Digital Resilience for Europe
Europe is on a digital drip: cloud, chips, platforms and standards are controlled elsewhere. g_enesis is the independent think tank in Vienna that makes these dependencies visible and translates them into strategies for government, business and society.
Digital systems are not neutral tools. Behind every platform, every piece of infrastructure and every standard there are people, interests and power relations. Those who do not understand them lose room to decide.
The problem: many of the systems that Europe's economy, public administration and public debate rest on are designed and controlled outside Europe. The choice is often reduced to accepting what is on offer, or being left out. In a rapidly changing world it is time to understand these structures better, make dependencies visible and open up new room for manoeuvre for the actors involved.
“Non, je ne peux pas le garantir.”
Microsoft France before the French Senate on 10 June 2025, asked whether French data can be kept beyond the reach of US authorities. Not a technical limit, a jurisdictional one.
Dependency is not fate. But it stays invisible as long as nobody puts it in the spotlight, measures it precisely, explains it and so makes it negotiable.
Our mission is to analyse the digital structures of our time holistically, make their effects understandable and so enable shaping them. We work, analytically grounded and institutionally independent, at the intersection of technology, politics and society. Together with decision-makers in government and administration, companies running critical infrastructure, and a public that wants to understand what it depends on digitally.
The world is in the middle of a profound technological and geopolitical shift. The decisions taken today about digital infrastructures, standards and dependencies determine tomorrow's room for manoeuvre. Europe does not have to reinvent the digital world. But in the deep, systemically relevant systems that economy, state and society are built on, it must not be coercible.
Now is the moment to understand these structures, before others decide over our room to shape them.
A patchwork should become an ecosystem.
Europe's digital landscape today is a patchwork: national island solutions, competing standards, duplicated structures and responsibilities that stop at every border. The technology for better has long existed. What is missing is coherence.
We work to turn those separate pieces into a European ecosystem: one that works together instead of running in parallel, and one that carries European values in every one of its aspects, as a property of the architecture: in infrastructure, standards, rules and day-to-day operations.
Working papers and policy briefs that translate technical depth into a basis for political decisions.
Roundtables, simulations and briefings in Vienna: confidential, independent and across sector boundaries.
We make dependencies measurable, from digital supply chains to the sovereign stack share.
Europe measures how much cloud is used, but rarely whose cloud it is. We work on closing that gap: with measures such as the sovereign stack share and with targeted network analyses that show where control actually sits. Step by step, as robust as the data allows.
The Austrian Bundesheer is moving its office software to open source, the French Gendarmerie and Denmark are on similar paths, and Schleswig-Holstein has already migrated around 80 % of 30,000 administrative workstations. We document what such transitions cost, what breaks along the way, and what it takes to repeat them. Exit from dependency is feasible, but not free.
In cloud and chips the dependencies are largely set, but in quantum technologies and post-quantum cryptography the window is still open. If we set standards and build capacity now, we will help shape the outcome instead of merely auditing it later. We work that window while it is open.
Every field connects to the others.
To the topic map →Analysis grounded in technical understanding, not in political narrative. We use new methods to get there: data analysis, simulation and systems modelling instead of surveys and gut feeling. That way we speak the language of engineers and the language of politics.
Free of corporate interests and political commissions. We disclose who funds us and how we arrive at our results. Independence is the condition under which an analysis can be robust at all.
Rules that protect without paralysing. For us that means three things: contemporary, because they keep pace with the technology. Strategic, because they strengthen Europe's capacity to act rather than merely administer it. Sustainable, because they outlast a single legislative term.
Technological progress as a means of social progress, not as an end in itself and not as an instrument of power.
Scenario planning and foresight methods, anchored in solid data. No speculation without substance.
We seek exchange with all actors: states, companies, civil society. Change comes from persuasion, not from regulation alone.
Briefings, mappings and analyses on digital resilience and technology policy.
We welcome exchange with government, public administration, business, research and anyone working towards a resilient Europe.