Greece’s digital elitism shuns parents and grandparents

An elderly couple enters a police station on a scorching day in Greece. One of them drags his feet, because health doesn’t ask about ID card expiration dates or EU regulation deadlines. They’ve come to do what the state asked of them: replace their identity cards by August 3, as mandated by Regulation (EU) 2019/1157. Obedient, conscientious, as they’ve been their entire lives toward this state — toward its tax office, its pension funds, its queues, and all its reversals.

There, the bureaucratic obstacles start coming, one after another. See the dialogue:

– Your birth certificate doesn’t include your mother’s surname.

– Yes, but you know it, because it’s written on my identity card.

– That doesn’t matter. It must be corrected by your municipality.

– But must I now run to the municipality too, when you have my information in your systems and my identity card, which lists my mother’s surname.

And then comes that familiar look. The look reserved for second-class citizens. And a question, delivered with that counter clerk arrogance that thinks it’s being humorous:

Why do you need the ID at your age? Are you going to travel?

Here, then, is the official state philosophy, expressed through the mouth of a police officer, not just a civil servant — and you know, on this website we hold police officers in the highest regard: The old man is finished. He doesn’t travel, he’s not needed, he doesn’t exist. He is “full of days” — let him quietly await his exit from the registry. And if he needs to travel for medical reasons? If the hospital that will save his sight or his life is in another city or another country? Perhaps that too doesn’t befit his age? Besides, to issue a passport, they’ll ask him for… the new identity card. The circle closes hermetically — and outside remains the human being.

Let’s Name It

This phenomenon doesn’t yet have a name in public discourse, so I propose one: digital elitism. The international literature speaks politely of “digital divide” — as if it were a geological phenomenon, a rift that opened by itself. It didn’t open by itself. The digital divide has architects. Digital elitism is the mindset of a technocratic ELITE that designs the state, banks, and services to its own measurements — people who cannot imagine life without their smartphone and MacBook — and considers anyone who doesn’t follow them not a citizen with rights, but a residue to be depreciated.

And let’s speak clearly about who these “devalued” people are. They are people who never became familiar with new technologies — and were not obliged to become familiar. Who keep in their pocket a simple phone with buttons, not a smartphone; and if they even have a smartphone, they’re unable to complete bureaucratic procedures on it that require precision, passwords, downloading applications, and the composure of a tax auditor. Who don’t have a computer, nor knowledge of how to operate one. Who don’t have family to assist them — or they do, but the children live in another city, another country, another life. And — most importantly — people who don’t understand why, while they’ve been responsible and conscientious toward the state their entire lives, this state now asks them to transform into something that befits neither their age nor their capabilities.

And something else, which the technocracy stubbornly refuses to hear: there is also disposition. A person’s will cannot be permitted to be despised. Why, truly, must a pensioner know about computers and mobile phones? What law, what Constitution, what elementary logic defines that citizenship now presupposes a certificate of digital skills? The person who lived eighty years without Taxisnet passwords is not defective. What’s defective is the system that treats him as such.

It’s Not Just the Identity Cards

The identity cards are merely the trigger — the drop. The glass is overflowing from everywhere.

Payments to the Public Sector? Electronic paravolo. Even to issue the new identity card, an e-paravolo and an appointment through the digital platform at gov.gr are required. That is, to prove to the state who you are, you must first prove to it that you know how to issue electronic paravolos. Public utilities? Bills are moving to e-bill, physical service points are shrinking, call centers refer you to “the site.” Banks? The audacity here touches perfection: the very sector that makes e-banking practically inaccessible to its elderly customers simultaneously closes branches, abolishes tellers, limits counter hours, and charges a commission to anyone who dares to transact with a human instead of a machine. They push you to digital and close the physical — and whatever remains, they charge you for as a luxury.

And the stadium? Ah, the stadium. The person who went to the terraces for fifty years with a paper ticket from the ticket office today needs an app, digital identification, and an electronic ticket on their phone. If they don’t have a smartphone, if they don’t have a willing and available grandchild to “book a seat” for them — and how exactly should they ask them, through what procedure, with what passwords? — they simply don’t go to the stadium. The team they loved for a lifetime bids them farewell with a QR code they’ll never scan. This isn’t modernization. This is eviction.

The Numbers of Contempt Also Reveal the Hypocrisy

Let no one think we’re talking about quaint exceptions. Greece is consistently at the top of the European Union in the percentage of citizens who have NEVER used the internet — approximately one in ten, meaning over a million people. In the 65-74 age group, our country records among the lowest performances in the EU in internet use, while across Europe only one in three of this age has even basic digital skills. There is even a Greek region that holds the European record for digital exclusion. To this population — our own population, our parents and grandparents — the state addresses itself exclusively through platforms.

And here a bitter international parenthesis is worth noting: even in Denmark, the paradise of digitalization, researchers found that the digitalized welfare state doesn’t reduce inequalities — it deepens them, producing new forms of exclusion. And the UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston, warned as early as 2019 that states are marching “like zombies” toward a digital dystopia, where “digital by default” becomes in practice “digital or nothing.” If the Scandinavians stumble, imagine what happens to the 87-year-old in the queue at a Greek police station, in the middle of a heatwave.

Once the State Went to the Citizen

The most infuriating part? This same state once knew how to behave. For signature authentication, the police would serve the infirm at home. Today, in the age of hyper-technology, drones, and “digital governance,” there isn’t one — one! — special service that will go to the home of a bedridden or nearly blind person to take fingerprints and a photograph. The state that can send you a notification on your phone in seconds is unable to send one employee to a home. It’s not unable, of course. It doesn’t deign to.

And yet, the Constitution — that text which digital elitists probably haven’t yet downloaded as a PDF — defines in Article 5A that everyone has a right to participate in the Information Society and that facilitating access constitutes an obligation of the State. A right, not an obligation. Facilitation, not coercion. The state took a constitutional promise of progress and transformed it into a tool of exclusion.

What’s Required

No one is asking to return to paper and inkwell. Digitalization, for those who can and want to, is a blessing — I know that better than anyone. What’s required is elementary and non-negotiable: every digital service must maintain an equal physical alternative. A counter with a human being. Payment with cash. A ticket from a ticket office. At-home service for the infirm. And employees who will remember that the elderly person in front of them was paying their salary before they were even born.

Because a state that asks the elderly person why do you need the ID, are you going to travel? is not digital. It’s inhuman — with fast internet.

P.S.: If anyone from the ministries of digital governance, citizen protection, and internal affairs wants further clarification about the incident that provided the impetus for me to write this article, let them send a message to NewsFire.GR. I assume, however, that I won’t be heard, since to the ears of all these people my voice is literally A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS!

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