But don’t we ever learn?

The emergency caused by the new Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship and the energy crisis caused by Trump's war on Iran have something profoundly similar. And I'm not simply talking about the fact that both are scary, or that they dominate the headlines for a few weeks. I'm talking about the psychological and political structure of the emergency: two crises arriving just a few years after other nearly identical crises, and therefore affecting societies already stressed, already traumatized, already conditioned by recent experiences.

It doesn't take much to notice a certain similarity between the current energy crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the one linked to the end of supply relations with Russia. Geopolitical actors change, flags change, the current television narratives change, but the mechanism perceived by the population remains incredibly similar: suddenly, there's talk again of a potential energy shortage, of out-of-control prices, of uncertain supplies, of governments urging people to "get ready," of industries at risk of slowdowns, and of families who are once again looking at their bills with the same veteran expression they had a few years ago.

And it doesn't take much to notice a certain similarity between the fear we're seeing emerging around this "new" virus and that experienced during the Coronavirus, COVID-19. Here too, even before the scientific data or the actual danger of the pathogen, the media and psychological ritual is immediately recognizable: the breaking news, the television pundits, the contagion maps, the passengers stranded on ships, the images filtered by smartphones, the catastrophic hypotheses built on incomplete information, and above all that collective feeling of "here we go again," which is perhaps the most important aspect of the whole affair.

Because the real difference compared to twenty years ago is that today, emergencies no longer arrive in an emotionally untouched society. They arrive in a population with very recent memories of nearly identical emergencies, and therefore react not only to current events, but also to the residual trauma of past ones. In practice, each new crisis automatically inherits the emotional burden of the previous one, like a kind of compound interest in collective anxiety.

The problem, let's be clear, isn't cognitive. The most superficial and irrational explanation for all this is to say that "the public has a short memory," as if people quickly forget previous crises and thus cyclically fall back into the same panic. But that's not true at all. In fact, if you look closely, exactly the opposite is happening.

If there's already tension and fear surrounding a new virus today, even before we fully understand how dangerous it is, it's precisely because we remember so well what happened last time. At the beginning of COVID-19, by contrast, many people reacted almost with condescension. Remember? "It's just the flu," "it's far away," "it won't get here." There was a kind of underlying disbelief, partly due to the fact that, for most Westerners, a real pandemic was something that belonged to history books or disaster movies.

Today, that psychological barrier no longer exists. The memory of COVID-19 is still very fresh, and so it takes much less to immediately activate the same emotional mechanisms: anxiety, suspicion, the rush to worst-case scenarios, the fear of quarantines, restrictions, overcrowded hospitals, supply chains stalling, schools closing. We're not just reacting to the new virus: we're also reacting to the memory of the previous one.

The exact same thing applies to the energy crisis. If today, just mentioning the Strait of Hormuz immediately conjures up scenarios of emergency, price increases, and shortages, it's because we already experienced an energy crisis a few years ago. People vividly remember the skyrocketing prices, the skyrocketing bills, the arguments over heating, the struggling energy-intensive industries, and governments talking about sacrifices and "reducing consumption." And so, at the first sign of renewed instability, the collective reaction kicks in much earlier, and much more quickly.

In short, the public doesn't have a short memory at all. If anything, the opposite problem arises: recent memories of emergencies accumulate and remain there, ready to be reactivated at the slightest resemblance to the previous crisis.

But then, if we remember previous crises so well, why aren't we prepared? The problem isn't memory, but the fact that memory never transforms into infrastructure.

The energy crisis should have sparked a rush to build better electricity grids, storage and distribution systems for electric cars, and energy redundancy. The pandemic should have sparked permanent mitigation systems: ventilation, epidemiological monitoring, more robust hospitals, and ready-to-use protocols.

Instead, we've retained the psychological trauma of the emergency, but have built almost nothing to deal with the next one. And so, as soon as something resembling the previous crisis appears, panic immediately returns.

We can ask ourselves the same question by including yet another crisis into the picture, that of so-called AI. We hear from many quarters that Europe is "behind," that it lacks giants like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Google, or OpenAI. Fantastic.

But the real question is: why?

Would we really want them?

Would you like to have a Mark Zuckerberg, an Elon Musk, a Bill Gates, and all the rest in Europe? Because the same Europeans who today complain about the lack of "tech champions" are often also the ones proudly championing European regulations and accusing these companies of destroying public debate, attention span, mental health, and even the growth of younger generations.

So we need to make a decision. Because we can't simultaneously say that that economic and social model is toxic, predatory, and destructive, and then complain that we don't have equivalent products in Europe. Either those companies represent a problem, or they represent a model to emulate. But both together become difficult to sustain.

But haven't we learned what happens when we let large IT companies become as huge as the American ones?

Introducing this third point, namely, the fact that we apparently haven't learned "what happens if you let companies grow to this size," helps to calibrate the aim. The question is always the same: haven't we learned from what happened?

Yes. But there's a difference. The attitude of the lobbies.

In the IT world, lobbies are pushing for Europe to "do the right thing" by building a "sovereign" IT system. And yes, they are lobbies. If we look at who's behind sovereign clouds, for example, we find people like Deutsche Telekom, SAP, and even the Schwarz Group. Yes, the one behind Lidl. One of the participants in the European sovereign cloud trough is StackIT, the Schwarz Group's cloud service, which has already secured several major contracts, including one from the Dutch government.

Yes, the very one that Lidl has.

And so in Europe we need to say—and make people believe—that we want European giants like Amazon or Azure, simply because a slew of local lobbyists want it to happen, and screw the lesson learned from the USA.

And if we now look at who's preventing us from responding, or being prepared, for energy shocks, who do we find? We find the chemical industry, the refineries, and the European oil industry, obviously. It's certainly not the automotive industry that's opposed to switching to electric vehicles.

On the contrary, oil companies and the petrochemical industry don't want to hear about it. And so, in the press, they continually amplify the opinions of those who maintain that it's "too early" to phase out fossil fuels.