I just finished Anu Bradford’s Digital Empires, which lays out three very different ways of governing technology.
America trusts the market. China trusts the state. Europe trusts rules.
It reminded me of a conversation with a Dutch friend last summer when the EU AI Act came up. I joked, “Wow, you guys really love paperwork.”
She shot back, “Yes, because we’re still living with the trauma of what happens when governments keep very good paperwork.”
Three beverages in and we both knew what she meant.
The Nazis and their collaborators used census records, government registries, police files, and other seemingly ordinary information to identify and locate Jews and other targeted populations. Decades later, East Germany’s Stasi built an extraordinary surveillance apparatus around collecting information on ordinary citizens.
As Americans, we haven’t lived through that level of bat-shit crazy data trauma. Europe has firsthand experience with what can happen when institutions know too much about people and there are too few limits on what they can do with that information.
Sure, we had Snowden. We discovered our government was collecting far more data than most of us realized, got very upset, held some hearings, changed some laws, and then collectively downloaded another twelve apps asking for our location.
For many Europeans, the abuse of information isn’t just an abstract privacy concern. It sits within living or generational memory of persecution, surveillance, disappearance, and authoritarianism.
Maybe that’s why GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act can look excessive from this side of the Atlantic.
We see regulation and worry about what it might constrain. My friend, and many others whose societies have lived through this kind of trauma, see something else entirely. They know what can happen without it.
It has me thinking about how little we talk about trauma in policy circles. Not individual trauma, but the kind societies carry for generations, quietly shaping the rules they write long after the original wounds were inflicted.
Roll credits.