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 It should be made clear that, if Starlink support is withdrawn from Ukraine, or extended to Russia (beyond its current illegal use), both X and Starlink will be blocked by all free countries.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.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
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.