The digital fortress does not exist. It is an illusion dear to managers and IT directors, a medieval fantasy projected onto the screen of a laptop. While you raise electronic drawbridges and dig encrypted moats, the enemy is already inside. He sits at the desk next to yours, drinks coffee from the vending machine, accesses the server with the same credentials as you. They call it “Zero Trust.” A name that is already a confession of failure. Zero Trust. The blatant admission that the battle for the perimeter is lost, that the border between inside and outside has dissolved into a cloud of erratic bits. We no longer build walls. We suspect every single stone that composed them.

It is the perfect response for an era of structural betrayals. The modern company is not a community; it is a temporary set of contractual interests. Zero Trust is its objective correlate, the immune system of an organism that knows it is intrinsically ill. It verifies every transaction, inspects every packet of data, treats the CEO and the cleaning clerk with the same, glacial distrust. It is a paranoid system for a paranoid world. It does not promise salvation, it promises survival. A perpetual, suffocating control that turns the corporate network into a crystal panopticon: everyone sees everything, and everyone is seen. Productivity as the only deity, security as its only priest.

And the individual? The irreducible atom that, in a remote corner of its consciousness, refuses to be dissolved into the corporate collective or the mass of data? He responds with his private talisman: the VPN. A tool that is the exact philosophical opposite of Zero Trust. While the company erects a temple to absolute transparency, the citizen digs his burrow for opacity. The VPN is not security; it is mimicry. It is the promise of a refuge, of an other place in the non-place of cyberspace. It is the digital equivalent of someone who, walking through a metropolis watched by a thousand electronic eyes, pulls up their hood and quickens their pace. It is not a solution, it is a reaction. A gesture of defense, often desperate, of a dying privacy.

The VPN sells an idea of freedom that is, at best, an anachronism. In the era of surveillance capitalism, where the product is you and your attention is the traded commodity, believing you can hide behind a server in Holland or Panama is the technological version of faith in amulets. It is the individual and weak response to a systemic and monstrous problem. Zero Trust is honest in its cruelty: it tells you it doesn’t trust you. The VPN is mendacious in its promise: it tells you that you can escape a gaze that has ceased to have a center, that has become the very environment in which you move.

These two principles, one collective and obsessive, the other individual and illusory, do not fight each other. They coexist in a strange, symbiotic equilibrium. The company implements Zero Trust to protect its capital – which now includes your data – and you, at the end of the day, turn on the VPN to protect your small capital of intimacy from that same company and its peers. It is a trench war without a defined front, where the same person is both the soldier and the target. The professional who applies the dogmas of Zero Trust by day is the citizen who clings to the click of the VPN in the evening.

So, perhaps, the question is not which of the two models is more effective. The real question is what kind of soul we are forging in this technocratic dualism. On one hand, a humanity accustomed to being constantly suspected, verified, analyzed. On the other, a humanity that responds with flight, with deceit, with the construction of volatile digital identities. We are building a world where trust, the most ancient social cement, is expelled from the realm of machines and, perhaps, is beginning to evaporate from the hearts of men as well. The future is not the citadel of Zero Trust or the burrow of the VPN. The future is the schizophrenic tenant who inhabits both places simultaneously, and who in neither will ever find a home.