A new authoritarianism is being engineered. Across the Atlantic, we are seeing it not through coups or brute force but through infrastructure, as the systems that carry public governance pass quietly into private hands. In Beijing and Moscow, state surveillance has meanwhile reached a scale that once belonged to science fiction. For Brussels the question is no longer whether these systems reach us, but whether we inherit them or build our own.
Techno-authoritarianism has emerged as the defining technological challenge of our time, yet it is commonly misunderstood as a single phenomenon. In fact, two dimensions converge toward the same outcome: the erosion of democratic control through technology. Understanding this distinction is essential for crafting an effective European response.
The first dimension is state-directed digital authoritarianism. This refers to the systematic use of surveillance and digital infrastructure to monitor and repress citizens. China's Golden Shield Project integrates facial recognition across roughly one billion cameras with biometric registration and AI-driven monitoring of minorities in Xinjiang, which the Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes as "the most enveloping surveillance regime in the world." Russia deploys city-wide facial recognition networks to identify and arrest protesters. Iran throttles internet backbones during demonstrations and uses facial recognition to enforce dress codes.
The second dimension is privatised techno-governance within democracies. This phenomenon sees technology billionaires and firms acquiring de facto governmental power in countries that formally remain democratic. In 2024, The Atlantic's executive editor Adrienne LaFrance explained how Silicon Valley's leadership has curdled into something more than corporate ambition. It has become a small elite that borrows the language of Enlightenment values of reason, progress, and freedom, while building systems designed to concentrate power rather than distribute it. These are leaders who present themselves as libertarian disruptors, yet who increasingly expect their platforms, and their politics, to go unquestioned.
In October 2025, Francesca Bria, Honorary Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at UCL in London and Board Member of the European Innovation Council (EIC), mapped what she calls the "Authoritarian Stack": a network of U.S. tech firms, venture-capital funds, and political actors transforming core state functions such as data, defense, space, energy, and finance, into private platforms that operate as de facto state infrastructure. Her research documents over 245 actors, thousands of verified connections, and $45 billion in documented financial flows. Companies like Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX are not merely selling software to governments; they are becoming the operating system of government itself.
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What should alarm Brussels most is that techno-authoritarianism is not a confined phenomenon. Its European reverberations are already visible, from national defence ministries integrating foreign satellite and drone infrastructure, to public administrations quietly outsourcing core digital functions to the same handful of providers. As Bria mapped, Palantir software was deployed by regional police forces across Bavaria, Hessen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Baden-Württemberg, although recentl Germany is increasingly moving away from using the U.S.-based software. The UK National Health Service signed a £330 million contract for Palantir's federated data platform covering tens of millions of patient records, procured without meaningful public debate. Anduril's joint venture with Rheinmetall promises autonomous drone swarms across NATO. Italy quietly integrated Starlink terminals across military systems.
The procurement mechanism is the Trojan horse. As Bria explains, "Each procurement cycle narrows democratic choice until choice itself becomes technically constrained by infrastructure built to serve investors, not citizens. Democracy persists only as a form of legacy interface, maintained for stability." When European institutions sign contracts with these vendors, they are not just purchasing services, they are importing a worldview where dominance, surveillance, and force override democratic deliberation. The concern is not simply that particular companies have become powerful. It is that dependence on their infrastructures can gradually become dependence on their political and economic interests. The techno-authoritarians understand that infrastructure is never neutral. Who builds it, owns it, and governs it determines the future.
From dependency to digital sovereignty: Forging a European third way
When the European Commission unveiled its Tech Sovereignty Package on 3 June, the intention was to reduce dependence on dominant American companies, especially on non-European chips, cloud, and artificial intelligence. The risk is settling for a binary choice between Silicon Valley's extractive model and China's state-controlled one. Neither is the only future on offer. Europe must forge a third path: techno-democracy.
Techno-democracy is not technocracy repackaged, nor retreat from technological ambition. It means technology designed to strengthen, not replace, democratic governance. In practice: public stewardship of digital ecosystems; auditable algorithms; citizen data held in public trust; procurement rules weighing accountability as heavily as cost. Sovereignty understood this way is not a digital fortress but having enough capacity and choice to make democratic decisions about the infrastructure society depends on.
Europe already possesses foundational tools that can forge the path ahead: GDPR established global standards for data protection; the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act began regulating platform power; the AI Act attempts risk-based oversight of artificial intelligence. However, these remain regulatory frameworks layered atop infrastructure we do not own. Regulating technology built elsewhere can mitigate harms but cannot produce alternatives. Those must be built and must demonstrate that innovation and democracy can coexist.
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Being bold does not mean copying Silicon Valley more quickly, nor rebuilding China’s model under a European flag. It means constructing a third way together, which is the ambition behind the European Techno-Democracy Coalition, convened by the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) - a citizen-centric European civil society organisation with 35 years of experience in empowering Europeans to exercise their rights. The Coalition gathers civil society, academics, European technology companies and innovators around a Blueprint for European Techno-Democracy and an Action Plan, organised along three dimensions: values establish what technology should and should not be permitted to do, institutions turn those principles into governance, standards and procurement, and products give them shape in the technologies people use. No single community can carry that work, which is why the first workshop in March 2026, brought 30 participants together to examine dystopian scenarios, identify the levers that matter and begin drafting the Blueprint.
Digital sovereignty is not only a responsibility for governments and technology companies. Europeans do not have to accept the technological future being built around them. Citizens make choices every day about the systems they use. European alternatives already exist in privacy-focused communication, search engines, social media, operating systems and sustainable hardware. Choosing them will not transform the digital economy overnight, but it helps create demand for a different direction.
An alternative for Europe will not appear simply because we regulate what we do not like. We have to imagine it, design it and build it together. The real test of European ambition is not whether Europe can become the next Silicon Valley. It is whether Europe can prove that another technological model is possible: one in which innovation strengthens democracy rather than hollowing it out, infrastructure serves citizens rather than making citizens serve infrastructure, and technological power remains subject to democratic power.
Europe should be bold enough to go its own way.
Promoted by ECAS (European Citizen Action Service)
