Post
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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@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.
@pluralistic Post-America? Bring it on.
(Also, a couple of grammatical errors slipped through: "have saw", "can useful own".)
@pluralistic me in the US, waiting for Canada to pull the trigger on cutting US tech loose:
@thefyuuri @pluralistic alas, it doesn't look like it'll be the UK. Starmer seems determined to remain supine.
@pluralistic I've mentioned it a few times to friends from the EU, but, I think trump has given them a near-ideal situation to leverage to claw out from the US's shadow *and* deal with their tax haven (Ireland) problem, and still come out looking like the heroes/good guys for it on the global stage.
"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 @pluralistic ahh, but this is premium paper. Or superior paper. Or thick paper. It's endless upselling
@pluralistic
Learn to read French, Spanish or German. Or if you're a pessimist, Russian and Chinese...
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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).
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This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
