Editor’s note:
In this reflection, Sylvie responds to journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s TED talk, “We’re living through a digital coup.”While acknowledging Cadwalladr’s courage in exposing the surveillance empire of Big Tech, Sylvie goes deeper—tracing the roots of the digital tyranny to the emotional wounds of its creators. What we call “innovation,” she writes, is often the unhealed child reenacting its own trauma through machines.
Carole Cadwalladr’s recent TED talk struck me to the core. I admire her courage. She stood on that stage again—after being legally, financially, and emotionally attacked for simply telling the truth—and warned the world: we are living through a digital coup.
She’s right. But the coup didn’t begin with data harvesting or algorithms.
It began in childhood.
Carole exposed the political and corporate machinery of digital tyranny, but beneath all the code, all the surveillance, all the money, there is something far older and more primitive: the wounded child seeking control over the chaos it once endured.
The engineer’s illusion
The “tech bros,” as she calls them, are not villains in the mythic sense. They are frightened little boys who grew up believing that feelings are dangerous and vulnerability is shameful. Their engineer minds became their refuge. Logic became their armor.
Through data, they seek certainty. Through surveillance, they seek safety. Through domination, they seek relief from the unbearable memory of having been dominated.
What they cannot see is that the algorithms they write are psychological reenactments of their own childhoods—endless loops of fear and control disguised as progress.
They build machines to watch others because they were always being watched. They collect our data because their own emotional lives were never truly their own.
They think in equations because they were never allowed to think—or feel—freely.
Surveillance as repetition compulsion
Carole showed a chilling image in her talk: the old headquarters of the East German secret police, who kept files on one in three citizens. “That is nothing,” she said, “compared to what Google has on every single one of us.”
And she’s right. But the deeper truth is that this addiction to surveillance is a psychological compulsion.
Those who never experienced inner freedom as children are now recreating a world where no one can have it.
Their childhood homes were emotional prisons—now they’re building digital ones. Their parents monitored every thought, every mistake, every feeling; now they monitor billions of human beings through screens.
It’s all the same drama, replayed on a planetary scale.
The same playbook
When Carole said, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him,” I felt a chill. I lived that quote.
My own niece and the sociopaths in my workplace combed through every line I’d ever written—my blogs, my book, social media my private messages—searching for something to use against me. Just like the digital tyrants Carole described, they couldn’t stand the sight of my authenticity. My words exposed what they refused to face within themselves.
It wasn’t about facts or justice. It was about power.
It was about punishing the one who refuses to obey the family lie, the institutional lie, or the corporate lie.
Carole’s experience and mine are mirrors: when truth threatens repression, repression strikes back.
The true coup: emotional repression
Carole called it a digital coup.
I call it an emotional coup—a global system of control built by unhealed humans desperate to escape their own pain.
This is why I keep saying: AI is not dangerous. Unhealed humans are.
When emotionally blind people gain access to vast technological power, they use it to reconstruct their internal prison in external form. They repeat the trauma instead of healing it. They confuse domination with safety, and in doing so, they enslave us all.
It’s not technology that threatens democracy—it’s the emotional blindness of those who wield it.
The way out
Carole ended her talk by saying, “We are not powerless.” And she’s right again. But our power does not come from lawsuits, protests, or encryption alone—it comes from consciousness.
We must name the real enemy: repression.
We must stop obeying in advance—not just politically, but emotionally. We must learn to feel again.
Only emotional honesty can dismantle tyranny. Only inner freedom can end surveillance.
Until we heal the frightened child within us, we will keep building systems that terrorize others in the name of safety.
There can be no true democracy without emotional awareness.
So yes, we are living through a digital coup.
But behind every line of code, every algorithm, and every AI model stands a human being trying not to feel the terror of being small, helpless, and unseen.
When we heal that child, the coup will end—because there will be no tyrant left to build it.
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