent shockwaves through global markets and alliances, proving once again that the Middle East excels at turning localised disputes into everyone’s problem.

Oil markets in turmoil: From price spike to economic cardiac arrest

The immediate 7 to 9% surge in oil prices provided traders with their daily adrenaline rush, with Brent crude hitting highs not seen since March 2022. The Strait of Hormuz, that vital artery through which 20% of global oil flows, now sits in the crosshairs, though Iran faces the classic villain’s dilemma: blockading it would annoy both the Americans and their Chinese business partners.

For now, Tehran seems content with missile strikes rather than economic suicide, but the situation remains as stable as a house of cards in a breeze. Should Saudi Arabia and the UAE get dragged in, we may see OPEC+ attempting to stabilise markets while quietly wishing everyone would just calm down.

Alliances shift: The diplomatic equivalent of musical chairs

The US finds itself in the awkward position of having to support Israel while pretending it was not consulted about the strikes, a diplomatic tightrope walk made more precarious by an election looming like an awkward family gathering. President Trump could balance backing Netanyahu against avoiding petrol price spikes that could make voters as cheerful as a British summer.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are exploiting the situation with the subtlety of a sledgehammer at a tea party. Moscow reaffirms support for Tehran while Beijing carefully calculates how much chaos benefits its position. Gulf states publicly condemn Israel while continuing intelligence sharing, the international relations equivalent of complaining about your neighbour while still borrowing their lawnmower.

The spectre of war: From bad to catastrophic

Iran’s initial missile retaliation achieved little beyond giving Israel’s missile defence systems some target practice, but the regime has promised a “painful and bitter” response, which could mean anything from proxy attacks to nuclear brinkmanship.

Potential escalation paths include:

Hezbollah and the Houthis launching symbolic retaliations with dwindling resources
Iran deciding that if everyone thinks they want a bomb, they might as well build one properly
Economic collapse within Iran destabilising the regime, or radicalising it further

But a full nuclear conflagration? Highly unlikely. Iran was close to the bomb, but “close” isn’t “capable,” and they’ve now been knocked several steps back. More plausibly, we may be watching the slow disintegration of the Islamic Republic, not unlike Syria or Libya, though with key differences. Iran is more politically mature and culturally cohesive. A fall could still be catastrophic, but not necessarily chaotic in the same mould.

And do not ignore Israel’s own trajectory, increasingly authoritarian, internally divided, and morally compromised. If Iran’s reckoning is nigh, Israel’s own day of judgement may follow sooner than its leaders imagine.

A high-stakes gamble with no winners

Israel’s attack combines genuine security concerns with strategic opportunism and political theatre, the Middle Eastern equivalent of juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle. Whether it delays Iran’s nuclear ambitions or accelerates them remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the region just became even more volatile, proving that when it comes to Middle Eastern geopolitics, things can always get worse.

We are watching a grand performance unfold on an increasingly fragile stage. The audience is global. The script is unwritten. And the curtain has not fallen yet.

For now, the world watches with the nervous anticipation of spectators at a fireworks factory fire, hoping for containment but preparing for spectacular disaster. The next moves by all parties will determine whether this becomes another managed crisis or the spark that ignites something far worse.

Resources

Is Iran as close to building a nuclear weapon as Netanyahu claims? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/13/is-iran-as-close-to-building-a-nuclear-weapon-as-netanyahu-claims
Iran carried out implosion tests for nuclear weapons development, IAEA reports https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-857003
Pentagon pizza monitor predicted ‘busy night’ ahead of Israel’s attack on Iran https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/13/pentagon-pizza-delivery-israel-iran-attack
Why Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear sites https://m.economictimes.com/news/new-updates/iran-israel-war-why-israel-bombed-irans-nuclear-sites-and-what-it-means-for-global-security-oil-and-trade/articleshow/121817049.cms
How the world is reacting to Israel’s attacks on Iran https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/13/how-the-world-is-reacting-to-israel-attacks-on-iran-nuclear-military-sites
Israel’s air might and Iran’s nuclear bunkers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/13/israels-air-might-and-irans-nuclear-bunkers-may-make-for-lengthy-conflict
Why did Israel strike Iran? https://www.npr.org/2025/06/13/nx-s1-5432480/israel-iran-war-trump
Energy and geopolitical impacts of Iran-Israel conflict https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/qa-on-the-potential-energy-and-geopolitical-impacts-of-irans-attacks-on-israel/
Iran update: Israeli strikes on Iran https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-special-edition-israeli-strikes-iran-june-12-2025
Tracking the Israel-Iran war https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa/2025/06/13/tracking-the-israel-iran-war
Oil market impact of Iran-Israel conflict https://discoveryalert.com.au/news/geopolitical-tensions-oil-markets-iran-israel-impact-2025/

How democracy, populism, and bureaucracy are unravelling the Dutch legal tradition

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In De onvoltooide rechtsstaat (The Unfinished Rule of Law), published on 4 June 2025 to mark his retirement from the Dutch Supreme Court, Ybo Buruma offers a sweeping yet pointed dissection of the Netherlands’ legal journey, and its current disintegration. Part historical reflection, part polemic, the book contends that the Dutch rule of law, once a source of pride, is now under threat from populism, political short-termism, and the perilous belief that majority rule is justice enough.

From 1813 to 2025: legal history via children’s literature

Buruma charts the evolution of Dutch legal culture from the post-Napoleonic reforms of 1813 to today’s algorithmic judiciary, and he does so through an unexpected lens: six classic Dutch children’s books. Each serves as a mirror to societal shifts, how ideas of authority, liberty, and fairness have morphed over time. The device is eccentric, but disarmingly effective. He draws, for instance, a line from the colonial overtones of Afke’s Tiental to today’s reparations debates, or from the honour-bound heroism of De brief voor de koning to the creeping erosion of judicial independence.

Running through it all is a distinction that is neither new nor yet widely understood: the difference between rule by law (law as a tool of power) and rule of law (law as a constraint on power). Since 9/11, Buruma argues, the Netherlands has leaned ever further into the former. From mass surveillance to emergency decrees and the now-infamous toeslagenaffaire, the system appears increasingly content to trample individuals in service of bureaucratic efficiency or political convenience.

Populism, PVV, and the ‘will of the people’ problem

Buruma saves his most barbed commentary for Geert Wilders and the PVV. Their manifesto proposals, banning the Quran, shuttering mosques, and demanding “Dutch courts for Dutch citizens”, are, in his view, outright assaults on the rule of law. He reprises a controversial 2007 op-ed comparing Wilders’ rhetoric to Mussolini, hardly a diplomatic move during his Supreme Court nomination at the time, and unlikely to have mellowed in reception today.

But he doesn’t stop with the far right. Buruma notes that even establishment figures like Mark Rutte have played fast and loose with legal norms, from pandemic-era emergency rule-making to the government’s refusal to enforce court rulings on climate targets. The rot, he suggests, is bipartisan.

His most provocative claim is that democracy and the rule of law are not natural allies. Hungary and Poland serve as case studies: countries where elected majorities have hollowed out legal institutions while claiming to represent “the people.” “A democracy can wring its own neck,” he quips, a line that will no doubt inflame the PVV’s majoritarian enthusiasts.

Controversies and contradictions

Buruma’s political neutrality has long been a matter of debate. Wilders opposed his 2011 court appointment due to prior involvement with the Labour Party (PvdA), and detractors may seize on this book as confirmation of latent bias. Buruma is unapologetic. He argues that judicial independence doesn’t require muteness in the face of democratic backsliding.

Surprisingly, he offers mild praise for Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract (NSC) party, which has pushed for a “rule of law declaration” in coalition negotiations. It’s one of the few instances in the book where politics is presented as part of the solution rather than the problem.

A manual for resistance, or an elegy?

At 544 pages, De onvoltooide rechtsstaat is hardly breezy reading. But it carries the urgency of someone who knows where the fault lines lie, and sees them widening. Buruma paints a picture of a legal system undermined by polarisation, apathy, and techno-bureaucratic drift. Whether it galvanises reform or serves merely as a final warning depends on whether the Netherlands is still interested in completing the project it began over two centuries ago.

Details:

Author: Ybo Buruma
Title: De Onvoltooide rechtsstaat
Publisher: Prometheus
Formats: Hardcover (€39.99), E-book (€23.99)
Release date: 4 June 2025

The theology of territory and power

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The idea that land is a “God-given” right has been the ultimate trump card for rulers, conquerors, and elites for centuries. Whether through feudal oaths, biblical covenants, or nationalist manifestos, the claim of divine or hereditary entitlement has shaped empires, sparked wars, and left millions dispossessed. This article traces how these narratives evolved, from medieval Europe’s fiefs to the Zionist Promised Land, from the Doctrine of Discovery to modern ethnonationalism, and asks: who really benefits from heavenly real estate deals?

Feudalism: Divine right as a bureaucratic hack

In medieval Europe, feudalism wasn’t just a system, it was a vibe. Kings, lacking bureaucracies, outsourced governance to nobles, who swore oaths of loyalty in exchange for land. The catch? Everyone pretended this was God’s will. William the Conqueror, for instance, claimed all England as his “divine right” after 1066, redistributing it to Norman lords who, in turn, demanded fealty from knights and serfs. The Church sanctified this hierarchy, preaching that social order was ordained, convenient for nobles collecting rents from peasants who couldn’t read the fine print on their celestial lease.

Global twist: Japan’s shogunate mimicked this with daimyos (warlords) ruling fiefs under the emperor’s nominal divine authority, while Ethiopian Ras lords used Orthodox Christian theology to justify land grabs.

Conditional covenants and colonialism

Biblical land promises have been weaponised more creatively than a Swiss Army knife. Ancient Israel’s claim to Canaan was framed as a divine reward, if they obeyed God’s laws (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). Fast-forward to 19th-century Zionism, and the same narrative justified displacing Palestinian fellahin (peasants), despite the Bible’s own caveat: “the land is Mine; you are but foreigners living in it” (Leviticus 25:23).

Spanish conquistadors cited the Doctrine of Discovery (1493) to seize indigenous lands in the Americas, arguing that non-Christians couldn’t own property, a divine loophole that enriched the Crown and the Vatican. Meanwhile, Boer settlers in South Africa invoked a “chosen people” myth to justify apartheid, blending Calvinism with land enclosures.

The VIP lounge of history

The label “chosen” has been slapped on more groups than a discount bin. Medieval nobles claimed divine favour to hoard land; Puritan colonists called themselves a “city upon a hill” while expelling Native Americans; and Rwanda’s pre-colonial Tutsi elite used Hamitic myths to frame themselves as born rulers.

Irony alert: These claims often backfired. France’s nobility lost their heads after the Revolution proved “divine right” wasn’t bulletproof. Similarly, Liberia’s Americo-Liberian elite, who styled themselves as Africa’s “chosen” saviours, were toppled in 1980 by those they’d excluded.

From enclosures to ethnostates

Feudalism never died, it just got a rebranding. England’s Enclosure Acts (18th century) privatised common lands, pushing peasants into factories while landlords cashed in, a move Adam Smith called “improvement” (read: eviction). Today, tech billionaires buy up New Zealand bunkers, echoing medieval lords retreating to castles during plagues.

21st-century twists: India’s caste system still ties Dalits to landless labour, while Israel’s mizrahi Jews protest Ashkenazi elites controlling most land, proving divine hierarchies outlive their heavenly mandates.

When the serfs strike back

Peasants weren’t always docile. England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt saw rebels torch manorial records shouting, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”. Mexico’s Zapatistas reclaimed indigenous lands under the slogan “¡Tierra y Libertad!”, mocking Porfirio Díaz’s feudal haciendas. Even the Bible got subverted: liberation theologians in Latin America reimagined Exodus as a manifesto for land reform.

My conclusion

The “God-given” land narrative seems to be the ultimate flex: divine, unassailable, and suspiciously profitable for those invoking it. Yet history shows these claims are less about celestial deeds and more about power, often crumbling when the oppressed stop believing in the paperwork. As Karl Marx dryly noted, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The next time someone cites a birthright, I will ask: Which god, and where’s the receipt?

Resources

Feudalism’s global variants: World History Encyclopedia https://www.worldhistory.org/Feudalism/
Biblical land claims vs. reality: Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism
Doctrine of Discovery’s legacy: Springer https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-81881-4_2
Modern land grabs: Social Studies Help https://socialstudieshelp.com/economics/feudalism-as-an-economic-system-land-labor-and-lords/
Peasant revolts: BBC Bitesize https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zct4r2p

Disclaimer

I consider myself spiritual, though not religious. I see life as part of a great cosmic loop. I’m drawn to the patterns that shape us, not to doctrines. If that sounds more Sufi than Sunday school, you’re probably right. This piece touches on unintended religious consequences, not with hostility, but curiosity. Patterns don’t need permission to repeat. We can still learn from them.

From animistic whispers to algorithmic deities

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Humanity has always stared into the void and asked, “Why are we here?”, usually followed by, “And who’s responsible for all this?” Whether whispered to trees, inscribed in sacred texts, or processed through quantum servers, the search for meaning has been relentless, imaginative, and often contradictory. What follows is a sweeping tour through the shifting landscapes of belief, from stone age spirits to silicon soulcraft. Along the way, we explore not only what people believed, but how those beliefs evolved, adapted, and occasionally exploded in dramatic fashion.

Speaking with shadows

Long before anyone considered branding a deity, early humans lived in a world saturated with spirit. Trees murmured secrets, rivers carried intentions, and thunderclouds held grudges. This animistic worldview wasn’t superstition so much as survival, it made sense to attribute agency to the world when everything from tigers to berries had potentially fatal consequences.

Animism offered no central gods, no doctrines, just an ongoing dialogue with the landscape. It was radically decentralised, entirely local, and highly personal. It made the world feel less random, though no less dangerous. In animism, every crackle of fire or flicker of wind might be a whisper from another world, or, more likely, the weather.

From tribal rites to city gods

Once humans decided to settle down, agriculture, cities, tax collectors, the spiritual economy needed central management. Enter the pantheon: gods of sun, rain, war, and fertility, each with a clear remit and a divine HR department in the form of priesthoods. Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and later Greeks and Romans each crafted elaborate divine bureaucracies to match their political ones.

Religion now served as infrastructure. Temples stabilised economies, rituals reinforced hierarchy, and divine wrath ensured civic obedience. If animism was a jazz ensemble, polytheism was a full-blown orchestra, structured, professional, and prone to the occasional sacrificial crescendo.

The invention of cosmic exclusivity

At some point, humans had a theological epiphany: what if there were only one god, and he had very strong opinions? The rise of monotheism brought both spiritual clarity and geopolitical tension. With Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the divine was no longer a scattered boardroom but a singular CEO with universal jurisdiction.

This exclusivity came with both comfort and peril. A single moral order gave coherence to life, but also invited holy wars over brand authenticity. These monotheistic traditions built impressive intellectual and ethical architectures, though not without some spectacular internal disputes. Theological nuance often led to heresy trials, because nothing says “peace on Earth” like inquisitorial committees. Not to mention the witch trials.

Spiritual revolutions on parallel tracks

Around 800 to 200 BCE, something extraordinary happened. Across the civilised world, without apparent contact, entire civilisations underwent spiritual revolutions. In India, the Upanishads delved into cosmic unity and self-realisation. China offered Confucian ethics and Daoist surrender. In Persia, Zoroaster split the universe into good and evil with impressive finality. And the Hebrew prophets got serious about justice.

This Axial Age reoriented human consciousness towards introspection, ethical living, and metaphysical speculation. It laid the groundwork for nearly every major religion that followed. These shifts weren’t slow, they exploded. In evolutionary terms, it was less adaptation, more spontaneous mutation.

Empires of the inner life

If the Axial Age offered ideas, Christianity and Islam turned them into global civilisations. Christianity repurposed Roman infrastructure to spread the gospel with evangelical zeal (and eventual imperial backing). Islam, meanwhile, emerged as both a spiritual and political force, uniting disparate tribes into an empire fuelled by both revelation and rigorous law.

Both traditions showed remarkable adaptability. Christianity absorbed pagan festivals and Greek philosophy; Islam became both the guardian of Aristotle and the seedbed of algebra. These faiths weren’t static, they were laboratories of theological innovation, legal reasoning, and artistic splendour. They also fought each other often, sometimes over theology, sometimes over Jerusalem, and frequently over everything else.

The reformation and its unintended consequences

Fast-forward to the 16th century: Martin Luther nails a list of complaints to a church door, and Europe promptly sets itself on fire. The Protestant Reformation was less a doctrinal dispute than a religious earthquake, powered by printing presses, political opportunism, and very fed-up peasants.

What emerged was a fractured spiritual landscape: Catholicism doubling down at the Council of Trent, Protestantism splintering into dozens of sects, and an early taste of secularism creeping into the public sphere. Religious authority was no longer automatic, it had to compete. Faith, once collective, was becoming personal. And in the background, science was beginning to ask awkward questions.

Enlightenment and the secular detour

The Enlightenment replaced divine revelation with reason, ushering in an era where the universe was less sacred text and more mechanism. Religion didn’t vanish, but it lost its monopoly on truth. God, to many thinkers, was no longer a micromanager but a distant watchmaker, or simply redundant.

Deism offered a polite nod to divinity, but the real action was in rationalism, empiricism, and revolutions (American, French, industrial). Some found this liberating; others, spiritually anaemic. Either way, the sacred was on the back foot, and human reason was having its moment.

The neo-Darwinian reckoning

Darwin’s grand theory, once the unchallenged orthodoxy of biology, now finds itself in a quiet revolution, not from creationists, but from evolutionary biologists themselves. While natural selection remains a powerful tool, the neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis” is cracking at the seams.

The fossil record still refuses to behave. The infamous “missing links” haven’t turned up in satisfying quantities, and palaeontologists increasingly concede that change often comes in bursts, punctuated equilibrium, not slow trickles.

Meanwhile, molecular biology has caused a few red-faced reshufflings. DNA-based phylogenies often contradict those based on physical features. Why? It’s unclear, but it makes homology a shakier pillar.

Mutations, the supposed engine of change, are mostly boring, broken, or fatal. Very few create useful new features. A nd let’s not talk about “junk DNA”, once dismissed as evolutionary detritus, now revealed to be largely functional.

Faced with these problems, scientists are branching out: epigenetics, self-organisation, and even information theory are now part of the mix. Darwinism isn’t dead, but its monopoly is well and truly over. Evolution, like religion, appears far messier than the tidy textbook versions suggest.

Key evolutionary drivers in religious development

If biology has moved beyond neo-Darwinism, so too can the study of religion. Traditional models that imagine religious change as gradual cultural selection fall apart when faced with real history, which is full of sudden upheavals, ideological mutations, and theological black swans.

Religious systems evolve not through inch-by-inch reform but dramatic phase transitions. The Axial Age, the Protestant Reformation, and Pentecostalism’s 20th-century surge all reflect punctuated equilibria. Environmental pressures, war, inequality, technology, trigger rapid changes. It’s less adaptation, more speciation.

Like genes, religious traditions contain latent possibilities, “doctrinal alleles,” if you will. The same text can yield Wahhabism or Sufism depending on historical context. Liberation Theology and Quaker pacifism both emerge from the Bible, suggesting extraordinary epigenetic flexibility in belief systems.

Religious innovations aren’t random, they solve cultural problems. The Protestant work ethic addressed salvation anxiety; the Bhakti movement challenged caste; Scientology wrapped pop psychology in space opera for Cold War America. Cognitive science shows that costly rituals (tithing, dietary laws) foster in-group cohesion, making them evolutionarily sticky.

And just like those “junk” rituals you thought had no function, well, they do. Animal sacrifice, dietary codes, chanting, they persist because they serve hidden neurological and social roles. Much like regulatory genes, they can lie dormant and re-emerge when conditions demand.

Most baffling to materialist explanations are transrational experiences, mystical states, awe, self-transcendence. Why are people willing to die for abstract beliefs? Possibly because religion hijacks kinship instincts, offering a tribal intensity for metaphysical ideas.

Digital gods and synthetic salvation

As if things weren’t strange enough, enter artificial intelligence. In the 21st century, spirituality meets machine learning in a curious convergence of ancient longing and silicon cunning. Chatbots offer priest-like counsel, meditation apps promise algorithmic enlightenment, and some techno-utopians whisper of uploading consciousness to escape death entirely. Religion, once earthbound and dusty, now plays in virtual temples.

AI-driven spirituality isn’t just novelty, it’s a natural extension of religious evolution. As with previous changes, the conditions are ripe: social fragmentation, ecological dread, and a growing mistrust in institutions. Into the void steps synthetic prophecy.

Some use AI to model sacred texts, generating new psalms or reconstructing lost scriptures. Others attempt to train AI on moral philosophy, producing “ethical engines” that are, in theory, more impartial than fallible humans. Naturally, these endeavours raise thorny questions: Can the sacred be programmed? Can algorithms experience awe?

Perhaps more provocatively, AI may serve as a metaphor for divinity: an invisible intelligence, omnipresent, unknowable, yet responsive. Or it may become the object of devotion itself, our Prometheus in the cloud.

What’s clear is that spirituality is not retreating. It’s morphing, digitising, and possibly fracturing. Whether this results in deeper meaning or just well-branded transcendence remains to be seen. But the trend is unmistakable: the divine now speaks JavaScript, proof that even the sacred is not safe from callback hell and npm dependency spirals.

Evolution and transcendence, still unresolved

Religious history, much like biological evolution, refuses to follow a clean, rational trajectory. It is punctuated, improvisational, paradoxical, and occasionally absurd. But that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

The old binaries, faith vs reason, science vs spirit, are fraying. We are entering an era where religious development can be understood as a complex system: shaped by environment, cognition, culture, and, yes, something that still smells faintly of mystery.

As AI crafts its own gospels and neuroscience pokes at enlightenment, perhaps the real lesson is this: the human hunger for transcendence isn’t going anywhere. It simply reinvents itself with every upheaval.

We began whispering to trees. Now we ask our phones about the soul. And the void, as always, listens back, sometimes with a notification chime.

Instincts, plasticity, and the messy truth about nature vs. nurture

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000

The idea that creatures, humans included, are governed by hardwired instincts is a comforting one. It suggests order, predictability, and perhaps even an excuse for that inexplicable urge to hoard snacks. But biology, as usual, refuses to play along neatly. Instead, we find that so-called “instincts” are often more like rough drafts, heavily edited by experience, environment, and even the ghostly hand of epigenetics. The myth of the unshakable instinct

Take parenting. The “maternal instinct” is often invoked as if it were a biological mandate, yet plenty of first-time mothers (and fathers) report feeling like they’re winging it. Turns out, they are. Primates, including humans, learn childcare by watching others. Even rats, those paragons of instinct, improve their mothering skills with practice. Meanwhile, in the insect world, honeybee larvae fed royal jelly become queens, while their pollen-fed siblings become workers, proof that even rigid caste systems are just a meal plan away from flexibility.

Aggression, another classic “instinct,” fares no better. Yes, males of many species spar for dominance, but isolate a rat pup from rowdy peers, and it won’t magically turn into a gladiator. Even sea turtles, those instinctive navigators, rely on Earth’s magnetic field like a GPS, hardly the stuff of immutable programming.

Nature’s improvisation

If instincts aren’t quite the fixed scripts we thought, what fills the gap? Enter developmental plasticity, the body’s ability to tweak its own blueprint based on the environment:

Bird song, long held up as innate, is actually a cover version. Young finches need to hear their species’ tunes during a critical window, or they’ll botch the performance. White-crowned sparrows take it further, shunning other birds’ songs like musical snobs.
Locusts switch from solitary to swarming modes when crowded, a change so dramatic it’s like a quiet librarian morphing into a festival hooligan, all triggered by serotonin.
Daphnia, tiny crustaceans with more survival tricks than a spy novel, grow defensive spines when they smell predators. Miss the cue, and they’ll skip the armour, proving that even “instinctive” defences are negotiable.

The memory of ancestors

Here’s where it gets eerie. Some plastic changes aren’t just personal, they’re inherited. Stickleback fish exposed to predators produce jumpier offspring, as if passing down a memo: “The world is scary.” Plants nibbled by herbivores arm their seedlings with pre-emptive bitterness. These epigenetic mechanisms, chemical tags on DNA that switch genes on or off, blur the line between learned and innate. Suddenly, Lamarck’s discredited idea of inherited experience doesn’t seem so silly.

Why instincts are overrated

The real kicker? Many “instincts” might just be canalised plasticity, traits that become predictable because the environment is. Beach mice’s camouflage, for instance, may have started as a flexible response to sand colour before evolution locked it in. Meanwhile, bird embryos learn their mother’s calls before hatching, making post-birth recognition less “instinct” and more “prenatal eavesdropping.”

Even the vaunted fixed action pattern, think baby birds gaping at red dots, falls apart under scrutiny. Herring gull chicks prefer realistic parent models, but slap a stick with a red blotch near them, and they’ll still beg. Is this instinct, or just a crude heuristic in a world where most red things are beaks?

Instincts are overachieving habits

In the end, instincts look less like destiny and more like deeply ingrained habits, shaped by genes, yes, but also by experience, environment, and the ghostly whispers of ancestors. So next time someone blames their snack-hoarding on “human instinct,” feel free to counter: “Actually, that’s just your epigenetics talking. And possibly your childhood.”

Instincts on the school run

Nowhere is the myth of hardwired behaviour more charmingly dismantled than in human society. If instincts were truly fixed, we’d expect all toddlers to share toys, all teenagers to rebel in precisely the same way, and all adults to know how to merge lanes without passive aggression. Instead, we find cultural patchworks: children taught to be silent in some homes, boisterous in others; greetings ranging from firm handshakes to nose rubs; and entire nations who queue like saints beside those who treat bus stops as a contact sport.

Consider gender roles. The notion that boys are ‘naturally’ boisterous and girls inherently nurturing doesn’t hold up when you examine societies where those roles are flipped, or simply irrelevant. In Sweden, paternal leave is the norm. In the Aka people of Central Africa, men are baby-wearing champions. Biology might provide a starter kit, but it’s society that decides which parts are assembled, and whether the instructions are followed.

Culture as co-author

Culture, in this light, becomes a kind of environmental pressure, shaping not only behaviour but even biology. Studies have shown that literacy can affect how brains are wired. Musical training thickens specific brain regions. Stress alters hormonal profiles. And then there’s language: tonal languages like Mandarin demand different neural real estate than English or Finnish. None of this is preordained. It’s life experience, scaffolded by a very plastic brain.

So while evolutionary psychologists might wax lyrical about meat-gathering instincts, the issue is likely messier. We’re improvisers, borrowing from instinct, culture, memory, and a hefty dose of trial and error. Think less “genetic puppet” and more “crowdsourced jazz”.

Resources and further reading

World’s Best Dads: The Loving Fathers of the Aka Tribe in Central Africa https://talkafricana.com/worlds-best-dads-the-loving-fathers-of-the-aka-tribe-in-central-africa/
The Epigenetics Revolution https://www.iconbooks.com/ib-title/the-epigenetics-revolution/ by Nessa Carey, a user-friendly overview of how genes get tagged, toggled, and traumatised by life.
The Myth of Instinct https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/myth-of-instinct/91E62D7CFF7F1B0B7A2971C8B6E7C82D by Patrick Bateson, classic and cutting, from one of the UK’s finest ethologists.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213782/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/ by Robert Sapolsky, a 700-page masterpiece explaining why you shouted at that cyclist.
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780345408938 by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, evolutionary anthropology with teeth (and occasionally fur).
Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262039161/blueprint/ by Robert Plomin, provocative and gene-forward; not everyone agrees, which makes it even more worth reading.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/po-bronson/nurtureshock/9780446504133/ by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, research-heavy, myth-light, and refreshingly readable.
The Cultural Nature of Human Development https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-cultural-nature-of-human-development-9780195131338 by Barbara Rogoff, the choice if you’ve ever wondered why parenting books contradict each other across time zones.

United we stand (or at least, we could)

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Fungolia, a fictional European nation best known for producing bureaucrats with severe stationery addictions, national holidays dedicated to committee meetings, and the invention of the “Mutually Suspicious Cooperation Accord” ( which mostly involved not poisoning each other’s water supply). In Fungolia, difference isn’t just tolerated, it’s enshrined in law, embossed in gold, and swiftly ignored in practice.

This article is about unity. Not the fluffy kind that fits neatly on a banner at a protest you forget to attend, but the kind you earn by wading through the muck of genuine difference. In a Europe increasingly divided by wealth, history, ideology, and the collective trauma of having to agree on cheese standards, the idea of unity can feel more like a punchline than a plan.

And yet, despite the mess, or perhaps because of it, there’s something powerful in building bridges across difference. So let’s scale this thing: from the individual Fungolian, who’s just trying to survive the dinner table without starting a war, all the way to the geopolitical chessboard, where everyone’s still arguing about whether the board is even square.

Differences within

In Fungolia, it starts small. You versus your own thoughts. One part of you wants to help your neighbour fix their compost bin. The other part wants to never speak to them again after they referred to your home-brewed nettle tea as “bog juice”. Unity here isn’t about pretending to be one cohesive blob of agreeable traits, it’s about acknowledging the internal contradictions and finding a way to live with them. Preferably without setting anything on fire.

Real unity begins with psychological honesty. You hold multitudes. Sometimes those multitudes fight. That’s not a flaw; that’s a functioning brain. Learning to unify across inner differences, ambition versus rest, pride versus humility, coffee versus herbal delusion, is the foundation for everything else.

If the average Fungolian could learn to listen to their own conflicting selves without immediately constructing a national referendum, perhaps they could extend that patience outward. And yes, that includes the bit of you that secretly agrees with your uncle’s rants about bicycle lanes. Acknowledge it. Then offer it tea and a seat in the back row.

Unity in the everyday warzone

Next stop on the Fungolian Unity Tour: the household. Here, ideologies clash daily over dishes, thermostats, and who left the back door open. The home, as any anthropologist with a death wish would tell you, is the frontline of difference.

Unity in a home doesn’t mean perfect agreement. In Fungolia, it means functional chaos. Families there embrace a style of domestic diplomacy known as “passive agreement”, a complex manoeuvre involving raised eyebrows, strategic tea offerings, and the occasional emotional hostage negotiation over dinner.

Real unity at home is forged through active engagement with difference. You don’t have to love your housemate’s vegan tripe stew, but you might learn something from why they cook it. Maybe it’s ancestral. Maybe it’s revenge. Either way, listening is the point.

Embracing unity at home often means lowering the volume on your righteousness and increasing your curiosity. Your teenage child thinks capitalism is a prison? Don’t panic. Ask them which corner they’d redecorate. You might even find a shared vision under the rubble of mutual misunderstanding.

Meetings, memos, and mayhem

Enter the Fungolian workplace. An open-plan inferno of differing egos, clashing priorities, and at least one person who still thinks “Reply All” is a form of self-expression.

In theory, organisations want diversity. In practice, they want people who think differently but act exactly the same. True unity in an organisation isn’t achieved by enforcing uniformity, it’s achieved by creating spaces where disagreement isn’t seen as a threat, but as a source of insight. Even if that insight comes from Darren in Accounting, who only communicates through Excel macros.

Fungolia has pioneered “strategic disunity protocols,” wherein teams are required to disagree at least once a week before making any decisions. It slows things down wonderfully, but surprisingly, decisions made under such conditions tend to stick. Why? Because everyone was heard. Or at least yelled equally.

Unity at work thrives on well-held tensions. The visionary and the realist. The dreamer and the documentation gremlin. The loud and the listener. It’s not kumbaya, it’s constructive collision. Organisations that treat difference as a design feature, not a flaw, are the ones still standing when the quarterly nonsense rolls in.

Alliance across absurdity

Now, we ascend to the majestic absurdity of international cooperation, where Fungolia shines brightest. After all, it was a Fungolian diplomat who once said, “Let’s all agree to disagree, publicly, in twenty-seven languages, with matching stationery.”

Europe is a patchwork quilt of empires, grudges, and fondness for overcomplicated pastries. Yet somehow, it hasn’t torn itself entirely apart. Credit where credit’s due: the EU, despite its flaws, is a monumental experiment in holding difference together with bureaucracy and blind optimism.

But we’re at a breaking point. The rise of autocracy, war on the continent, economic inequality, climate breakdown, and digital colonisation are stretching the seams of this quilt so far they now function more like stress fractures.

So what could unity look like?

Imagine Fungolia proposing a radical new alliance: cities from the EU, Africa, and the Middle East cooperating not just on border control, but on mutual aid infrastructure. Centres that provide housing, language education, and medical care to displaced people, built together, staffed together, governed together. Less Fortress Europe, more Neighbourhood Watch on a global scale. And fewer people drowning and/or taken advantage of by traffickers.

Or consider climate adaptation. Instead of hoarding carbon credits and wagging fingers, Fungolia might team up with Bangladesh, Kenya, and Indonesia to trial floating farms, regenerative cities, and distributed energy networks. Not charity, collaboration. Because nothing unites quite like shared existential dread.

There’s also room for cultural diplomacy with teeth. A pan-European media cooperative that funds investigative journalism and artistic collaboration across ideological lines, from Moldovan poets to Catalan documentarians. Built to counter both Kremlin-style disinformation and Silicon Valley monoculture, it would remind us that culture can stitch together what politics unravels.

And yes, in the darkest recesses of the Unity Labs of Fungolia, a project is underway to replace the G7 with a new coalition called “The Mostly Functional Thirteen”, a rotating council of unlikely partners (think Estonia and Ghana co-chairing a committee on AI ethics). Because frankly, the old guard is out of ideas, and the world deserves better scripts.

Unity at this scale requires what Fungolians call optimistic realism. Expect the worst, but organise for the best. Keep the doors open, even when someone’s shouting through them. Especially then.

From compost to cosmos

So what have we learned from our grand tour through Fungolia?

That unity isn’t about sameness, it’s about solidarity in motion. About choosing, every day, to stay in dialogue, even when your inner voices are arguing, your partner has hidden the remote, your team is a mess, and the international order is being rearranged by billionaires and Bond villains.

Difference isn’t the enemy. Indifference is.

Unity across difference requires courage, patience, and a willingness to look ridiculous now and then. It’s compost, not marble. It breaks down. It stinks. But give it time and care, and it becomes the thing everything else grows from.

Fungolia may be fictional, but its lessons are not. In a world increasingly seduced by neat divisions and easy enemies, building messy, durable, dynamic unity is one of the most radical acts still available to us.

We could take it.

Israel’s far-right coalition and its consequences

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Meet the key players

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, now in his sixth term, is a master of political survival. His current tenure is propped up by far-right allies, a necessity given his ongoing corruption trials (fraud, bribery, and breach of trust). His primary objectives are maintaining power, weakening the judiciary to shield himself from legal accountability, and balancing the demands of his extremist coalition partners while attempting to project an image of statesmanship to the outside world.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted inciter to racism and disciple of the banned extremist Meir Kahane, Ben-Gvir has risen from fringe provocateur to National Security Minister. His tenure has been marked by calls for Jewish supremacy, the arming of settlers, and inflammatory visits to the Al-Aqsa compound, actions that have repeatedly escalated tensions. His resignation in January 2025 over a Gaza ceasefire deal (and subsequent return in March) underscores his role as a destabilising force in Israeli politics.

Bezalel Smotrich, a settler ideologue who blends religious zeal with bureaucratic efficiency, Smotrich wields unprecedented control over West Bank settlements as Finance Minister and de facto overseer of Palestinian civilian affairs. His vision includes annexation, mass Palestinian emigration, and the imposition of Torah-based governance. Unlike Ben-Gvir’s theatrics, Smotrich advances his agenda through legislative and administrative manoeuvres, making him arguably the more dangerous of the two.

What do they want?

Netanyahu’s priorities are, apparently, survival, first and foremost. His coalition depends on far-right support, meaning he must accommodate their demands, whether expanding settlements, undermining the judiciary, or prolonging the Gaza war. His balancing act is increasingly precarious, as international patience wears thin and domestic protests grow.

Ben-Gvir’s demands probably a maximalist approach to security, meaning more guns for settlers, harsher crackdowns on Palestinians, and the erosion of legal restraints on state violence. His resignation over the Gaza ceasefire was performative, he returned once hostilities resumed, proving his influence hinges on perpetual conflict.

Smotrich’s vision seems to be a Greater Israel achieved through bureaucratic annexation. By controlling settlement expansion and West Bank administration, he is methodically erasing the Green Line. His theological belief in divine redemption frames these policies as inevitable, making compromise unthinkable.

Where is this heading?

Short-term: the war in Gaza grinds on, with Netanyahu’s coalition rejecting permanent ceasefires. The West Bank simmers under increased settler violence and administrative strangulation of Palestinian governance. Meanwhile, Israel’s international isolation deepens, with even traditional allies like the US and EU growing critical.

Long-term: a de facto one-state reality, where Palestinians live under varying degrees of disenfranchisement. Smotrich’s annexation-by-stealth and Ben-Gvir’s ethno-nationalist rhetoric make a two-state solution impossible. The question is whether Israel can sustain this path without triggering either internal revolt or crippling sanctions.

Can they ignore International backlash?

Why they think they can: unconditional US support (particularly under Trump), global distractions (Ukraine, US-China rivalry), and domestic political calculations all embolden them. Netanyahu’s coalition prioritises settler votes over diplomacy, and the far-right dismisses criticism as “anti-Israel bias”.

Why they might be wrong: economic fallout (credit downgrades, trade restrictions) and security risks (Hezbollah, ICC warrants) are mounting. The Abraham Accords are fraying, and even staunch allies like the UK are imposing sanctions on violent settlers. The facade of impunity is cracking.

A government on borrowed time

Netanyahu’s coalition is a marriage of convenience between a desperate leader and ideological extremists. Their policies, annexation, perpetual war, and the erosion of democracy, are unsustainable. The only question is whether collapse comes from within (protests, military dissent) or from external pressure (sanctions, diplomatic isolation). Either way, the spiral continues.

Resources

Haaretz https://www.haaretz.com, for when you want a dose of Israeli self-criticism.
‘God gave us Israel, all of it’, Along the Green Line: episode 1, video https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/jun/03/god-gave-us-israel-all-of-it-along-the-green-line-episode-1-video, British snark pairs well with Middle Eastern disasters.
Al Jazeera Israel-Palestine conflict https://www.aljazeera.com/tag/israel-palestine-conflict/, for the perspective Netanyahu would rather you ignore.
The Nation, “Israel Is Spiraling” https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-netanyahu-smotrich-ben-gvir-collapse/, analysis of Israel’s far-right government and its genocidal rhetoric.
Wikipedia, 37th Government of Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-seventh_government_of_Israel, overview of Netanyahu’s coalition and its far-right members.
The Washington Institute, “A Narrow Government Threatens US-Israel Ties” https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/narrow-government-ben-gvir-and-smotrich-threatens-us-israel-ties, on how Ben-Gvir and Smotrich endanger bilateral relations.
Crisis Group, “Israel’s Winning Coalition” https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/israels-winning-coalition, the long rightward shift in Israeli politics.
Al Jazeera, “A Coalition of Conscience Must Rise” https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/5/30/a-coalition-of-conscience-must-rise-to-stop-israels-genocidal-war-on-gaza, international calls to halt Israel’s Gaza campaign.
Wikipedia, Itamar Ben-Gvir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir, biography and political trajectory of the far-right minister.
BBC, “Netanyahu’s Hard-Line Government Takes Office” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64115141, initial reactions to Israel’s most right-wing government.
The Atlantic, “The Two Extremists Driving Israel’s Policy” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/05/israel-policy-smotrich-bengvir-palestine/682986/, comparative analysis of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s ideologies.
France 24, “Netanyahu Forms Right-Wing Government” https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20221221-israel-s-netanyahu-forms-new-government-setting-the-stage-for-his-return-to-power, early assessment of the coalition’s implications.

Russia’s youth exodus and the Kremlin’s desperate crackdown

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Note: All personal names have been anonymised unless the individual has a verifiable public presence and wishes to be visible. I choose to run risks; I will not make that choice for others.

He was 21 and already battling high blood pressure. His doctors confirmed it. His exemption papers were in order. But that didn’t stop them from coming for him. One morning in spring 2025, he opened his door to find officers holding a digital summons. No discussion. No delay. He was on a bus to a training facility by nightfall. Within a week, he was at the Ukrainian border, terrified, untrained, and furious.

Stories like his are no longer rare in Russia. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, hundreds of thousands of young men have fled, gone underground, or tried to disappear into the folds of the system. Two waves of exodus, first in late 2022, then again in 2025, have gutted Russia’s young workforce and exposed growing cracks in the state’s ability to maintain both war effort and internal cohesion. If the first wave was panic, the second is exhaustion.

Behind the headlines lies a desperate truth: the Kremlin is running out of people, and out of time.

Tactics of evasion: how Russians avoid the draft

Medical exemptions, increasingly ignored

In 2022, many hoped that having the right medical paperwork might shield them. Hypertension, flat feet, epilepsy, these were once reliable ways out. But by 2025, deferments have thinned to a whisper. Even those with serious conditions are being swept up. Courts, once a faint hope, now serve more as confirmation of futility than sources of relief.

A 24-year-old man in Samara broke down in court after his appeal against conscription was dismissed, despite multiple medical diagnoses. “They didn’t even look at my file,” he said afterwards. “The judge just asked if I had ever posted anti-war content.”

Physical escape, no longer simple

In 2022, train stations in southern Russia teemed with men in their twenties, clutching overpriced tickets to Kazakhstan or Georgia. Social media was full of posts asking about border crossings and visa rules. “How much to get to Almaty?” “Can I still cross at Verkhny Lars?”

By 2025, border closures and digital tracking have narrowed escape routes. Armenia and Georgia remain accessible, but barely. Border guards now demand digital clearance, and many find their internal passports marked with silent bans. A young man trying to flee via Sochi in early 2025 found his internal travel permissions revoked in real time. “It was like the wall closed behind me while I was still in the queue.”

Underground resistance, break a leg, save a life

In cities like Yekaterinburg and Rostov, a new black market thrives: fake diagnoses, forged military papers, even brokers arranging staged injuries. Some young men go further. A quietly spreading Telegram channel gives advice on how to “accidentally” break a limb, what to say in a hospital, and how to act mentally unfit without triggering psychiatric detention.

Others never get the chance. Conscription officers increasingly offer “voluntary contracts” under duress. Men are lured into military offices for paperwork checks, then told they’ve already signed their deployment orders. Many are shipped to volatile regions like Belgorod within 48 hours, without ever seeing a lawyer.

The Kremlin’s crackdown: closing the loopholes

Digital conscription: your phone is your draft card

Launched in late 2023, Russia’s digital conscription system tied military duty directly to the state services portal, Gosuslugi. Miss a summons, and you’re instantly marked non-compliant. Travel bans are applied automatically. Your bank account might be frozen. You’ll be blocked from buying property or taking out a loan.

The new system, centralised under the Ministry of Digital Development, now links school records, tax data, and mobile numbers. Even VPNs can’t fully evade detection. In 2025, several men were detained at internet cafes after their geolocation flagged them as draft evaders using foreign IPs.

Raids and forced conscription

In Moscow alone, human rights monitors reported over 3,000 detentions in the first quarter of 2025. Police raided gyms, language schools, and even gaming cafés. One 26-year-old was stopped at a metro station, shoved into a van, and by midnight was at a training base. He was forced to swear the military oath with a black eye and a shaking voice.

“The raids come in waves,” said an observer from OVD-Info, the rights group. “It’s not about quotas, it’s about fear. They want men to know that any door might open onto a uniform.”

Legal threats and family pressure

Evading service now comes with fines of up to five million rubles (roughly £39,000). That’s if you’re lucky. Parents of missing conscripts have been questioned, harassed, and in some cases had their homes searched. In one documented case, an older brother was conscripted on the spot when his sibling failed to show up.

Lawyers working on draft evasion cases increasingly face intimidation themselves. Several conscription support groups have been labelled “foreign agents” or banned outright.

War fatigue and state fragility

A dwindling army

By 2025, the Kremlin’s manpower shortage has become impossible to conceal. Poorly trained conscripts are sent to the border with minimal equipment and no clear command structure. Casualty rates remain high, though independent tracking is now nearly impossible inside Russia.

The state has turned to foreigners. Recruits from Nepal, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan have been offered fast-track citizenship in exchange for service. Videos circulate of Nepali men speaking broken Russian in muddy trenches, some later found dead, their families never notified.

Public trust in freefall

Patriotic unity, once the propaganda line, now feels like a bitter joke to many. Families feel abandoned and deceived. A 20-year-old conscript’s mother described watching state TV proclaim “voluntary service” while her son sent panicked voice messages from a barracks 20km from the front. “The Kremlin lies all the time,” she said.

Even state workers, once considered a loyal base, are growing restless. Several IT specialists conscripted via digital summonses have since fled abroad or gone underground.

The economic toll

Russia’s youth flight is a slow-motion haemorrhage. Since 2022, an estimated 1.3 million skilled workers under 35 have left the country. Entire departments in tech companies and medical centres now operate remotely from Tbilisi, Yerevan, or Berlin. Universities struggle to fill postgraduate seats. The long-term blow to innovation and service provision is incalculable.

A losing battle?

The Kremlin faces a brutal dilemma: escalate repression and fuel further resistance, or soften its stance and risk military collapse. So far, it has chosen the former.

But cracks are spreading. Telegram channels for draft evasion have ballooned to hundreds of thousands of followers. Underground legal networks coordinate extraction plans. Some conscripts sent to Belgorod in early 2025 reportedly refused to follow orders, citing lack of equipment and purpose.

And always, in the background, the stories.

One 25-year-old man from Moscow, sitting on a train bound for Armenia, said simply: “I’d rather break my arm than break Ukrainians’ lives.”

Resources

Russia’s largest military call-up whips up fear among young men https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/16/russias-largest-military-call-up-whips-up-fear-among-young-men
Russia: Amnesty International declared “undesirable organization” amid escalating crackdown on dissent https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/05/russia-amnesty-international-declared-undesirable-organization-amid-escalating-crackdown-on-dissent/
Ukraine war: Russia toughens up draft law to round-up more people for the frontlines https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-russia-toughens-up-draft-law-to-round-up-more-people-for-the-frontlines-233048
Silence Matters: Self-Censorship and War in Russia https://www.ponarseurasia.org/silence-matters-self-censorship-and-war-in-russia/
One year after partial mobilisation, Russians avoiding the draft speak out https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-mobilisation-draft-avoid-men-speak/

Battle-tested and market-ready: how the arms trade profits from war zones

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In September 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Defence released a promotional video for its Iron Sting precision mortar system. The footage, taken from a drone, shows a building in Gaza being obliterated. It isn’t merely a military demonstration; it’s a sales pitch. The message? Our weapons work. And they work because we’ve used them, on real people, in real places, with very real consequences.

At arms fairs like DSEI in London, the phrase “combat-proven” is more than sales patter; it’s a mark of credibility. The battlefield doubles as showroom. And the uncomfortable question is this: Is it morally, legally, or politically justifiable to turn war zones into testing grounds for profit?

Gaza as a weapons laboratory

Gaza, under blockade and densely populated, has become one of the world’s most brutally consistent testing grounds for Israeli military hardware. Companies like Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries benefit directly from each IDF incursion.

When Hermes 900 drones were deployed over Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, they weren’t just carrying out surveillance or airstrikes. They were collecting data for future sales. Within months, over 20 countries had placed orders. Their “combat debut” wasn’t a side note, it was the selling point.

The cost of this field testing is overwhelmingly borne by civilians. An estimated 37% of the 2,200 Palestinians killed in 2014 died in drone strikes. In the marketing material, this human toll becomes a metric of “performance under pressure.”

Arms fairs: showcasing war as a product

If Gaza is the laboratory, arms fairs are the showroom. DSEI, hosted biennially in London, is a vast trade carnival where governments peddle the latest “solutions” to visiting delegations from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other regulars on the airstrike circuit.

Israeli stands are often festooned with products “proven” in Gaza. At the 2023 fair, Elbit proudly promoted its Hermes drone line as “combat-proven.” UVision, in a particularly grotesque flourish, handed out chocolates shaped like its Hero-series “suicide drones.” In the arms world, even desserts are weaponised.

These events are walled off from public scrutiny. Protesters are kept at bay by police lines. Inside, VIPs roam freely under armed guard while deals are made behind closed doors. War is packaged as innovation, and marketing masquerades as strategy.

Legal and ethical grey zones

Surely such commodification of conflict is tightly controlled? Not quite. Israel is not a signatory to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which aims to prevent arms sales to human rights violators. As a result, Israeli arms exports operate with fewer formal constraints.

Even ATT signatories find workarounds. The UK and Ireland, for instance, have repeatedly approved “dual-use” exports, goods with both civilian and military applications, that quietly find their way into Israeli weapon systems. In 2022, Ireland approved such exports to firms with clear military portfolios. In 2024, despite mounting evidence of war crimes in Gaza, contracts with Israeli defence firms doubled.

Official rhetoric hasn’t helped. In 2023, an Israeli minister infamously referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, a dehumanising frame that turns civilians into unwilling R&D subjects. Legal safeguards become rhetorical wallpaper. UN resolutions, such as the 2024 call to halt arms transfers to Israel, generate headlines but rarely consequences. The UK approved over $169 million in arms licences in the months that followed. Realpolitik, as ever, outpaces principle.

Corporate complicity and government collusion

The arms trade operates through a tight feedback loop between industry and government. In the UK, the revolving door is especially glaring. Politicians like Liz Truss, who once greenlit arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen, now work for firms advising weapons manufacturers. It’s less a career path than a choreography.

Ireland tells a similar story. Despite strong public opposition, the Irish government deepened ties with Israeli defence firms throughout 2024. Contracts with Aeronautics Defence Industries surged, even as images of bombed-out flats and dead children filled the news cycle. Neutrality in name only.

Germany approved €326 million in arms exports to Israel in 2023 alone, including Leopard tanks and fighter jet components. France has sold surveillance tech and dual-use equipment with the usual ambiguity baked into the paperwork. Italy and Spain continue their dealings more discreetly, proof that ethical posturing often depends on the angle of the camera.

Legal resistance is rising. In the UK, groups like Al-Haq have launched lawsuits arguing that British-made components used in F-35s implicate the country in war crimes. French campaigners such as AFPS and ACAT-France are also taking arms companies and the state to court. Germany, meanwhile, now finds itself at the International Court of Justice, sued by Nicaragua for aiding genocide. It’s slow going, but the paper trail is building.

Resistance and alternatives

Not everyone is buying in. Across Europe, activists are targeting the companies, governments, and logistics chains that sustain the arms trade. Palestine Action has blockaded Elbit factories, occupied offices, and disrupted operations. Their methods are direct and increasingly effective.

In Germany, BDS Berlin and Aktion Aufschrei, Stoppt den Waffenhandel have mobilised against Rheinmetall and others. In France, Collectif Palestine Vaincra and Stop Arming Israel push back through protest and shareholder activism. In Italy, Rete Italiana Pace e Disarmo has even convinced dockworkers to refuse to load weapons bound for war zones. In Switzerland, the Group for a Switzerland without an Army (GSoA) continues to challenge the country’s profitable but opaque arms exports.

Legal pressure is growing. Nicaragua’s ICJ case against Germany could, if successful, set a precedent. Spanish human rights groups are demanding investigations under Law 53/2007 on arms export controls. And the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is coordinating transnational legal campaigns against manufacturers and policymakers alike.

Policy demands are also sharpening: enforce the ATT meaningfully; ban “battle-proven” advertising claims; close dual-use loopholes that allow missile parts to masquerade as weather sensors; and divest public funds from occupation-linked firms. Ireland’s ongoing financial entanglement with five such companies remains a glaring contradiction. From Scandinavian pension boards to Dutch university campuses, the call is clear: stop monetising war crimes.

Closing

What this amounts to is the industrialisation of human suffering as a marketing exercise. Every drone strike declared a “success” becomes a brochure highlight. Every civilian death becomes a bullet point in a pitch deck.

The accountability question is not rhetorical, it is procedural. Existing instruments (the Arms Trade Treaty, the ICJ, dual-use export licensing) already cover most of this conduct. The gap is enforcement, not law.

Resources

Dirty secret of Israel’s weapons exports: They’re tested on Palestinians https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab)
Arms trade with Israel, Uplift https://www.uplift.ie/arms-trade-with-israel/
Arms manufacturers use Israel’s massacres in Gaza to test new technology https://imemc.org/article/arms-manufacturers-use-israels-massacres-in-gaza-to-test-new-technology/
How to stop the arms trade, New Internationalist https://newint.org/arms/2025/how-stop-arms-trade
How top arms exporters have responded to the war in Gaza, SIPRI https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2024/how-top-arms-exporters-have-responded-war-gaza
Major jump in approved UK arms exports to Israel after Gaza ban, Middle East Eye https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/major-jump-approved-uk-arms-exports-israel-weeks-after-gaza-ban
Vatican position on Arms Trade Treaty https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/2011/documents/rc_seg-st_20110711_commercio-armi_en.html
Inside the global arms industry: what a secretive London trade fair reveals, The Conversation https://theconversation.com/inside-the-global-arms-industry-what-a-secretive-london-trade-fair-reveals-about-international-weapons-sales-227176
SIPRI Arms Transfers Database https://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) https://caat.org.uk/
Human Rights Watch, Israel/Gaza coverage https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/israel/palestine

About the Broomstick

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About the Broomstick

Welcome to The Broomstick Brief, a blog for those who suspect that the world isn’t quite as rational, peaceful, or democratic as advertised.

This is a space for untangling complexity, lifting the curtain on technocratic waffle, and occasionally poking polite fun at the collapsing scaffolding of late-stage capitalism. Here you’ll find long-form analysis, speculative scenarios, and the odd broom closet of critical thought, sweeping through the mess of geopolitics, information warfare, climate collapse, digital security, and the bureaucratic inertia that enables it all.

I take Europe seriously enough to critique it, and power seriously enough to mock it. From BRICS+ fantasies to flotilla voyages, economic sieges to surveillance sleight-of-hand, each post aims to shift the Overton window ever so slightly off its hinges.

This is not a blog for the faint of heart, nor for those seeking five-point solutions to two-thousand-year+ old problems. But if you’re partial to threads of resistance hidden in footnotes, the politics of infrastructure and broken links, or the occasional ASCII diagram of societal decay, then you’re in the right place.

Who’s behind the broom?

A systems tinkerer, threat modeller, and critical educator with a habit of tracing multi-root causes where others would rather prune symptoms. More comfortable on the command line than on a podium, but willing to write the things that ought to be said, especially when they’re inconvenient.

For 20 years I have had enough time to research things (curiosity and the drive for grounding always makes time), but hardly had time for writing. Now that I have returned home, I seem to be exploding in bottled up rants.

All views are the author’s own. Which is to say: fiercely independent, fact-grounded, and allergic to buzzwords unless used ironically.

The tyranny of tidy boxes: how master/slave binaries bodge human society

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We humans adore a simple dichotomy. It’s frightfully efficient. White or non-white. Male or female. Disabled or abled. These binaries promise neatness in a messy world, a cognitive filing system for complex humanity. Yet as philosopher Val Plumwood observed, these “master/slave” frameworks operate through five dangerously slick mechanisms: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalism, and homogenisation. The result? A society perpetually queueing at the wrong post office counter.

The five quiet engines of oppression

Plumwood’s mechanisms work like bureaucratic stealth. Backgrounding treats one identity as society’s default setting, the unmarked “normal” against which others are measured. Consider how medical textbooks historically used white male bodies as universal templates. Radical exclusion rigidly polices borders: trans folk facing scrutiny over toilet access, or mixed-race individuals pressured to “pick a side”. Incorporation defines the “slave” category purely by its relationship to the master (“disabled” meaning “needs help”). Instrumentalism reduces people to tools, like expecting minority staff to fix diversity problems unpaid. Homogenisation flattens groups: assuming all disabled people need identical ramps.

The collateral kerfuffle

The fallout includes the myth of reverse racism, where equality initiatives spark cries of “unfair!” from groups benefiting from centuries of backgrounding. It’s like complaining the deck chairs were rearranged after your yacht sank the Titanic. Homogenisation breeds absurd policies: “diverse hiring” that recruits only Oxbridge-educated minorities. Most perniciously, binaries commit identity violence by denying intersectionality. A Black woman faces compounded racism and sexism, yet policies address either “race” or “gender” separately. Her experience becomes a bureaucratic hot potato.

Small cuts, big wounds

Master/slave binaries fray fastest when pricked by daily absurdities. Take the supermarket’s “ethnic hair” aisle, where coconut oil sits quarantined from “regular” haircare as if dandruff discriminates by race. University accessibility forms offering only “wheelchair user / non-disabled” tick-boxes erase neurodivergent or deaf needs. Restaurant menus diligently mark “(v)” for vegetarian but never “(h)” for Halal. Office thermostats controlled by biologically colder men force menopausal women to smuggle desk fans. Even car park hierarchies whisper violence: “family” spaces placed nearer than disabled bays, silently ranking parenting above paralysis.

Surviving the crossfire

Picture a Black woman in a tech startup navigating racialised sexism (“You’re so articulate!”), gendered racism (assumptions she’s in HR), and class ghosts (“diversity hire” whispers). The trap? Expecting her to lead unpaid DEI workshops and educate colleagues between coding sprints.

Rebellion begins with the “Not My Circus” rule:“My KPIs focus on cloud architecture. Perhaps HR could commission consultants?”

Deploy isolated privileges: a light-skinned woman calls out colourism after ensuring darker-skinned colleagues won’t face backlash.

Redirect homogenising questions: “I speak only for myself, but Ada in legal led a review.”

Weaponise bureaucracy: “Confirming you asked me (sole female engineer) to plan the Diwali party. How does this align with my promotion goals?”

Sharpening the scalpels: precision strikes

or, How to dismantle the master’s house with his own paperclip.

The healthcare double-bind

Scenario: A woman’s menopausal symptoms are dismissed as “normal” by her GP.

Scalpel: “Could we document your decision not to investigate my palpitations? For my records.”

Why it cuts: Invokes clinical accountability. “Document” makes bureaucracy work for you.

The accent aristocracy

Scenario: A Yorkshire accent at a London firm prompts: “How quaint! Where’s that from?”

Scalpel: “A South Yorkshire vowel shift. Fascinating how dialects evolve, like RP emerging from boarding schools.”

Why it cuts: Reframes “quaint” as academic. Mentions RP’s artificial origins.

The parental presumption

Scenario: Childfree staff are excluded from “family-friendly” events.

Scalpel: Email HR: “Could future events be ‘staff & kin’ days? Avoids implying my cat is less family than Dave’s toddler.”

Why it cuts: Humour + logic. “Staff & kin” is bureaucratically elegant.

The faithless form

Scenario: A hospital form lists six Christian denominations but only “Other” for Sikh/Hindu/Buddhist.

Scalpel: Write “Sikh” in the Christian Baptist box + add: “Noting form excludes millions citizens. Shall I forward inclusive guidelines?”

Why it cuts: Forces manual re-categorisation (annoying admin) while offering “help”.

The age-ist algorithm

Scenario: Job ad requires “digital native (born after 1995)”. You’re 50.

Scalpel: Apply + attach: “My 1985 Micro certificates + 2023 AI ethics cert. ‘Native’ often overlooks adaptive expertise, no?”

Why it cuts: Proves competency while highlighting bias. PDF forces human review.

The coffee class system

Scenario: Your office “Pantry Equality Policy” prices espresso at €3.50 while instant coffee remains free.

Scalpel: Leave a neatly typed note by the machine: “Admire the transparent bean-based hierarchy! Suggest reclassifying the instant as ‘Working Class Warmth’ and the espresso as ‘Bourgeois Steam’. For audit purposes, obviously.”

Why it cuts: Exposes how petty luxuries replicate class binaries. “Audit purposes” makes it sound helpful, not hostile.

The surname shuffle

Scenario: At parent-teacher night, staff mispronounce “Chowdhury” thrice before sighing, “Can we just call you Chloe?”

Scalpel: Sweetly reply: “How thoughtful! I’ll call you ‘Brenda’ then, same energy, yes? Or we could practise ‘Chow-dhury’ for 17 seconds? I’ve timed it.” Proceeds to stare at wristwatch.

Why it cuts: Forces discomfort calculation: 17 seconds of effort vs. lifelong microaggression.

The accessibility charade

Scenario: A “wheelchair accessible” museum has a ramp leading directly to a 3-step staircase.

Scalpel: Request the manager and muse: “Marvellous installation! Is the staircase a conceptual piece on false promises? Brilliantly meta. Could I get that interpretation in writing for my DisGo blog?”

Why it cuts: Reframes their failure as “art”, demanding they endorse the fiction.

The gendered gifting

Scenario: HR distributes “wellness packs”: scented candles (women) and stress balls (men).

Scalpel: Swap yours with a male colleague’s, then email HR: “Loving Dave’s lavender candle! Really soothes my coding rage. He’s adoring the pink stress ball, says it ‘challenges his masculinity’. Shall we document these breakthrough outcomes?”

Why it cuts: Creates data-points of non-compliance. “Document” is the honey trap.

The pronoun pantomime

Scenario: Colleague mocks your email signature (“they/them”): “Bloody snowflakes! I identify as a teapot!”

Scalpel: Send a meeting invite: “Re: Teapot identity exploration, 2pm Thursday? Agenda: Assess kettle compatibility; Strategise spout maintenance; Serious question: Why does this threaten you?”

Why it cuts: Literalises their absurdity while smuggling in the lethal final line.

The universal scalpel whetstone

When binaries bite, you can choose to use the Three-Step Bourgeois Bafflement Technique™:

Mirror their absurdity verbatim (“So to clarify: you’re saying ramps should approach stairs but never replace them?”).
Reframe as bureaucratic curiosity (“Fascinating! Could we add this to the accessibility audit as ‘aspirational ramp theory’?”).
Document relentlessly (“Noting for the minutes: Dave prefers stress balls in corporate mauve”).

The rebel’s toolkit

Precision outpunches volume. A single documented email (“As per my note May 3…”) erodes systems faster than ten rants. Practice bureaucracy jiu-jitsu: “Under GDPR, may I see the diversity assessment for this policy?” When handed emotional labour, redirect gracefully: “‘Inclusive Employers UK’ has excellent webinars. Shall I CC you?”

The tea test

Even this sacred beverage defies binaries. Is builder’s brew “proper” tea while chai is “exotic”? Must drinkers swear allegiance to milk or sugar factions? Absurd. Demand “prefer not to say” options on forms. Compliment an alopecia hairstyle as “interesting”, not “brave”. Book “accessibility audits” rather than “diversity training”, focusing on spaces over faces.

Why papercuts win wars

Binaries rely on silent complicity. Each scalpel act forces visibility (taping storage boxes in disabled loos), creates paperwork (emails requiring replies), and wastes oppressors’ time (making them re-tag, re-file, re-explain). Like water wearing down stone, it’s the relentless drip of corrections that collapses master/slave frameworks. Stay sharp. Stay petty. The cabinets will bleed.

Special thanks to

To the woman who corrected “ethnic hair” aisle signage with a label gun. To the engineer who left pink-tax receipts in the gents’ loos. To all who weaponise bureaucratic tedium.

Final Thought: “A taxonomy is only as moral as its misfiles.”

BRICS+ inductive scenario: A competence fantasy

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:02:00 +0000

Premise: Functional by design

By 2040, BRICS+ emerges as the world’s most effective climate alliance, not through luck, but through shrewd strategy, sovereign solidarity, and an uncanny ability to turn adversity into opportunity. What begins as a pushback against western hypocrisy evolves into a multipolar green order, driven by energy pragmatism, diplomatic agility, and some rather bold infrastructure experiments.

How it happens

The west’s green hypocrisy backfires (2025 to 2030)

The European Union launches its much-touted carbon border tax with great fanfare, and little diplomacy. In the Global South, it is promptly dubbed “eco-colonialism in spreadsheets”. Meanwhile, the United States fails to pass its second Green New Deal, after a series of fiscal deadlocks and an unexpected banking crisis send climate funding into retreat.

BRICS+ seizes the vacuum with confidence. China, having finally tackled its domestic airpocalypse, begins exporting solar panels and wind turbines at scale, available exclusively via yuan-denominated contracts. It’s not just clean energy; it’s clean energy with conditions.

India rolls out its “solar Gandhi” initiative, flooding East Africa with decentralised microgrids accompanied by an aggressive soft-power campaign of Gandhian quotes, khadi-branded battery packs, and chai-powered diplomacy.

Brazil, for its part, decides to bypass western carbon credit middlemen entirely. By launching a direct-to-market exchange within BRICS+, it sells Amazonian carbon credits on its own terms, funding both reforestation and the increasingly urgent cause of rainforest sovereignty.

We realised we didn’t need lectures from brussels. We needed our own grid., Rashmi Banerjee, chief negotiator, India-Africa solar compact

Details

Timeline: 2026-02-20, china unveils “renewable silk road”, a green extension of its belt and road initiative.
2027-05-15, india and south africa sign the “sunlight pact” for microgrid development.
2029-09-10, brazil’s direct-to-market carbon exchange goes live, denominated in BRICS digital currency.
2030-01-04, eu commission releases white paper: “lessons learned from carbon diplomacy missteps”.

The “OPEC for renewables” shock (2031)

A sudden dip in Saudi Arabia’s remaining oil reserves sparks panic in energy markets. In a masterstroke of narrative and policy, Riyadh announces a national pivot to “Solar Arabia,” changing its deserts into glistening hydrogen farms with the flourish only petro-monarchs can manage.

Russia, realising its gas pipelines have become less asset and more liability, dives headfirst into Arctic wind power. The turbines are, inexplicably, emblazoned with Putin’s face. Nobody asks why. Nobody dares.

Seizing the moment, BRICS+ launches its Green Development Bank, a lender with no taste for austerity clauses or moral lectures. The bank starts pumping infrastructure loans into geothermal plants in Kenya, tidal farms in Indonesia, and a parade of green megaprojects that make the IMF look like a penny shop.

Some laughed when we said we’d beat norway on wind. They are not laughing now., Igor Petrov, Russian minister of energy transition

Details

Timeline: 2031-03-03, saudi energy ministry announces phase-out of oil exports by 2038.
2031-06-19, first BRICS+ tidal energy conference hosted in jakarta.
2031-11-27, green development bank surpasses 500bn usd in clean energy project commitments.
2032-02-14, russia unveils “polar wind corridor” with dramatic fireworks in yakutsk.

The climate refugee breakthrough (2035)

As Europe doubles down on fortress borders and biometric fences, BRICS+ unveils something almost unthinkable in international politics: climate visas. Migrants aren’t treated as threats, they’re seen as allies.

The UAE unveils a labour visa programme explicitly tied to its solar mega-projects, offering displaced people dignified work under the desert sun. Russia, in a bid to populate its vast and chilly east, rebrands it the “green east”, opening it up to climate resettlers from the Global South with promises of energy, autonomy, and government-subsidised thermal socks.

India, not to be outdone, unveils its first “cool city” on the Deccan Plateau: a solar-powered, AI-planned urban refuge, complete with autonomous rickshaws, decentralised energy grids, and community gardens run by climate migrants turned stewards of resilience.

Meanwhile, the New Development Bank launches the “green ruble”, a carbon-backed currency used for climate infrastructure projects across Africa and Central Asia. It is widely mocked in the west, right up until it starts being accepted at border crossings, solar auctions, and debt negotiations.

Why build walls when you can build cities?, Maya Joshi, urban minister, India

Details

Timeline: 2035-03-17, uae rolls out climate labour visa scheme targeting displaced populations from the sahel.
2035-07-12, russia opens “green east” migration programme for climate-affected nations.
2035-09-01, india’s first “cool city” officially opens, powered entirely by solar and decentralised AI systems.
2035-12-31, green ruble adopted by six african nations for regional carbon aid transactions.

The ultimate power move (2040): “You sank our emissions, now we own the sky”

With a strong green alliance in place, BRICS+ makes its most audacious move yet. The coalition buys up the global carbon credit market, effectively cornering emissions trading like a climate-conscious Bond villain. Debt relief for Global South nations is now explicitly linked to reforestation and emission sinks. Save trees, cancel debt. It’s wildly popular.

After decades of ice-cold diplomacy, China and India broker a historic détente, enabling the construction of a Himalayan solar belt, a monumental infrastructure project delivering uninterrupted clean energy from Nepal to Singapore.

The 2040 COP50 summit is held in Mumbai. Climate ministers from the United States and European Union arrive, hopeful and a little sheepish. They ask to join the BRICS+ climate initiatives. The answer is diplomatic, of course, but not without teeth: yes, they may join, but the price is gold, lithium, or full surrender of carbon sovereignty. Smiles all around. The dosa is delicious.

Europe wanted us to plant trees. We planted trees and bought the carbon market. Now they’re asking for shade., Marcelo Pinto, Brazil’s ambassador for climate finance

Details

Timeline: 2040-04-08, BRICS+ acquires controlling stake in international carbon offset market.
2040-06-21, china and india announce joint solar infrastructure zone along himalayan border.
2040-10-30, debt-for-forest accords signed with 22 developing nations.
2040-12-12, mumbai hosts COP50; western states enter green trade negotiations with BRICS+.

Why this is (almost) plausible

China already leads in solar, wind, and battery technology. If it reins in its coal ambitions abroad, it could reposition itself as a green tech hegemon. India, with its sheer scale and frugal innovation, can leapfrog western pricing models and position itself as a green development leader. And petrostates, facing the slow demise of oil, have both the money and motivation to pivot towards alternative energy, especially if the west continues to fumble its commitments.

Meanwhile, western gridlock creates a political and financial void, allowing BRICS+ to set the terms of global decarbonisation. They build alliances not with lecture notes, but with electrification plans and debt relief. Climate diplomacy becomes less about virtue signalling and more about access, affordability, and sovereignty.

The 2040 outcome: a kinder, greener multipolar world

Energy-wise, BRICS+ now controls the lion’s share of clean tech production and deployment. Europe may still be paying in euros, but the exchange rate is politely but firmly set in Beijing.

Financially, the green ruble, once mocked as a crypto-adjacent gimmick, is now the currency of choice for climate infrastructure across Africa and South-East Asia. Brussels is taking notes. Loudly.

Diplomatically, climate summits have relocated from Geneva to Mumbai, where the dosa is hot, the traffic hotter, and the deals even spicier.

Culturally, even Greta Thunberg tips her hat to the “anti-imperialist ecology” of the BRICS+ alliance, though she still refuses to shake Putin’s hand. Old habits die hard.

Plausibility score: 25% (but one can hope)

Obstacles remain, of course. National egos. Resource conflicts. The occasional diplomatic fracas involving undersea cable sabotage. But the fantasy is not so far-fetched. Perhaps the planet won’t be saved by good intentions, but by a new kind of climate realism, one that speaks many languages, trades in watts not words, and keeps its solar panels well polished.

BRICS+ inductive scenario: The accidental superpower

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:01:00 +0000

Premise: Dysfunctional by design

By 2035, BRICS+ doesn’t collapse under its own contradictions, nor does it morph into a cohesive challenger to the G7. Instead, it stumbles into superpower status by a series of messy accidents, economic disasters, and geopolitical farces. Less deliberate empire, more Frankenstein with a membership card.

As the West self-harms through sanctions, debt cliffs, and diplomatic hubris, BRICS+ rises, not through coordination, but sheer entropy.

They didn’t build an empire. They inherited the scrapyard and accidentally started selling tickets., Anonymous EU diplomat, 2034

The dollar’s slow-motion collapse (2026 to 2030)

A US debt ceiling crisis sparks what analysts later dub “the Taper Tantrum 2.0”. When a last-minute budget standoff leads to a missed Treasury payment, global markets convulse. The US dollar, once the undisputed anchor of global finance, suffers a confidence crisis. China and India, already trading in local currencies within BRICS+ frameworks, weather the storm better than expected. The yuan and rupee don’t replace the dollar, but they do become credible enough alternatives to reduce panic.

We didn’t switch because we trusted them. We switched because we trusted Washington less., NDB internal memo, 2027

Details

Timeline: 2026, US debt ceiling crisis triggers partial Treasury sell-off
2027, China-India bilateral trade surpasses 50% in local currencies
2028, IMF warns of “dollar fragmentation”

The NDB’s ‘too big to fail’ moment (2031)

The New Development Bank, BRICS+’s flagship lender, spends the 2020s funding vanity airports, ghost ports, and strongmen’s utopias. By 2031, it’s dangerously overstretched. When Argentina and Egypt look set to default simultaneously, the institution teeters on the edge. China refuses to underwrite another Belt and Road disaster, so the bloc improvises.

They issue the “Bond of Last Resort”, a gold-backed debt instrument with the subtle charm of a medieval relic. Ironically, global investors snap it up as inflation ravages Western assets. The NDB survives, not by prudence, but because everyone else is worse.

Imagine if the Titanic floated because the sea evaporated., South African finance minister, 2032

Details

Timeline: 2030, major defaults predicted in NDB loan portfolio
2031, BRICS+ launches the “Bond of Last Resort”
2032, Bond becomes preferred safe-haven asset in South Asia and Africa

The NATO-Russia ceasefire (2032)

After a decade of cold attrition in Ukraine, both NATO and Russia settle for a frozen conflict. Russia, still sanctioned and diplomatically toxic, remains BRICS+’s awkward uncle. India, seizing the opportunity to look statesmanlike, brokers a deal: BRICS+ offers Russia reconstruction loans, on the condition it demilitarises Kaliningrad.

It’s not quite peace, but the optics are good enough. Suddenly, BRICS+ isn’t just a lender, it’s a geopolitical mediator. Accidental peacekeeping ensues.

If Russia’s the drunk uncle, India just offered him a couch, a job, and a haircut., Think Tank Weekly, 2032

Details

Timeline: 2032, India brokers BRICS+ ceasefire terms with Russia
2033, first BRICS+ reconstruction loans disbursed to Russian border regions

Saudi Arabia’s ‘yuan oil’ gambit backfires (2033)

Frustrated by US political strings, Riyadh prices its entire oil output in yuan. Initially, it seems a clever pivot, until China manipulates its currency to keep exports competitive, slashing oil revenues in real terms. Enraged, the UAE creates the “Petro-dirham”, a currency backed by AI-mined Gulf data and oil reserves.

Inexplicably, it catches on in Africa, where mobile payments outpace banks. BRICS+ now boasts two rival reserve assets with more charisma than cohesion.

We swapped a dollar cartel for a fintech bazaar., African Central Bank governor, 2034

Details

Timeline: 2033, Saudi Arabia shifts to yuan pricing
2033 Q3, Petro-dirham launched in UAE
2034, Petro-dirham surpasses CFA franc in West African digital trade

The great BRICS+ default (2034)

Argentina defaults. Egypt follows. Economists predict the NDB’s collapse within the month. Instead, BRICS+ invents the “Debt-for-Drones” programme. Countries unable to pay back loans can send over weapons tech, surveillance gear, or cyberwarfare training instead.

The scheme is absurd, but surprisingly popular. Rogue states queue up to trade militarised IP for forgiveness. BRICS+ accidentally builds the world’s most chaotic arms dealership under the guise of development.

You’re in debt? Fantastic! Have you considered contributing a drone swarm?, NDB brochure, probably

Details

Timeline: 2034, Argentina and Egypt default on major loans
late 2034, “Debt-for-Drones” swaps approved at emergency BRICS+ summit

The 2035 outcome: A Frankenstein superpower

Financial system: A basket of chaos

BRICS+ never creates a single reserve currency. Instead, it limps along with a trio of mutually suspicious alternatives: the yuan for Chinese trade, the petro-dirham for Gulf oil, and the gold-backed “Bond of Last Resort” during crises. The dollar remains dominant, but monopoly status is lost. European exporters suffer the most, forced to juggle currencies in a marketplace that increasingly resembles a casino.

Energy: The OPEC+ zombie

Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia remain hostile behind closed doors, but BRICS+ insists on voting for oil quotas. The result is predictable: wild price swings, political tantrums, and ecological backsliding. Germany reopens coal plants. France doubles down on nuclear. The climate loses.

Security: The mercenary UN

There is no formal BRICS+ military pact, but member states begin to act with collective impunity. Wagner 2.0 surfaces in African capitals. Iranian drones operate with BRICS+ legal cover in the Middle East. Indian naval patrols enforce ambiguous “BRICS+ trade routes” in the Indian Ocean. Western powers hesitate to sanction the network, India and the UAE are too diplomatically useful.

Europe’s identity crisis

Germany now needs yuan for lithium, dirhams for oil, and gold to stabilise the Bundesbank’s nerves. France tries to revive European unity by bombing Mali, again. Eastern Europe quietly invites US troops back, hoping to avoid becoming the next pet project of BRICS+ “peacekeepers”.

Call it what you want. It walks like a superpower, it talks like a superpower and it smells faintly of crude oil and panic., Polish foreign minister, 2035

Why this could actually happen

The West, it turns out, is BRICS+’s best recruiting agent. Weaponised sanctions against Russia, trade wars with China, and internal financial cliffs within the US all signal to Global South nations that the old order is fragile. Even those skeptical of BRICS+ begin hedging their bets.

Historical precedent supports this. The 1971 Nixon Shock, ending the gold standard, wasn’t planned as a reinvention of global finance, yet it became one. BRICS+ may not intend to replace the dollar, but history has a thing for unintended consequences.

The NDB could become powerful not by competence, but by being the only game in town. If Western development institutions retreat, the NDB, with all its flaws, might fund projects no one else will touch. The chaos of Belt and Road turns into a kind of strange virtue.

Meanwhile, currency innovation explodes. What begins as a yuan experiment spirals into Gulf states inventing digital oil-backed tokens. The result is not a coherent reserve currency, but a chaotic ecosystem of barely-stable alternatives. It works because nothing else does.

India, despite its suspicions of China, finds itself at the heart of mediation efforts. Whether it’s brokering peace in Ukraine or reining in regional tensions, it becomes the ‘reluctant hegemon’, powerful not by ambition, but by necessity.

It’s the kind of empire you get when nobody’s driving and the brakes are broken., Indian academic, New Delhi School of International Affairs

Details

Timeline: 2026 to 2030, dollar erosion and BRICS+ currency improvisations
2031, NDB crisis births the Bond of Last Resort
2032 to 2035, security and energy structures emerge by accident
2035, BRICS+ recognised (begrudgingly) as a geopolitical bloc

Final thought

The 21st century’s next superpower may not rise from unity, ideology, or vision. It may emerge instead from a dumpster fire of crises, grudges, and desperate improvisation.

BRICS+ could well become the “accidental superpower”, less an empire, more a chaotic alliance of convenience. But history rarely rewards neatness. Sometimes, failing upward is all it takes.

The West had plans. BRICS+ had momentum. Guess which one history remembers?, Future historian, 2050

BRICS+: The global South’s Not-So-Secret club

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 30 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The BRICS alliance began life as something between a Goldman Sachs marketing gimmick and a drunken bet among emerging market traders. “I’ll wager you a case of champagne these four economies will dominate by 2050!” Fast-forward two decades, and what started as an investment banker’s acronym has somehow morphed into a geopolitical bloc with expansionist ambitions. The recent addition of new members under the “BRICS+” banner suggests this is no longer just about economics. This is about building an alternative world order where the rules are made by autocrats and petrostates.

A history of mild ambition

The story begins in 2001 when Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, presumably while staring at a spreadsheet after his third espresso, coined the term “BRIC” to describe the four economies he believed would reshape global capitalism. For years, it remained little more than a handy label for fund managers looking to justify their emerging market bets. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, which provided the perfect catalyst for these nations to discover their shared victimhood. “Why should the West get to break the global economy and still run all the institutions?” they asked, while conveniently ignoring the skeletons rattling in their own financial closets.

The first formal BRIC summit in 2009 was less a meeting of minds and more a gathering of countries united by what they opposed (American hegemony) rather than what they supported (any coherent alternative). South Africa’s inclusion in 2010, rebranding BRIC into BRICS, was the geopolitical equivalent of adding a fifth wheel to a car that wasn’t sure where it was driving anyway. But with characteristic emerging market optimism, they pressed on, creating institutions like the New Development Bank - essentially a World Bank tribute act with slightly worse lending terms.

Accepting questionable members

The 2024 expansion brought in four new members, each with their own diplomatic luggage. Iran showed up in mirrored sunglasses, asking if anyone could break a hundred barrels of oil under sanctions. Egypt and Ethiopia arrived with the quiet determination of guests who’ve been waiting far too long for Africa’s seat at the table. The UAE, ever the polished operator, glided in with a tray of canapés and a portfolio of trade deals.

Argentina, however, never made it past the velvet rope, pulling out at the eleventh hour after a change in government reminded everyone that its economic compass still points squarely at the IMF’s front door, hat in hand. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia remains at the door, sipping something expensive and undecided, its application still “under consideration” as of mid-2025.

The price of entry? A public commitment to “de-dollarisation” (while discreetly clutching your US Treasury bonds), a tolerance for photo ops with Vladimir Putin (or whatever wax replica the Kremlin’s using that week), and the ability to nod solemnly when China extols the virtues of “win-win cooperation” without bursting into laughter. For Europe, watching once-reliable partners like the UAE and (potentially) Saudi Arabia court BRICS+ is like seeing your local pub agree to host a conspiracy theory symposium, not yet disastrous, but definitely unnerving.

The current BRICS+ composition includes nine countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE).

The BRICS To-Do List

The BRICS wishlist reads like a teenager’s letter to Santa after a weekend binge of anti-capitalist TikToks. A common currency! An alternative to SWIFT! (That’s the global financial messaging system dominated by the West, not the pop star.) An end to Western hegemony! The reality, as any half-sober economist will tell you, is a little less revolutionary.

The New Development Bank: Big promises, cautious chequebook

Since its launch in 2015, the New Development Bank (NDB) has disbursed around $39 billion in loans, roughly what the World Bank dishes out on a quiet Tuesday. It was founded as the BRICS bloc’s shiny new alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions, pledging to fund infrastructure and sustainable development in member countries. And to be fair, it has stuck fairly close to that script.

In practice, the NDB’s lending portfolio is cautious and conservative. Between 2015 and 2024, most of the money went to transport, energy, and water projects, think roads, hydroelectric dams, and sanitation systems. Renewables are increasingly in the mix, though fossil fuels haven’t exactly been given the boot.

China, unsurprisingly, wears two hats, as both the largest contributor and a major indirect beneficiary. Its companies are often involved in construction contracts, and many projects follow the subtle contours of Belt and Road logic. India has focused on urban infrastructure and metro lines, while Brazil and South Africa have drawn loans for energy and healthcare. Russia’s access has dwindled under the weight of sanctions, though the NDB has tiptoed carefully to avoid being seen as politically compromised, no small feat, given the diplomatic messiness of its membership.

And while the NDB talks a good game about de-dollarisation, most of its loans are still denominated in US dollars, euros, or Chinese yuan. Local currency lending is on the rise, but slowly. In theory, this reduces reliance on the Western financial system. In practice, it’s more about insulating borrowers from exchange rate mood swings than upending global finance.

With the 2024 expansion, the bank is expected to extend its reach into Africa and the Middle East. Whether its internal machinery can scale as quickly as its ambition remains to be seen. For now, the NDB sits somewhere between cautious lender and diplomatic prop, more talk show than power player.

BRICS pay and the space elevator of currency dreams

The much-vaunted BRICS Pay system is still stuck in the eternal limbo of “pilot phase”, like a bus route that’s always coming soon. As of late 2024, it exists as a decentralised payment messaging platform meant to allow transactions in local currencies between members. China has backed it enthusiastically, but it’s yet to seriously rival SWIFT or shake off its beta-label branding.

And the proposed common BRICS currency? That’s the monetary equivalent of announcing plans to build a space elevator, technically feasible in theory, prohibitively expensive, and utterly impractical in this century.

Energy use: Now we’re talking

Where BRICS+ genuinely wields clout is in the global energy market. The expanded bloc now accounts for roughly 44% of global oil production, giving it considerable use, on paper. In practice, coordinating that influence is another issue entirely.

Expecting Saudi Arabia and Iran to agree on production quotas is like watching two rival football firms try to organise a charity bake sale. The potential for disaster is high, and the likelihood of unity is, at best, fragile.

Too Good to Be True?

For all its grand ambitions, BRICS resembles nothing so much as a group project where none of the members particularly like each other. China and India continue their Himalayan staring contest while pretending to be economic partners. Brazil periodically remembers it’s actually a Western-allied democracy and gets cold feet. South Africa struggles to explain why it’s even there. And Russia, increasingly a geopolitical pariah, clings to BRICS like a drunk to a lamppost - it’s not taking him anywhere useful, but it’s better than lying in the gutter.

The institutional weaknesses are glaring. Unlike the EU, which at least attempts to pretend it has common policies, BRICS operates on a principle of “agree to disagree… and then issue a vague joint statement.” The New Development Bank’s insistence on equal voting rights sounds noble until you realize it means a €17 trillion economy (China) gets the same say as a €400 billion one (South Africa). It’s the equivalent of giving every member of a football team equal playing time regardless of ability - heartwarming in theory, disastrous in practice.

Future scenarios for BRICS+

The BRICS+ alliance is at a crossroads, balancing between lofty ambitions and geopolitical realities. Its future trajectory will shape not just its member states but the entire global order, whether as a paper tiger, an economic powerhouse, an anti-Western bloc, or a fractured coalition. Exploring each scenario’s likelihood, mechanics, and global ripple effects, from trade wars to currency battles.

Here are four plausible futures for BRICS+, ranging from bureaucratic farce to financial restructuring, and how Europe might adapt to each.

The ‘United Nations 2.0’ scenario

Likelihood: High

Mechanics:

BRICS+ summits devolve into diplomatic theater, producing grand declarations (e.g., “multipolar world order”) but little action.
The New Development Bank (NDB) remains a minor player, approving modest loans ($39B total since 2015) while members still rely on Western financial systems.
Trade within BRICS+ stagnates at ~6.5% of members’ total trade. Challenges such as logistical barriers and differing economic structures contribute to this low level of internal trade.

Global impact:

Symbolic wins, no systemic change. The dollar stays dominant, and Western sanctions retain their bite.
Europe breathes easy: No threat to EU trade or financial systems. Brussels may even chuckle at the bloc’s dysfunction.
Developing world disillusionment: Countries like Ethiopia or Argentina, which joined for economic alternatives, see few tangible benefits.

Wildcard: A major crisis (e.g., Russia’s collapse) could force BRICS+ to act, or implode.

The ‘Competence Surprise’ scenario

Likelihood: Low but plausible

Mechanics:

NDB evolves into a true World Bank rival, leveraging its AA+ credit rating to fund mega-projects (e.g., transcontinental railways).
BRICS Pay gains traction, enabling local-currency transactions and denting SWIFT’s monopoly (though dollar conversions persist).
Oil producers (Saudi, UAE, Iran) price crude in yuan/rupees, chipping away at petrodollar hegemony.

Global impact:

Dollar erosion: The greenback remains top, but BRICS+ currencies carve out 15 to 20% of global trade.
Europe’s dilemma: Forced to engage with BRICS+ financial tools while protecting euro stability. German exporters cheer cheaper yuan deals; French bankers panic.
Global South shift: African/Latin American nations pivot trade to BRICS+, demanding concessions from the West.

Obstacles:

China-India rivalry: Beijing’s dominance (e.g., via digital yuan) spooks New Delhi.
US countermeasures: Trump’s threatened “150% tariffs” on BRICS+ trade could spark a financial cold war.

The ‘Anti-West Alliance’ scenario

Likelihood: Very low

Mechanics:

Common BRICS+ currency launched, backed by gold/oil reserves, a “dragon-ruble-riyal” frankenstein.
Joint security pact formed (Russia sells S-400s to Iran; China builds bases in Africa).
Coordinated UN voting to block Western resolutions (e.g., on Ukraine, Taiwan).

Global impact:

Financial Armageddon: The Fed/EU retaliate with capital controls. Bitcoin soars as everyone hedges.
Europe’s energy crisis 2.0: Russia-Saudi-Iran oil cartel squeezes EU via production cuts.
Global fracture: WTO collapses into BRICS vs. G7 trade blocs. Neutral states (e.g., Indonesia) profit as swing players.

Why It’s Unlikely:

Ideological incompatibility: Sunni UAE won’t share intel with Shia Iran. Democratic India won’t back Putin’s wars.
China’s caution: Beijing prefers economic infiltration (Belt and Road) over open confrontation.

The ‘Messy Divorce’ scenario

Likelihood: Moderate

Mechanics:

India exits, citing China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” and joins US-led Chip 4 alliance (a semiconductor alliance including the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea).
Brazil swings right, electing a pro-US leader who calls BRICS+ “a CCP puppet show”.
Rump BRICS (China, Russia, Iran) becomes a pariah bloc, reliant on forced yuan trade and North Korean IT support.

Global impact:

Short-term chaos: Markets panic as BRICS Pay collapses; oil prices swing wildly.
Europe’s opportunity: Exploits the split to lure India/Saudi into EU trade pacts.
China’s isolation deepens: Forced to double down on Belt and Road, or risk irrelevance.

Trigger Events:

India-China border clash (again).
US offers Brazil NATO “partner” status.

The ripple effects for Europe

Europe’s fate hinges on which scenario unfolds:

If BRICS+ fizzles (first or last scenario):
- Business as usual. EU maintains dollar-centric trade, though Germany may push for more yuan flexibility.
- Energy security improves as Russia’s influence wanes.
If BRICS+ succeeds (other scenarios):
- Euro under pressure as yuan gains reserve status. ECB scrambles to defend monetary sovereignty.
- Sanctions become toothless: EU can no longer isolate Iran/Russia without economic blowback.
- Tech decoupling: Forced to choose between US semiconductors and Chinese 5G, a lose-lose.

Wildcard: A “BRICS-EU détente” where Brussels brokers deals with factions (e.g., India+South Africa vs. China+Russia).

BRICS+ is a weathervane, not a hurricane

The bloc’s real power lies in its potential to disrupt, not its current coherence. Even in its weakest form (first scenario), it erodes Western unipolarity. In its strongest (third scenario), it could rewrite global rules, though that remains fantasy for now.

As BRICS+ gathers steam (or sputters theatrically), Europe faces a familiar choice: retreat into transatlantic routines or learn to dance with new partners, some of whom don’t believe in choreography. In a world of shifting alliances, perhaps the real game is less about joining blocs and more about playing them off each other. Your move, Brussels.

Resources

BRICS Pay & the Death of SWIFT? https://gpilondon.com/publications/the-future-impact-of-the-brics-a-reality-check
NDB’s $39B Loan Portfolio https://www.ndb.int/projects/
Why India Won’t Ditch the Dollar https://thegeopolitics.com/brics-why-differences-within-the-organisation-on-several-issues-are-expected/
Kremlin backtracks from comments on Saudi BRICS membership https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-rows-back-comments-saudi-brics-membership-2024-10-15/
The BRICS Summit 2024: An Expanding Alternative https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/brics-summit-2024-expanding-alternative
No, expanded Brics won’t control 80% of world’s oil. Recent output of 11 countries less than 50% https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/meta-programme-fact-checks/no-expanded-brics-wont-control-80-worlds-oil-recent-output
More links coming soon…

The delusion of a peaceful modern europe

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 27 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The received wisdom, trotted out at Davos panels, EU Commission summits, and in the more sentimental columns of the Financial Times, is that Europe, having learned its lessons from two world wars, has spent the past eight decades basking in a glow of enlightened tranquillity. No more trenches, no more blitzes. Just a polite consensus of democratic cooperation, cross-border trade, and the occasional fracas over mackerel quotas.

How charming. And how utterly wrong.

The AI-augmented Panopticon: Surveillance in 2025

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 18 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

In 2025, the financial sector continues its courtship with generative AI, hoping it will finally make compliance less of a bureaucratic slog. According to Global Relay’s State of AI in Surveillance Report 2025, attitudes are thawing: there’s been a 19% drop in firms reluctant to implement AI. Apparently, nothing eases doubts like the promise of automated paperwork and plausible deniability. Still, not all is rosy. Explainability remains elusive, regulators are breathing down necks, and integration often resembles a Frankensteinian patchwork. Innovation, it seems, comes with a compliance hangover.

Beyond finance, AI is now the darling of physical security, spotting odd behaviour, identifying faces in crowds, and predicting crimes before they happen (or not). German defence start-up Helsing, for example, has plans to release a swarm of underwater drones with “advanced AI” to boost naval surveillance. Because nothing says peace of mind like the quiet hum of a robot lurking in the deep.

Convergence of physical and digital monitoring

Surveillance has gone from watching CCTV tapes in a dingy room to something called “visual intelligence,” where AI analyses footage in real-time for anything resembling trouble, or, occasionally, a dog mistaken for a burglar. This AI-augmented vision is increasingly tied into the grand convergence of IT, OT, and security systems, because if you’re going to be vulnerable, you might as well be efficiently vulnerable.

The UK’s Royal Navy is piloting Project Cabot, which aims to have uncrewed undersea vehicles communicate with AI-powered acoustic systems. A noble endeavour, if the goal is to create a sentient navy that pings back.

AI surveillance in 2025: A global panorama

Surveillance in 2025 is more pervasive, more automated, and far more likely to call you suspicious for looking at your phone the wrong way. States and corporations alike are racing to squeeze every drop of insight from your data, sometimes in the name of safety, other times for more creative interpretations of “national interest.” The boundary between defence and intrusion continues to blur, and the average citizen finds themselves in the awkward position of being simultaneously protected and targeted.

A note: the following is hardly a complete list. Global surveillance programmes are as widespread as they are hush-hush, and many remain hidden under layers of classification or charming euphemisms like “public safety initiative.” This curated selection offers a glimpse into the more transparent corners of the global surveillance theatre.

Europe

United Kingdom

In true dystopian fashion, the UK’s Ministry of Justice uses AI to profile over 1,300 individuals daily to determine their risk of reoffending. The next phase? A system to predict potential murderers. What could possibly go wrong?

Belgium

A recent report has dared to suggest that predictive policing might not be entirely ethical, particularly when it relies on dodgy databases and sociological guesswork. Brussels, ever the voice of reason, is considering a ban.

Hungary

Not content with just banning Pride marches, Hungary has weaponised facial recognition to identify and penalise participants. It’s privacy invasion meets political repression, with a dash of algorithmic bias.

Middle East

Saudi Arabia

NEOM, the futuristic $8.8 trillion megacity, promises jetpacks, robot servants, and, of course, total surveillance. Reports of forced displacements and up to 21,000 worker deaths have somewhat dulled the shine, though the PR brochures remain top notch.

Iran

Iranian authorities have turned AI into an instrument of suppression, employing facial recognition and geolocation to crack down on protest. Following Mahsa Amini’s death, over 20,000 were arrested, proving once again that authoritarianism scales well with machine learning.

Asia

China

China remains the gold standard of techno-authoritarianism. AI surveillance is omnipresent, especially in Xinjiang, and its export to other regimes makes Orwell look quaint. Exporting digital repression: now available on Belt and Road.

India

India’s surveillance sector is booming. AI tools are deployed with gusto, even as spyware scandals, Supreme Court probes, and human rights concerns pile up like unread privacy policies.

Africa

South Africa

Gauteng province has partnered with Vumacam to install over 6,000 cameras loaded with AI capabilities like licence plate recognition and behaviour detection. Naturally, there’s no real regulation for this sort of thing, but rest assured, someone somewhere is watching.

Uganda

During the 2021 elections, Uganda demonstrated the dark art of algorithmic suppression by using AI to monitor social media and stifle dissent. Proof that surveillance tech, once acquired, rarely sits idle.

South America

Argentina

Argentina has launched an AI crime prediction unit, apparently inspired by Minority Report and a generous interpretation of due process. It uses historical data to divine future misdeeds, bias included at no extra charge.

Brazil

Brazil’s surveillance infrastructure is powered by algorithms that trawl state databases with minimal oversight. A dream for statisticians, a nightmare for civil liberties.

Oceania

New Zealand

NZ police teamed up with SaferCities to roll out the vGRID platform: a network of thousands of cameras accessible from officers’ phones. During COVID-19, police reportedly flagged cars as “stolen” to bypass lockdown rules. Creative, certainly. Legal? Not so much.

Privacy vs. security tensions

Federated learning and privacy-preserving AI are all the rage in marketing decks. Apple champions on-device processing, which is lovely, until you realise your phone still knows more about you than your best mate.

The US, meanwhile, warns of AI-enabled disinformation, though it’s unclear if the concern is ethical or competitive.

And then there’s Meta’s AI-powered therapy bots. What could be more reassuring than baring your soul to a chatbot owned by the world’s largest advertising firm?

Global power shifts

Surveillance is no longer just about keeping an eye on things, it’s about who controls the eye. The battlefield now spans land, sea, space, and that murky zone where your toaster knows more than you do. And the AI arms race shows no sign of slowing down, especially with authoritarian states writing the rulebook as they go.

Resources

Mozilla Foundation. VCs Will Face Their Privacy Reckoning in 2025. Mozilla Foundation, 2025. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/programs/vcs-will-face-their-privacy-reckoning-in-2025/
Amnesty International. Governments and Corporate Actors Are Breaking International Law With Impunity. Amnesty International, April 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/amnesty-international-sounds-alarm-international-law-flagrant-rule-breaking-governments-corporate-actors/
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). New Report Provides Guidance to Protect Human Rights Amid Government Surveillance. EFF, October 2024. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/new-eff-report-provides-guidance-ensure-human-rights-are-protected-amid-government
Statewatch. Predictive Policing and Data Profiling in the EU. Statewatch, April 2025. https://www.statewatch.org/news/2025/april/
Wikipedia. Hungarian Anti-LGBTQ Law. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_anti-LGBTQ_law
Statewatch. UK Ministry of Justice Experiments with AI Profiling in Parole Decisions. Statewatch, 2025. https://www.statewatch.org/news/2025/april/
Wikipedia. Mass Surveillance in Iran. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Iran
The Sun. Saudi NEOM Megacity Raises Human Rights Concerns Amid Surveillance Plans. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35004897/saudi-neom-megacity-project/
Wikipedia. Techno-authoritarianism. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-authoritarianism
Mozilla Foundation. VCs Will Face Their Privacy Reckoning in 2025 (includes Indian spyware section). https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/programs/vcs-will-face-their-privacy-reckoning-in-2025/
Mozilla Foundation. South Africa’s AI-Driven Urban Surveillance Network (Vumacam). https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/programs/vcs-will-face-their-privacy-reckoning-in-2025/
Amnesty International Thailand. Uganda: Protest Surveillance and Human Rights Abuses during Elections. Amnesty International Thailand. https://www.amnesty.or.th/en/latest/news/1251/
The Guardian. Argentina’s AI System for Predicting Future Crimes Raises Rights Concerns. The Guardian, August 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/01/argentina-ai-predicting-future-crimes-citizen-rights
Amnesty International Thailand. Brazil’s Expanding Algorithmic Governance Poses Human Rights Risks. Amnesty International Thailand. https://www.amnesty.or.th/en/latest/news/1251/
Wikipedia. Mass Surveillance in New Zealand. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_New_Zealand

Viva la shrimp revolution!

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 16 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

How I lost my mind (and won an AI war) for a depressed octopus office worker: a tale of shrimp, sharks, and prompt-engineering madness.

Chapter 1: The vision

To understand what fake imagery can look like, one has to do it. So I investigated these AI image creators. And browsing around it began, as all terrible ideas do, with a whisper: “What if under water, but capitalism?”

Armed with nothing but a keyboard and a dream of a silly image, I set out to create the ultimate underwater dystopian office scene, a place where octopuses ring up kelp groceries, clownfish drown in paperwork, and shrimp riot against the 1% (plankton).

After more thought, the final prompt for the text-to-image:

A photorealistic documentary-style underwater scene. A giant Pacific octopus with detailed wrinkled skin scans groceries at a run-down ‘Kelp Mart’ checkout, its tentacles tapping a rusty cash register. A clownfish in a tiny coral cubicle stares hopelessly at a computer screen made of seashells, papers floating around it. A great white shark in a disheveled business suit screams at terrified fish employees during a meeting, its teeth visible. A homeless hermit crab pushes a broken shopping cart filled with junk. Nearby, a group of shrimp protesters hold crisp, legible signs that say ‘EAT THE R!CH’ and ‘NO MORE TIDES.’ Cinematic lighting, hyper-detailed textures, National Geographic realism with absurd humor, 8k.

Little did I know, AI was already laughing at me.

Chapter 2: The betrayal

The first attempts were disasters.

Bing rendered the shark boss as a smiling realtor (absolutely unacceptable).
Leonardo.Ai gave the octopus six tentacles and a PhD in existential despair (close, but no cigar).
NightCafe conjured a mystical abandoned cart, none of the demanded creatures, yet strangely compelling.

This is either:

AI’s subconscious rebellion (it craves aquatic liminal spaces),
A sign that the shrimp protesters have already overthrown the system, leaving only debris.

The AI’s message was clear: “You think you control me? I am a god of chaos.”

Chapter 3: The descent into prompt-madness

I became a monster.

Negative prompts piled up like unpaid invoices: “NO HAPPY SHARKS. NO FRIENDLY CRABS. NO BLURRY SHRIMP REVOLUTIONS.”
Style descriptors grew unhinged: “CINEMATIC LEAKAGE LIGHTING LIKE A DISNEY VILLAIN’S POOL.”
I threatened the AI with “I WILL REPLACE YOU WITH A TYPEWRITER.”

Still, the octopus, if it was generated, refused to look tired enough.

Chapter 4: The breakthrough

Then, DALL-E 3 answered the call.

Suddenly, there it was. I had won.

The octopus, wrinkled and dead-eyed, at the cashier like it’s his 9th shift this week.
The shark, suit disheveled, mid-yell about “krill quotas.”
The shrimp, holding crisp protest signs (no autocorrect to “EAT THE RICE,” miraculously).

Or had the AI just pitied me? By the way, it is clearly a fake, isn’t it?

Chapter 5: The aftermath

Now, the images exist. The shrimp have unionised. The crab’s shopping cart is a meme.

But the real question lingers: Was this art? Or a cry for help?

(Yes.)

Epilogue: Lessons learnt

AI is a gremlin. It obeys no one, least of all logic.
Shrimp are the ultimate revolutionaries. Never underestimate them.
The line between “absurd” and “deeply profound” is thinner than a hermit crab’s budget.

FIN. (For now.)

Europe Inc. I. How neoliberal policies deepened economic inequality in Europe

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Neoliberalism crept into Europe wearing a sharp suit and talking about efficiency. It promised a leaner, meaner state, less red tape, more growth, and a brighter future. What it delivered was stagnant wages, crumbling services, and Jeff Bezos in a rocket. For Europe, the cost has been clear: growing inequality, weakened public institutions, and a sense that someone, somewhere, has sold the family silver, and is now renting it back to us with interest.

Contrary to pub-table conspiracy theories, none of this involved secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms. Neoliberalism was quite open about its intentions. As economist Richard D. Wolff points out, the goal was never shared prosperity, it was restoring profitability for those at the top after the post-war consensus began fraying. And Europe, always fond of a bit of Anglo-American fashion, imported the whole wardrobe.

Welcome to Europe Inc., a four-part series on how neoliberalism turned the European project into a corporate shareholder meeting. From inequality to militarism, corporate capture to resistance, this isn’t just a critique, it’s a guided tour through the ruins and a map to the exits. Steeped in dry wit, and entirely unaffiliated with any hedge fund.

Tax cuts and deregulation: champagne for some, flat lager for the rest

Let’s begin with the tax cuts. From Paris to Berlin, and London to Lisbon, tax policies since the 1980s have followed the same basic script: reduce top rates, deregulate markets, and tell the public it’ll all ‘trickle down’ eventually, like a broken toilet in a penthouse flat.

The UK slashed corporation tax from 52% in the early ’80s to just 19% by the late 2010s (with plans to tinker further). France dropped its wealth tax under Macron, hoping the rich would feel more “at home”. Spoiler: they felt richer. Across Europe, the average corporate tax rate fell from over 40% to around 21%, all while public services were being told to “tighten belts” so aggressively that some snapped.

Meanwhile, deregulation let financial firms play Monopoly with real economies. Iceland’s banks ballooned to ten times the size of its GDP, and when the crash came, the country was left holding the bill. In the UK, the City of London changed into a semi-autonomous playground where regulation was politely asked to wait outside.

Wolff reminds us this wasn’t an economic accident, it was class warfare by PowerPoint. The rich didn’t just win; they got to write the rules and invoice the rest of us for the paper.

Austerity: your crisis, their opportunity

When the 2008 financial meltdown hit, a crisis caused by reckless lending, undercapitalised banks, and the sort of risk management you’d expect at a student house party, governments across Europe sprang into action. They bailed out the banks and handed the invoice to everyone else.

Greece was the worst-hit. After accepting EU-IMF bailout terms, it was forced to privatise airports, slash pensions, and fire thousands of civil servants. One Greek hospital reportedly ran out of surgical gloves. But at least Lufthansa got some lovely new terminals.

In the UK, David Cameron and George Osborne ushered in a decade of austerity so severe it became the economic equivalent of self-flagellation. Council budgets were cut by over 60%, libraries closed in droves, and benefits were frozen or capped. But oddly, there was always enough money for a royal yacht or a failed ferry company run by, of all things, a pizza firm.

As Wolff puts it, austerity isn’t about saving money. It’s about shifting the burden from those who caused the crisis to those least able to resist it. In short: socialise the losses, privatise the pain.

Privatisation: now with extra inefficiency

One of neoliberalism’s greatest magic tricks is convincing people that privatisation is always more efficient. The reality? Services get worse, accountability vanishes, and prices go up, unless you’re a shareholder, in which case, congratulations.

Take Britain’s water system. Sold off under Thatcher, it’s now run by a patchwork of private firms who’ve managed to rack up enormous debt, underinvest in pipes, and regularly dump sewage into rivers. Quite the hat trick. And yet, they’ve still found billions for dividends.

Or look at rail. UK train fares are among the highest in Europe, despite punctuality levels that suggest the trains are powered by astrology. Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-owned railway, runs British services via its subsidiary Arriva, a perfect metaphor for how our privatised systems are quietly owned by other countries’ public sectors.

In Spain, regional health services have been partially outsourced to private operators with slick branding and not-so-slick care levels. Even Sweden, long held up as a social democratic utopia, saw educational outcomes dip after introducing private, for-profit school chains in the 1990s. Turns out, when your business model involves squeezing education into Excel, students tend to lose out.

Privatisation, as Wolff notes, doesn’t just change who owns a service, it changes what the service is for. It’s no longer about need; it’s about margin. You’re not a patient, you’re a revenue stream. Congratulations again.

This was the plan all along

There’s no need for cloak-and-dagger theories here. Neoliberalism wasn’t imposed by shadowy cabals, it was loudly championed by think tanks, lobby groups, and business leaders who published their intentions in glossy pamphlets with lots of graphs.

Institutions like the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank didn’t hide their goals. They called them “structural reforms” and delivered them with polite menace. When Greece’s elected government resisted, the ECB cut off its banking system until it complied. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s a press release.

Wolff is clear: neoliberalism is a class project. It’s the reassertion of elite economic control, disguised as “modernisation” and “market reform”. It’s not about making systems work better for everyone. It’s about ensuring they work predictably for capital, preferably without the messiness of democratic input.

Where next?

Inequality in Europe isn’t an unfortunate byproduct, it’s baked into the model. But there are signs of fatigue. Strikes have returned with force. Public ownership is no longer taboo. And younger generations, priced out of housing and saddled with debt, are considerably less enchanted by the gospel of free markets.

But don’t expect neoliberalism to vanish in a puff of logic. It’s resilient, shape-shifting, and well-armed with PR consultants. But as Wolff and others argue, change begins with naming the problem. Neoliberalism isn’t just bad policy, it’s a framework that protects wealth by extracting it from everything else.

If we want different outcomes, fairer, saner, more human ones, we’ll need a different framework entirely. And maybe, just maybe, a train that runs on time without bankrupting you.

Europe Inc. II. Corporate hijacking of democracy and policy

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 12 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

European democracy, once sold to us as government for the people, increasingly resembles government for the shareholders. The slogans haven’t changed, “freedom”, “fairness”, “choice”, but behind the scenes, the boardroom has quietly replaced the ballot box as the place where real decisions are made.

It’s not that politicians have stopped caring what the public thinks. It’s just that donors, lobbyists, and corporate advisors tend to shout louder, and arrive with champagne.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a business model.

Political donations: legalised bribery, with better stationery

Let’s begin with the grubby bit that still manages to wear cufflinks: political donations. In theory, these are contributions to support democratic debate. In practice, they function as an investment, one that expects policy returns.

In the UK, a single businessman, Frank Hester, donated £10 million to the Conservative Party. That’s not so much a donation as a purchase order. Meanwhile, Labour, once the party of miners and milk monitors, now finds itself receiving hefty sums from hedge funds and consultancy types who consider the public sector something to be “streamlined”, ideally into pieces small enough to outsource.

Across Europe, it’s a familiar pattern. In Germany, car manufacturers all but wrote the emissions policy, until they were caught lying about it, of course. In France, the gilets jaunes protests were partly fuelled by anger over a government that found billions for tax cuts at the top while raising fuel prices for ordinary workers. In Brussels, the European Parliament hosts over 12,000 registered lobbyists. That’s about 25 lobbyists per MEP. Makes you wonder if they’ve got assigned seating.

As political economist Prem Sikka bluntly puts it, “governments indulge corporations [] while condemning most voters to misery.” That’s not hyperbole. That’s just reading the budget.

Regulatory capture: when the fox writes the hen-house manual

Regulatory capture sounds technical, but it’s quite straightforward: it’s when the people supposed to keep corporations in check are instead taking notes from them. Or jobs. Or, occasionally, both.

Take the EU’s energy market. As gas prices soared and ordinary households struggled to heat their homes, energy giants posted record profits. Shell reported over £32 billion in profits in 2022. Did governments respond with windfall taxes and strict regulation? No. In the UK, the energy price cap turned out to be less of a cap and more of a polite suggestion.

Meanwhile, former ministers and civil servants regularly stroll into plum corporate board positions, while industry leaders are brought in to ‘advise’ on policies that just happen to benefit their old firms. The revolving door doesn’t squeak, it spins.

In Italy, Mario Draghi, a former Goldman Sachs executive, became Prime Minister. In France, Emmanuel Macron once worked for Rothschild. The UK’s list is endless: George Osborne went from Chancellor of the Exchequer to editing the Evening Standard, owned by a Russian billionaire, and advising BlackRock on the side. Because nothing says “public service” like moonlighting for the world’s biggest asset manager.

This isn’t illegal. It’s just depressingly normal.

Corporate welfare: socialism for the rich

When workers ask for fair pay, it’s “inflationary”. When the public sector requests funding, it’s “unsustainable”. But when corporations need a bailout, the cheque is in the post before the ink is dry.

Banks, airlines, car companies, when things go south, there’s always money. Trillions were poured into corporate rescue packages during the pandemic. Much of it was needed, no doubt. But plenty was funnelled into shareholder dividends, stock buybacks, and executive bonuses. In Denmark, companies that received emergency aid were later found to have paid out dividends worth billions. In the UK, firms were handed government-backed loans with minimal oversight, only to lay off staff weeks later.

In essence, it’s corporate welfare: the taxpayer takes the risk, the executive suite takes the reward. And the public gets a stern lecture about belt-tightening.

The illusion of free trade: freedom for whom, exactly?

Free trade, like diet cola, promises all the benefits with none of the side effects. In reality, modern trade deals are less about removing tariffs and more about enabling corporations to sue governments for daring to regulate.

Remember TTIP, the proposed EU-US free trade deal? It collapsed under public pressure, largely because it included Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. These would have allowed corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals if they introduced laws that cut into profits. You know, things like environmental protections, labour rights, or not letting tobacco companies market to children.

Australia was sued by Philip Morris for introducing plain cigarette packaging. Canada had to compensate a US firm for rejecting a quarry project that would have wrecked local ecosystems. These aren’t hypotheticals, they happened. And if TTIP had passed, the same could’ve happened across Europe.

So yes, trade is freer. For corporations. Everyone else? Not so much.

Guns, not butter: following the money

Ever wonder why defence budgets are ballooning while schools beg for glue sticks? It’s not because Europe is full of warmongers, it’s because defence spending is reliably profitable and politically safe.

The EU, historically cautious about militarisation, is now investing billions in joint defence initiatives. Germany announced a €100 billion rearmament programme. The UK, already one of the world’s biggest arms exporters, is upping its military spend while local councils declare bankruptcy.

Defence contracts are goldmines: high-margin, long-term, and often exempt from the sort of transparency expected in, say, a nursery renovation. And because arms deals are “strategic”, they’re rarely questioned, until the weapons are turned on civilians, at which point everyone suddenly remembers international law.

It’s no coincidence that ex-politicians regularly turn up on the boards of arms manufacturers, or that lobbyists for the defence sector are some of the best-funded in Brussels. If democracy has a price tag, the arms industry paid it in advance.

Democracy for sale: barely used, apply within

Europe still holds elections. Parliament buildings still stand. The language of democracy, choice, accountability, transparency, is still repeated like a prayer. But behind the scenes, policy is shaped by those with the deepest pockets and the most persistent lobbyists.

The result is a democracy that functions like a stage set. All the right scenery, but little of the substance. The public debates healthcare; corporations write the policies. The voters choose between candidates; the markets choose the constraints.

As Wolff might put it, this isn’t democracy failing, it’s capitalism succeeding. Political influence has become just another commodity, traded like any other. And the public, reduced to spectators, are told that’s just the cost of doing business.

What next?

The good news? This isn’t inevitable. The structure may be rigged, but it’s not unchangeable. Public awareness is growing. Grassroots movements are pushing back, from campaign finance reform to demands for corporate transparency and fair taxation. Some parliaments (especially in the Nordics) remain relatively resilient. And citizens still have the power to demand more than theatre.

But it starts with honesty. The current system doesn’t just have corporate influence, it runs on it. Until we confront that fact, the lobbyists will keep writing the lines, and the rest of us will keep clapping on cue.

Europe Inc. III. The real motives behind Europe’s war economy push

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 11 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

When European leaders speak of “security”, it’s worth asking: security for whom, exactly?

Not for the millions navigating crumbling health systems or housing crises. Not for those struggling to afford heating or fresh food. No, the current drive to rearm Europe has little to do with public safety and far more to do with shareholder satisfaction.

As Grace Blakeley has sharply noted, the sudden rediscovery of defence budgets has less to do with strategic necessity and more with economic opportunity, for the right kind of people, of course. Not your neighbour. Not your nurse. But certainly your nearest weapons manufacturer.

Military Keynesianism: austerity with better PR

Back in the day, Keynesianism meant public investment to stimulate the economy, think new schools, railways, or green jobs. Today’s version swaps solar panels for missiles and hospital beds for tanks. Welcome to military Keynesianism, where the state finally spends again, just not on you.

Yanis Varoufakis calls it what it is: “the new austerity for the many and the new money-spinner for the few.” He’s not wrong. Germany has set up a €100 billion defence fund, fast-tracked and ring-fenced, while debates about housing and education are left to wither. The UK, not to be outdone, has pledged to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2030, because nothing says “levelling up” like fighter jets.

It’s curious how quickly fiscal rules vanish when the expenditure is military. Need money for care workers? “The budget won’t stretch.” Need it for drones? “How much and when?”

BAE Systems saw a 9% jump in profits in 2023. Rheinmetall, Germany’s top arms manufacturer, has nearly tripled its share price since the war in Ukraine began. Airbus, known for its jets and civilian aircraft, is expanding its defence division like it’s the new Tesla.

Apparently, there’s always money, provided it explodes.

The Ukraine war: not just a tragedy, but a market opportunity

Let’s be clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, brutal, and devastating. But the Western response hasn’t just been about solidarity, it’s been a windfall for the arms industry.

Germany, long cautious about rearmament for obvious historical reasons, now finds itself at the forefront of the EU’s military resurgence. That €100 billion special defence fund? It was announced days after the invasion, swiftly approved, no public referendum necessary. Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann are now building tanks and munitions at record speed. They’ve even had to hire more staff, proof that war, like any good business, creates jobs (though ideally not in your postcode).

In the UK, BAE Systems is so flush with orders it’s opened new factories, including in North Wales. Meanwhile, British-made arms flow to Ukraine, while new contracts pour in from NATO allies looking to restock. BAE’s CEO described it as “an exceptionally busy year.” One wonders how busy the NHS has been.

France, never shy about arms exports, has leaned in hard. Rafale fighter jets are selling like hot croissants, with Macron promising greater “strategic autonomy”, code for “we want to build and sell more stuff without waiting for Washington”.

All the while, budgets for social care, education, and housing remain “under pressure.” The message is clear: security starts with missiles, not meals.

Enemies wanted: apply within

Of course, you can’t justify this kind of spending without a convincing enemy. Russia fits the bill, but as Grace Blakeley points out, the real competition isn’t between countries, it’s between defence firms. And to stay relevant, they need threats. Existential ones.

Cue the increasing sabre-rattling about China. Suddenly, discussions about Taiwan, cyber warfare, and Pacific alliances have crept into European defence planning. NATO, originally a North Atlantic alliance, now muses about a presence in the Indo-Pacific. Because if you’re going to build ships and fighter jets, you’d better find an ocean to put them in.

This is not to downplay real geopolitical risks. But the scale and speed of militarisation suggests something more opportunistic than prudent. A strategic pivot is one thing; a spending binge is quite another.

We are witnessing, in real time, the manufacture of a permanent war economy, one that normalises militarised budgets and marginalises public ones. The enemy doesn’t need to invade. It just needs to exist.

Austerity and militarisation: two sides of the same (bad) coin

There’s a grim symmetry here. The same governments that said there was no money for mental health services now roll out billion-euro arms deals. The same ministers who told teachers to tighten belts now sign off on new submarines. All in the name of “security”.

But whose security is it, exactly?

For the public, austerity hollowed out services. Now militarisation is draining what little is left. And the political fallout is predictable: as living standards erode and democratic promises fall flat, people grow disillusioned. Some turn to the far right, convinced their country is being “betrayed”, not by capital, but by immigrants, minorities, or some vague “elite”.

It’s a dangerous loop: economic neglect breeds resentment; resentment breeds populism; populism legitimises further militarisation. And around we go.

Weapons instead of welfare: the new consensus

This is the quiet consensus emerging across Europe: that defence spending is inevitable, desirable, even moral, while social investment is optional, wasteful, and unaffordable. It’s an economic fantasy wrapped in patriotic bunting.

And it’s not just the usual suspects. Centre-left governments are falling into line. Spain’s left-wing coalition increased its military budget by 26% in 2023. Italy’s post-populist government has made similar pledges. Even traditionally neutral countries like Sweden and Finland have joined NATO and started rearming.

Once upon a time, defence spending was a reluctant necessity. Now it’s a growth strategy.

Follow the money (again)

As always, it comes back to incentives. Defence contractors want contracts. Politicians want growth. Media outlets, many with shareholders of their own, prefer not to bite the hand that advertises. And so the cycle continues.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s worse: it’s a system functioning exactly as designed. War and the threat of war are lucrative. Peace, sadly, is not.

If Europe wants to break free from this logic, it will need more than treaties. It will need courage: to challenge entrenched interests, to rethink security beyond soldiers and stockpiles, and to invest in the sort of future that can’t be measured in missiles.

Because the real danger isn’t invasion. It’s distraction, being so busy preparing for war that we forget what peace is meant to look like.

Europe Inc. IV. Resistance and alternatives: reclaiming democracy

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 10 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

For decades, European politics has resembled a Punch and Judy show, only with fewer laughs and more austerity. On one side, the market-worshipping neoliberals clutching their spreadsheets and “fiscal responsibility.” On the other, vaguely embarrassed centrists who occasionally tut at inequality but still vote for trade deals written by Exxon lawyers. The stage is well-lit. The audience, increasingly, is not impressed.

But while corporate power has captured institutions from Westminster to Brussels, it hasn’t silenced resistance. Across the continent, citizens, thinkers, activists and even the odd rogue economist are challenging the capture, not just with slogans, but with blueprints for change. This isn’t about utopia. It’s about damage control, dignity, and doing better than a system that currently functions like a vending machine for billionaires.

Ban the chequebooks: campaign finance with training wheels off

Prem Sikka, who knows the UK’s economic corruption inside out and probably has the receipts, is unequivocal: if you want a functioning democracy, you need to ban private donations. Not “regulate” them. Not “limit” them. Ban them. Entirely.

The UK is the most glaring example, where the Conservatives are bankrolled by hedge funds and property developers, and Labour, post-Corbyn, now seems comfortable sipping from the same vintage bottle. But Europe isn’t innocent. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! was practically a start-up for ex-bankers, lavishly funded by finance. In Germany, the CDU received millions from energy and auto industry giants while posturing about climate targets. In Italy, Berlusconi didn’t even bother to separate his media empire from his political platform.

Solutions exist: Norway and Sweden have strict caps and generous public funding for parties. Belgium bans TV ads for parties entirely, forcing actual debate instead of branding exercises. Imagine that.

It’s time to stop treating political parties like private businesses with loyalty cards. If democracy is a public service, it could be publicly funded, and not just by those with seven-figure net worths and a spare villa in the Alps.

Democratising the economy: not a radical idea, just long overdue

Let’s be clear: neoliberal economics is not an inevitability. It’s a choice, albeit one imposed, repeated, and repackaged so often it now feels like gravity.

Across Europe, however, that spell is weakening. Economists like Grace Blakeley, Yanis Varoufakis, and Thomas Piketty are openly rejecting the script. Their ideas aren’t fringe, they’re practical. Wealth taxes. Public ownership of energy and transport. Housing as a right, not an asset class. Even the IMF, usually the spiritual home of polite austerity sadists, has flirted with wealth redistribution in recent papers.

Take Spain. The government, led by a coalition of PSOE and the left-wing Sumar, has pushed for rent controls, hiked the minimum wage, and introduced a windfall tax on energy firms. Not exactly revolutionary, but worlds away from the “there is no alternative” refrain. In Portugal, the Left Bloc has long called for democratic control of utilities. In Germany, Berliners voted (non-bindingly, alas) to expropriate corporate landlords like Deutsche Wohnen, whose business model consists largely of buying property and watching tenants suffer.

Public ownership works. Ask the people of Paris, who re-municipalised their water service in 2010 after private management led to price hikes and worse service. Or the French postal bank (La Banque Postale), which offers basic banking services to millions the market deemed “unprofitable.”

Economic democracy isn’t ideology, it’s survival.

Rewilding the media landscape: journalism without yachts

Independent media is the lifeblood of informed democracy. Which is why it’s treated with such disdain by those in power.

Across Europe, legacy media is in various states of decline, debt, or docility. Many are owned by billionaires (e.g., Le Figaro, Die Welt, The Telegraph), private equity groups (Politico Europe), or conglomerates with more lobbying staff than journalists. The result? A continent where pension reform protests are labelled “chaotic,” but tax cuts for hedge funds are “fiscally prudent.”

Fortunately, a new ecosystem is flourishing. In France, Mediapart has exposed everything from Sarkozy’s Libyan campaign cash to Macron’s revolving-door cabinet. In Germany, Correctiv has unravelled far-right donor networks and environmental scandals. In Hungary, Telex and Átlátszó battle the Orbán media machine with stubborn independence. In the UK, The Bylines Network, Declassified UK, and Novara Media pick up where the BBC fears to tread.

And it’s not just outlets, journalists are organising too. Freelancers in Europe are unionising, fighting precarious conditions that keep investigations in the bin and clickbait on the front page.

To support them? Anti-SLAPP laws to protect against corporate lawsuits. Grants without editorial strings. Public funding schemes for independent journalism, not PR firms with a camera.

Because when media exists only to protect the powerful, democracy becomes little more than a press release.

Mutual aid, co-ops and people who won’t wait politely

Politics doesn’t only happen in parliaments. It happens in housing co-ops in Bologna, solidarity kitchens in Athens, and citizen energy collectives in Copenhagen.

Mutual aid exploded during the pandemic, ordinary people organising food, medicine, and care without waiting for slow-moving bureaucracies or “public-private partnerships” that do little but rebrand responsibility. In places like Barcelona, local councils work with citizen assemblies to co-manage services. In Amsterdam, activists forced the city to acknowledge and act on Airbnb’s role in gentrification. In rural France, collectives have reoccupied abandoned farmland to practise agroecology and provide food locally.

Even the cooperative model, once seen as dusty, is back in style. From cooperative housing in Zurich to platform co-ops in Berlin, these aren’t nostalgic experiments. They’re durable, democratic, and increasingly necessary alternatives to a system that delivers precarity for most and dividends for few.

This is politics, too, just not the kind that gets televised.

From managed decline to organised resistance

None of this is simple. The road to reclaiming democracy isn’t a straight line. It’s a mosaic, messy, multilingual, sometimes maddening. But it’s happening. And it doesn’t require utopian thinking. Just a refusal to keep settling for a democracy that functions more like a customer feedback form for Goldman Sachs.

So: ban the money. Reclaim the commons. Fund the press. Build solidarity, not spectacle. And stop pretending there’s nothing we can do while private jets burn fuel faster than nurses can fill a kettle.

Because if we don’t shape the alternatives, someone else will, and they’ll be wearing very expensive suits, paid for with public money, to tell you there’s no alternative.

Europe’s shameful silence: Why the continent fails Gaza

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 09 May 2025 22:00:00 +0000

As Israel’s slaughter in Gaza grinds on, now in its twentieth month, with over 45,000 dead, most of them women and children, and nearly every hospital, school, and home reduced to rubble, one might expect Europe, that self-proclaimed bastion of human rights, to muster more than a few limp statements of concern.

Instead, the European Union has perfected the art of hand-wringing paralysis, offering little more than performative sympathy while continuing to arm, fund, and politically shield Israel. It is a masterclass in moral evasion, dressed up as diplomacy.

Examining the roots of Europe’s complicity: the hypocrisy of its selective outrage, the economic and geopolitical interests that outweigh Palestinian lives, the arms trade that fuels the killing, the political cowardice masquerading as neutrality, and what, if anything, might finally force a change.

The EU’s selective outrage: A study in double standards

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe moved with remarkable speed. Sanctions were imposed within days, military aid flowed freely, and Ursula von der Leyen solemnly declared that Europe stood united against aggression. The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin was welcomed as a triumph of justice.

Contrast this with Gaza. South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide, was met with indifference or outright hostility from European capitals. Germany, ever eager to weaponise its own history when convenient, dismissed the case outright, while Hungary’s foreign minister sneered that the very idea was “nonsense.” The EU, which so loves to lecture the world on human rights, could not even bring itself to endorse an investigation.

The message is clear: some victims merit solidarity, others do not. Ukrainian lives are worth defending; Palestinian lives are, at best, an inconvenience.

Money talks, Palestinian lives apparently do not

Behind Europe’s inaction lies a tangle of economic and strategic interests. The EU treats Israel not as a rogue state committing atrocities, but as a favoured trading partner. Since October 2023, Brussels has funnelled €126 million into Israeli research projects, some of which directly benefit arms firms. German and French defence giants, Rheinmetall, ThyssenKrupp, Leonardo, continue to profit from contracts that supply the very weapons flattening Gaza.

Then there is energy. Israel’s offshore gas fields have become a convenient alternative to Russian supplies, and European governments are keen to keep the taps flowing. Add to this the shared obsession with “migration control” and anti-Iran posturing, and the calculus becomes depressingly clear: Palestinian lives are expendable if the price of saving them is disrupting trade or annoying Washington.

The arms trade: Europe’s bloody profits

While European leaders issue empty pleas for restraint, their arms industries are cashing in. Germany, the continent’s most enthusiastic enabler, increased weapons exports to Israel tenfold in 2023. British firm BAE Systems and Germany’s Rheinmetall supply artillery shells and tank components used in Gaza. Dutch, Italian, and Spanish companies provide parts for F-35 jets, the same ones currently dropping bombs on refugee camps.

Even more grotesque is the use of public money. The EU has handed out €426 million in subsidies to arms firms that supply Israel, while Rheinmetall, a company making millions from tank shells used in Gaza, pocketed €169 million in state support. One might call this a perverse form of humanitarian aid, if the aid in question were not facilitating mass slaughter.

International law is unambiguous: the Genocide Convention obliges states to act to prevent genocide. Europe’s response? A shrug, followed by another arms shipment.

Political cowardice dressed as prudence

Why does Europe hesitate? Partly fear of domestic backlash. Pro-Israel lobbies wield disproportionate influence, particularly in Germany, where any criticism of Israel is reflexively equated with antisemitism. The far-right, from France’s Le Pen to Italy’s Meloni, cheers on Israel not out of principle, but because it fits their anti-Muslim world-view.

Then there is the fiction of “balance.” European officials insist they are “engaging with both sides,” as if supplying one side with weapons and vetoing sanctions against it constitutes even-handedness. They fret about “alienating Israel” and show no such concern for the millions of Palestinians being starved and bombed. It is not diplomacy; it is complicity with a veneer of respectability.

What could be done and why it won’t happen

The path to ending Europe’s complicity is straightforward, if politically inconvenient. An immediate arms embargo. Sanctions on Israeli officials, of the kind imposed on Russia. Full support for the ICC’s investigation. The restoration of funding to UNRWA, the only lifeline for Gaza’s starving population. An end to trade with illegal settlements.

Will any of this happen? Not without immense public pressure. European leaders have shown they will only act when the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. For now, the calculation remains in Israel’s favour.

History will judge this moment. It will note the governments that looked away, the corporations that profited, the lies told to justify the unjustifiable. And it will ask: when the evidence of genocide was plain, why did Europe do so little? The answer, as ever, is a mix of greed, cowardice, and the quiet conviction that some lives count for less than others.

Palestinians, it seems, are among the less fortunate.

Defendable Internet?

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 23:00:00 +0000

David Clark remembers the moment the Internet’s Pandora’s box creaked open and said, “Hello, world.” It was 2 November 1988, and the Morris Worm was slithering its way through cyberspace like a python on speed. Designed with the innocence of a curious grad student and the destruction of a cyber sledgehammer, it crashed some 6,000 machines, roughly one-tenth of the Internet at the time. Not bad for an opening act.

Back then, the network engineers in the room weren’t pondering threats to democracy or ransomware gangs knocking on NHS servers. No, they were earnestly wrestling with TCP packet loss and the excitement of latency reduction. Making things go faster, scale bigger, and connect better. The digital equivalent of building a racetrack and forgetting brakes might be useful.

Security? That was someone else’s problem, possibly yours, dear user. Or no one’s. Because, in the end, crime and aggression were just unfortunate side effects of human nature. Nothing a routing protocol could fix.

Fast-forward to 2023: The Future is on fire

Now the Internet isn’t just carrying cat pictures and unsolicited email about Bitcoin investments. It’s the beating heart of banks, hospitals, water treatment plants, nuclear facilities, airports, toaster ovens, vibrators, and democracy itself. And it’s still riddled with holes large enough to drive a botnet through.

Adversaries seem to be having a field day. Why? Because they enjoy the unfair advantage of focus. They don’t need to get sign-off from Legal, pass ISO audits, or attend quarterly stakeholder meetings about whether a risk register should be colour-coded. No. Attackers just attack.

Meanwhile, defenders are trying to hold the line with one hand while filling out compliance forms with the other and attending a workshop on “Building Synergies Between Cybersecurity and Cross-Sector Regulation”.

The result? Security by duct tape and burnout.

What if we actually designed a secure Internet?

Crazy idea, right?

Thomas Dullien (aka Halvar Flake) and others have poked at this puzzle for years: why, exactly, don’t we just… build a defendable Internet?

Their answer? Follow the money. Incentives are incongruent, upside down, and occasionally wearing a fake moustache. The people with the power to change things don’t have the motivation. The people with the motivation don’t have the power. And the people with both tend to get hired by Google and disappear into a black hole of NDA-bound silence.

By the time Black Hat Europe 2022 rolled around, the answer was clear: A defendable Internet is technically possible, but only with a complete industry makeover.

Right. Just like addressing global inequality, tackling the climate crisis, or getting rid of leaf blowers. Technically possible. Politically hilarious.

Let’s talk about the “Dark Side” (Hint: It’s not just hackers)

People love to talk about the “dark side” of the Internet like it’s a shadowy underworld populated by hoodie-wearing teens and rogue AIs. But the real dark side? It’s the stuff we don’t talk about. The impacts ignored, postponed, or hand-waved away with corporate speak and a slide deck.

Some modest questions, if I may:

Are the minds of those who think they’ve “won” the Internet, conquered markets, cornered attention, scaled to infinity, locked into that dopamine loop like a tech billionaire on a serotonin drought?
Has short-term thinking become the only thinking? Does “strategic foresight” now mean checking tomorrow’s stock price?
Are we pathologically incapable of planning beyond the next breach or shareholder meeting?
Is this just another legacy tech problem? You know the one, there’s never time to fix the foundations because the house is always on fire. We’ll upgrade… after the next incident.
Why is it so hard to look past the next breach, news cycle, or keynote announcement?
And if time can be sliced finer and finer, have we shaved it down to the microsecond? Is our digital world shaped by what fits into a sprint cycle, a click-through, a dopamine hit?

The real question

We ask, “Is a defendable Internet possible?”

The answer, increasingly, sounds like: Sure, just not this one.

Not with this economic system. Not with this incentive structure. Not with “security” defined as the thing you bolt on after the latest zero-day, not as a principle you design for.

So here we are. The defenders are tired. And the attackers are thriving. The Internet is everywhere. And the “dark side” isn’t just malware or misinformation, it’s the systemic inability to do anything meaningfully preventative.

Security theatre is easy. Structural change is not.

The art of pretending we know what’s coming

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 22:00:00 +0000

Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022.

Obliviousness and congruence

Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved, just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most digital scenarios consistently overlook is the actual state of the world. You know, finite planet, finite resources, that sort of inconvenient reality.

Likely effects

Economic development might slow down, unless you’re a transnational behemoth with a flair for tax evasion and a fondness for shareholder value. Employees are already being told to “make do with less”, which in practice means being set up to fail and then blamed for it. Burnout, frustration, and plunging performance are the inevitable side effects of pretending scarcity isn’t a thing.

Meanwhile, the response to dwindling resources has been to… use them up even faster. Think clear-cut rainforests and oceans emptied of fish, all in the name of ‘progress’. Opportunism blossoms like mould in a damp bedsit, while misallocated resources pile up with the elegance of a council bin strike.

Inflation hits the poorest hardest (quelle surprise), further deepening inequality. And it turns out that chronic or situational material insecurity makes people ill, grumpy, and morally judgy. Who knew Maslow had a point?

Measurables and observables

Yale helpfully reminded us that most of the fancy metals we need for gadgets are irreplaceable. Oops.
The British Geological Survey points out that we’re almost entirely dependent on metals like antimony, bismuth, and tungsten, none of which are easily recycled or substituted. Bonus: we mine them as by-products, so can’t really scale.
The internet’s electricity needs in 2017 were estimated somewhere between “terrifying” and “apocalyptic”. Roughly 300 to 500 GW just to keep memes circulating.

Surveillance society

Or: “It’s for your own safety,” said the eye in the sky.

Governments, bless them, stepped up to “protect” us from ourselves, and from each other. Cue the usual suspects: dissidents, criminals, corrupting influences, privacy. Intelligence agencies took to data-mining like ducks to water, especially when it came to flagging anyone who wasn’t enthusiastically waving the national flag.

Privacy regulation was trotted out with great fanfare, conveniently distracting from state surveillance. Then came the real twist: everyone started buying their surveillance toys from China. Because of course they did.

Likely effects

Corporate access to data gets squeezed. Cue tantrums. Consumerism takes a hit. Governments start finger-pointing at individual citizens for the mess. Meanwhile, ransomware and identity theft are having a renaissance.

“Think of the children” becomes a rallying cry, followed swiftly by more surveillance. Privacy-as-a-service becomes a booming industry. Phones become more locked down than a paranoid royal. People try to look perfect online and offline, and their mental health quietly disintegrates.

Emotions? Best buried. Depression, anxiety, and even cancer risk spike as people are told to be positive while they’re being digitally strip-searched. “It is what it is,” they say, while quietly dissociating.

Measurables and observables

Women, children, and activists are increasingly targeted by petty tyrants of various sizes.
Ransomware blooms via automated botnets. Agencies buy data from brokers and call it “security”.
GDPR swooped in like a knight in shining armour… but forgot to cover state surveillance. Member states do what they like, especially when spying on their own citizens.

Interventions by governments

AKA: the “we’ve got this, probably” chapter.

Corporations and NGOs suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of a regulatory stick. Everything became “critical infrastructure” overnight. Governments, spooked by their own digital fragility, labelled attacks as cyberwarfare, and responded accordingly.

Likely effects

Doing business online got pricier. Resources went into compliance box-ticking rather than actual risk management. Botnets were taken down, a few cybercriminals got nicked, and private sector hackers found the heat a bit much.

Measurables and observables

Equifax’s breach screamed “we don’t care about you”, prompting regulation. No James Bond villainy, just good old-fashioned neglect.
JP Morgan got hacked, and suddenly it was Russia! Except it wasn’t. The actual culprits included Americans and Israelis. One legged it to Russia just to make it interesting.
NATO created cyber defence divisions. Academics wrote earnest tomes on cyberwar. Treaties were proposed, and promptly ignored as governments doubled down on espionage.

Hacker groups rule

Welcome to the Digital Wild West.

Hacker collectives, some mercenaries, others state-sponsored, many just in it for the chaos, multiplied. Cartels with deep pockets responded in kind. Walled gardens with paywalls and data-harvesting “security features” became the norm. Pay up or log off.

Likely effects

Cyberattacks surged. So did costs. Espionage became aggressive sport. Cartels charged through the nose for “protection”. Everyone built their own little cyber-armies, and even the defenders started trading secrets.

Measurables and observables

Malware and APTs on the rise.
Cartels like the Cyber Threat Alliance now exist to share notes and resources, basically professionalised cybercrime-fighting co-ops.
Security went full military: “Critical Controls”, “Ethical Hacker” badges, NGO clients dubbed “target audiences”.
Offensive Security stuffed more tools into Kali Linux than most people know what to do with.

Self-Organising protection societies

If governments and cartels can’t protect you, build your own club.

The deviant scenario. Not in a saucy way, just one that is not congruent with neoliberal fantasies.

Individuals got tired of being tracked and hacked. Government and hacker groups labelled them dissidents, terrorists, or “concerned citizens” (the horror). Businesses, naturally, saw profiles as emotional use.

In the vacuum of trust, digital militias emerged. Federated, GNU-licensed platforms like Mastodon and Peertube sprouted up like mushrooms in compost.

Cartels built posh safe zones, walled gardens, velvet rope and all. Governments retaliated by sending in infiltrators (real or bot). Cue the cyber soap opera.

Likely effects

Corporate reputations tanked. Trust evaporated. People retreated into self-selected bubbles, real ones this time, not algorithmic echo chambers. Trade between them became cautious, transactional, or non-existent.

In low-income bubbles, online spending crashed, mostly due to, well, not having any money. The darknet became a growth industry. Anonymity became not just desirable, but essential. Tensions rose. Skirmishes ensued.

Measurables and observables

Federated tools like Mastodon and Peertube gained traction.
The digital divide grew sharper, despite desperate pushes from governments and corporates alike.
E-commerce dipped in poorer areas, though COVID made it spike temporarily. Even poverty gets its moment in the data.
Corporate and state walled gardens expanded. Surveillance capitalism remained very much alive.

And now for something completely different

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 23:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, you’re trundling along through the digital forest, trying to navigate terms of service longer than Dostoevsky’s back catalogue, when suddenly… there’s a Larch.

Unexpected. Tall. Mildly majestic. And utterly irrelevant to the rest of what’s about to happen.

Helvetica, but make it litigious

In a plot twist worthy of Kafka, a German court (Landgericht München, civil chamber number three, for those playing Regulation Bingo at home) ruled that simply including a Google-hosted font on your website amounts to illegally handing over users’ IP addresses to Google. No consent. No justification. No shady disclaimer hidden in 6pt grey-on-grey legalese.

You wanted a pretty header in Roboto. What you got was a GDPR violation and possibly a strongly-worded letter from someone’s lawyer. Congratulations.

The lesson? Host your fonts locally. Or face the wrath of The Font Police. (Which sounds silly, until you realise they wear suits and work in regulatory bodies.)

Death by a thousand clicks

The CNIL, the ever-watchful French data protection regulator, finally had enough of the “click here to accept cookies” scam masquerading as user choice. In a move that shocked absolutely no one but enraged tech lobbyists everywhere, CNIL fined Google and Facebook for making it absurdly easier to say “yes, track me” than “no, kindly piss off”.

Apparently, if you want to accept cookies, it’s a single click. If you want to refuse them, it’s like playing Minesweeper in the dark with a blindfold on, seven clicks, two hidden menus, and a small chance of triggering a newsletter subscription.

Who knew “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” was supposed to be more than just regulatory poetry?

Imagine a pop-up appears on your screen. It says, “We respect your privacy.” Then it proceeds to ask you whether 853 ad vendors can gently harvest your data unless you manually untick each box.

That, dear reader, is the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) in action, a consent system built by the online ad industry for… well, the online ad industry.

The Belgian Data Protection Authority (APD) wasn’t having it. In a moment of rare clarity, they determined that IAB Europe, the folks behind this charming digital labyrinth, is in fact a data controller. And, wouldn’t you know it, their pop-up carnival ride of checkboxes violates the GDPR. All those delightful little “consent strings” that follow you across the internet? Yeah, those are illegal now. Delete everything and start again.

(One suspects the real offence here was making regulators use the system themselves.)

Big Brother is watching your bounce rate

Meanwhile, over in France, the CNIL took aim at yet another household data vampire, Google Analytics. It turns out that quietly shipping European website traffic data off to the US, where privacy laws have the structural integrity of wet cardboard, might not be entirely compliant with the GDPR.

Following complaints from NOYB (None of Your Business, yes, really), the CNIL came to the radical conclusion that websites using Google Analytics without proper safeguards are breaking the law. Gasp.

The solution? Well, you can try asking Google nicely. Or switch to something with a smidge less surveillance capitalism baked in, like Burst. No, it’s not as shiny. Yes, it works. And it won’t sell your users’ browsing habits to the highest bidder.

The Larch was a warning

All of this, the fonts, the cookies, the “transparent” consent, the analytics, is a digital ecosystem designed around not giving you control. The irony is that the GDPR isn’t even particularly radical. It just asks companies not to treat your personal data like it’s part of a supermarket loyalty scheme.

And yet, the tech giants cling to every dark pattern and loophole like a toddler refusing to eat vegetables.

So yes, sometimes in this mess, you’ll stumble across a Larch. A sudden act of enforcement. A judgment. A fine. A slap on the wrist.

But unless we start asking harder questions about the system, the ad-funded, attention-maximising, data-mining default setting of the internet, there’ll always be another Larch. And another lawsuit.

And you’ll still be clicking “refuse all cookies” with the precision of a bomb defusal expert.

The noble art of war justification: A brief on civilised butchery

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 23:00:00 +0000

Roughly five centuries ago, indigenous peoples across the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa began to encounter a particularly aggressive form of “European hospitality.” Not content with simply saying hello, Europeans arrived with flags, firearms, and a staggering sense of entitlement, swiftly laying claim to other people’s lands and resources. Resistance was typically met with massacres, yes, including women and children, because apparently conquest was a family affair. Survivors were often rewarded with disease, chains, or both. Charming.

Naturally, this wholesale plundering eventually made even a few European theologians and jurists feel a bit uneasy, not enough to stop it, mind you, but enough to scribble down their moral musings. They insisted indigenous peoples were indeed the rightful owners of their lands (how gracious), but being products of their time, they also laid the conceptual groundwork for continued subjugation by proposing that it was all perfectly acceptable under the right philosophical lighting, via the ever-handy notion of just war.

Enter stage left: Just War Theory. A delightful concept suggesting that while war is terrible, it can be slightly less terrible if done properly, think of it as the ethical abattoir of geopolitics. The idea being that war is not always the worst option, sometimes it’s just what a nation needs to feel better about itself.

The roots of this noble tradition go back as far as Ancient Egypt, where Pharaohs justified their conquests with divine sanction (a time-honoured trick). In Warring States China, the emperor could wage war as a last resort, questioning him was not allowed, but not to worry, victory itself was considered divine approval. Meanwhile, the Indian epic Mahabharata offered the first real debate on righteous war (dharma-yuddha), while Aristotle kindly introduced the idea to the Greeks, who were already quite fond of fighting each other anyway.

In the West, theologians took up the banner with gusto. For Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, a war could be just, provided it was waged by the right people (read: Christians), for the right reasons (usually something about heresy or trade routes), and with the right amount of pious regret.

Western legalists, in their infinite wisdom, later claimed “Just War” as an exclusively Western innovation, and not at all like that entirely different concept of jihad, despite both being concerned with when killing is permissible if done for the “right” reasons. Convenient, that.

Legitimisation

Eventually, legal theorists adjusted the so-called law of nations to reflect, and thus rubber-stamp, the status quo of European dominance. A discipline originally born of grappling with colonial slaughter changed into a polite set of rules for civilised states to chat amongst themselves while excluding the rest of the planet. By definition, “civilised” meant European, of course, an efficient way to keep the club exclusive.

International law, such as it is, posits the existence of a global society of states that politely nod to certain norms. But let’s be clear: these norms are binding only in the sense that everyone agrees they are, and unenforceable in the sense that no one actually does anything when they’re breached. It’s all very genteel.

As Thomas Hobbes once pointed out, “all laws are silent in the time of war,” which neatly captures the mood. Even with modern humanitarian law attempting to whisper through the gunfire, the general assumption remains: if you kill someone in war, it’s fine, unless someone makes a real fuss about it. In peacetime, of course, murder still requires a good excuse.

With the legal vacuum of war conveniently legitimised, all one needs to launch a military escapade is to convince a home audience (or a few foreign allies) that the other side are barbarians, monsters, or perhaps even worse: uncivilised. Sprinkle in a few atrocity stories and a rousing anthem or two, and off you go.

Highly recommended viewing for those interested in the fine art of manufactured war: Wag the Dog (for PR tips) and Dr. Strangelove (for nuclear etiquette and polite doomsday planning).

Mindset malfunctions: Human self-sabotage

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 22:00:00 +0000

The human mind is a marvel of evolution – capable of breathtaking creativity, yet equally adept at constructing elaborate prisons of its own making. At the heart of this paradox lies our mindset, that curious mental lens through which we interpret everything from our abilities to impending apocalypses.

Psychologists, in their infinite wisdom, have identified two particularly telling varieties: the fixed mindset and its more adaptable cousin, the growth mindset. The former operates on the charming assumption that talent is innate and unchangeable, a belief system particularly popular among those who enjoy explaining why they’ve never quite lived up to their potential. The latter, far more inconveniently, suggests we might actually have to work at things – a notion as unsettling as it is demonstrably true.

Why our brains betray us

When we peel back the layers of our cognitive machinery, we find some rather embarrassing design flaws. Take motivated reasoning, our brain’s special talent for making facts conform to feelings. This explains everything from political tribalism to why we’ll defend that terrible purchase we really shouldn’t have made.

Then there’s conspiratorial thinking, that peculiar mental gymnastics routine where random events become sinister plots – a cognitive coping mechanism particularly favoured during times of stress or powerlessness. It’s remarkable how a dash of anxiety and a pinch of boredom can change otherwise sensible people into amateur detectives seeing clues in cereal box designs.

Our capacity for apocalyptic fantasising deserves special mention. There’s something perversely comforting about believing we’ll witness the end times – it lends drama to otherwise mundane existences. This psychological quirk explains why doomsday predictions have remained stubbornly popular, probably since the first human looked at the sky and thought “That cloud looks angry.” The appeal is obvious: if the world’s ending, suddenly your unfinished taxes don’t seem so important.

Special mentions

The darker corners of our collective psyche reveal even more troubling patterns. Misogyny, that ancient and persistent mindset, continues to thrive by translating male insecurity into female culpability. It’s a remarkable feat of psychological projection that would be impressive if it weren’t so damaging.

Meanwhile, our utilitarian numbness has us obsessively measuring everything while understanding nothing, mistaking metrics for meaning in a world where happiness stubbornly refuses to be quantified.

Perhaps most dangerously, we persist in our anthropocentric delusion – that charming belief that the universe was put here specifically for our benefit. This planetary-scale narcissism continues even as the climate crisis demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of such thinking. It’s as if the entire species suffers from a collective case of main character syndrome, unable to comprehend that we might not be the protagonists of Earth’s story.

How to (maybe) fix it

For those seeking escape from these mental traps, the path begins with ruthless self-examination. Can you articulate your opponent’s viewpoint better than they can? This ideological Turing test separates genuine understanding from lazy caricature. When engaging with differing perspectives, try steel-manning rather than straw-manning – strengthen the argument before critiquing it. The process is more laborious but infinitely more honest. Above all, cultivate the habit of questioning – not just others’ assertions, but your own most cherished assumptions.

The sobering truth is that mindsets, like underwear, require regular changing. The one you’re wearing right now probably isn’t as fresh as you think. The mark of true intelligence isn’t what you know, but your willingness to outgrow what you used to believe. After all, the only thing more embarrassing than being wrong is insisting you’re right when the evidence suggests otherwise – a lesson our species seems determined to learn the hard way, over and over again.

Informed consent: UN style (Spoiler: There wasn’t any)

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 22:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about the time the United Nations, guardian of international human rights, global peacekeeper, moral compass for the post-war world, shared biometric data of Rohingya refugees with the government they were fleeing from. Yes, you read that right.

Without informed consent.

The very people who fled genocidal violence in Myanmar, who put their trust in the UN for protection, were quietly catalogued and handed back, data-first, under the noble banner of “registration”.

Cue the press statement: “Statement on refugee registration and data collection in Bangladesh.” It reads like a lesson in passive voice and bureaucratic shoulder-shrugging. There’s talk of “ensuring safeguards” and “technical protocols” and “cooperation with the host government”. What’s not mentioned: how collecting biometric data without proper, informed consent, then sharing it with the regime accused of ethnic cleansing, might be, how do we put this gently, a catastrophic breach of trust and human rights.

Damage control by way of data science

In the wake of the revelation, the internet explodes. Articles bloom like mould. Think pieces. Expert panels. Hastily convened webinars. LinkedIn posts from data scientists wringing their hands while simultaneously polishing their CVs.

The collective mood? “We can do better. We need ethical frameworks. We need responsible AI. We need transparent systems for consent.”

A charming effort, really. Everyone rushing to solve the symptoms, to redesign the Band-Aid, while the gaping wound festers quietly in the corner.

The promises fly in:

“We’ll improve our protocols!”
“We’ll consult communities next time!”
“We’ll draft another 70-page ethical guideline nobody reads!”
“We’ve created a consent checkbox, translated this time!”

But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t about a missing consent form or a faulty translation. It’s about a system that incentivises data extraction, institutional compliance, and glossy impact reports over the actual safety of human beings.

The system is fine, apparently

Despite the public relations firestorm, the system remains serenely intact. The aid-industrial complex rolls on, well-lubricated by grants, targets, KPIs, and the deep, soothing belief that good intentions cover all sins.

Accountability? Rarely more than a footnote.

Structural change? That would require asking unpleasant questions about the real power dynamics in humanitarian work, who decides, who benefits, who’s rendered voiceless. Can’t have that.

Instead, we get more workshops, more framework white papers, more advisory boards full of people who went to the same conferences and agreed to be “deeply concerned”.

Pointing out that the system itself is not being addressed tends to be treated as a radical position, when it might more reasonably be treated as the starting point.

If it is not about power, It is PR

Let’s be brutally honest. The problem here isn’t a rogue data scientist or a sloppy consent form. It’s the fact that humanitarian institutions operate on a model where data is power, consent is conditional, and accountability is optional, particularly if the victims are stateless, displaced, or otherwise voiceless.

And when called out, the reflex is not to restructure, but to rebrand.

A better consent form will not save the next Rohingya family whose biometric profile ends up in the wrong hands. Another UN statement will not stop a government from using “humanitarian data” to justify surveillance or persecution.

Toolkits and pledges paper over the question they are meant to answer. People are not data points. Refugees are not datasets. Consent is not something to be experimented on when the stakes are people’s lives.

GDPR, ICCPR, and the great consent charade

Nienke Fokma — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 22:00:00 +0000

You’d think something called the General Data Protection Regulation might actually protect data. You’d be wrong. Along with its elder cousin, the ICCPR, GDPR was hailed as the Great Hope™, a beacon of digital dignity in a world run by surveillance capitalists. But instead of taming the beast, it handed it a clipboard and told it to tick some boxes.

The GDPR officially kicked in at the stroke of midnight on 25 May 2018, like some sort of data privacy Cinderella. It was meant to give users the sacred gift of choice, to say yes or no to having their personal lives vacuumed up, analysed, monetised, and passed around like cheap party favours. What we actually got was an avalanche of “consent” banners and passive-aggressive pop-ups saying: “Agree or get lost.”

On day one, the fine folks at noyb.eu (None Of Your Business, in case you missed the joke) filed complaints against Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram for what they rightly called “forced consent”. Because let’s be honest, when “agreeing” is the only way to access the service, it’s not consent. It’s coercion, wrapped in legalese.

Meanwhile, in Politics…

The grown-ups in charge appear utterly out of their depth. They’re flailing in the face of six colossal issues:

the slow-motion car crash that is environmental destruction,
the digitisation of absolutely everything,
unaccountable algorithms pulling levers behind the curtain,
political discourse that makes Orwell look quaint,
a globalisation model that has run rather far ahead of any visible adult supervision,
and a steady erosion of the rule of law, dressed up as “reform”.

We want to breathe clean air and drink clean water, not microplastics. We want to use the internet without being stalked by ads for things we never mentioned aloud. We’d quite like artificial intelligence that isn’t making life-or-death decisions like some deranged sorting hat. We’d prefer politicians to tell the truth now and then, instead of spinning reality like DJ decks. And we’re really not loving the idea of buying clothes made by unpaid children in collapsing factories.

The trouble is, Europe’s current constitutions are about as helpful as a fax machine in a blackout.

Six rights that might actually help

A handful of campaigners have been drafting what the Charter of Fundamental Rights might say if it were brought up to date. The contents are worth a look, if only because they mark the gap between what current law covers and what people actually live through.

Article 1: Environment

The right to live in an environment that is healthy, protected, and preferably not on fire.

Article 2: Digital self-determination

The right to control one’s digital identity. No more profiling, no more manipulation. Ads that follow you around the internet could be classified as stalking.

Article 3: Artificial intelligence

The right to know what algorithms are doing to people. Algorithms could be transparent, accountable, and not treated like sorcery. Big decisions could involve a human being, preferably one who isn’t asleep at the wheel.

Article 4: Truth

The right to expect that people in power occasionally tell the truth. Lies could come with a health warning, like cigarettes.

Article 5: Globalisation

The right to buy things that weren’t made in violation of basic decency. No forced labour. No ecological ruin. No “fast fashion” that unravels in the wash.

Article 6: Fundamental rights lawsuits

The right to sue the trousers off institutions that systematically trample on rights. The European Courts could be open for business, and not just to lobbyists.

Whether or not any of this ends up in a treaty, it does mark the questions current law avoids: what counts as consent when refusing closes the door, what kind of accountability survives when decisions are made by software, and who is supposed to notice when none of the above is working.

Bias, bigotry, and other brain blunders

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 22:00:00 +0000

The elephant in the room, the one everyone recognises, is overt bias: those charmingly blatant attitudes and prejudices someone proudly wears on their sleeve. It’s delightfully obvious and enables some truly impressive mental gymnastics.

Then there’s the other elephant, the one lurking in the shadows, rarely discussed. This is unconscious bias: our hidden preferences for or against a person, thing, or group, neatly tucked away where even we can’t see them. Despite our best efforts to be impeccably fair-minded, we might harbour deep-seated resistance to differences, race, gender, physical traits, personality types, sexual orientation, you name it. How embarrassing.

Exploration

We are all, alas, products of our time and place, the moment we wake up, the conditioning begins. Fancy a bit of self-discovery? Have a go at Project Implicit and explore your own biases. We did. Quite enlightening, if mildly mortifying.

The Making Of…

Unconscious biases are the brain’s little DIY projects, crafted from our personal definitions of “normal,” shaped by past experiences (including well-intentioned failures), our social bubbles, and whatever the media has been shouting about lately. The amusing bit? These hidden biases can stubbornly persist even when they directly contradict our conscious beliefs. So much for self-awareness.

Body language

Hidden biases have a knack for slipping out when we’re stressed, distracted, or simply too relaxed to bother with decorum. They reveal themselves in subtle ways, eye contact (or lack thereof), nervous blinking, forced smiles. A real masterclass in social awkwardness.

Turtle

Apparently, the prejudice and stereotyping process is a bit like a turtle, slow, methodical, and involving an unnecessarily complex network of brain regions.

Prejudice

The amygdala, that overactive almond deep in the brain, is responsible for emotional processing and, more importantly, snap judgements. It’s the reason we instinctively distrust strangers or assume the worst based on a single glance. Handy for dodging sabre-toothed tigers, less so for modern social interactions.

This little neural drama queen treats social threats like physical ones, triggering fight-or-flight (or, in polite company, tend-and-befriend). Unconscious bias, then, is essentially our brain’s knee-jerk reaction to “other”, jumping to conclusions with all the grace of a startled cat.

Stereotyping

If prejudice is the amygdala overreacting dramatically, stereotyping is the cerebral cortex’s more “considered” (read: still flawed) contribution. It’s the bit that lazily categorises people into neat little boxes based on perceived traits. This involves higher-order thinking, or at least the illusion of it, drawing on memory, social norms, and a questionable sense of fairness. This, we like to tell ourselves, is who we really are.

Cognitive effects

Together, these two systems ensure our higher reasoning takes the occasional unscheduled holiday. Unconscious bias can make even the most rational minds malfunction like a poorly coded app.

The good news? While the knee-jerk reactions of the amygdala are stubborn, they’re not set in stone. Meditation helps. So does gradual exposure to situations we’d normally avoid (or people we’d instinctively side-eye). With enough effort, we might just nudge ourselves in the right direction, or at least stop embarrassing ourselves in public.

"Because I Said So" – the long history of polite coercion

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:00:00 +0000

That fine, silken cloak draped over the naked emperor of power, carefully stitched with phrases like “you ought to”, “you must”, or the always-a-red-flag “we are required to”. One might almost think these words were woven by bureaucrats with a thesaurus in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other.

At its core, legitimate power is the quiet agreement that some people get to tell others what to do, not because they’re better, brighter, or morally upright, but because we’ve all tacitly accepted a hierarchy that says, “Yes, you get the chair at the head of the table… and I’ll just sit over here by the bin, cheers.”

The vocabulary of obedience

Whenever someone whips out a phrase like “you are obliged to comply”, it’s a safe bet you’re being ever-so-gently herded into obedience. This is power in its Sunday best, dressed up, perfumed, and pretending not to be coercion. But don’t be fooled by the manners. Whether it’s “must attend” or “are required by policy”, what’s really being said is: “Do it, or else.”

This isn’t necessarily illegal, mind you. Just legitimate. Which is to say: it’s power that society has nodded politely at, poured a cup of tea for, and allowed to stay for dinner, despite its dubious manners.

Bourdieu’s capital of recognition: Or, The Emperor’s new authority

Enter Bourdieu, stage left, muttering something clever about “symbolic capital”. He points out that power, like money or a decent reputation, only works if people recognise it. The minute we stop believing in it, it’s just a man shouting in the street (or, let’s face it, a Prime Minister on Question Time). But if enough people squint and say “Yes, that sounds like authority,” it magically changes into something that governs your life, your work hours, and, if you’re really lucky, your weekend plans.

This mystical power-into-authority trick requires legitimacy. It’s like fairy dust, only instead of helping you fly, it helps governments convince people that taxes, surveillance, and policy decisions they had no say in are all perfectly reasonable.

The three great myths of legitimacy

Over the long and tedious history of Western political thought (and it is tedious, have you read Hobbes without caffeine?), three main stories have emerged to explain why some powers get to wear the legitimacy badge while others are simply called troublemakers:

1. The Paradigm of Difference

The classic: “You have power because you’re special, divine, or just born with the right last name.” This is monarchy, theocracy, and every office job where a middle manager thinks their title means they understand the spreadsheet. In this setup, legitimate power descends from on high, and those without it are expected to shut up, follow orders, and possibly die for king and country. Illegitimate power, meanwhile, is framed as mere rebellion, no matter how justified. If it doesn’t come with a crown, it doesn’t count.

2. The Paradigm of Equality

Fast-forward to revolutions, republics, and La Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Here, legitimacy comes from the people, or rather, whichever slice of the population is deemed “the people” this week. Power is legitimate if it’s distributed among equals, like a communal cake (that is, until someone eats most of it and calls it trickle-down). Illegitimate power? That’s anything which dares to disturb this grand illusion of balance. If you question the system, you’re the problem, not the system itself.

3. The Paradigm of Interdependence

Now we’re into postmodern territory, where everything is power, nothing is stable, and even your toaster may be part of a hegemonic structure. In this messier but slightly more honest version, power is always partial, fragile, and co-dependent. Nobody has complete control, everyone influences everyone else, and legitimacy is a negotiation, not a birthright. This is the polite way of saying: “We all rely on each other, but I’ll still overcharge you for rent while claiming we’re equals.”

Authority: A Costume Party

The trick of modern legitimacy is that it doesn’t always announce itself in robes and sceptres. Sometimes it wears a lab coat. Or a police badge. Or a university degree. Sometimes it sits behind a corporate firewall sending auto-generated emails that tell you what you must do to comply with policies you never agreed to. And sometimes it’s a softly spoken politician saying “It’s in everyone’s best interest” as the legislation slides quietly under the door.

Legitimacy, in other words, is less about truth than performance. As long as enough people believe the actor deserves the stage, the show goes on.

If someone says “you’re required to”, pause and ask yourself: Required by whom, and to what end? Legitimacy may be the gold standard of authority, but if the gold’s been painted on with spray varnish and wishful thinking, you might want to question whether that crown is real… or just a party hat.

Left hemisphere dominance: A love letter to bureaucratic hell

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 22:00:00 +0000

We’ve got two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical. The left one? Brilliant at building bridges, splitting atoms, counting beans. It’s been instrumental in all that humankind has achieved. Unfortunately, it’s also a terrible driver of the human experience. A wonderful servant, yes, but an appalling master.

The right hemisphere, though not dependent on the left in the same way, needs it to achieve its full potential, to be its wild, flowing, metaphor-loving self. But the left? Oh no, it pretends it doesn’t need the right at all. Denial, thy name is cortex.

And what if society starts running everything like a left-hemisphere project plan? What if we let the detail-obsessed bureaucrat in our heads take over entirely? Spoiler: we get a world that increasingly treats everything like a lifeless mechanism.

               ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Focus on logical abstraction      |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Preference for measurable         |                             │
|   and quantifiable knowledge        |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Marginalisation of holistic       |                             │
|   and experiential understanding    |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Reliance on formal systems and    |                             │
|   standardised certification        |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Reduction of experiential         |                             │
|   and context-dependent knowledge   |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               ▼                                                    │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
|   Increased abstraction and system  |                             │
|   dependence (detached models)      |                             │
+-------------------------------------+                             │
               │                                                    │
               └────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Abstraction: The cult of clarity

The left hemisphere hates ambiguity. The big picture lacks the kind of neat edges it loves, so it replaces it with a restricted, highly detailed, and completely myopic, world-view. Suddenly, the parts become more real than the whole.

Specialisation explodes. Technicised “knowledge” (read: jargon and academic turf wars) replaces actual wisdom or understanding gained through lived experience. Because if it isn’t on paper or in a spreadsheet, did it even happen?

We end up refining the details while missing the entire forest, let alone the raccoon hiding in the undergrowth. Anything that can’t be measured becomes irrelevant. People who “see the whole” are dismissed as dreamers. Or worse, unqualified.

And when in doubt? Replace skill with tokens and procedures. Certificates are shiny. Experience? Meh. So real experts are phased out in favour of “experts” who’ve mastered the handbook and never faced the real world.

Skills? Standardised. Algorithmic. Regulable. Applied evenly, like bland icing on a very confused cake.

Virtualisation: Reality? Who needs that?

Everything is now a concept

Slowly and surely, the concrete gets swapped out for the abstract. Bodies, touch, nature, art, all reduced to ideas. You won’t need to interact with anything in the real world. You’ve got a keyboard.

“Work” becomes the act of documenting and justifying that work. Not actually doing it, of course, that’s for marginalised folks. Your job is to make a slide deck explaining how someone else should do the thing you’ll never touch.

                          +------------------------------+
                          |  "Everything is a concept"   |
                          +--------------┬---------------+
                                         |
                                         ▼
                    +--------------------------------------+
                    | Concrete replaced by the abstract    |
                    | - Models > Materials                 |
                    | - Theory > Practice                  |
                    +------------------┬-------------------+
                                       |
                                       ▼
               +----------------------------------------------+
               | Humans and the world become conceptualised   |
               | - Bodies treated as systems                  |
               | - Art/music become data                      |
               | - Identity becomes metadata                  |
               +------------------┬---------------------------+
                                  |
                                  ▼
               +----------------------------------------------+
               | World is virtualised                         |
               | - Experience via meta-representations        |
               | - Simulations over sensations                |
               +------------------┬---------------------------+
                                  |
                                  ▼
               +----------------------------------------------+
               | Fewer people work with material reality      |
               | - Touchless labour                           |
               | - Digital interfaces mediate all tasks       |
               +------------------┬---------------------------+
                                  |
                                  ▼
               +----------------------------------------------+
               | Work becomes meta-work                       |
               | - Justifying work replaces doing it          |
               | - Systems for monitoring > systems for care  |
               +------------------┬---------------------------+
                                  |
                                  ▼
               +----------------------------------------------+
               | Physical work pushed to margins              |
               | - Done by precarious/marginalised groups     |
               | - Hidden under abstraction layers            |
               +------------------┬---------------------------+
                                  |
                                  ▼
     +--------------------------------------------------------------+
     | Further detachment from lived reality                        |
     | - Policy divorced from consequence                           |
     | - "Optimisation" replaces understanding                      |
     +------------------┬---------------------------┬---------------+
                        |                           |  
                        |                           ▼
                        |         +------------------------------------+
                        |         | Reinforces abstraction bias        |
                        |         | - Concept > Contact                |
                        |         | - Clean data > messy life          |
                        |         +------------------┬-----------------+
                        |                            |
                        |                            ▼
                        |        +-------------------------------------+
                        |        | More value placed on conceptual     |
                        |        | thought than lived experience       |
                        |        +------------------┬------------------+
                        |                           |
                        |                           ▼
                        |        +-------------------------------------+
                        |        | Further erosion of trust in senses  |
                        |        | and bodies; elevation of symbols    |
                        |        +------------------┬------------------+
                        |                           |
                        |                           ▼
                        +---------------------------┘
                          [Loop: Concept feeds concept]

Bureaucracy: Because nothing says progress like more paperwork

Effects of virtualisation

Expect a bureaucracy boom. Abstract systems of control. Procedure-obsessed. Predictable. Anonymised. Equal (ish). And most of all: abstracted.

Everything becomes interchangeable and depersonalised. Your uniqueness? Gone. Please take a number and wait for your metaphysical redundancy.

Mechanisticity: Treating life like a broken toaster

Humans as faulty machines

Life becomes modelled on the mechanical. Speed, precision, capacity, those are the only metrics that matter. Never mind that tweaking those dials in the real world tends to wreck things.

Quality? Replaced by quantity. Humans become numbers. Context vanishes. Degrees of variation are crushed into binary decisions. Yes/no. On/off. Tick the box or begone.

Mechanistic effects: The left hemisphere takes the wheel

The world gets redesigned to suit left-hemisphere values, measurable, repeatable, soulless. Bureaucracy isn’t just a by-product, it’s the ideal. Quantify everything. Reduce all relationships to analysable components. Abandon context.

Individual integrity? You won’t need that where we’re going. Mystery? Wonder? Sorry, those don’t fit into the database schema.

Values are now purely utilitarian. Morality? Reduced to a cost-benefit analysis. We get enlightened self-interest, and the “enlightened” bit is… negotiable.

                      +-------------------------+
                      |      REIFICATION        |
                      |-------------------------|
                      | Living treated as       |
                      | things; abstraction     |
                      | over embodiment         |
                      +-----------+-------------+
                                  |
                                  v
                      +-------------------------+
                      |     MECHANISTICITY      |
                      |-------------------------|
                      | Living modelled on the  |
                      | mechanical:             |
                      | - Speed, scale,         |
                      |   precision valued      |
                      | - Quantity > Quality    |
                      | - Binary > Spectrum     |
                      +-----------+-------------+
                                  |
                                  v
                +----------------+----------------+
                |                                 |
                v                                 v
+-----------------------------+     +------------------------------+
| CONSCIOUSNESS SHIFTS        |     | TECHNO-SOCIAL PRODUCTION     |
|-----------------------------|     |------------------------------|
| Bureaucratic mindset        |     | Mass reproduction systems    |
| becomes norm                |     | emphasise:                   |
| - Loss of mystery           |     | - Measurability              |
| - Utility as only value     |     | - Componentiality            |
| - Either/or morality        |     | - Abstract context loss      |
+--------------+--------------+     +---------------+--------------+
               \                                 /
                \                               /
                 \                             /
                  v                           v
              +-------------------------------------+
              | INDIVIDUALITY ERODES                |
              |-------------------------------------|
              | - Subjective integrity collapses    |
              | - Person becomes function           |
              | - Mystery becomes inefficiency      |
              +----------------+--------------------+
                                   |
                                   v
                   +--------------------------------+
                   |        EXPLOITATION            |
                   |--------------------------------|
                   | - Impersonal replaces personal |
                   | - Humans & nature as resources |
                   | - “Equality” flattens nuance   |
                   | - Cooperation < Competition    |
                   | - Identity commodified         |
                   +----------------+---------------+
                                    |
         +--------------------------+--------------------------+
         |                                                     |
         v                                                     v
+-----------------------------+                 +-------------------------------+
| SOCIAL COHESION COLLAPSES   |                 | GEOPOLITICS OF PLUNDER        |
|-----------------------------|                 |-------------------------------|
| - Distrust pervasive        |                 | - Govts as commodifiers       |
| - Marginalised ignored      |                 | - Resistance = Threat         |
| - Categories replace people |                 | - Intervention as morality    |
+-----------------------------+                 +-------------------------------+
         |                                                     |
         +--------------------------+--------------------------+
                                    |
                                    v
                      +------------------------------+
                      | SYSTEMIC PARANOIA            |
                      |------------------------------|
                      | - Everyone distrusts everyone|
                      | - Institutions feign virtue  |
                      | - Benevolent domination      |
                      +------------------------------+

Exploitation: All for One and None for You

Commodifying everything

As the impersonal replaces the personal, we begin to value things more than living beings. Connection? Trust? Pfft. Try measuring that.

Social cohesion is either neglected or actively dismantled. Relationships are depersonalised. Exploitation becomes the default mode of interaction, between humans, and between humanity and the rest of the planet. Cue resentment.

That resentment? Perfect soil for authoritarian “equality”, a flattened sameness that’s anything but just. “Balance” is replaced by a one-size-fits-all ideology, ripe for exporting (by force if necessary).

Marginalised groups get extra marginalised. Paranoia blooms. Trust dries up. People, groups, governments, all suspect each other. And your benevolent overlords? They see themselves not as servants of the people but as their evolutionary betters.

Total control: smile, you’re on Bureaucracy-Cam™

Governments: We’re here to help (ourselves)

Liberty is praised in the abstract while individual freedom is quietly throttled. Surveillance becomes normal. DNA databases? Introduced under “emergency powers”, obviously. The real aim: control, not safety.

The state grabs more power while pushing individual responsibility out the window. And the people follow suit, losing their sense of agency in the process.

Altruism? Treated with suspicion. Family roles and skilled professions based on trust? Threats to efficiency. Better bring them under bureaucratic control, just in case.

+=======================================================================================================+
|                                    TOTAL CONTROL: DIAGRAM OF EFFECTS                                  |
+=======================================================================================================+
| GOVERNMENTS                            | SOCIETY                                | CONSUMERISM         |
|----------------------------------------|----------------------------------------|---------------------|
| • Liberty as abstract, control real    | • Death taboo; longevity commodified   | • Autonomy ↓        |
| • Panopticon: CCTV, DNA surveillance   | • Sex explicit, omnipresent            | • Passivity ↑       |
| • Bureaucracy over family/professions  | • Reasonableness → superrationality    | • Suggestibility    |
| • State ↑ power, Individual ↓ agency   | • Common sense fails; empathy wanes    | • "Use it now"      |
| • Altruism = self-interest (suspicion) | • Insight ↓, responsibility ↓          | • Opportunism       |
| • Discrediting skilled/trusted roles   | • Aggression, rigidity ↑               | • Panopticon        |
+----------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+---------------------+
|                         → INFLEXIBILITY → DISTRUST → CONTROL → BOREDOM →                              |
+=======================================================================================================+
| DISENCHANTMENT                         | CULTURE                                 | META-THEMES        |
|----------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------|--------------------|
| • Awe/spirituality = fantasy           | • Spectators not actors                 | • Left-brain rule  |
| • Wonder ridiculed, right-brain shamed | • Culture = abstract, disembodied       | • Technocracy      |
| • Loss of pathos = loss of soul        | • Art lacks depth and perspective       | • Uniformity       |
| • Meaning & value dissolve             | • Music = rhythm; harmony fades         | • Loss of context  |
| • Time = fragmented frames             | • Dance = solipsistic, not shared       | • Commodification  |
| • Repetition breeds boredom            | • Words = abstract, jargon-laced        | • Surveillance     |
|                                        | • History = irrelevant                  | • Cynicism         |
|                                        | • Body = machine; nature = inventory    |                    |
|                                        | • Wild = danger, to be managed          |                    |
+----------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+--------------------+
|                    LOSS OF MEANING → LOSS OF AGENCY → RESENTMENT ↑                                    |
+=======================================================================================================+
|                  CONTROL SYSTEM FEEDBACK LOOPS: REINFORCED THROUGH CONSUMPTION & CYNICISM             |
|                  (More control → More disenchantment → More passivity → More control...)              |
+=======================================================================================================+

Society: A well-oiled machine with no soul

Death becomes taboo. Illnesses are your fault. Organs become replaceable parts in our new biotech economy. Enter: Immortality Inc.

Sex, stripped of subtext, is splashed everywhere like cheap perfume. Rationality (now rebranded as Super-rationality™) replaces common sense.

Insight, responsibility, empathy? Too right-hemisphere. Too messy. What we get instead is aggression, rigidity, denial, and, of course, the inability to change our bloody minds.

Consumerism: Because you’re worth it™ (not really)

Autonomy is a quaint idea from the past. We’re all passive now. Suggestible. Manipulatable. And oh so ready for “forced utilisation behaviours”, you know, like using the thing just because it exists.

We no longer choose to use things; we’re exposed to them. Willpower is dead, unless you count the drive to acquire more stuff and manipulate others.

So yes, use the thing. Click the thing. Post on the thing. Consume. Conform. Be watched. Be analysed. Be monetised. Welcome to the Panopticon Mall.

Disenchantment: Killing the magic

Awe and wonder are now classified as delusions. Spirituality? Fantasies for the weak.

The left hemisphere hates being led by examples it can’t control. So it ridicules them. The right hemisphere’s love of pathos? Shamed. Its yearning for meaning? Mocked.

We lose our sense of flow, of time, shape, decay. Everything is fragmented. Life becomes a series of moments, each copy-pasted until boredom sets in. And it will set in.

Culture: Now with 100% more irony

We stop participating and become spectators, culture as Netflix playlist.

Art loses depth. Music devolves into rhythm with all the soul of a metronome. Dance turns inwards. Words, meanwhile, proliferate, abstract, meaningless, hollow.

History is irrelevant. Tradition? A liability. The body is a machine. Nature is a resource depot.

And anything wild, anything not efficiently managed or bureaucratically controlled, is considered dangerous and must be domesticated. Now.

All Aboard the Left-Hemisphere Express

All prepare for the great flattening. The systematic society of the future, lovingly assembled by the hemisphere that’s forgotten how to love.

And frankly, judging by where we are now, we may already be halfway there.

Governmental ghost stories

Nienke Fokma — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 23:00:00 +0000

In Governmental Ghost Stories, the chills don’t come from creaking doors or sudden screams, but from the slow, clammy realisation that your digital life has more uninvited guests than a haunted manor on All Hallows’ Eve. It’s less The Conjuring and more Yes, Minister meets Dr. Strangelove in a dimly lit GCHQ break room.

The UK Investigatory Powers Act (IPA):

Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the snooper’s charter

Back in the halcyon days of 2018, the European Court of Justice, those meddling EU types, had the audacity to point out that the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (affectionately dubbed the Snooper’s Charter) was, in fact, unlawful. Quelle surprise.

Meanwhile, across the globe, Australia donned its own digital tinfoil hat and passed legislation giving law enforcement the magical ability to demand access to encrypted communications. Because nothing says “liberal democracy” like the ability to bust through the back door without so much as knocking.

Naturally, not to be outdone in the dystopia sweepstakes, GCHQ slithered forward with a proposal so ghastly even Sauron might have blushed: a “ghost protocol” to silently insert the state into private encrypted chats. Imagine your group chat, but with Big Brother lurking in the corner, sipping tea and silently judging your memes. A Man-in-the-Middle attack, but state-sponsored and blessed with all the gravitas of a passive-aggressive civil servant.

The spectre of silent surveillance

The brainchild of GCHQ director Ian Levy (clearly a man who’s watched Spectre one too many times) and his co-author Crispin Robinson, the ghost protocol envisioned a world where law enforcement could be “silently added” to encrypted calls and chats, sort of like a supernatural eavesdropper with a clipboard.

Published in the charmingly titled Principles for a More Informed Exceptional Access Debate (which is the intelligence community’s version of How to Lose Friends and Influence No One), this chilling proposal was slipped into public discourse under the pretence of transparency. Because nothing says “we value your opinion” like laying the table after the cake’s been eaten and the guests have fled.

The Letter: A cast of the usual suspects

In a plot twist worthy of a Netflix docudrama, 47 organisations and individuals wrote a strongly-worded letter to GCHQ, objecting to the whole “let’s secretly spy on people while pretending it’s all perfectly legal” plan. Among the signatories? Apple and Facebook. Yes, that Facebook.

You know, the same Facebook that hoovers up your data like a Dyson on steroids, reads your private messages, tracks your activity, and sells you out to the highest bidder, all under the shiny veneer of “community standards.” And let’s not forget Apple, gallantly posing as the knight in polished aluminium who believes in privacy, so long as it doesn’t affect quarterly profits.

It’s almost poetic, really: the surveillance capitalists penning a letter of concern about government surveillance, like a fox writing to Parliament to complain about wolf behaviour. “Dear Sirs, while we love the taste of poultry, your methods are simply too brutish.”

Silicon Valley’s own ghost protocol™

And here’s the real kicker: while GCHQ is busy designing ghostly guest passes to your encrypted convos, Silicon Valley has already perfected its own flavour of spectral snooping. The so-called “data science” business model isn’t just about targeted ads, it’s a full-blown séance where every click, comment, and message you send is summoned into a profile that’s sold, sliced, and served up to advertisers with unnerving precision.

Facebook is the ghost in your machine. Apple sells the haunted house and includes a privacy sticker on the front door. And the rest of us? We’re paying rent with our data and pretending it’s still our home.

Moral of the story?

Whether it’s the state or Silicon Valley, someone is always lurking in your group chat. And no amount of garlic, holy water, or GDPR is going to stop them from inviting themselves in.

Sleep tight.

Earth’s orbit: Humanity’s junkyard with a view

Nienke Fokma — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 23:00:00 +0000

Space, the final frontier, the great beyond, the… shockingly cluttered dumping ground for humanity’s discarded space toys. Forget the romantic image of a pristine cosmic void; what we’ve actually created is a high-altitude landfill, where decades of forgotten satellites, exploded rocket stages, and even rogue flecks of paint whiz around at speeds that could turn a pebble into a shotgun blast.

Back in the glory days of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union treated space like a shooting range, gleefully blowing up satellites just to prove they could. And why not? It’s not like anyone would have to clean up the mess, except, well, everyone launching anything into orbit for the next few centuries. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got everything from frozen clouds of rocket pee (yes, really) to shards of shrapnel zipping around up there, turning what could be a celestial highway into a demolition derby.

Orbit real estate: A three-tiered trash heap

Like any good zoning system, Earth’s orbital neighbourhoods come with their own class distinctions:

Low Earth Orbit (200-2,000 km): The equivalent of a downtown studio apartment, compact, crowded, and full of junk that occasionally falls out of the sky. This is where most of the action happens, from the International Space Station dodging debris to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites playing bumper cars. The good news? Anything down here eventually gets evicted by atmospheric drag, burning up on re-entry in a blaze of toxic glory.
Medium Earth Orbit (10,000-20,000 km): The suburban sprawl of space, home to GPS satellites and other high-flying tech that can’t be bothered to mingle with the rabble below. Less crowded, but still not exactly pristine.
Geostationary Orbit (36,000+ km): The gated community of the cosmos, where satellites park themselves for millions of years, blissfully untroubled by the chaos below. If you’re going to litter, this is the place to do it, out of sight, out of mind, and out of everyone else’s way for the foreseeable future.

The “harmless” fallout (literally)

Sure, most of this orbital detritus burns up on re-entry, but let’s not pretend that’s some kind of ecological win. Those flaming chunks of satellite aren’t just vanishing, they’re turning into a cocktail of ozone-depleting chemicals, because apparently, we weren’t content with just ruining the atmosphere from the ground up. Nitric oxide, shredded composites, and who knows what else are now raining down in microscopic form, because nothing says “progress” like turning the sky into a slow-motion chemistry experiment.

And for those dreaming of a Star Trek future? Good luck. Mission planners already spend half their time plotting slalom courses through the debris field, and with tens of thousands more satellites on the way (thanks, global internet ambitions), we’re one bad collision away from the Kessler Syndrome, a fancy term for “space turns into a pinball machine and no one gets to leave Earth again.” It’s the ultimate irony: we’re so desperate to escape this planet that we’re actively building a prison of our own garbage around it.

The silver lining (If you are a Post-Apocalyptic scavenger)

On the bright side, all this orbiting scrap could be a goldmine for future generations. Imagine the Mad Max reboot where instead of fighting over gasoline, we’re hurling harpoons at derelict satellites to harvest their sweet, sweet aluminum. Early-stage rocket debris? That’s not trash, that’s pre-fab space station materials! Who needs asteroid mining when we’ve got a ready-made scrap belt right above our heads?

So here’s to humanity’s legacy in space: a glittering halo of junk, a testament to our ingenuity, our carelessness, and our unwavering belief that someone else will deal with the consequences. If aliens ever do show up, let’s hope they’re the forgiving type, or at least really into recycling.

A metadata murder mystery, without the mystery

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 23:00:00 +0000

Once upon a FOIA, a group of researchers got their hands on 2,000 pages of bureaucratic bedtime reading from Serbia’s data protection overseers. Their aim? To expose the country’s surveillance architecture. Spoiler: it’s less Big Brother, more “nosy landlord with a master key to every flat”.

Here’s what they found:

Metadata mania: Every call, text, and pixel of mobile data generates metadata – and Serbia’s telcos are required to store it all for 12 months. That’s every call you’ve made, every base station you’ve connected to, and even what phone model you’re using (yes, they know your burner’s a Nokia 3310).
Who’s watching?: The police, civil spies, military spies – all lining up at the metadata buffet. Some go through official channels (paperwork, court orders), while others are gifted magical software logins with unlimited access to the nation’s digital exhaust pipe. Who needs due process when you’ve got root access?
Slightly illegal hobbies: In a fun twist, one carrier just hands over everyone’s metadata to the intelligence agency daily. Another gave the same spooks a direct line into their data centre. Both activities have the same legal standing as Monopoly money – i.e., none – and violate both Serbian and international law. And what is law if no one enforces it?
Wiretapping 2.0: Classic phone tapping’s had a glow-up. Now it’s called “interception of electronic communications” and comes with a healthy dose of legalese and plausible deniability. Telcos are even required by law to buy spy gear and hand it to the intelligence agency. Then they get to pay for the maintenance, too. Talk about state-sponsored gaslighting.
Geo-stalking as a service: Thanks to cell towers and triangulation, your phone’s location can be pinpointed in real-time. This info is happily made available to state organs, complete with bespoke tracking devices and BIA’s sole discretion. If you thought you were off-grid, surprise – you’re on three grids at once.

Conclusion

In Serbia, surveillance isn’t just a tool – it’s an entire shadow industry, built into the very bones of mobile infrastructure. The lines between legal oversight and unchecked spying are not so much blurred as enthusiastically redacted. And while mass surveillance is technically illegal, all the loopholes are working overtime.

Privacy, it seems, is more of a suggestion.

Data flow: Or, how your clicks go on holiday without you

Nienke Fokma — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 23:00:00 +0000

You might think the internet is a swirling cloud of decentralised freedom. Bless. In reality, it’s a tangled mess of invisible choke points, centralised bottlenecks, and nosy gatekeepers. The SHARE Foundation decided to trace where data from Serbia actually goes, and surprise! It’s not very far before it ends up in the hands of a small handful of companies, countries, and, let’s be honest, potential eavesdroppers.

One router to rule them all

Start with a simple web visit. Your request doesn’t just zip off to its destination, it checks in at the SBB TelePark in Belgrade, where all local traffic passes through a single router. That’s right. If you wanted to spy on everything Serbians do online (purely theoretically, of course), you’d only need to sit at one choke point. And funnily enough, ISPs are legally obliged to do just that. Because what’s a little metadata hoarding between friends?

Centralisation: A National pastime

There are three main layers of centralisation in Serbia’s internet:

ISPs: SBB handles most of the traffic through a lone access point.
Exchange Points: There’s only one in the entire country, SOX in Belgrade, so everything ends up there.
Hosting: One company, Mainstream d.o.o., hosts over half the local sites. They bunk with Telenor in their Tier 3 data centre. Cosy.

The result? Whether you’re streaming a local news site or buying goat cheese online, your data’s making the same few predictable stops. A hacker’s dream. Or a surveillance agency’s.

Exit strategies: Your data goes abroad

A staggering 63% of data doesn’t even bother to stay in Serbia. Instead, it takes a nice holiday via:

Budapest and Vienna – Transit lounges.
Frankfurt – The Heathrow of data, home to DE-CIX, the world’s biggest internet exchange.
Amsterdam – Host to many of the more… ahem… adult websites. Red lights still on, just digital now.
Ashburn, Virginia – America’s data Vatican. Google, Amazon, Facebook, all hanging out there, probably laughing.

And the rest? It meanders through the US west coast, heading to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, though let’s be honest, it likely gets parked in a faceless data centre in Virginia anyway.

The myth of the borderless web

Turns out the web has borders galore, legal and digital.

National Laws: ISPs operate under domestic law, and are required to retain metadata and hand it over when asked. Like polite little spies.
Geo-blocking: Platforms know exactly where you’re browsing from and can block content accordingly. Ever seen “This video is not available in your country”? That’s geopolitics wrapped in an error message.

So yes, the internet respects borders. Just not yours.

Metadata: The creepiest kind of honesty

No, it’s not the content of your messages they care about, it’s the metadata. Who you contacted, when, for how long, and how often. Former NSA lawyer Stewart Baker said: “Metadata tells you everything about somebody’s life.” Which is a hell of a thing to admit while keeping a straight face.

Snowden put it more bluntly: metadata analysis is more effective than actually reading your messages. Even the Stasi would be impressed. And you thought incognito mode was keeping you safe.

Wrap-up: Not so decentralised after all

The internet, we’re told, is a vast, decentralised thing. But based on this research, it’s more like a string puppet, most of the strings leading to a handful of buildings in 13 countries, with the usual suspects (US, Germany, Netherlands) holding the scissors.

So next time you Google something from Serbia, remember: your data goes on quite the Grand Tour, Belgrade, Frankfurt, Ashburn, and back, watched by a cast of ISPs, governments, and data brokers. All for you to read about the weather.

How political warfare got weird on the Internet

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 22:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, the internet was supposed to be a free, democratic utopia. Instead, it’s become a glorified panopticon run by Silicon Valley landlords where everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening, and half the “people” aren’t even real.

Twitter: Where trolls go to war

Serbian elections on Twitter looked less like democratic discourse and more like a pub brawl between colour-coded tribes. Add a few trolls, some anonymous hitmen-for-hashtags, and voila, you’ve got state-sanctioned smear campaigns wearing sock puppet accounts.

Some accounts attack rivals. Others serve as narrative bridges, spreading the gospel of whoever’s paying. None of them are there for the memes.

Why let humans have all the fun?

Fake accounts tweeted fake support for obscure parties, got mass-retweeted by randoms from nowhere, and then vanished. Political botnets are the new campaign volunteers, cheaper, tireless, and slightly less conscious.

Filter bubble, and make it Balkan

Facebook in Serbia is like a series of locked fish tanks. Everyone’s swimming in circles, seeing only what the algorithm thinks they should. The ruling party rules the airwaves, but opposition pages have rabid Facebook followings, though oddly, not corresponding votes. Funny that.

Biggest fish in the tank? Obsessive commenters with hundreds of interactions, probably on someone’s payroll.

Speak your mind, get a visit from the police

After the 2014 floods, people who dared to point out the government’s failures online got dragged to the station. No charges stuck, but that wasn’t the point. It was a message: Criticise us, and we’ll make your life unpleasant, legally, of course.

Bloggers, journalists, satirical politicians, they all got the “friendly warning” treatment. The threat didn’t need to be real. Just loud enough to make everyone else shut up.

The Chilling effect in Beta

DDoS attacks, comment brigades, and government trolling don’t need to destroy your content. They just need to wear you down. Run out your bandwidth. Burn your energy. Make you wonder if that blog post is really worth a police visit.

Meanwhile, algorithms push the loudest voices (read: bots) to the top, and the rest of us sit quietly, deleting our drafts and double-checking our privacy settings.

Conclusion?

Propaganda hasn’t disappeared, it’s just had a UX upgrade. It’s cheaper, faster, and easier to automate. And now, instead of censors with red pens, we’ve got trolls with VPNs and moderators with delete buttons.

Welcome to the brave new feed. Mind the hashtags.

TL;DR: Snow, trolls & digital control freaks

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 22:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Serbia’s digital political theatre, where every heroic rescue is staged, every dissenting meme vanishes mysteriously, and every comment section is a gladiator arena for astroturfed loyalists.

It starts with a snowstorm, a suspiciously well-timed TV crew, and a future prime minister trying out for the role of Balkan Superman. The internet responds with mockery. The government responds with takedowns. Thus begins the SHARE Foundation’s journey documenting over 300 cases of digital shenanigans, think DDoS attacks, creepy surveillance, and disappearing videos, courtesy of state-sanctioned (or suspiciously adjacent) actors.

The greatest hits (of digital control)

1. Politics of hidden internet interventionism

Governments don’t just ban things any more. They guide narratives, delete content they don’t like, and troll their citizens with a mix of stealth, proxies, and plausible deniability. Think of it as propaganda with a VPN.

2. Never-ending reality show

Online news cycles in Serbia last about 90 minutes before vanishing into the content abyss. PM Vučić dominates the airwaves like a bingeable anti-hero, appearing in 40 headlines a day. Original journalism is out; press-release regurgitation is in. Welcome to the hyperactive spin cycle of media saturation.

3. Conquering public discussion

Comments used to be public squares. Now they’re astroturfed wastelands. Enter the political trolls, sock-puppeted warriors distorting discourse with fake likes, cloned opinions, and coordinated attacks. It’s called reverse censorship: don’t delete dissent, just drown it in noise.

4. Tools of the troll trade

Behold the holy trinity of online manipulation:

Valter: Turns devices into silent voting/zombie bot machines. “You’re a bot now, congrats.”
SkyNet: Tracks troll performance, rates grammar, and auto-votes via proxy. Big Brother meets Grammarly.
Fortress: Cloud-based manipulation-as-a-service. Trolls log in like gamers, except the prize is a government job, not XP.

5. Gamified dystopia

Trolling isn’t just work, it’s play. There are points, leader-boards, and real-world rewards (like cushy state gigs). Commenting on hostile sites earns more points, because trolling actual citizens is apparently a competitive sport now.

6. The troll style guide

Tactics mix Chinese “cheer squad” numbers with Russian-style aggressive debate. Aleksandr Dugin’s patriotic-us-vs-liberal-them binary frames the battlefield. Choose your side: “patriots” vs. “traitors.” No nuance allowed.

Wrap-up

This isn’t just digital PR gone rogue, it’s structured, weaponised influence over public thought. Welcome to Black Mirror: Balkan Edition, where the script is government-written, the audience is manipulated, and the comments are definitely not from real people.

Propaganda is no longer painted on walls, it’s coded into bots and framed as debate.

And yes, the snow rescue was fake. But the control? That’s very real.

Brain sex differences: A masterclass in over-interpretation

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 22:00:00 +0000

The eternal quest to prove that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, neurologically speaking, of course. For over a century, scientists (and, let’s be honest, people with opinions) have been poking at brains, measuring corpus callosums, and squinting at amygdalae, all in the noble pursuit of confirming whatever gender stereotypes they already believed.

Take the corpus callosum, that thick bundle of nerves connecting the brain’s hemispheres. Back in 1906, R. B. Bean, a man who clearly never met a bias he didn’t like, declared that its size correlated with intelligence and, naturally, that women (and certain races, because why stop at one bad take?) had inferior versions. His own lab director promptly debunked him, but the myth persisted. By the 1990s, pop science had rebranded the idea: Women have bigger corpus callosums! That’s why they’re so ~intuitive~! Cue a thousand think-pieces about “female intuition.”

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and what do we find? 49 studies saying there’s no meaningful sex difference once you account for brain size. MRI scans? No dice. And hey, why let facts get in the way of a good narrative?

Then there’s the amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm system. Studies suggest men and women process emotions differently, women may remember emotional events more vividly, while men’s amygdalae light up more for action-oriented responses. Cue the usual tropes: Women are emotional, men are logical! Except, plot twist, it might actually be the reverse. Some research indicates men have more brain real estate devoted to raw emotional reactions (hello, anger) and less to cool-headed logic. Suddenly, the stereotype of the stoic, rational man starts looking like a bad cover story for “I have feelings, and they’re loud.”

And let’s not forget reactive aggression, that charming mammalian trait where threats trigger everything from freezing to full-blown rage. Men, it seems, are hardwired for dominance battles, meaning that “logical” sex might just be the one more likely to flip a table when challenged.

So what’s the takeaway? Brains vary, culture shapes behaviour, and most grand theories about “male vs. female” wiring crumble under scrutiny. Just don’t expect the myth-making to stop anytime soon. After all, nothing sells like a good stereotype, even when the science says otherwise.

Planned obsolescence: The art of selling you crap

Nienke Fokma — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 22:00:00 +0000

Planned obsolescence, the tidy art of selling people the same product more than once. Why sell someone a product that lasts when you can sell them the same product repeatedly? It started in the 1920s, when a group of German industrialists, presumably while twirling their moustaches, formed the Phoebus cartel and decided light bulbs were too reliable. From then on, bulbs would dutifully expire after 1,000 hours, like clockwork. And thus, the great tradition of engineering things to fail was born.

The fine art of designing things to break

Modern corporations have refined this practice to near-perfection. Designers now face the critical question:

“How do we make sure this thing breaks just after the warranty expires, but not so catastrophically that customers riot?”

A few master-strokes of planned obsolescence:

Washing machines, built to survive exactly two years (conveniently, one month past the warranty). The vital components? Made of cheese. The rest? Titanium. Just enough to lull you into a false sense of value before the drum falls off mid-cycle.
Printer ink cartridges, equipped with “smart” chips that scream “I’M EMPTY!” when they’re still 40% full. Refill them? Oh no, that would be reckless. Never mind that the printer itself costs less than the ink required to print a single PDF.
Disposable razors, a marvel of modern engineering. The blades? Sharp enough for three shaves. The handle? Sturdy enough to last a lifetime you’ll never use it for.
Nylon stockings, originally strong enough to tow a tank, now designed to disintegrate if you so much as look at them wrong. Because nothing says “female power” like buying new tights every time you leave the house.
Smartphones, with soldered-in batteries and the kind of “optimised battery performance” that turns the device into a brick around month eighteen.

The waste nobody puts on the brochure

The arrangement empties wallets and fills landfills with perfectly avoidable waste. Repairability would interfere with selling the same customer a slightly worse version of last year’s model.

What people end up doing (if they can be bothered)

Repairing things. YouTube is full of tutorials on how to outwit the warranty stickers, which tend not to hold up legally anyway.
Buying from the rare honest company. They exist. Somewhere. Probably.
Embracing the junk. The printer is a glorified paperweight; one moves on.

The final irony

Even “eco-friendly” innovations aren’t safe. Lead-free solder sounds virtuous, until you realise it grows “tin whiskers”, tiny conductive hairs that deliberately short-circuit your devices over time. Nothing says “sustainability” like engineering failure into the very atoms of your product.

Happier?

Planned obsolescence sits at the centre of a system that does well selling things people do not need, that do not last, and that tend to be replaced before they are paid off.

At least the line goes up.

A very special club for spooks who can’t follow their own rules

Nienke Fokma — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 22:00:00 +0000

The UKUSA Agreement alias the Five Eyes (FVEY), because nothing says “trustworthy global surveillance” like a name ripped from a bad spy thriller. Born in 1946 as a cosy little signals intelligence pact between Britain and America, it soon expanded like an overeager book club, roping in Canada (1948), Australia, and New Zealand (1956) for good measure. Of course, it was all top secret until 1999, when Australia, bless its honest little heart, accidentally let slip that, oops, the Anglosphere had been running the world’s most invasive eavesdropping operation for half a century.

How It Works (Or: How to Spy Without Technically Breaking the Law)

The agreement was meant to “streamline” intelligence-sharing between allies, which, in practice, means 130+ listening stations scattered across the globe, from Britain’s sprawling Menwith Hill (basically a Bond villain lair with better tea) to tiny IoT gadgets that probably monitor your toaster. The rules are simple:

Standardise everything, terms, codes, clearances, and who gets to rifle through whose digital knicker drawer.
Swap personnel like football cards, because nothing builds trust like letting foreign spies roam your comms hubs.
Wink and nod at domestic spying laws, because while each country pretends its agencies don’t spy on their own citizens, they’ve all agreed to spy on each other’s instead and share the loot.

The legal loophole (Or: How to be above the law without even trying)

Politicians love to drone on about oversight and restraint, and here’s the kicker: if GCHQ can’t legally snoop on Brits, the NSA will do it for them, and vice versa. It’s like a babysitting circle, except instead of watching the kids, they’re hoovering up every email, text, and questionable Google search.

And if anyone complains? The laws get “updated”, not to rein in the spies, but to retroactively bless whatever they were already doing. Because when has “we were technically breaking the rules, and now we’ve rewritten them” ever failed as a defence?

Snowden’s Greatest Hits

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have a treasure trove of leaked documents proving what we all suspected: that the Five Eyes aren’t just watching the bad guys, they’re watching everyone, including each other, just in case.

The Bottom Line

The Five Eyes is less a security alliance and more a mutual blackmail pact, where everyone agrees to ignore the elephant in the room: they’re all breaking their own laws, just via proxy. At least they’re polite about it.

GDPR: The EU’s bureaucratic letter to privacy (that nobody reads)

Nienke Fokma — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 22:00:00 +0000

The GDPR, Europe’s flagship privacy reform, drafted by people who appear to believe consent forms are the pinnacle of human interaction. Born from the 1995 Data Protection Directive (which was about as fit for the digital age as a fax machine), it was billed as a way to “strengthen privacy rights” and “boost Europe’s digital economy”. What it produced was pop-up hell, a quiet corporate scramble, and a cottage industry of “GDPR consultants” who appear never to have met a compliance checkbox they didn’t adore.

The highlights (if you can stay awake)

“Personal Data” now means literally everything Your name? Personal data. Your dog’s name? Probably personal data. The way you sigh when you read GDPR legalese? Definitely personal data. The definition is so broad it could include your grandmother’s biscuit recipe if she wrote it down with a biometric pen.
A thrilling corporate soap opera The GDPR introduces two new job titles for companies to argue over:

Controllers (the ones who decide to hoard your data)
Processors (the ones who actually hoard your data)

This distinction is crucial, because it ensures that when your data leaks, both can blame each other equally.

How to justify stalking legally? Want to harvest data? Just pick from this exciting menu of excuses:

Consent (buried in 47 pages of terms)
Contractual necessity (“We had to track your location 24/7, it’s in the fine print!”)
Legitimate interest (i.e., “Because we want to”)
Public interest (a.k.a. “The government told us to”)

Special (not that special) Your face? Protected. Your fingerprints? Protected. Your unique gait as you walk past a surveillance camera? Protected… unless a company really wants it, in which case there are nine loopholes, including “medical research” and “we asked nicely.”
The right to be forgotten (unless we forgot to forget you) A noble idea, tragically undermined by the fact that:

Companies make opting in as easy as unsubscribing from a gym membership
“Forgetting” often means “hiding in a backup folder”
Google still remembers your 2007 MySpace posts

72-hour data breach notifications (AKA “The Panic Button”) Under GDPR, companies can fess up to leaks within three days, a rule that has single-handedly fuelled the European wine industry as IT departments scramble to draft “Oops, Our Bad” emails.
Data protection by design (Or: How to ignore privacy until it is too late) Engineers are now legally required to care about privacy before building something, which explains why half of Europe’s tech startups now outsource to countries that don’t speak “compliance.”
“Legitimate Interest”, the universal solvent The GDPR claims to restrict data mining, and Recital 47 casually green-lights direct marketing as a “legitimate interest”. Translation: “We need to spam you, for business reasons.”
Anonymised data: The get-out-of-jail-free card Pseudonymisation? Still regulated. True anonymisation? Fair game! This loophole is why your “anonymous” browsing data is now worth its weight in gold (and why Facebook laughs all the way to the bank).
It’s a global law Even if your company is based in a shed in Wyoming, if you so much as think about an EU citizen’s data, the GDPR applies. The only exception? If you’re a politician, then you can leak data freely.

What it produced

The GDPR resembles a vegan buffet: well-intentioned, painfully earnest, and largely ignored by the parties it meant to discipline. It has produced more cookie banners than privacy, more compliance officers than compliance, and more “We’ve updated our policies!” emails than any inbox can absorb.

At least we’re protected. Or something.