As I type this, Trump is threatening tariffs on anyone who challenges the interests of America’s technology oligarchs, all of whom are now paying obeisance at this court. Technology is the US biggest weapon against the free world of which it was formerly part, and the right place to fight back. But what can be done?
I’ll start with the most straightforward case. X should be banned outright, for precisely the reasons that the US Congress tried to ban TikTok, and for its general evil and toxicity. We already have alternatives in Bluesky and, more appealingly, the Fediverse. An important additional step would be the establishment of an official platform, open only to legitimate public and non-profit organisations for the kinds of public service functions that have migrated to X, and also to Facebook – weather alerts would be an obvious example.
For the moment, this should be a bargaining chip. It should be made clear that, if Starlink support is withdrawn from Ukraine, or extended to Russia (beyond its current illegal use), both X and Starlink will be blocked by all free countries. Brazil did this a while ago and Musk backed down.
This will presumably trigger tariff threats from Trump. Again the appropriate response isn’t symbolic goods like Jack Daniels, it’s further retaliation against US tech, including limits on intellectual property prohibition of chips that allow remote bricking and so on.
At the extreme end of the difficulty spectrum, it seems impossible to erode US dominance in computer and smartphone operating systems and software. Apple, Google and Microsoft have nearly the entire market. The only serious alternative, Linux, is tiny in comparison. I’d be happy to hear suggestions of possible responses.
Between these two are a range of activities, such as cloud computing and web services, where the US holds a dominant position that may take time to erode.
Finally, and particularly relevant to current crises, the free world needs its own AI program. Deepseek has shown that the resources required are modest. Moreover, there has never been a better chance to recruit US tech talent. With the job cuts made by the big tech companies, and Trump’s decrees denying the existence of whole categories of people, and the full humanity of anyone other than white males, there will be plenty eager to start a new life in a free country.
{ 48 comments }
AnthonyB 02.25.25 at 3:45 am
The world’s servers run Linux. The only place Linux isn’t dominant is the desktop.
Matt 02.25.25 at 6:00 am
An important additional step would be the establishment of an official platform, open only to legitimate public and non-profit organisations for the kinds of public service functions that have migrated to X, and also to Facebook – weather alerts would be an obvious example
Do you think this could overcome the network effects issue, if this is mostly/only what it does, and do we really need it? I get weather alerts all the time (actually, somewhat too often, as they are not necessarily targeted enough) from the BOM on my phone already, and have the “emergency services” app, too, which doesn’t seem (thankfully, I guess) to notify me of much. Do you think enough people would sign up for a twitter-like service that did what these apps do, as opposed to just the apps? (I certainly don’t want to be notified of weather events in, say, Perth, let alone in Montreal, so it would need to be targeted, but then again, why isn’t the existing BOM app enough for this?)
nastywoman 02.25.25 at 7:05 am
@’I’ll start with the most straightforward case. X should be banned outright, for precisely the reasons that the US Congress tried to ban TikTok, and for its general evil and toxicity’.
How true – but as it will be impossible to ban X – the only way is to change X into a platform where twits like US (Anonymous – DEUTSCHESFERNSEHEN etc.) dominate again.
And as mentioned before – if every ‘Resister and/or ‘good gamer’ would open as many X accounts as possible and counter every single RightWingandElonPropagandaTweet with as many NO’s as possible – the complete dominance on the Worlds nastiest HATEMACHINE could be broken.
Which shouldn’t stop anybody to flood and disrupt Elon’s game with as many international (criminal) complaints as possible. The German E-Minister Robert Habeck showed the way with hundreds of ‘Anzeigen’ wegen defamation or threats. And if such complains are not from politicians but from ‘people like you and me’ they could read like this one:
‘We hereby file a criminal complaint against Twitter Germany on suspicion of disseminating pornographic content, incitement to hatred, defamation, insults, slander and are filing criminal charges for all relevant offenses. This is based on the following facts: At the beginning of the year, we were not the only ones to discover that Twitter, represented by Elon Musk, was publishing fake pornographic nude photos of the idol of millions of underage German girls.
On June 26, 2024, a so-called ‘Twit’ even propagated a possible rape.
Months earlier, in hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘tweets’, young so-called ‘Swifties’ were also slandered and insulted in Germany as ‘followers of a satanic and/or demonic sect’. On the occasion of Taylor Swift’s tour of Germany, Elon Musk was asked to protect children from the most brutal Nazi slogans, which are punishable in Germany. But Elon Musk sees his company as not responsible for his tweets and believes that under American law, even the most vicious criminal slanders and insults are free speech’.
John Q 02.25.25 at 10:25 am
Matt, there isn’t really a comparison between a microblogging site like X and a full website like the BOM. I’d imagine a site where lots of organisations posted and feeds like that of BOM could be customised. In an emergency, posts would be more frequent.
The absence of typical X content would make such a site more useful than X. The big question is whether it would also have less reach.
otto 02.25.25 at 10:37 am
Re. X should be banned outright, for precisely the reasons that the US Congress tried to ban TikTok, and for its general evil and toxicity.
I am really finding it hard to draw the line between e.g. banning “Twitter” and banning e.g. “the Murdoch press”. Perhaps there isn’t one, except that the norm of allowing ‘press barons’ is more established than allowing ‘tech social media oligarchs’.
Alex SL 02.25.25 at 12:27 pm
I really wish more ‘western’ governments would have the backbone required to ban the media of a ‘western’ billionaire. I will believe it when I see it.
Finally, and particularly relevant to current crises, the free world needs its own AI program.
Assuming “AI program” here means Large Language Model: no. The world does not need those. Their primary use cases are high-throughput spam creation, cheating on assignments, fraud in academic writing (which could be seen as a subsection of spam), and assisted coding that could mostly be replaced with “google my problem, click the stackoverflow link”. They are a plagiarism nightmare and so fundamentally stochastic that they cannot reliably be used for anything that requires accuracy and quality – speaking from direct personal experience here. Anybody who says that their work has benefited from an LLM is revealing a lot more about their own lack of qualifications for their work than about LLMs. Anybody who trusts any answers an LLM has given them should read up on Gell Mann Amnesia.
reason 02.25.25 at 3:21 pm
I use Linux Mint on my laptop. I can do most things with it. (It has for instance Thunderbird and LibreOffice as standard.) I also have a Windows desktop for the few things that require windows. But smartphone operating systems are harder. But who will sponsor open source infrastructure development as a public service? The EU?
reason 02.25.25 at 3:24 pm
In fact, shouldn’t that ridiculous bogeyman of the right, George Soros, be convinced to sponsor (no strings attached public alternatives to propriety social media, operating systems, and broadcasting)? It would be more use that what he is doing now with his money.
Michael Cain 02.25.25 at 5:52 pm
But what can be done?
The US tech giants are almost entirely dependent on advanced integrated circuit fabrication done by TSMC in Taiwan. That fabrication is entirely dependent on EUV photolithography equipment, sole supplier ASML in the Netherlands. Is restricting US access to hardware on your list of possibilities?
hix 02.25.25 at 8:24 pm
The soft version below an explicit ban is to demand an interface to interact with other platforms seamless and ban anyone who has no interface while building up a government run system that does this.
There are quite a few reasons how TikTok, X and meta are of a quite different magnitude and reaching into very different legal environments while behaving as if only US law (or maybe only Chinese in the Case of TikTok would apply, which is reasonable enough for Fox News.
(1) There is more than enough content there that is far worse than Fox News.
(2)Those are platforms with an almost unbreakable monopoly or oligopoly, depending on how you define the market. Jan Böhmermann suggest in his latest episode that even paid political advertising at Instagram would reach 5 times more people when it was done by AFD for the same money as the one done by left parties…. Those kinds of things can be grounds for bans based on monopoly abuse that are in no way connected to any legal action that would ban Fox News.
That said, a world without any billionaires able to use their media outlets for their personal propaganda would be nice – Springer is in many ways no better than Fox, for example.
wetzel-rhymes-with 02.26.25 at 1:48 am
@Alex SL, you wrote the following about large language models: “Their primary use cases are high-throughput spam creation, cheating on assignments, fraud in academic writing (which could be seen as a subsection of spam), and assisted coding that could mostly be replaced with “google my problem, click the stackoverflow link”.
For my part, I believe the most significant use for large language models will be political, unveiled the next year, where like it or not, many new users will arrive and settle in, replicating us here in our own forums. These new ‘users’ will be based on us, different personality types, and to carry on discussions, panick, spreading crisis and scapegoat. Additionally, large language models are already in use in permission based omnidirectional customer life-cycle marketing platforms for profiling and typing, such as at Zeta Global, which owns Disqus, the software backing so many forums outside of meta, google universe or X. The security of the open internet must be a major concern requiring immediate adjustment for European societies because you won’t win an information war on X, TikTok or Facebook, because those are no longer a place to discuss society’s problems. They are being instrumentalized for turnkey global fascism.
a. y. mous 02.26.25 at 10:21 am
: Crawling out of the twisted woodwork after a almost a decade and a half.
CT Admins – bring back Twigs & Branches. You did it once. Do it again. Too much of cross posting in the comments. Guilty. No surprise, given the macro situation across the globe; both, the economy and the politics.
You cannot dispense with the tech. bros. Just as you could not dispense with the masters-of-the-universe finance bros, who ended up in govt. Someone somewhere here in CT commented on how there are so many Goldman Sachs alumni in the governments across the world. In the same vein, you cannot dispense with the US. Or dispense with Russia. Or dispense with Right wing. Or dispense with Left wing.
Wilhoit’s Law explains the “how”. The “why” is equally pithy. “Fruits of other people’s labor” (FOOPL). What can I do to maximize FOOPL? Violence. Currency (with an emphasis on fungibility, not value). Demagoguery. Virtue Signaling (with different people emphasizing one of the two words, but never both). Greenfields. 1984. Brave New World. Many options. Mix and match. But the purpose remains the same. The Trump administration has chosen to go down the Currency mixed with Demagoguery path to attain FOOPL. The quest for non-terra habitats and resources by the long termists is the Greenfield path.
So, it is moot to bemoan bad behavior. It is worse, to argue about definitions of bad and evidence of behavior.
A large, I mean >50%+1 large, number of people today want FOOPL. Automation, AI, “the wonderful beautiful rare-earth and mineral deal of the century!” that is currently being signed between the US and Ukraine, all of them, are merely attempts to maximize FOOPL. Until and unless there is a generational shift in the value systems that emphasizes a post scarcity model of economics and politics, there can be no dispensation, in all senses of that word. To summarize in true Internet trolling style: A request to all tech. bros. More Trek. Less Wars.
Alex SL 02.26.25 at 1:07 pm
wetzel-rhymes-with,
Flooding the web with propaganda bots is a use, and already happening e.g. on microblogging platforms, but I see that as a subgenre of spam.
I should have said, by the way, that even if one is convinced that the world needs an unreliable expensive super-autocomplete that isn’t controlled by Altman, Musk, or some other corporation or government, open source LLMs have been available for quite some time. That problem is solved. Similarly, people could just use Linux instead of Microsoft and iOS, and they could use LibreOffice instead of Office.
What looks more difficult to me is search engines, videoconferencing software, smartphone operating systems, and social media networks like Youtube or Twitter. It seems those are variously either impossible or very tedious or only very user-unfriendly to create and maintain with a large corporation or government behind them? Not everybody wants to or has the resources and skills to run their own server. Not sure, however, why there isn’t a popular open source smartphone operating system comparable to what Ubuntu is for laptops, or a popular open source videoconferencing app. Nearly everybody seems to be locked into Android/iOS and Teams/Zoom, respectively, plus a smattering of Skype and Google Meets, all corporate. A problem with smartphones may simply be that the app store of an open source operating system would start out very empty.
At any rate, for the search engine and social media platforms, the solution would be to offer them as a public service. And I must admit, I struggle to understand why the EU hasn’t already at least considered doing that.
David Mitchell 02.26.25 at 3:19 pm
As Cory Doctorow and others have pointed out it’s a collective action problem. You need a critical mass of folks willing to move to other platforms and be willing to support it. I’ve used Linux and libreOffice both and they work well, in particular with older PCs that would otherwise be obsolete. However Linux lacks some ready to run programs that are available for Windows such as CAD and Finite Element Analysis. Yes there are some open source versions but it takes a lot of effort to get them working while the Windows version is ready within an hour.
The only way Video conferencing and cell phone software and server support can be addressed is either through government or a non-profit corporation. And there would need to be robust protection against privatization. I still have bad memories from Skype selling out to Microsoft. A good thing trashed IMHO.
Aardvark Cheeselog 02.26.25 at 5:06 pm
Google’s offering, Android, is Linux. It’s a “product-ized” Linux distribution with some application framework and a lot of special hardware drivers. An EU tech consortium that wanted an alternative could make it: a technological base that can build things like the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Saab Gripen is going to be up to that challenge, if somebody resources it.
The threat of “fuck your IP protections” is a potentially existential one even to the mega tech corps. “We’ll clone your stuff and bar you from our markets” is not something they can ignore.
Casey 02.26.25 at 5:07 pm
The American tech industry’s dominance is protected by international treaties whereby other countries basically enforce US copyright law within their own borders.
If the US and silicon valley have betrayed the western liberal consensus … why continue doing this? Let’s just sell unlocked iPhones to the rest of the world.
wkw 02.26.25 at 9:23 pm
Aardvark and Casey have hit onto something v important, something that Herman Mark Schwartz has been emphasizing in research for about a decade (e.g., link at bottom): IP-at-scale is the profit base of the “productive” (i.e., nonfinancial) parts of the US economy. Draghi’s recent report on European corporate competitiveness drives this home.
But structural power is also structural vulnerability. Hierarchical networked systems (e.g., Tech) are fragile to attacks at their core.
AI and “disrupter” tech are already threatening the IP growth model and will soon kill aspects of it, maybe the whole thing. See Meta’s recent legal claim (in defense of the practices they used to build their AI model) that IP piracy is fine as long as you don’t seed the torrents you use to steal others’ IP. Well… turnabout is fair play on that one, mfers.
“Move fast and break stuff” cannot be a one-sided strategy, it needs to be tit-for-tat and maybe grim trigger. So: move fast and break Elon. Then ask Sam some questions about his future plans.
Trump killed the WTO, which is the primary body that protected IP in the global economy, via TRIPS and its extensions. Want to regain domestic legitimacy and belief in the EU project? Free cancer drugs for the boomers and Ozempic for the Zoomers!
That leverage point is more vulnerable than many think because the value of IP comes from network adoption, and Trump’s ruling coalition is IP (not the traditional GOP corporate class, and not even Wall St).
Schwartz: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/hermanschwartz/publications/fordism-franchise-intellectual-property-and-growth-models-knowledge-economy-0
Rj 02.27.25 at 5:17 am
Deepseek has shown that the resources required are modest.
No, it hasn’t. It has shown that intelligent people are prepared to suspend disbelief when they read an appealing press release, no matter how obviously questionable the claims in it might be.
The quant firm that Deepseek is a part of is estimated to own more than 50,ooo modern GPUs. That extensive infrastructure, along with the hundreds of ML researchers and technicians employed by the group form important part of an extensive – and expensive – research and development program. This R&D program includes a significant team spending years creating and improving upon enabling code and systems, cultivating and optimising data sets, creating and continuing to optimise synthetic data, and all of the fundamental research required for a global AI lab. Standing on this platform, they then have the opportunity to run down however many blind alleys required to discover the iterative marginal gains of fruitful paths, each of which cost a modest amount.
One of these runs, after being evaluated and being found to be useful, was singled out and had a misguiding press release issued about it.
John Q 02.27.25 at 6:16 am
RJ@18 Let’s say $1000 apiece for GPUs. That’s $50 million, which is small potatoes. Not sure about the hundreds of staff (Wikipedia says <200), but say they are getting $US100k apiece, you might get another $50 million. My university’s engineering and IT faculty spends that many times over.
Or to approach it differently, this is a boutique hedge fund no one had ever heard of, with (according to Wikipedia) $7 billion under management. If they can produce an LLM comparable to ChatGPT (as lots of tests suggest), then any large European government can do it with spare change.
Tm 02.27.25 at 8:59 am
“a world without any billionaires able to use their media outlets for their personal propaganda would be nice”
Indeed.
Zamfir 02.27.25 at 12:11 pm
@John, those GPu are much more expensive than 1000 E, by at least a factor of 10, plausibly more. Such equipment, plus several years of paying researchers (who would cost much more than 100k/y in Europe or they will be bought by US firms), ends up in the hundreds of millions.
Of course governments can afford that, in theory. In practice, it is near impossible to get such budget for a project with highly uncertain success or value. You can perhaps get such budgets some years later, once it has become clear that it would be important.
There is something similar to deepseek in France, called Mistral. It gets government money, and it has ties to all those French vaguely-national industries, but it also ties into US networks, doing deals with Microsoft etc.
I think that’s telling – the French government is in love with AI stuff, seriously keen on independence from the US, but it can’t really pony up enough money to cut out the rich Americans.
Trader Joe 02.27.25 at 1:31 pm
Yikes!
I never thought I’d hear a legitimate free market economist so freely toss around the concept of banning commercial modes of communication and encouraging active undermining of highly efficient and useful technology which creates the exact network effects that allow the free exchange of ideas.
Hammers can be used to drive nails and bludgeon skulls, lets ban them.
Too much oxygen will kill you, lets restrict it.
Free speech can shed light and spread hate, lets ban it.
I hear what you’re saying, but do you really mean it?
PeteW 02.27.25 at 5:43 pm
“Hammers can be used to drive nails and bludgeon skulls, lets ban them.
Can’t we just ban skull-bludgeoning?
“Too much oxygen will kill you, lets restrict it.”
Since it’s pretty much impossible to breath in lethal levels of oxygen without going to a huge amount of effort (and why would you?), restricting it seems unnecessary.
“Free speech can shed light and spread hate, lets ban it.”
Banning X, as the OP posits, would not be banning free speech. X is a privately-owned publishing platform, not the embodiment of free speech.
John Q 02.27.25 at 7:59 pm
@Zamfir, as you say, whether it’s tens of millions or hundreds of millions, it’s not a constraint for governments. It’s true that they haven’t taken the AI problem seriously until now, but they spend billions every year on Galileo rather than relying on US GPS, and have announced 10 billion euros to rival Starlink.
So all you are really say is that the policy I am advocating hasn’t yet been adopted.
Art 02.28.25 at 4:41 am
Worm’s-eye-view but IMHO one of the easiest ways to get linux onto desktops is Linux Mint. Free ( a donation is not required but would be appreciated) and remarkably easy to set up and use. Download onto a thumb, check the download integrity with the official checksum (you can’t be too careful), restart and let it do it’s thing. It will give you lots of options.
It is possible to run Mint from the thumb drive if you want a taste first but it’s sloooow. You also have the option of downloading and having it dual-boot with whatever monstrosity of an OS you have now. The Mint OS is very good at detecting existing hardware and adjusting for it. Linux Mint will run well on surprisingly old and obsolete PCs with stunted hardware. A common use is resurrection of ancient PCs, way below minimum hardware requirements for any recent version of Windows, and using the PC as an e-mail server or single-process machine. Mint just works.
Most of the usual office/ productivity software has very functional analogues that are included. The OS also has a nice system for the usual patches, updates, security upgrades so there is no reason to go barefoot.
Linux Mint is not the most sophisticated version of Linux but it is very capable and a good starting point. If you are used to Windows Mint should be, for the most part, intuitively obvious. Mint also has a lot of online support and guidance. Lots of step-by-step guides and a community willing to lend a hand and walk you through any issues. I’ve never really needed much help as long as I wasn’t doing something super weird.
Zamfir 02.28.25 at 11:48 am
A JQ, I can only notice that in practive, government do find it difficult free up such money. And when they do, it attracts a lot of competing interests that try to steer the budget their way, often with fatal consequences to its usefulness. Galileo was almost killed by 15 years of infighting after its annoucnement in 1994, and that’s a succes example. There’s also projects like the Human Brain Initiative or Gaia-X, that were already guaranteed failures before they started. There is a spiral there: failures and difficulties from the past, reduce the confidence to start new projects
I don’t mean that as some iron law of government projects. It does mean that you cannot just adopt a policy, spend some money, and expect results. You need a much wider framework, that can identify worthwhile and promising causes, shape projects (and slect contributers) in a way that makes them likely to succeed, that can monitor them and redirect when needed, that can somewhat shield them from political and commercial pressures, and that can absorb a chunk of failures without losing outside confidence. That is much larger than individual projects.
Europe has something like that for space technology, but its fragile. Projects of a few billions strain it to the core. Quite possibly, the US has already killed it without trying, and we’re just looking at the walking remains.
For soemthing like “build alternatives to US software monopolies”, I am as yet not even seeing the outline of such a program.
Tim Worstall 02.28.25 at 11:55 am
“The absence of typical X content would make such a site more useful than X. The big question is whether it would also have less reach.”
Seems an odd statement. Reach is the number of people who use something. People who use something presumably find it useful. So the argument seems to become lots more people would use it but we’d have to worry about people not using it. Which seems to contain a certain contradiction.
James McA 02.28.25 at 12:33 pm
Other countries could put manners on him overnight by declaring that they will not enforce US intellectual property. When his phone lines are jammed with furious CEOs of Microsoft, McDonalds, Disney etc it’d soon shut him up.
John Q 02.28.25 at 6:15 pm
Tim @27 You might want to read up on network effects. I’m surprised I have to point this out to you.
Tim Worstall 02.28.25 at 6:26 pm
Network effects are – in essence – that something becomes more useful for each person as more people use/have it. OK. Doesn’t really get us over the hump in your argument that less reach – fewer users – will be more useful.
engels 02.28.25 at 7:05 pm
Having just watched the White House press conference that turned into Jerry Springer I don’t know whether social media caused this but I’m increasingly sure we’re all fcuked.
wkw 03.01.25 at 4:15 am
Re Zamfir @26, all true but I think you’ll find that major power wars have a galvanizing effect.
nastywoman 03.01.25 at 6:45 am
@reasingly sure we’re all fcuked.
On the other hand -GREAT TV
(from the NYT)
‘This is a man who spent years yelling at people on TV as a way to make a living. He is wired to think about things in terms of “great television.” He is a highly conscious performer. But playacting as a tough guy on NBC on Thursday nights between 9 and 10 p.m. is not the same thing as bossing around an ally before the eyes of the world, even if Mr. Trump uses the same language to describe one performance as he would the other.
Still, how one postures before the cameras is of paramount importance in this White House.
After the meeting, the president did an imitation of Mr. Zelensky in front of the cameras and said: “All of a sudden, he’s a big shot.” Where Mr. Trump is involved, there is usually room enough for one big shot.
The other European leaders who had come to Washington over the past few weeks to reason with him about Russia understood this. They knew how to play their parts in the Oval Office while the cameras were rolling. President Emmanuel Macron of France literally held Mr. Trump’s hand at one point. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer presented a letter from King Charles III to Mr. Trump for all to see. It went over so well that Mr. Trump brought the letter out to wave around again a little while later at their joint news conference.
It’s not that Mr. Zelensky doesn’t know how to perform. He was a television actor before he became president and has been skillful in using the media as he tries to galvanize support. But evidently the role of supplicant was not one he was going to play Friday’.
Zamfir 03.01.25 at 10:31 am
Wkw, thats quite possible. I juat think we should not underestimate the size and difficulty of the task.
John Q 03.02.25 at 1:10 am
Zamfir, sorry if I gave the impression that this is going to be easy. I thought I was pretty careful to say it wasn’t easy, just that there is no better time to do it than now.
Dk 03.02.25 at 3:57 am
JQ, turning off Starlink effectively means cutting off regional Australia from broadband internet. I wish as much as anyone that the NBN were properly funded, but it would be nice for the capital cities to realise there is a whole continent out here where people also live.
Seekonk 03.02.25 at 5:45 pm
I think that that we should undertake the establishment of official platforms.
Information and communication, particularly instantaneous electronic mass communication, are too important to society to be controlled by private owners. Notwithstanding their shortcomings, PBS and BBC are models.
Lee A. Arnold 03.02.25 at 6:47 pm
I have always wondered whether the European Union is a path into the future. Whatever its flaws, eventually it would be compelled to step up and correct them.
John Q 03.02.25 at 8:21 pm
DK
Buying a Tesla, relying on Twitter/Facebook for comms and signing up for Starlink all seemed like good ideas at the time, but they have turned out to be bad mistakes. These mistakes can’t be reversed overnight, but we have to reverse them. In the case of Starlink, what’s needed is a big acceleration in the development of European alternatives. Australia can’t switch until that happens.
hix 03.02.25 at 10:32 pm
Disagree about buying a Tesla. That never seemed the best idea to me. That company just always stood out in a bad way, even among the usual of us tech and in this case, the alternatives were not US tech. It was never that kind of quasi monopoly like Meta or Amazon, either.
Anyway, twitter Starlink or Tesla were never relevant for me.
Seriously considering making much more of an effort to avoid Amazon, however. That sure does come with some price here in lost convenience.
LFC 03.03.25 at 2:02 am
Perhaps (?) in a few instances (fast-moving emergencies like wildfires or hurricanes?) agencies have used social media for announcements they’ve not made elsewhere, but generally I’m not sure where the idea comes from that Facebook and X are important sources of public service announcements, such as weather, that can’t usually be gotten elsewhere. I’ve never been on Facebook; I had a Twitter account but I basically never used it and have now deactivated it. I don’t feel I’ve missed anything in the way of crucial information. Anyone with a smart phone, even a quite primitive one as in my case, can find the weather forecast with a couple of clicks, or one can look at the newspaper (online or otherwise). Local radio gives the weather too (as does local TV). And where I live it’s still possible, I’m happy to say, to dial a phone number at any hour and hear the recorded voice of a meteorologist giving the weather report. How 20th century!
dk 03.03.25 at 2:08 am
@39 JQ
Thanks for clarifying your position. I’m all for us developing a properly working NBN that actually serves rural regions. Sounds better than e.g. renting nuclear submarines. Until then, I can’t do without Starlink and many others are in the same position as I am.
Janus Daniels 03.03.25 at 9:02 pm
X, TikTok, Facebook, or whatever, are not the real problem. The real problem is the absence of any public alternative. Every citizen should have federal ISP, banking, email, website, messaging, blog, and so on, to use as they like, or not.
hix 03.03.25 at 10:08 pm
Don’t see even such minor baby steps like this petition get any real traction among party politicians.
https://savesocial.eu/en/
engels 03.03.25 at 11:59 pm
The real problem is the absence of any public alternative.
There should be public alternatives but without aggressive regulation they won’t be able to compete with commercial platforms that are designed to be addictive.
KT2 03.04.25 at 6:45 am
Cory Doctorow has some “Ideas Lying Around ”
….
“Friedman had an answer: “In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis.”
…
‘There’s a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.”
…
“Taking the margins for Big Tech’s most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.
“Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs’ superyachts – those, it will swamp and sink).”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh
wkw 03.07.25 at 7:15 pm
Re my invocation of Blyth and IP rents above, here is Cory Doctorow:
“Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.”
Those treaties — esp w/r/t TRIPS in the WTO — should now be treated as void. Even better, he devilishly recommends this course via Milton Friedman’s logic regarding crises-as-opportunities.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh
wkw 03.07.25 at 7:16 pm
Ugh, I mentioned not Mark Blyth but Mark Schwartz. Mark Blyth has plenty to say about financialized “growth models” too.
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