Chat Control, the infamous European regulation that would allow all our private messages, encrypted or not, to be scanned, made a lot of noise on social media, particularly around the end of last year (October 2025), only to ultimately not be adopted. But chase it out through the door, and it comes back through the window.
All it took was waiting for the holidays, a heatwave and numerous wildfires for the European Union to come back on the offensive and push the project through quietly. Indeed, Chat Control 1.0 was adopted in early July 2026. This is a first step allowing platforms without end-to-end encryption to scan content that is not encrypted (Instagram, Gmail, etc.), while the second version, which is still under negotiation, would force platforms to scan encrypted content (Signal, Telegram, etc.). The first version is a temporary derogation, whereas the second is a permanent regulation that could return in September, with no possibility of going back...
Under the pretext of protecting the population from child sexual abuse, the European Union is placing all users under surveillance through artificial intelligence. And this is almost systematic: justifying authoritarian measures in the name of security for everyone.
But who exactly is the government trying to monitor?
Chat Control, the Trojan Horse for Stifling Popular Revolt
Chat Control emerged within the same timeframe as the Gen Z revolts, particularly in Asia. The prominent role played by social media in the collective organization of these political movements has been extensively documented. Indeed, despite all the harmful effects they embody, social media are currently popular platforms for sharing political criticism, "becoming politicized," creating collective opposition, and organizing concretely in the field.
Yet Chat Control would allow governments to scrutinize the slightest expressions of dissent online, the slightest criticism directed at the system and its leaders, and to trace the precise identities of their authors. An effective recipe for nipping in the bud any political group seeking to organize — virtually and in the real world — in order to challenge the inherent harms of the current system.
We acknowledge that encrypted messaging applications make it possible to organize effectively, even though we maintain that revolutionary struggle must ultimately take the form of practical action, and that, in the long run, this will necessarily entail the collapse of these communication networks.
Although Chat Control has outraged a large number of people and made it possible to experiment with various tactics such as petitions and rallies, particularly in Germany, but it must be said the broader struggle against surveillance is making far too little progress. Indeed, mass surveillance will not stop there; Chat Control or not, it will continue to intensify. One only has to look at the advances in Algorithmic Video Surveillance, digital identity, and facial recognition.
In many countries, authoritarian governments simply shut down the internet when popular dissent becomes too widespread. Take Senegal, for example, which in 2024 blocked internet access during demonstrations after postponing the presidential election, or Angola, which did the same in 2025 during protests against rising fuel prices. Tanzania shut down the internet eight times in 2025 during the election period. In Gabon, access to social media has been blocked since February because of social unrest. In Narendra Modi's India, internet shutdowns are becoming increasingly common whenever there are demonstrations, conflicts, communal violence, or religious festivals...
The internet and social media are tools for political organization and assembly, but they are also infrastructures controlled by governments.
Controlling Human Behavior: The Real Purpose of Technological Surveillance
Among those opposing these new measures, some do not fall into the statist trap of justifying the introduction of security measures "to combat social problems." Yet many Instagram "tech influencers" — who make a point of informing people about the dangers of technological innovations while never proposing concrete solutions to stop them — cry out against attacks on individual freedom without questioning the very concept of the smartphone and social media.
But if these new measures are described as "freedom-restricting," what freedom are we actually talking about? And what if social media and smartphones were already products of a broader dynamic of continuously expanding technological surveillance at the expense of human freedom?
In fact, technological states did not wait for Chat Control to monitor our actions and movements through our phones. Besides generating enormous social problems such as addiction, isolation, and depression, they are portable listening devices that provide tech giants with almost unlimited access to individuals' virtual "privacy." Likewise, the internet is a machine designed to automatically and efficiently collect, transmit, and gather "data." In the age of Big Data, your data is the new resource over which all the tech giants are fighting: knowing what you consume on social media, your interests, how many interactions you have with your friends, what you buy and on which website, etc.
Large organizations, armed with technology, are creating mass societies in which human behavior must be regulated, administered, and controlled so as never to disrupt industrial growth. Chat Control in Europe, digital identity in the United Kingdom: in our time, developing increasingly effective technologies — thank you, AI! — to control human behavior guarantees, perpetuates, and secures the industrial order.
If we do not seriously organize ourselves to put an end to the technological system, it is highly likely that social credit, generalized surveillance, and technological genocides will be the dystopian future looming over the most technologically advanced nations, including France.
A Struggle for Freedom
What kind of freedom exists in a system where everyone is entirely dependent on technological prostheses that constantly require energy in order to live "with dignity"?
What kind of freedom exists in a system where our fate is left in the hands of insane technocrats playing at space conquest and the uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence?
What kind of freedom exists in a system that encompasses and dictates every aspect of our lives, reducing us to mere cogs in a machine that is beyond our control?
Our lives depend on a complex system made up of global infrastructures over which we have no control. Our daily lives, our security, and our health depend on the proper functioning of all these machines operating on a just-in-time basis across the entire globe. Since the First Industrial Revolution, technology has done nothing but deprive us of control over our own lives.
The struggle for freedom should not be fought merely against a regulation that scans our private messages; it must go further and target the dismantling of the technology that increasingly atomizes individuals, threatens the Earth's habitability, and reduces our lives to an undignified existence.
It is no longer enough merely to denounce the intrusive nature of social media and phones; we must collectively recognize that the entire technological infrastructure has been designed and conceived to control individuals. If it creates the conditions for the existence of a totalitarian society, then the very concept of Technology becomes incompatible with Freedom.
Mass surveillance is gradually becoming the norm, while our possibilities for resistance are dwindling. To fight mass surveillance, we must bring down the technological infrastructure that makes it possible. We must organize collectively as quickly as possible to paralyze the global technological infrastructure.
For the Earth and for freedom.
