The Right to Disappear

Berlin, September 2017. There was a protest they called Save the Fundamentals—thousands of people in the streets, angry about surveillance. The government was sneaking laws through to hack phones and computers. Citizens were nothing but data sources now, mined for profit. That was the angle.

The organizers’ message was straightforward. They were done with governments pushing legislation through the back door at night, done with surveillance becoming normalized, done watching activists and journalists get crushed for doing their work. They wanted a real conversation about what kind of digital society we wanted to live in. They wanted it to stop.

I wasn’t there, but I remember reading about it. The protest felt important in a way that was hard to articulate—not because I thought it would change anything, but because someone was still willing to say it out loud. The problem hadn’t gone away. The infrastructure for watching exists. The laws keep getting written. Corporations and governments treat everyone as a walking database, patterns to extract and sell. Privacy used to feel like a right. Now it’s something you have to protect against, and even then it’s mostly theater.

What got me was how clear the whole thing was. Not some abstract concern about data ethics or algorithmic systems or whatever. Just: they’re watching, they’re recording, they’re building tools to violate you, and it’s not okay. You don’t need to make it complicated. The ability to have thoughts without someone cataloging them—that should be automatic. The fact that we have to march in the streets for it is its own kind of answer about how much we’ve already lost.

I think about that demo sometimes. Not often, but when I do, I remember that part: people who thought something should be different, so they went to say so. Whether it mattered or not doesn’t change what it meant to be there.