From Silicon Valley to Brussels; From Covid-19 to Digital Identity

The common thread is Data. Those pulling the strings: Big Tech. And AI is following the same path.

Europe’s response to Covid-19 quietly became a laboratory for experiments whose consequences are only now coming into focus.

The economic experiment

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) — a €750 billion fund conceived to rescue economies battered by lockdowns — introduced a quietly radical shift in how public money flows. Rather than reimbursing costs already incurred, funding was tied to the achievement of milestones and the delivery of reforms. It was a fundamental change in the logic of EU spending, and one the European Commission now hopes to entrench: as we reported, Brussels is pushing to extend this model to the next multiannual EU budget.

The social experiment

The first lockdown also functioned as an extraordinary test of administrative reach and popular compliance. Sociologist Nicolas Mariot and historian Théo Boulakia documented this dynamic rigorously in their book L’Attestation: exit permits, QR-coded health passes, emergency powers routinely invoked — all of it normalising the idea that a crisis could justify the temporary suspension of fundamental freedoms, with surprisingly little public pushback.

As researcher Yuwen Zhang observed in a recent study, “this social QR-code-isation during the health crisis has translated into a system for classifying individuals based on personal data. In today’s digital society, whoever controls the data and the rules governing its use holds the power.”

The technological experiment

Which brings us to the third dimension: surveillance.