What Gets Stored
Late November 2016. The US election had just happened. Mark Zuckerberg was insisting—with the straight face of a man who has never doubted himself for a moment—that the idea Facebook influenced the outcome was "pretty crazy." And in the background, quietly, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act had become law. Everything you look at online: stored for a year. Every chat, every website, every search. Theresa May, who had championed the legislation, was apparently comfortable saying in public that security matters more than freedom, that surveillance matters more than privacy. As arguments go, it’s the kind that gets more frightening the more reasonable it sounds.
The Zuckerberg defense was always going to collapse under any sustained pressure. Facebook had spent years engineering the perfect filter-bubble machine—optimizing relentlessly for engagement, which turned out to mean outrage, which turned out to mean lies that spread faster than corrections. The earnest media conversation about filter bubbles was fair as far as it went, but it missed the more uncomfortable point: Facebook wasn’t a neutral container for misinformation. It was built to amplify it, because amplification was profitable. Calling that "pretty crazy" was its own kind of misinformation.
What I kept coming back to that week was a column by Christian Stöcker in Der Spiegel about the psychology of contempt—why looking down on others feels so satisfying, why tribalism runs so deep. His answer was essentially evolutionary: contempt for out-groups isn’t a product of stupidity or ignorance. It’s older than language, wired into us before we had words to dress it up. That’s the part I found genuinely hard to sit with. Bad information doesn’t fully explain what’s happening. Something more structural does.
Two smaller stories from the same week. Germany’s federal government was reportedly planning a new agency—the Zentrale Stelle für Informationstechnik im Sicherheitsbereich—with the power to break encrypted communications. No full parliamentary debate required; just a budget committee resolution. Journalists and activists who rely on encryption to do their work: now on notice. Meanwhile, Berlin’s new left-leaning coalition had published a program that included open-source promotion, whistleblower protections at state level, and net neutrality provisions. Small things. Real things. A different version of what government could choose to prioritize, tucked inside the same news cycle as everything else.
None of it added up to optimism. But it was useful to see the shape of it all at once—surveillance expanding, platforms shrugging, the architecture of contempt proving more durable than any individual news story. The week didn’t feel like a beginning or an end. It felt like something that had been building for a long time, finally deciding to be obvious about itself.