The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War: How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost.
The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War: How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost.
www.foreignaffairs.com
The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War
6 comments
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IMO it's mind blowing to see how many Europeans are now discovering alternative EU or OpenSource solutions for IT services that were imbedded in our lives for so many years. Linux is booming, Proton.me is one of the biggest competitors for the Google eco-system, alternative browsers like Vivaldi are sky rocketing, Signal, BlueSky, Mastodon and Substack. I had never heard of that 1 year ago and now I have no more Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp. Also many... many european businesses are moving their cloud drives to EU cloud services. This is only the beginning.
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Proton's CEO is a fan of Trump and BlueSky is as American as apple pie. So is SubStack, it got series A funded by a16z, which nowadays is best known for its founder Marc Andreessen being an absolute shitbag.
Signal I'll give a pass. It's American, but a nonprofit. Mastodon is at least FOSS.
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It could also spell the end of today’s open Internet, as Europeans look to build alternative platforms to those of the giant U.S. tech firms.
I think you mean "closed internet"!
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I wouldn’t say they lost. Not by a long shot. I understand the sentiment of “let’s get rid of them! Now’s the best time to do that”. But there’s still A LOT to do to make that happen.
But obviously - let’s contribute to that as much as possible.
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Let's start with realizing silicon valley not being a leading figure outside of their production range. A technocrat is an ugly word in English btw.
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I agree. I just don’t like the attitude where internet is already declaring “victory” when so far not much has been done.
I understand that people got angry (partially because of “Canada + Europe vs USA” stuff; partially because people are already pissed at Big Tech). I also understand that inside of niche communities people are trying to do something and are getting hyped.
The problem is when people start extrapolating the view of “their” community to the whole world. “Everyone is ditching big tech! I read about that every day! (In a community populated by likeminded people)”. And suddenly there are “victorious” headlines and people get complacent. “Yeah Big Tech, you lost… That’s what you get for messing with us”.
I might be preaching to the choir, but we shouldn’t get complacent this time.
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6 comments