In the weeks after the public release of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Italy announced sanctions against the California company for allegedly including its citizens’ data in its model, which it claimed was against the law. In the ensuing months, this step would initiate a movement uniting populists from the political Right and Left, from Budapest to Berlin. The results, however, were not as intended.

After decades of mobilizing waves of critique, Europe succeeded in preventing its sovereign data from being included in the foundational models at the core of the planetary economy. These data and the people to which they were legally attached were not surveilled or modeled, nor were they accounted for.

Unlike King Canute, who stood before the ocean waves commanding them to stop, various new and old European bodies were able to hold back the tide from their particular shores.

Local and international companies and academic researchers would begin to refer to the “Bluropean Union,” because its strict data privacy laws made it opaque to systematic observation and analysis. New regional political parties would run on policies such as “a continent’s right to be forgotten,” demanding a “low-resolution society.” They would largely make good on these promises. Other policies, such as attempting to fund a “sovereign phone” made only from minerals indigenous to the European continent, were less successful.

The effects of this culturally entrenched “self-depresentation” had some less-than-clearly-positive effects. Emblematic of these difficulties was the notoriously unreliable open source urban map system codesigned by Barcelona and Amsterdam. It was the only street map allowed to be preinstalled on phones sold in Europe, but it would often steer users into ditches and canals or instruct them to take train routes through neighboring counties just to get across town. Eventually, some smaller cities would rebel and use Chinese models to assist their bus drivers, but since these were based on maps of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the buses would constantly turn east trying to get home.

The cumulative consequences of societal self-depresentation were corrosive in ways impossible to reverse. Instead of municipal communitarianism filling the gaps in governance, as imagined by those populist party platforms, politics shorn of the responsibilities of seeing like a state took flight and became an autonomous realm of obscure, contested symbolism. Countries that once had ceremonial monarchies now bore the weight of ceremonial parliaments.

Generations coming of age during these years would debate—both jokingly and seriously—whether Europe was even real. If an entire society falls in the forest and has made it illegal to hear it, does it even exist?