The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives, says science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow
Everyone thinks they can leverage trump for their own agenda because he’s a wildcard. But unless you’re directly putting money toward his whatever you’re very unlikely to get the result you want. And even if you do send money his way, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll turn on your at some point.
That isn’t what the article is proposing. The premise is that Trump’s tariffs and policies have functionally brought into reality the only action that previously acted as threats to keep other countries from reverse engineering American tech and creating solutions to de-shittify products and services. If the threats are no longer valid, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so, and providing better versions of existing products, or products that remove the enshittification from the existing options.
In short, they aren’t calling on Trump to take action, they’re calling on others to leverage the actions Trump has already taken.
Ah, you mean like how some countries that were previously COMPLETELY under the thumb of the US and seemingly happy about it are finally starting to disentangle themselves a tiny bit because the fascist kakistocracy makes even the appearance of cooperation unfeasible?
That too but the article is more focused on how before the US would threaten countries with unreasonable tariffs if they didn’t comply and let US tech giants rule. Well…Trump already levied unreasonable tariffs, so if they are already hit with tarrifs, why not just created their.own versions of the solutions? Why not ban X and Grok?
Obviously Cory takes an optimistic view of what could be done. The way I look at it is that more and more countries will take a Chinese approach to tech and go for a total control over what we can do online and visibility (no privacy) into everything.
Everyone thinks they can leverage trump for their own agenda because he’s a wildcard. But unless you’re directly putting money toward his whatever you’re very unlikely to get the result you want. And even if you do send money his way, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll turn on your at some point.
That isn’t what the article is proposing. The premise is that Trump’s tariffs and policies have functionally brought into reality the only action that previously acted as threats to keep other countries from reverse engineering American tech and creating solutions to de-shittify products and services. If the threats are no longer valid, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so, and providing better versions of existing products, or products that remove the enshittification from the existing options.
In short, they aren’t calling on Trump to take action, they’re calling on others to leverage the actions Trump has already taken.
Ah, you mean like how some countries that were previously COMPLETELY under the thumb of the US and seemingly happy about it are finally starting to disentangle themselves a tiny bit because the fascist kakistocracy makes even the appearance of cooperation unfeasible?
That too but the article is more focused on how before the US would threaten countries with unreasonable tariffs if they didn’t comply and let US tech giants rule. Well…Trump already levied unreasonable tariffs, so if they are already hit with tarrifs, why not just created their.own versions of the solutions? Why not ban X and Grok?
Obviously Cory takes an optimistic view of what could be done. The way I look at it is that more and more countries will take a Chinese approach to tech and go for a total control over what we can do online and visibility (no privacy) into everything.
I’m reminded of the XKCD toon about competing standards. Seems like we’re about to have some new ones!