Corfu, October 23, 2026
Photo: economist.com
“We’ve entered a global digital prison,” Fr. Arsenios Vliagkoftis told an audience in Corfu this week, warning that it’s being built in the Orwellian manner, by winning our consent and applause under the pretext of making life easier.
The monastic and author spoke on the evening of Wednesday, October 21, at the Spiritual Center of the Holy Metropolis of Corfu. His talk opened the lectures of the local Church’s Free University, with digital totalitarianism and the freedom of the human person as the first topic, reports Romfea.
In his introductory words, His Eminence Metropolitan Nektarios of Corfu warned that we live in difficult times, since the global system, with insidious laws and in a hidden, crafty way, wants to silence the Church and pull people away from their relationship with the person of Christ.
The human person is in danger, he said, because we easily hand our life and freedom over to globalization, which, quoting the late Archbishop Christodoulos, he described as a steamroller that tries to turn humanity into a mass and leads to a substitute for a pan-religion.
He added that the presence of Islam in Europe alters the Christian character of our societies, and over time makes us strangers in our own homeland. Metropolitan Nektarios urged the audience to counter this with faith, patriotism and knowledge of history, and to rally around the Church in order to endure the global prison that digital totalitarianism is methodically setting up.
In his talk, Fr. Arsenios said it’s no accident that AI and robots work from only the calculating element of the human soul, not the rational element that, according to our Patristic tradition, characterizes man. He pointed to two phrases in the Greek tradition, “The brave soul is free” and “Freedom requires virtue and daring,” saying they can serve as the basis for preserving our civilization. Today, he said, we live in a multicultural scattering where rootless and homeless people follow the dictates of the New World Order, which wants nihilism as the ruling ideology.
This shows in the mandatory digital ID and Personal Number, he said. According to St. Paisios, receiving electronic IDs is a fall, though not a denial of Christ. A democratic society offers alternatives, not compulsion. The digital ID works as a surveillance card, he said, and we need to claim an offline life instead of being online 24 hours a day.
Answering the argument that we’ve got nothing to hide, Fr. Arsenios said privacy is abolished this way, meaning we lose our freedom. He also pointed to the new credit rating system, which, on the Chinese model, will let the state and perhaps private parties know our mistakes and late payments and cost us our rights. Step by step, he said, we’ll move toward the abolition of cash, 15-minute cities and control of diet through mandatory seed planting. The climate crisis may serve as a pretext to restrict our freedom further, he said, as we saw with the coronavirus lockdown, the closing of churches and mandatory vaccination.
Fr. Arsenios closed by urging the audience to become more active and assertive citizens, not to rush to get the new digital IDs, and to become the system’s fear instead of fearing it.
A discussion with the audience followed.
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