Ever since Trump came to power, we’ve been screaming blue murder about the lack of digital sovereignty.
And that’s not just because the US CLOUD Act ensures that every American company, upon a nod from a US intelligence or law enforcement agency with a three-letter name, quietly hands over your data. It doesn’t matter one bit that our European legal systems don’t allow this or that the data is physically located in Europe. It can even lead to you losing access to your own data, even if you are the president of the digital criminal court in The Hague.
Our entire digital infrastructure has been sold out to American players who, with monopolies exceeding 70% market share, poison the market and strengthen their influence and revenue. We are digitally colonized, with all the exploitation and consequences that come with it.
Combine this with a US government that, in a post-9/11 fear reflex, regards the liberal freedoms of us all,personally and as a society, as secondary at best, and non-existent at worst.
This was the case long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene; it’s a 30-year process of selling out our digital future to American players. Trump is merely the catalyst, the accelerating element that makes us realize we are on the wrong track.
After the smooth-talking, cool Obama and the sympathetic “grandpa” Biden, we suddenly have an anti-figure we all love to hate. But there has been no difference in policy this millennium; Trump’s predecessors just knew how to wrap it better.
Despite contrary reports from useful idiots, this limits our digital operations. These companies don't promote innovation; they buy up innovative players and integrate them into their larger whole.
Microsoft, for example, is not an innovative company: it’s a marketing, sales, and lobbying organization that buys up innovative solutions and businesses. This applies to almost all major tech players: aside from perhaps one initial brilliant concept, their dominance is entirely due to aggressive sales/marketing, die-hard lobbying, and the acquisition of competitors and new ideas.
And yes, we are all guilty: we believe hollow slogans and half-lies, we follow the other lemmings, and we are too lazy to suffer a bit more pain in the short term to avoid being milked by a monopolist in the long term.
The first step toward digital freedom is being aware of our own limitations—of how Big Tech indoctrinates us to choose against our own best interests.
And yes, I am guilty too: I’m typing this on a MacBook (great machine, long battery life, but locked into Jobs’ ecosystem), posting this on a US social media platform, and using Gemini to create illustrations.
Not because I don’t know any better, but because time and again I am seduced by the addictive pull of good marketing, convenience, and in the case of the MacBook: a technically and functionally great product. I understand the irony and the slight form of hypocrisy that is typically human.
In the coming posts, I’m going on a study trip: to determine how bad things really are, how it got this far, what I and you can do individually to become structurally digitally independent in small steps, and last but not least, how to tackle this as a government, company, and organization.
I’ve pondered for a long time what to call this series; the most boring title, “The road to digital liberation,” still sounds best and covers the most ground.
I won’t just stare blindly at American influence; I also want to keep an eye on other threats to our digital government. Technically, a significant part of our digital society comes from China, for example. But our own governments, national or European, also create—sometimes with good intentions—wrong and downright dangerous measures. The guardians of our liberal democracy must also be watched.