Subscribed to Silence: How the State and Big Tech Disarmed Our Anger

On July 1, 2026, Sony announced the end of physical PlayStation discs: starting in January 2028, no game will ship in anything but digital form, and the PS3 and Vita online stores will be shuttered along the way. The reaction was immediate and massive. A petition neared 100,000 signatures within days before topping 285,000, boycott threats flooded social media, the official PlayStation blog drowned in fury, and a Dutch class action demanded more than 400 million euros. Sony’s response? Two days after the announcement, the company’s CEO sold off more than half of his personal shares, and the firm stayed the course without blinking. One industry analyst summed up the doctrine bluntly: Sony knew exactly what the online storm would look like, and is simply waiting for it to pass. Customer anger was handled as exactly what it has become: background noise.

Two worlds with nothing in common, and yet the same flat dismissal. Because eight years before the gamers got theirs, the citizens got theirs, in a phrase that became infamous. In July 2018, at the height of the Benalla scandal, Emmanuel Macron taunted his supporters’ critics: “Let them come and get me.” The line was mocked, dissected, turned over every which way. What went largely unnoticed is that it was the truth. Nobody came to get him. Nobody comes to get anybody anymore.

From the living-room console to the Élysée Palace, the discovery is the same: the customer is no longer king, and the citizen is no longer the boss. Yet we French keep behaving as if our elected officials owed us an accounting the way employees owe one to their employer. That belief has a history; for a long time, it even worked. The uncomfortable question lies elsewhere: when did it stop drawing blood, and through what mechanisms did the system patiently armor itself against it?

A Belief with Deep Roots

It’s worth explaining where this reflex comes from, because it isn’t absurd. The Revolution planted in French minds the idea that power is a delegation: temporary, and revocable at least in moral terms. The mandate is representative, not binding; the framers of 1791 made sure of that. But the popular imagination never really accepted that lawyer’s distinction. To the French, an elected official is a worker on a fixed-term contract whose paycheck the people sign.

Add to that a national peculiarity: the street as a legitimate check on power. Where a German negotiates through the works council and a Brit waits for the next election, a French citizen marches. And for more than a century, this was no folklore. It was a method that delivered results.

When the Boss Still Got His Way

And deliver it did. In 1936, a few weeks of strikes and factory occupations were enough to wring out the Matignon Accords: paid vacations, the forty-hour week, collective bargaining agreements. In 1968, the largest general strike in the country’s history produced the Grenelle Accords and a massive increase in the minimum wage. In 1995, the Juppé pension plan was withdrawn after three weeks of nationwide paralysis. As recently as 2006, the CPE, a controversial youth-employment contract, was signed into law and then repealed almost immediately under pressure from student protests.

Look closely at those four victories: each time, at least one of three conditions was present. A politically fragile or divided executive (the fledgling Popular Front; Chirac weakened first by his botched dissolution of parliament, then by the twilight of his reign). Relative unity in the movement, with unions and public opinion aligned. And above all, genuine fear among those in power that the situation might spiral into something uncontrollable. Power gave in when it was afraid. Everything that followed is the story of learning not to be afraid.

The Machine That No Longer Yields

The Fifth Republic did not drift toward this outcome; it was designed for it. De Gaulle wanted a regime immune both to the parliamentary instability of the Fourth Republic and to direct pressure from the street. The tools have been in the text since 1958: Article 49.3, which lets the government pass legislation without a parliamentary vote; the power of dissolution; the referendum, whose question and timing the president alone decides. What changed is not the toolbox but the shamelessness with which it is used. Under the Borne government, Article 49.3 was drawn twenty-three times in under two years, including once, in March 2023, to ram through the pension reform against overwhelmingly hostile public opinion and months of record-breaking protests. Thirty years earlier, a power play like that would have toppled the government or forced the bill’s retreat. This time, nothing.

The pivotal moment, the one everyone prefers to forget, is 2005. The people were consulted by referendum on the European Constitution. They said no, by nearly 55 percent, with 69 percent turnout. Three years later, the Lisbon Treaty, a near-carbon copy in all essentials, was ratified through parliament, at the Congress in Versailles, without anyone going back to the voters. That day, the system supplied the demonstration its edifice had been missing: even a massive, lawful “no,” expressed through democracy’s most solemn forms, can be neutralized. After that, why fear a protest march?

Every crisis since has been a training session. After 1995, the lesson learned was not “we must negotiate” but “we must communicate better and slice reforms into thinner pieces.” After the Yellow Vests came an entire arsenal: the 2019 “anti-rioter” law, the creation that same March of the BRAV-M motorcycle police units, a more aggressive crowd-control doctrine, the normalization of kettling and surveillance drones. After Covid, the state of health emergency established the idea that an executive can suspend fundamental liberties by decree, for a long time, and that most of the country will get used to it.

And on July 14, 2026, Bastille Day itself, the loop closed with an irony no pamphleteer would have dared invent: to attend the parade commemorating the storming of the Bastille, you had to register on the French presidency’s website and present a personal QR code along with photo ID. Ruling on an emergency petition, the Paris administrative court had struck the scheme down the day before, calling it a grave and manifestly unlawful infringement on freedom of movement. The Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, reinstated it overnight, at two in the morning. A people celebrating its own founding insurrection must now request a laissez-passer from the Élysée, and even its victory before a judge lasted all of twelve hours.

But that level of control does not take hold through statutes and judges alone. For a country to accept scanning a QR code in order to celebrate its own revolution, all opposition must first have been morally disqualified, reduced to a public-order problem rather than recognized as political expression. This is the most delicate part of the story: the machinery of discredit. I don’t believe in a coordinated plan, and none is needed; the incentives suffice. In November 2018, the Yellow Vests enjoyed over 70 percent support in the polls. Three months later, the entire movement was being asked to answer for antisemitic insults hurled at the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut by a handful of individuals. In March 2023, at the peak of the pension battle, the president declared that “the crowd” has no “legitimacy” against “the people, who express themselves through their elected representatives”. It is a remarkable sentence: it puts on public record that the street is no longer considered an expression of the people but a parasite upon it. Power no longer needs to persuade a majority; it only needs to keep dissent filed under “radicalized minority” in the eyes of the upper middle classes who shape mainstream media opinion.

And when a government might sincerely want to yield, there remains the lock from above: European budget rules, excessive-deficit procedures, sovereign debt ratings. “There is no alternative” has become the conversation-ending argument of every debate, and it has the immense advantage of being partially true.

This is where Sony meets the Élysée. You might object that the comparison limps: the citizen still holds a ballot with which to change the rules of the game, while Sony’s customer merely signs a one-sided boilerplate contract he never negotiated. The objection is fair on paper, but it misses the convergence: the state technocrat and the corporate lawyer proceed from the same impulse, to drain a decision of its political or ethical substance and refile it under risk management. In both cases there is nothing left to debate, only parameters to optimize and malcontents to contain. The July 2026 decision creates nothing new; it makes a doctrine official: you no longer buy a game, you rent a revocable license, and soon there will be no physical edition left to escape into. Shareholder logic has done to the customer exactly what institutional logic did to the citizen: it stripped him of his leverage. The boycott, the consumer’s historic weapon, runs into the same walls as the strike: network effects, closed ecosystems, prohibitive exit costs. Leaving PlayStation means abandoning your library, your saves, your friends. Leaving your country, let’s not even go there. And look where dissent has taken refuge: in the courts, with those Dutch consumers challenging the PlayStation Store’s 30 percent commission. When the only path left is litigation, slow, uncertain, and played on the opponent’s turf, the direct balance of power is dead. The opponents of the pension reform ended up before the Constitutional Council; the gamers end up before Dutch judges. The sovereign customer and the citizen-employer died the same death: the death of the power to make anyone bend.

The gamers, for their part, thought they had found recourse one floor up. Asked to weigh in, the European Commission answered a week after the announcement, through its commissioner in charge of consumer protection, Michael McGrath: this all comes down to “commercial and contractual freedoms,” and companies remain free to offer their games and services however they see fit. Brussels will not legislate, just as it declined to legislate in response to the Stop Killing Games European citizens’ initiative, dispatched a month earlier with the promise of a voluntary code of conduct drawn up with the industry. Note the asymmetry: the European level that forbids a government from yielding to its own streets forbids itself from imposing anything on a multinational. The lock from above only turns one way.

A System That Learns

So, has the system “reformed itself intelligently” to protect itself? “Intelligent” is too flattering a word, but the effectiveness must be acknowledged. There was never a spectacular authoritarian turn, no coup-like power grab that might have awakened democracy’s antibodies. There was accumulation: a constitutional article used without embarrassment, a new security law after every tremor, a policing doctrine ratcheted tighter notch by notch, a presidential sentence that shifts the line of what may be said. Each lock, taken in isolation, is defensible. It is the stacking that makes the armor.

The result is measurable: the two largest social mobilizations of this century in France, the Yellow Vests and the 2023 pension protests, months in the streets, record turnout, majority public support, failed to obtain the withdrawal of what they were fighting. In the history of the French balance of power, that is a rupture, not an accident.

The Phantom Employer

The belief, for its part, survives. It survives because it is constitutive of who we think we are: a people that beheaded a king does not easily admit that it no longer frightens a president. But we have to see it for what it has become: a ritual. We march, we petition, we cancel our subscriptions, and power, public or private, manages it all as one risk among others, with its communications teams and its motorcycle squads.

The serious question, then, is no longer “how do we mobilize better” but “which levers do we rebuild.” On the institutional side, the answers are well known and carefully kept at arm’s length: citizen-initiated referendums, recallable mandates, audits of the books mid-term rather than only every five years. Nothing utopian there; the Swiss vote on everything, and their leaders take the results into account. If such mechanisms seem unimaginable in France, it is precisely because they would restore to the people what the system has spent sixty years taking back: the ability to impose consequences along the way, not just on a fixed date.

On the digital side, the lever is more immediate, because it asks no one’s permission. Taking back ownership, concretely:

• Choose the file over the stream, the disc over the cloud, the open format over the proprietary one.
• Self-host whenever you can: your email, your websites, your backups.
• Pick platforms you can walk out of with your belongings under your arm, and desert the others before they bolt the door.

Every exit cost you refuse to pay up front is a piece of leverage you keep for yourself. This is not a tinkerer’s hobbyhorse; it is the same battle as the institutional one: the battle for the power to leave.

In the meantime, we owe ourselves the lucidity to name our condition: we are employers who have lost the right to fire, customers who have lost the right to return the merchandise. And as long as leaving costs nothing to those who stay in place, “come and get me” will remain what it has been since 2018: not a provocation, but a statement of fact.