How has the internet become a race for domination? Where did this centralism suddenly emerge from? Why, just a few years after a world of transparency and participation seemed possible, are we faced with the revival of a political term which in world history represented a total, unparalleled lack of communication: the term “Cold War”? As we know, Chancellor Merkel couldn’t accept that among friends. But nobody can fail to see that Germany’s government is doing to its own population exactly what we remember from that era: remaining silent. Not out of bad faith, no; much worse—because for them the discourse is over, because there is no counterparty for them to confront, neither in America nor in Britain, probably not even in their own apparatus. It is a silence that is supposed to make the young Edward Snowden appear as though he had betrayed NATO’s deployment plans during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But what he actually revealed was that civil society and the Chancellor’s mobile phone, the chief communicative means of her politics, were being monitored. So, the question that explains the government’s silence and affects every individual is: how do you actually become an enemy or—in the language of...