#25 Start Earning Digital Prison Credits Today …

“Todas las páginas all the pages?” the South American behind the counter of a copy shop in Salamanca asks bewildered.

“Todas las páginas,” I confirm, and leafing through our passports, my new friend then sings to me in his South American accent, “But those pages are blank.”

“Lógicamente. Son …” “Honey, Nik,” Heidi interrupts me as Boris the little terrier sinks his teeth into one of my trouser legs. Somewhat bewildered myself now, I look aside, at Heidi, and say: “I’ve never been friendlier, what…” “Since we walked out of the extranjería,” Heidi interrupts me again, “you’ve been humming, which means that something or someone could fly through the air at any moment. Arrange those copies, back to the extranjería, coffee at the Plaza Mayor.”

“But …” “No tengo todo el día I don’t have all day,” my South American friend now interrupts me.

“Perdóname sorry,” I say as Heidi places a hand on my forearm and Boris shakes my trouser leg. “Eres de Colombia you’re from Colombia, no? De Medellín from Medellín.”

“Cómo lo sabes how do you know that?”

“Tu acento your accent. Es muy agradable it’s very pleasant. Escúchame listen, you know how it works at the extranjería. Esos lambones no valen ni cinco those idiots aren’t worth a dime, but they want a copy of every passport page.”

Not much later, Heidi, Boris, and I walk out of the copy shop with thirty-six A4 sheets.

Last August, Heidi—Dutch, like me—made our appointments at the extranjería, the Immigration Office, for today, November 14, 2025; earlier was impossible. She then invested hours collecting and copying the documents needed to apply for residency, and my thoughts wander to how, some years before the EU became a fact of life in Europe, I applied for residency in Spain for the first time. In Marbella, where I lived back then, I filled out a form at the front desk of the local police station. Five minutes after entering that police station, no appointment, I walked back into the sunlight. Three weeks later, I was notified that I could pick up my tarjeta de residencia, and … “Esos lambones no valen ni cinco,” Heidi interrupts my thoughts as Boris sniffs at the foot of a lamppost. “How did you come up with that?”

"Is Colombian."

“Colombian,” Heidi repeats thoughtfully. “And no! We'll have coffee after everything is done,” she adds when she notices that a café across the street is flirting with me.

Waiting every few meters for Boris, who is turning into an obsessive sniffer, we make our way through Salamanca’s streets until we walk into the Immigration Office for the second time today, the first time about three hours ago. Heidi had her appointment at a quarter past nine; I had mine at nine. The two Guardia Civil officers on metal-detector- and baggage-scanner duty today exchanged glances after spotting Boris. I winked at the two, stepped with Boris through the metal detector, and just before, after the alarm rang, I could say, “Metralla de la batalla del Ebro shrapnel from the Battle of the Ebro,” Heidi said: “Son las llaves del coche y la ha… hebilla de su cinturón it’s the car keys and his belt buckle.”

Shaking their heads, the Guardia Civil officers let us proceed to a counter where Heidi and I each received a ticket. One of the three officials operating the ticket-printing machine today directed us to an L-shaped hall. We seated ourselves on a marble staircase because all the seats for those waiting, despite the early hour, were occupied by mainly people from Africa and South America, hunched over their phones, headphones on their heads. At a quarter to eleven, on one of the screens in the hall, a combination of letters and numbers appeared that matched those on my ticket, followed by the text: Mesa 06. With my share of documents and copies in a folder under my arm, I walked into a room full of desks, a number above each desk. A friendly young man behind desk 06 gestured for me to take a seat opposite him, and as he leafed through the paperwork I gave him, I heard the voice of Heidi, who had drawn desk 07 and was now sitting behind me, Boris on her lap.

Things seemed to be running smoothly until the three officials across from us—at Heidi’s desk, a veteran kept an eye on a trainee—disagreed on the best way to guarantee our residency applications a digital future. That apart, they kept jumping up to assist colleagues to convince people from Africa and South America they had to wait for their turn.

Quite an ongoing uproar in the room where the penultimate decision on our residency applications would be made, and because my voice functions poorly under such circumstances, I placed the plastic screens—which had likely been standing on desks 06 and 07 for about five years—on the floor. The officials across from us seemed to have a eureka moment, and our communication became much easier. But just when coffee at the Plaza Mayor seemed within reach, the veteran across from Heidi decided a copy of every page of our passports was required.

Heidi calms down the two Guardia Civil officers who were startled out of their phones when Boris and I stepped through their metal detector, setting off the alarm. As Boris sinks his teeth into one of my trouser legs, I turn to the three officials operating the ticket-printing machine behind their counter.

“Todas las páginas!” they exclaim in unison.

“Todas las páginas,” I reply, and I sure set something in motion, because a minute later, Heidi and I are staring at a document stating that our residency applications are rejected should we not have heard from the extranjería by February 14, 2026. Another minute later, Boris is sniffing at a lamppost in front of the extranjería. It starts to rain, and I think of the United Kingdom, where Heidi and I ended up in 2022 and where applying for our visas turned out to be such a drama that Heidi decided to finish my application first and then start on hers.

Twice, I traveled to the Netherlands with stacks of documents and payment receipts to initiate my visa application, have my voice recorded, my irises scanned, and my finger- and palm prints taken. While having passport photos taken at a photographer in Cambridge, close to the village where Heidi and I lived, my face turned out not to be recognitiongenic, for only after the fourth session did a government agency approve the photo, which the photographer digitally sent to that agency after each session. Instead of a small cardboard sleeve with four passport photos, the photographer gave me a QR code, which Heidi incorporated into my visa application, and the Residence Permit I eventually picked up in London was a biometric ID to which only my bank account needed to be linked—the technology was not yet sufficiently developed—to secure my participation in a new monetary system and simultaneously effectuate my confinement in a digital prison.

The physical and electronic money we know will soon—Orwellian perhaps but true—be replaced by digital money that in reality is credit we can earn or squander through our behavior. As soon as our behavior—even more Orwellian perhaps but true—has definitively replaced physical and electronic money as currency, our confinement in that digital prison will be an irreversible fact, and voting for a non-globalist-oriented political party only then will be too late.

Now that the realization is dawning on more and more people that the imminent implementation of a social credit system—which I call a digital prison—is not a conspiracy theory, Big Tech is making haste to complete that system, supported by virtually all governments worldwide—put in the saddle not by people who cast an informed vote, but by people whose vote was manipulated by the top of the capitalist pyramid.

Storming the water- and energy-guzzling data centers, which are springing up like mushrooms after rain, will soon be the only way to regain our freedom, but I doubt whether such a storming stands a chance. We have let ourselves be robbed by Big Food and Big Pharma—just like Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Whatnot owned by the top of the capitalist pyramid—of our data-center-storming health. Furthermore, the pitchforks that were effective during the storming of the Bastille are no match for the drones, tested and further developed during the Ukraine war, which will protect data centers and will, until AI takes over their piloting, be piloted during their deadly missions by youngsters, recently recruited by Western armed forces to fight the Russians—who, eastern Ukraine aside, have no desire to set foot on Western soil. And as I try hard to snap out of my dystophoria, Heidi, Boris, and I walk into a café on Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor.

Past a bronze man, who, I realize, must be the writer Torrente Ballester—who seems to be inviting me to join him for a good conversation—we walk toward the counter. Heidi continues to the restrooms; I order coffee. When Heidi returns, she shakes her head. She pries Boris’s jaws from one of my trouser legs, stands up with Boris in her arms, and says: “How long have I left you alone? A minute? I assume the police are being called,” and she nods to two waiters behind the counter, frantically tapping on their phones as a third waiter keeps his phone aimed at us. “Does it really always have to be like this?”

“I was even friendlier than in that copy shop, but because of Boris, we have to drink our coffee outside. When I said that we would go elsewhere in that case, all hell broke loose. If you want to give those lads a euro for using the restroom, fine, but…” “Ja, ja,” Heidi interrupts me. She places a euro next to our coffees on the counter, and as we leave the café, one of the waiters tries to cut us off. Heidi pushes him aside, and a moment later, we are sitting between enormous Ionic columns on a staircase in front of a palace opposite Salamanca’s cathedral. We are wet but not soaked. Between us, next to Boris, the gas stove is snoring under our moka pot, and as I take two mugs out of my backpack, Heidi asks, “Why did we go to a café if you have everything with you to make coffee?”

“Before we left home," I answer, "I realized that Boris would likely be a spoilsport,” and I suddenly wonder what young waiters in cafés are so afraid of these days.

No law in Spain prohibits dogs in cafés. A guest who is allergic to dogs sneezes, moves a table or a stool away from the dog, and … “Is that so?” a voice in my head interrupts my thoughts, and I realize that the word dystophoria I just invented is not such a stupid word after all. Continuous unease about the gradual normalization of a dystopian reality, I inwardly chuckling concoct as a definition for the word. But my chuckling fades when it dawns on me that the genie of the social credit system in which we will soon be living is out of the bottle. Many people seem to sense that it is fitting to call that system a digital prison, and many people—mostly young people—seem to have started to acquire some credit in advance to survive in that prison.

I eh… I will never say it out loud, but I think life under the Stasi in East Germany was more pleasant than our life under a social credit system will be, and … man, I would have loved to sit down with Ballester for a good conversation. A question I would ask him is why he joined the Falangists after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. I would probably learn that Falangism, back then, was something different from what history books now claim it was, and Ballester and I would agree that history contains facts but is otherwise merely a collection of stories that only has value if we know from whom each story originates—and why—and if we have taken note of all the stories surrounding a historical subject.

When Bill Gates was born and when certain non-globalist-oriented political parties were founded are facts. That Bill Gates is a philanthropist and that non-globalist-oriented parliamentarians are right-wing extremists are stories. No disagreement with Ballester about that, and … the moka pot gurgles as the last of the coffee percolates through. Boris looks up in surprise. I pour coffee into a mug, and when I give the mug to Heidi, she says, “Café con leche. How did you pull that off?”

Heidi—if she drinks it—drinks her coffee with milk. Before I placed the moka pot on the stove, I poured the milk I had smuggled from home in a small bottle into the upper part of the moka pot, and refilling the moka pot with coffee and water, I say, “If all has gone well, the milk has warmed up before the coffee ran through.”

“The coffee is hot.”

“My, my,” I mumble as I realize why Robert Lemm, a Dutch author, appears in my thoughts. I interviewed him about his book Desengaño, in which he criticizes progress thinking and poses the question of whether the world can be improved if we do not first seek spiritual wisdom—improving the world usually the supposed premise of progress thinking. Until about two thousand years ago—my thoughts, not Lemm's—the search for spiritual wisdom was second nature to humanity. Gradually, humanity abandoned that search, and since, say, the storming of the Bastille, the top of the capitalist pyramid, using its influence on education and journalism to present us, whatever the subject, with only a selection of stories, is succeeding in manipulating our thinking in such a way that we are convinced that what is called progress today is progress indeed …

With Lemm, I also talked about Miguel de Unamuno, who was rector of the University of Salamanca about a hundred years ago. Unamuno claimed that knowledge and culture are conditions for freedom, and the ferocity with which the top of the capitalist pyramid tries to destroy knowledge and culture seems to indicate that he had a point. Unamuno, if I remember correctly, saw weaknesses in democracy as a system of governance, and that—without it getting in the way of my graduation—would have led to good conversations between us. I claim, after all, that democracy has no weaknesses but is weak and will irrevocably be abused to put an end to knowledge, culture, and ultimately freedom, for erudite people, united by culture and living in freedom, pose a danger to the top of the capitalist pyramid, which would be kept on a leash within any other system of governance.

Unamuno, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, turned against nationalists’ repression, and chuckling inwardly again, I decide that that repression pales in comparison to the repression to which people are subject today who doubt the grandeur of a social credit system or doubt the stories the top of the capitalist pyramid shares with the world through Big Media. And I will never say it out loud either, but if I had been forced to make a choice, I would have chosen the nationalist camp during the Spanish Civil War. Of all the isms I know, nationalism appeals to me the most, though not as much as tribalism, for which, in my head, I concoct the word villageism to make it applicable to the West.

“Yes, but,” I hear the top of the capitalist pyramid exclaim in unison in my head, “history teaches us that tribalism must be fought at all costs.”

“No, no,” I hear myself answer, “history doesn't teach us anything negative about tribalism. Only a few stories do. Despite the bombs Big Defense makes rain on tribal areas with our consent, manipulated by the top of the capitalist pyramid, and at our cost, people live happily there, and …” the moka pot gurgles. I pour coffee into my mug, and Boris looks up when behind us, a palace door opens. An older man, balding, gray beard and mustache, round glasses, walks out and puts on his hat. He nods kindly, says, “Qué perrito tan bonito what a nice dog,” and walks down the staircase on which Heidi and I are sitting into the rain.

“We must fight against fate,” I call after him, “even if there is no hope of victory!”

"What …?" Heidi says as the man looks over his shoulder, smiles, and gives me a thumbs up.

“Unamuno,” I mutter.

“Huh…?”

"No longer living as hunter-gatherers is not progress. Living in a democracy is not progress, and living in a social credit system is certainly not progress, though the top of the capitalist pyramid thinks differently. Only creating a climate in which we can have good conversations once again is progress."

Heidi shakes her head and then says with a laugh, “I envy your guts …”

“Huh…?”

“You said, ‘Climate …’”

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