Imagine a future where you can only enter a pub after digitally verifying your identity, proving your age, and navigating several layers of authentication at the door. Most people would probably assume they had accidentally stumbled into some strange crossover between a cyberpunk novel, airport security, and German bureaucracy.
Yet in digital spaces, comparable measures are increasingly discussed as perfectly reasonable. They are no longer called “digital access control.” Instead, they appear under friendlier names: child protection, age verification, platform regulation, digital safety, youth protection, or AI-powered moderation.
The problems motivating these barriers are, of course, real. Child abuse and cyberbullying, algorithmically engineered addiction, far-right radicalization, sexual violence, and coordinated disinformation are not imaginary threats. Even Ursula von der Leyen recently argued that social media systematically creates sleep deprivation, anxiety, and psychological stress among young people.
Precisely because these problems are real, the familiar neoliberal framing of “free internet versus necessary regulation” misses the point. The real political question is not whether digital spaces should be regulated. It is how they are regulated, by whom, and in whose interests.
Because while public debates revolve around TikTok, mental health, or whether social media should be banned for under-16s, something much larger is already emerging in the background: a new technical infrastructure of social control.
When we speak about a controlled society, we do not simply mean more surveillance. Gilles Deleuze described social control or “control societies” as forms of society [Pourparlers: 1972-1990]. Here power no longer primarily works through closed institutions but through continuous modulation, flexible access systems, and permanent behavioral management.
What matters is no longer simply who is included and who is excluded – what matters increasingly is constant evaluation, sorting, ranking, and administration.
This is where the real shift is happening. Biometric identity systems, automated moderation, massive data infrastructures, AI-driven risk analysis, predictive policing, and the integration of social data are increasingly converging into shared technical infrastructures.
This transformation does not follow some secret master plan. It emerges from the internal logic of digital capitalism itself—where platform economies, security institutions, and state interests increasingly require the same technical foundations.
Europe’s New Age-Control Infrastructure
Europe offers perhaps the clearest example of this shift. The EU is now openly developing common age-verification systems. In 2026, the European Commission introduced a Europe-wide age verification app intended to integrate with future digital identity wallets. Users may soon be expected to prove their age through official documents or digital identities.
At the same time, governments across the world are discussing age restrictions for social media. Australia has already implemented restrictions. France is debating bans for users under fifteen, as is Germany.ome members of the European Parliament are calling for a minimum age of sixteen.
Officially, this is about protecting children—and that concern is not merely a pretext. Parent organizations in Italy are currently suing Meta and TikTok over allegedly manipulative algorithms and inadequate age controls. The important question, therefore, is not whether protective measures will emerge. The important question is what kind of infrastructure those measures require.
ge verification means identities must be checked. Devices become linked to accounts. Authentication processes become standardized. Digital verification systems have to be built.
Even privacy-preserving models create new layers of technical infrastructure. That is why privacy advocates do not primarily warn about individual apps. Instead they are warning about the normalization of digital identity infrastructures themselves.
The Infrastructure of Predictability
Digital capitalism does not simply sell communication or advertising. It sells predictability. The most valuable resource of modern platform economies is therefore not data itself but the ability to transform data into behavioral predictions: Which content generates attention? Which users appear politically influenceable? Which groups represent risks? Which patterns can be monetized?
This is why corporations increasingly control not only platforms themselves but also the infrastructures that digital societies depend upon, Namely cloud systems, authentication services, advertising networks, AI models, and enormous data centers.
This process is not driven by some abstract hunger for data. It follows concrete economic logic. Digital markets create enormous economies of scale. Data improves algorithms. Better algorithms create market concentration. Market concentration produces access to even more data.
This is how infrastructural monopolies emerge. And this is why the boundaries between advertising, security, and platform governance increasingly blur—not accidentally, but because they rely on the same technical systems.
States, Platforms, and Security Apparatuses
The growing convergence between platform economies, security industries, and states does not mean their interests are identical. States pursue administration, security, geopolitical competition, and social control. Corporations pursue profit. The relationship between them is therefore both cooperative and conflictual.
This contradiction matters. Digital control is not expanding purely through state planning. Nor is it simply imposed by corporations. Instead, it emerges through complex relationships involving regulation, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, state contracts, cloud dependencies, and shared infrastructure.
This is precisely why digital statehood and platform capitalism increasingly grow together without becoming the same thing.
Palantir and the New Security Market
Companies like Palantir Technologies represent this development particularly clearly. Palantir builds systems capable of integrating enormous quantities of data. So police records, movement profiles, communication data, financial information, and social networks can all be merged into unified systems.
In Germany, Palantir’s software “Gotham” was deployed under the name Hessendata. In 2023, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court examined under what conditions such automated data analysis could even be considered constitutional.
The crucial change is not simply the quantity of data being collected. What is new is the ambition to make future behavior statistically predictable. Predictive policing therefore does not simply mean more data. It means attempting to calculate future risks from past patterns.
Critics warn about algorithmic suspicion, risk of discrimination, and increasingly expansive integration systems. At the same time, conflicts within German security institutions themselves demonstrate that this development remains contested.
Popular visions of authoritarian futures often resemble Orwell, with total surveillance, open repression, and visible censorship. But contemporary digital control usually works differently. Not every conversation is prohibited. Not every person is individually monitored. Not every platform is centrally controlled. That is precisely where its strength lies.
Control increasingly appears not as visible coercion but as ordinary infrastructure. What emerges instead are systems of constant evaluation, algorithmic sorting, probabilistic calculations, and automated risk management. That is also what makes this form of power appear neutral.
But algorithms are never neutral. They reflect the social relations within which they are developed, trained, and deployed. Research on biometric systems has demonstrated algorithmic bias and discriminatory misclassification for years.
The central question, therefore, is no longer simply who collects data, but who controls the technical conditions of participation itself.
Because once communication becomes infrastructure, control over infrastructure inevitably becomes a question of power.
