Science, innovation and civilization

Digital Vassals: How the Rejection of Open Source in Public Infrastructure Exposes Techno-Feudalism, Corruption, and Geopolitical Vulnerability

"Whoever controls the code controls reality. Whoever controls reality doesn’t need tanks."

Editorial Transparency: Research and structuring assisted by AI tools (Claude, Anthropic). Editorial responsibility and analytical judgment belong to the author.

A Competition the Vassals Don’t Know They’re Losing

There is a tacit convention in public discourse about the digitalisation of the state—a convention that politicians, corporate consultants, and tech journalists reproduce with almost liturgical fidelity: that adopting a new IT system, a new software package, or a new cloud contract represents, in itself, progress. That "modernisation" is a neutral, de-ideologised category, the technical equivalent of moving forward. That a ministry migrating to the infrastructure of an American or European tech giant has taken an evolutionary step, not an act of surrender.

This convention is a well-maintained lie. And it is precisely the meticulous care with which it is reproduced—in press releases, in ignored audit reports, in the inaugural speeches of systems that don’t work at launch—that should alert us to its political utility.

The world we live in is no longer organised around classical military blocs, though these still exist. Instead, it is organised around architectures of digital power. The competition between the United States, China, and—more timidly—the European Union is not played out solely on battlefields or through economic sanctions. It is played out in technical standards, in communication protocols, in the file formats public officials open in the morning, in the algorithms processing pension applications, in the databases storing an entire nation’s medical history.

And in this competition, a state that refuses to adopt Open Source solutions, that systematically prefers proprietary vendor contracts, is not making a neutral technical choice. It is making a geopolitical choice. It is choosing to be a vassal.

What follows is not a manifesto for free software in the evangelical sense in which the GNU movement formulated it in the 1980s, with the typical enthusiasm of Californian counterculture. It is a cold analysis of the mechanisms by which dependence on proprietary software in public infrastructure reproduces, in the digital register, the oldest forms of political and economic domination, while simultaneously expanding a state’s attack surface against external adversaries. In other words, it is an anatomy of voluntary vassalage.

Each morning, the route appears unchanged. I board the bus at the Pharmacy stop and sit by the window. It is only a few minutes to the Maternity Hospital. The bus moves slowly, stops, and people get on and off without looking at one another much. Some scroll through the news on their phones, while others discuss prices, the weather, or who has left town. From the outside, nothing seems out of the ordinary.

And yet, as the bus weaves between buildings, the thought of Anthony Giddens returns to me. He argues that the modern world functions through a form of "action at a distance". Our lives here are shaped by decisions made in places we will never see. An interest rate set by a central bank, a factory relocated to another continent, an algorithm modified in a technology hub, or a conflict erupting thousands of kilometres away — all find their way, in one form or another, onto this bus.

Modernity is no longer defined by globalization, but by competing digital infrastructures, and the next stage of civilization will be the struggle between several "juggernauts", not the existence of a single one. In this context, the only dimension that can still preserve the person as a person is spiritual, one that goes beyond sociological explanation.

I look at the people around me and wonder how many of their choices are truly their own. The young man reading job advertisements may be competing with someone on another continent. The woman talking on the phone about bills is feeling the effects of an energy market she will never fully understand. The pensioner gazing absent-mindedly out of the window lives in a city shaped by economic and political decisions made far beyond his borders.

The bus stops for a few seconds. No one notices the invisible connections between these destinies. They cannot be seen, but they exist. Giddens calls this a world where time and space no longer carry the same meaning. Distances have compressed. What happens far away produces effects almost instantaneously here, between two bus stops.

Perhaps this is why he speaks of a world out of control — a Runaway World. Not because someone is driving chaotically, but because change moves faster than people's capacity to understand it. Every day we adapt to new rules without knowing who wrote them or where they were decided.

There are moments in history when changes can no longer be understood simply by looking at the street we live on, the city we inhabit, or the country of our birth. Decisions made in a financial centre, a research laboratory, or a company thousands of kilometres away come to influence jobs, culture, values, and even the relationships between people in communities that had no say in these transformations. Anthony Giddens observes that this is one of the defining traits of late modernity: the world functions through a network of interdependencies in which geographical distance loses its importance, and the effects of decisions circulate almost instantaneously.

In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens describes globalisation as a form of "action at a distance", in which everyday life is shaped by economic, technological, and political processes that unfold beyond the direct experience of individuals. This acceleration produces unprecedented opportunities, but also a permanent sense of uncertainty. Traditions that offered stability come under pressure, identities become more fluid, and communities are forced to redefine their place in a world of continuous change.

 "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure." — Ursula von der Leyen, 3 June 2026

I. The Call from Cincinnati

It was a Sunday in February, and my cousin Andrei was on screen from Cincinnati(he is in Texas now, I didn't ask for details). He had been there eighteen months, working for a mid-size SaaS company doing cloud infrastructure — containerised systems, Kubernetes, the unglamorous plumbing that makes modern software run at scale. He had a Botoșani accent that the Ohio winters had not quite managed to erode, and he wore the expression of someone who had stopped pretending to be surprised by things. Behind him, visible through a narrow window, was a landscape that looked nothing like home: flat, grey, American in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like a foreign correspondent pretending expertise about a country glimpsed through a webcam rectangle.

We talked for two hours, the call stretching past the point where either of us had planned to stop. Not a recorded interview — just a family video call that drifted, as family video calls do, from the mundane (how expensive Ohio winters are, whether our aunt's garden had survived the frost) to the structural. Andrei is not a philosopher. He is a systems engineer who thinks in latency and in containers. But sometimes the most lucid diagnoses come from people who are paid to make things work, not to make things sound good.

At some point I asked him directly: What's the actual difference? Between working in tech in Romania versus working in tech in the United States?

He laughed — not with amusement, but with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been asked to explain gravity.

"Petru," he said, "it's not that the Americans are smarter. It's not even that they have more money, though they do. It's that the system assumes you'll succeed. Here, if you have an idea, the machine bends towards you. Loans, mentors, investors, second chances. In Romania — in Europe — the machine assumes you'll fail, and it builds in friction to prove itself right."

He was not bitter. He was precise. And that precision, delivered from a rented apartment in a mid-tier American city, contained more analytical power than most of the policy documents I had been reading for weeks.

This article grew from that conversation. It grew also from the legislation that landed on the European Commission's desk on 3 June 2026 — the Tech Sovereignty Package, the Cloud and AI Development Act, the Chips Act 2.0 — and from Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, which I had been reading in parallel and which provided, unexpectedly, the philosophical scaffolding I needed to understand not just what Europe had built, but why it had been allowed to rot at the foundations while looking perfectly presentable from the outside.

On Productivity, the Internet's Unfinished Lesson, and Why AI May Be the Exception That Breaks the Pattern

"It is the case that productivity creates more jobs. Just go back and look at history." — Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA

I. The Mundane Oracle

There is a particular kind of genius that chooses the most ordinary object available to explain the most extraordinary moment in human history. Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive of NVIDIA — the company that built the computational infrastructure upon which the current artificial intelligence revolution runs — chose a washing machine.

Not a steam engine. Not a microchip. Not a server farm. A washing machine.

He could have invoked the grandeur of the Industrial Revolution or the sublime complexity of neural networks. Instead, standing before cameras and microphones, one of the most powerful men in the technology industry pointed at something every family in the developed world has tucked behind a door somewhere, and said: this is how the next fifty years will work.

The argument, stripped to its bones, is this. The washing machine killed the laundromat as a profession. It eliminated a category of work that had employed real people, absorbed real hours, and sustained real livelihoods. Nobody mourned it publicly, because the machine arrived quietly, and the jobs drained away slowly. But in place of that lost profession, something else emerged — something nobody in 1920 could have named. The consumer appliances industry. The industrial designer. The refrigerator repairman. The electrician who wired the new kitchen. The shop assistant who sold the new machine. The marketing copywriter who described its virtues. The journalist who reviewed it. Entire occupational categories that did not have names before the machine made them necessary.