We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American *era* and a post-American *world*. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
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When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power - the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's *soft power* that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book *The Hidden Empire*:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
2/
As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global *power* - it is a global *platform*. If you want to buy from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system.
3/
No one serious truly believed that these US systems were *entirely* trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, *weaponize*) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world - lords and peasants, presidents and peons.
4/
Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions.
5/
These systems are now no longer trustworthy. Is as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack
6/
This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process - made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question:
7/
One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).
8/
When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft *bricked* the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader - anyone.
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It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they *own* it).
The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners - it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext - and overt message - of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025.
10/
When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands.
11/
This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as *The Onion* points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue":
https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-affordability/
12/
President Trump continues to make misleading statements about affordability despite the Consumer Price Index indicating an increase in costs for many goods and services. The Onion assesses the veracity of the president’s claims. Claim: The cost of living is low. True: The cost of living is much lower than what it will be in a […]
It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS):
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-drug-prices-starmer-trump-tariffs-b2841490.html
13/
But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected - one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the *threat* of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants.
14/
The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store.
15/
This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.
16/
It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.
So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.
17/
This would make everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turn America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet
There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double *reverse* whammy - making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector - but it's also *unambiguously within Canada's power to do*.
19/
After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably:
The EU - a far more powerful entity than Canada - has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers
20/
It's 2025. President Trump is back, and the richest men in tech are on stage with him. What started as a dysfunctional internet run by tech giants, and enabled by failed legislation, has morphed into something even more dangerous: what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism. Host Cory Doctorow traces how U.S. trade pressure dragged Canada into America's broken internet model, how shortsighted attempts to make big platforms behave came back to haunt us during the worst wildfire season in Canadian history, and offers up a solution for how to save the internet, asking: in a post-free trade world, why are we still playing by American rules?
Apple, being a truly innovative company, has come up with a whole lot of exciting *new* ways to tell the EU to fuck itself:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple_dma_complaint/
But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolutely control over.
21/
That picture. Chump isn’t even in the room, he’s away at the island, day-dreaming of ….
Kiddo next to him is back in the classroom being the boring school-kid. No-one is listening.
What was it about again?
Body language….
@pluralistic This is the legacy of ARPANET and something that the Internet Elders used to fret about in the '80s and '90s. The assumption they were challenging was that now the cat was out of the bag and the internet transcended borders, there would always be a management-level consensus that would impel everyone to do the Right Thing. The consensus would be driven by technical arguments and (of course) the moral ones would follow.
See how this has turned out.
"The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own."
I've often looked at this from the other side. the Toilet Paper Objection to Trickle down theory. There's only so much toilet paper any one human of any class status can use to wipe their backside.
@MakeAppPie @[email protected] @pluralistic Aren't these the same companies that sell "flushable" wet wipes? (Do not flush wet wipes, they contribute to fatbergs.)
Enshitification of the sector instead of the product line?
A really obvious solution to this conundrum: the rich could buy stuff for •everybody else•.
Oh wait—that's called taxes....
@pluralistic Probably also worth mentioning copy levies as (at least) tangentially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'd be interested in knowing how much global taxes on media just goes directly into the pockets of American IP holders.
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