Member-only story
The Empire of Rules vs. The Republic of Catastrophe: How the US and EU Regulate the Future
The tectonic collision between the European “Precautionary Principle” and the American doctrine of “Permissionless Innovation” will dictate the future of global capitalism.
Every time you visit a new website and are immediately confronted by a hysterical, screen-blocking pop-up demanding you manage your cookie preferences, you are experiencing the defining geopolitical reality of the twenty-first century.
Nobody likes the cookie banner. Users blindly click “Accept All” just to read a recipe for banana bread. Web developers despise coding them. Advertisers hate them. Even the privacy advocates who originally championed them privately admit they have devolved into a masterpiece of bureaucratic friction.
But that irritating little pop-up is not a glitch in the system. It is a monument to the European Union’s most potent remaining global export: the aggressive, uncompromising weaponization of bureaucracy.
We are currently living through a tectonic collision between two fundamentally incompatible philosophies of how a state should govern the future. On one side of the Atlantic sits the European Union, an aging, wealthy continent that has effectively given up on building the next generation of technological giants…
