I think clamouring for “sovereign frontier AI” is what “middle powers” shouldn’t do. Instead, they should be looking for (and funding) Pareto-optimal models to serve their critical sectors of the economy. You don’t need Fable running triage on customer support tickets, you don’t need Kimi K3 to manage your e-commerce catalogue.

Europe is already paying “cloud rent” to the US by way of Amazon, Visa, and Uber. European companies dumping billions in token spend into US labs would be an unfathomable level of capital extraction. Seeing Mistral’s push to integrate deep into industry, releasing their Forge for fine-tuning models, gives me hope that European corporations and governments will either find, or fine-tune their Pareto-optimal soveregin models.

I tried to define what a Cassandra should be, but could only come up with what it shouldn’t be, and that’s pessimism-as-a-service, or seniority-driven friction.

Every time you deploy a heterodox opinion in your company’s channels, you’re spending capital. That capital is earned back, with interest, when your heterodox opinion is proven right. Deploy that capital intelligencly.

We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services.

This was the quote of the quote of the former Danish Minister of Justice, when speaking on online communication, and the expectation of online privacy.

Without getting too ideological, I firmly believe that, if you want current liberal democracy to prevail, the limitation of government power on what can and can’t be surveilled is the only way to achieve that. Current technology, be it cheap BT or Wifi beacons that can easily pepper entire cities, or LLM-enabled stylometry attacks, are antithetical to organising against abuses of power.

On this front, I believe that Mullvad is one of the only companies that is ideologically committed to the preservation of online privacy and anonymity. They should be considered an indispensible ally by anyone that takes seriously the right to secrecy of correspondence as well as wanting to fight against mass surveillance.

Why a VPN? Why Mullvad? Why now?

No, this isn’t your stupid NordVPN pitch. For people living in liberal democracies, using a VPN, and a public one, rather than your self hosted instance helps with mainly two things: mixing your traffic with others’, and preventing your ISP from logging your DNS queries. Check the Mullvad checker page to see your current level of protection.

What Mullvad does really well

Identity minimization at signup. Random account numbers instead of email/username. No recovery flow means no identity anchor to subpoena.

Cash in envelope and Monero are both first-class payment paths. No billing relationship as a persistent identifier. Fungible payment options provided. No churn/upsell dark-pattern surface at all.

Server architecture designed so there’s nothing to seize. Mullvad claims RAM-only VPN infrastructure, with all traces of disk use removed. It doesn’t prevent logging, but it minimises the risk of accidentally retaining something retrievable.

Works via Wireguard-only. Don’t want to use their app? Don’t, just set up a Wireguard tunnel instead.

Open source clients since founding. Also, repeated third-party audits with reports published in full

Mullvad Browser. Tor Browser’s fingerprinting resistance without the Tor network.

Not just a company and a product. Activism

This is the part that I wish more people would appreciate Mullvad for. Gettting your voice amplified by a company that has a large megaphone in the online privacy space is not insignificant. Mullvad ran sustained, specific campaigning against Chat Control specifically, not vague “we support privacy” noise. They were early (and correct) at identifying that age-verification was identity-infrastructure dressed as child protection. Their London tube ads genuinely went viral and brought the topic of online privacy from the niches of Mastodon to the commutes of millions.

I believe Mullvad is genuinely one of the few companies that do it right. They’ve got my full-throated support.