My first encounter with European bureaucracy was so traumatizing it had me venting on X. The EU is in deep trouble, and their efforts to fix the problem are proving me right. What was supposed to be a plan for reducing red tape became corporate double-speak sprinkled with magical numbers: three pillars built on “five solid foundations”, laid on the backs of four elephants standing on top of a turtle hurling towards irrelevancy.
As a practical example, understand this: there are still, in 2025, software systems in the EU that require you to have Internet Explorer running ActiveX. Microsoft deprecated both of those antiques 10 years ago yet the requirement remains. EU’s proposed solution? A paid Google Chrome extension. You cannot make this up.
Example two: their step-by-step guide on how to update two fields in a database is 19 pages long. True, much of it are screenshots, but do you truly need 40 of them (and yes, I’ve counted, it is forty) to show how to make two simple edits? If I took five Americans fresh out of college and told them to make an intentionally confusing and opaque user interface then describe it in the most technical, acronym-laden language possible, I don’t think they would have it in them to make something as soulless, dehumanizing, seemingly technical yet spectacularly dumb as these instructions.
I would have recommended firing whomever was in charge, but then I am quite sure no one was quite in charge of any of it, which is how you come to this sort of a mess.