In the summer of 2025, NDC began working with Swiss journalists to release key findings from our digital identity research ahead of Switzerland’s e-ID referendum. On 1 August, we were hit with a cease and desist that targeted both me personally, and NDC’s ability to operate.
Pascal Sigg
Swiss investigative outlet Infosperber reports on NDC’s digital identity research and the legal campaign to suppress its publication ahead of Switzerland’s e-ID referendum. Sept 2025 (In German)
That C&D was the culmination of a series of threats that had been escalating since January. In the wider world, 2025 was the year that much of what NDC had been forecasting since 2018 arrived in full. Because of this campaign, we were unable to publish, unable to respond publicly, unable to contribute to a discourse we'd been central to for over half a decade.
During that absence, we turned our own methodology around on ourselves. We applied the same adversarial analysis we use in research and collaborations to protect ourselves, our work, and to confirm that what we had built was safe. That process took months. It’s now complete.
Against the backdrop of data centres being targeted in war for the first time, today we’re publishing Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? – a long essay on digital memory, infrastructure fragility, and the movements building outside institutional protection. It draws on a decade of work and begins with a personal story I’ve never published before.
Read it here:
Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?
Cade Diehm
5 May 2025 10 March 2026
A eulogy for cyberspace
This is a eulogy for a world we were promised but never lived in.
We were told there would be no more forgetting. The cloud would remember everything, cyberspace would liberate us all. We would be furnished with an abundance of digital memory, permanence always just a hard drive away. Or a floppy disk, a tape, a USB key – anything really. The medium didn’t matter, only the promise that the data stored within would last forever...
This is the first of several releases. Work that was suppressed last year is now being published alongside new material we've developed since returning to operation in December. The full Digital Identity Event Horizon report, new case studies, research notes, and follow-ups to publications such as The Imperial Sensorium and The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point are all coming.
NDC is back. More soon.
Cade