Buy European

Do people not realise that von der Leyen is a right-wing fan of totalitarianism? What she supports cannot be good for us.

She might just be defined by her connections in her actions, the person not mattering. I've heard that this person is just not very bright in some things outside of the bulk of their experience and knowledge. In general might be true for politicians. Their stakeholders need to have perspective. They need to keep faces, show good sense of humor and negotiating talent, and don't show what they think.

Not even totalitarianism, just power held by small elites, and this is a natural attraction for any human who got into rare places (also UvdL is notably a member of elites). See any sci-fi or fantasy universe, their plots often involve main characters and their small groups of acquaintances, traveling over all the world, solving millennium-old riddles, making color revolutions, and what not. All by a small group of heroes, all knowing each other. That's just natural. Humans always strive to monopolize decision-making for their group, without outsiders.

So - that person might not even understand they are evil. Maybe they are not. At the same time it's often really hard to tell which layer of a personality is the true one.

Long story short - yeah, I wouldn't trust judgement of people like UvdL or maybe Kallas (elites too, just ex-Soviet), and I wouldn't let them near power. But they themselves might not be malicious agents, just people thinking they are some sort of princess Leia in the New Republic, while the world is completely different and, notably, isn't comprised of NPCs in a game.

As to the point - it's a good technology to encourage critical thinking. It teaches you to trust nothing and nobody. The older generation, though, and even mine, show the opposite reaction, but anyone growing in a world where anything can be drawn believably by a computer will be used to think before believing.

It's good long-term. Short-term it's a catastrophe. They could use that investment for making a Xanadu-like EU-wide information system, plus cryptography as reinforcement, to counter the catastrophe, instead they are adding to it. Somehow with tech everyone tries to climb up and up faster, instead of fixing the foundations of towers they climb. Hypertext with reverse links and changes notification and global object identities and replication could solve so many flaws of WWW, that we wouldn't need a lot of what's been built on top of it.