Ghost in the Brussels: Understanding European Cybersecurity through Anime
By Antonio "AI" Ieranò
Europe once dreamed of regulating the Internet. Then Artificial Intelligence. Then - inevitably - humans.
Ghost in the Brussels is a dazzling, satirical journey through the labyrinth of European digital law, where bureaucracy meets philosophy and anime meets compliance. With wit as sharp as a regulation's footnote, Antonio "AI" Ieranò translates the dense world of EU directives into a philosophical saga told through the lens of iconic anime worlds - from Ghost in the Shell to Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, and Patlabor.
Each chapter reimagines a cornerstone of European regulation as a cyber-epic, where cyberpunk heroines, malfunctioning robots, and weary bureaucrats struggle over the same question:
Can a system built to preserve humanity ever understand it?
The book takes readers through the major regulatory odyssey of the European Union:
- NIS2 becomes a cyber-noir tale of networked consciousness and overzealous control;
- GDPR reemerges as a psychological drama of consent and identity;
- The AI Act transforms into a theological debate about machine morality;
- The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) explodes into a mecha war between firmware and accountability;
- DORA descends into the chaos of digital resilience and existential outages;
- eIDAS 2.0 and the Digital Wallet of Theseus ponder what remains of the self once every credential has been verified.
Blending European politics, speculative fiction, and a biting sense of humour, Ghost in the Brussels turns the arcane into the absurdly relatable. Ieranò's narrative voice oscillates between Oscar Wilde's irony and Masamune Shirow's futuristic melancholy, crafting a book that is both a critique and a love letter to the European dream of order through legislation.
With its mix of satire, philosophy, and cyber-aesthetics, this work transcends genres - appealing to technologists, legal scholars, and anime fans alike. Whether you're a compliance officer surviving your twentieth risk assessment or an otaku wondering how Brussels became the final boss of cyberspace, this book offers a mirror to our collective digital anxiety.
"Because, after all - the real high-risk system is us."
The tone oscillates between humour and elegy: one moment you're laughing at a robot waving an AI Conformity Certificate, the next you're struck by the quiet tragedy of a law trying to legislate consciousness. Every page brims with Easter eggs for those who live between the technical and the philosophical - engineers, lawyers, artists, dreamers - those who know that "data subject rights" sound suspiciously like "character arcs."
In Ghost in the Brussels, Antonio "AI" Ieranò achieves what few dare attempt: transforming European regulatory frameworks into an act of storytelling. The result is a strange, beautiful hybrid - half cyber-comedy, half bureaucratic odyssey - where compliance becomes poetry and irony becomes survival.
Perfect for readers of speculative nonfiction, cybersecurity satire, or anyone fascinated by how humanity endlessly rewrites its own code, this book will make you question whether the real singularity has already happened - not in machines, but in policy.
