That said, the correct response would be to slowly and silently divest from US-based Big Tech, fork whatever can be forked, and invest heavily in local services and infrastructure.
Past few months? Just look at their response to security and Russian aggression. I lost hope years ago.
Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
I feel the US/Trump is our only hope of slowing this down as a guarantee of (future) true democracy at the EU level essentially doesn't exist for us any other way. The EU sees China as an example to follow and I feel Trump/US is the only thing trying to stop EU leadership of going there.
Currently we're seeing a global version of a SaaS rugpull, and this should wake people up, if they're not awaken already.
I think the person you replied to thinks that the US is a shining beacon of liberty that is going to force the EU to be less authoritarian.
I like to watch this small excerpt from Frank Zappa interview time to time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fam5wRXcoQE
My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).
I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.
I want whatever you're on mate.
The thing is EU politicians have been more than asleep at the wheel for over 2 decades now, coasting along and it shows in the mess we are in today.
All they do is speeches and virtue signaling while not actually fixing any problems, cashing in their paycheques till they can reitre on their generous pensions and leve the mess for the next ones to fix or just keep kicking the can down the road.
Sure, the issue is that whenever Europe went "worse", it never ended well. Usually millions died, and it was only better after that for a few decades. So what do we do?
Replacing it with a centralized totalitarian US government that we don't even get to vote on.
Trump's approach to free speech: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
How do you figure?
The capitol storming and freeing all that participated. Having major cities being taken over by the army. Stifling free press. You know all that good old dictatorship playbook stuff.
The countries already want to it themselves. See the UK for an example.
What specific actions has the EU done to ban free speech and control the political narrative?
I see the US deporting legal permanent residents when they peacefully protest against US policy[1]. and I see the US searching social media accounts and forbidding private accounts[2] for visa applicants. Both of those seem like Trump is attempting to control political speech more than anything the EU has done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
[2] To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.” https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Second, no EU-wide regulation can come into being without support from Council, and Council is formed by member countries.
As always, people are complaining EU this, EU that, when EU in reality is their own country, among others. It will be your country that will do the censorship etc. If your country is small and weak it has low impact on the international state of affairs, regardless of its membership in the EU. Macron or Merz have much more to say than von der Leyen.
If you have a 27 country bloc and are rationally limited to the actions of the most timid or compromised, it's pretty easy to manipulate the actions of the whole. We know Hungary is effectively a Russia proxy, for instance, and has massively influenced the response to Russia. Similarly a couple of EU leaders (Meloni, Orban) are Trump lickspittles/mini-mes so there again they'll deny any collective response that offends their best pal.
Are those obscure priorities though? Putting local employment/wellfare/environment first seems justifiable to me, no?
I would argue that EU action has been pretty aligned with their actual citizens interests during this whole conflict:
- Kept domestic consequences contained (energy price)
- Prevented escalation
- Scaled up domestic military readiness especially in border nations
- Hurt destabilizing Russian expansionism via sanctions/secondhand arms almost for free
I would much prefer a principled, strongly voiced NO to neo-imperialism in the form of massive support and intervention. But would that be in the best interest of most voters? I'd argue no.
Only in the sense that they are not in the spotlight when EU officials talk about Ukraine. They don’t say “We have more important things to do”. But you are of course right, they dominate the agenda.
I tend to agree but
1. We risk Balkanisation of the internet
2. Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed - which will just end looking like a sped up version of the Matrix screen
3. If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities (which let’s face it is the destination of search and posting text or photos).
The power of social media is the power of a phone in every frigging pocket of every adult on the planet.
So we end up with normcore social media, partly because regulation will ramp down the extreme reactions of the algorithm, and partly because LLMs will replace a lot of queries, and they are mostly normcore because they are based on every written word ever, and that is a huge anti-extremism weighting
The natural gas supply among other things. Europe has made itself first dependent on Russia and then on the US for the basic survival of its population.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
Yes, we need to move away from fossil fuels but the reality is that we are still dependent on them so we may as well look at strategic independence and economic gains and produce what we can ourselves.
Anyway my point is making a compromise is not going to work here. Leftist/green parties will hand the continent over to the extreme right rather than support anything to do with fossil fuel exploitation (because anything else will have these parties shatter into 1000 pieces). Frankly, the way it looks that will happen anyway in 5, maybe 10 years, but I still prefer "hitler in 5 years" over "hitler now".
So no, a compromise on this is not possible.
So, your long game should be to forge amicable relations with your next-door neighbour, rather betting everything in your relationship with your manipulative friend on the other side of the pond. In the meantime, you should also become self-dependent.
That means the moderate right (think laissez-faire pro-immigration pro-business, the only remaining other voting bloc) and extreme right (hate based parties) control, easily, 50% of the vote. They are not currently allied but the problem is that a shattered left is not something the right (or anyone) can work with. If the left fully shatters, the right will be forced to join the extreme right.
So right now, it takes essentially EVERY small insignificant party cooperating not to hand EU countries to the extreme right (yes, in Germany there's more margin, in the Netherlands less, France is on the brink, ...)
That makes your "dumb" not dumb but a serious catch-22. Any compromise that makes ANY party that has 5% of the vote walk out is a total non-starter, because one vote of non-confidence and "hitler gets elected again" so to speak.
Until nations actually implement serious cybersecurity enforcement, this is a good thing.
> Enforcing interactivity (sharing posts between instagram and X sounds lovely) but the search and discovery is still the secret sauce - and once you regulate that the only fair way is a time based feed
A massive part of the modern-day propaganda machine. It's worse than awful and it's intended.
> If we do this, we don’t get our own (European) unicorns - what we get is regulated utilities
Ultimately, this is a better direction. But the regulations need to be carefully curated for freedom instead of suppression. Unfortunately, current political climate and public sentiment isn't going well for public safety.
Strongly disagree on this one. Utilities and heavy regulation are a necessary evil that should be used sparingly, not as the norm.
What's not fine is US oligarchs using social media platforms to influence elections - something Musk and Zuckerberg have both done, on the record, with fines to match.
That's not fine anywhere.
The US seems to have persuaded itself it is, but the EU - rightly - has other priorities.
US sucks as an ally! Please do not cover it up under "big tech"!
If we would develop local alternatives, there is a good chance US will bomb them!
The content is not on other apps though. Maybe other apps have other content, but it's not the good content that people want.
- install Firefox/Zen as main browser
- install uBlock Origin
- switch to Brave Search / Qwant for search engine
- switch to signal for IM for communicating with your parents and loved one (still use WhatsApp elsewhere)
- help family setup passkeys using Bitwarden EU
- advocate that they don't need to buy the latest android but can get 2nd hand e.g. motorola edge+ (2023) and help setup your parents linageos
- when switching router pick one with openwrt support and setup AdGuard on the router (some asus routers already have such things build in)
Amateur hour at the white house. (Or shall I say Trump hour?)
Europe at least has missed the last couple of trains on this. No one has trillions of dollars to spend and catch up with the US tech sector.
This is a good thing, because a lot of European led regulation has been pretty terrible.
Basically it will be outsourcing the traditional government censorship, oppression and propaganda work to the tech private sector because it's 1000x more efficient that the government at this and it also helps keep the image of those in power clean since if they get caught they can throw big-tech under the bus. It's literally the perfect setup.
How do I know this? Is it because I'm clairvoyant or mental with a tinfoil hat on? No. It's because US big-techs like Apple literally did the same deal for the CCP in China, so now that the can of worms has been opened, all the other countries want the same deal.
And if you think the EU leadership is somehow morally above these types of practices, boy you couldn't be more wrong. Their unscrupulous use of Israeli Pegasus spy-ware and Palantir surveilance-ware proves this. They'll gladly copy the CCP great firewall and give it a coat of blue paint with some gold stars on it and say it's for "protecting your democracy".
In england? started to break due to the black death
In russia? Lenin.
You might think Trump wants to serve corporations. However, mostly by incompetence, he is doing the opposite.
https://www.wsj.com/business/us-alcohol-industry-canada-boyc... (Not paywalled) https://archive.is/r8Cxr
In other areas - when the entire Canadian federal (and most provincial and territorial governments - many municipal governments, and of course the entire educational sector due to low-cost licensing) and large-scale industries are completely dependent on Microsoft 365 + Azure platforms (probably AWS as well) - information technology and management usage of US technologies is definitely not being boycotted...
I saw an attempt at a very large company to abandon M/S, it was working but there were a huge amount complaints. Then after a couple months, you can guess what happened. Certain people, usually 1st and 2nd level management, got exemptions, then some "important" finance people. Guess what, the move failed because you ended up with 2 tiers of employees, the revolts started happening. After 1 year, the relented and went back to M/S.
It's likely the EU will cave but together with other ongoing threats, this might throw India and Brazil closer to China's orbit.
But the EU leadership is so weak now that we never know, even if it doesn't make sense.
Simply put: can the EU do without US tech? No. Can the EU Commission do without extra tax revenues from US tech? Yes.
The US tech industry doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do, the hardest part to replace is the hardware, which mostly isn't built in the US anyways
That reminds me of Mark Zukerberg which threatened to leave a while back... and denied it soon after realizing the bluff didn't work.
Wrong. The answer is yes, they very much can. Do they want to? No.
Win some, lose some. Living in the EU, I really hope the EU bends the knee on this.
India and Brazil are part of BRICS, so they don't really need that much of a push to be fully aligned with China on most things.
BRICS is a joke.
Trump has already stuck 50% import duties on Indian products, conveniently exempting pharmaceuticals, of course. The pretext being “Russian oil.”
Since the government didn’t budge on oil, they’re hardly likely to budge on tech regulations.
"Might"?
Brazil already exports to China almost 3 times the amount it exports to the U.S.
And after the recent rise in tariffs against Brazil, China announced an huge increase in soybeans and coffee purchase from Brazil. Because of that the price of US soybeans dropped and American farmers sent an open letter to Trump asking him to not cause trouble.
1. Information control for political censorship
2. A source of cash from fines
The issue will not drive anyone into anyone else's orbit.
- The precarization of work by wage compression and anti-worker rights lobbying (Uber)
- The overexploitation of attention for financial (ads) and political gains (tolerance and reach for the ultraliberal, protofascist, neonazi groups and narratives) through American state-sponsored algorithmic manipulation (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
- Assimilationism, erasure of local culture, traditions, identities, to achieve cultural hegemony (Netflix)
Oh, this is not true for a long time. Much better money can be made by making people want.
What happens on social media is of the herd, by the herd, for the herd. As Nietzsche would say like organized religion it produces nothing but a herd or slave morality.
It will loose steam just like organized religion.
Luckily this isn't happening in the US and if it is definitely isn't getting rapidly worse.
It's time to diversify our ridiculous export-based economies and invest into creating a strong internal market.
I don’t see staples coming out of Europe. So I’m wondering what a strong internal market would be?
In fact I'm not buying much of anything from the US anymore. If anything to screw up Trump's "trade deficit" even more despite his tariffs.
On the other side of the coin, given the legislative tendencies of the EU and their governing bodies, they're hardly friends of protecting anything resembling respect for basic digital individual rights. American Big Tech is full of parasitic, mendacious, hypocritical self-serving bullshitters, but the bureaucrats in the EU governments do likewise under their own facade of "protecting the public interest"
The most favorite 3 words of every imperialist gringo.
Their least favorite words are probably "sovereignty" and "self determination".
My gripe is with the EU which feels the need to regulate everything. And my view is that it shouldn't. And if there is someone that can force them to rethink their approach, then I will support that.
And yes, other countries should follow the example of the US where everything is permitted unless explicitly denied, and not vice-versa.
Keep Microsoft Office and Cloud for a couple of years. Obliterate the rest. S&P would collapse.
It is very, very bad. But that is still their problem, not the U.S.'s problem.
That is the point of sovereignty.
And besides, an U.S.-supported "democracy" is quite often as bad (viz: Chile's Pinochet, Iran's Rheza Pahlevi, etc).
> force them
> other countries should
As a latin-american I say: please, Americans, keep thinking like that. Keep believing in "American exceptionalism". The more you do this kind of nationalist narcissism, the less relevant you'll become. And that's what I want.
But each country/place will react differently. Europe, Canada, Japan, Mexico and UK will get scared and just obey, as they've doing all along.
India, Brazil and China will mostly just ignore this.
I say it's high time we threaten its use.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
I'll call another one: The US is only going to do this to the EU and maybe a few other countries whose populace has zero spine and will just submit. A great example of a country that in effect has regulated US big tech far, far more strongly than the EU, and to far more effect, is South Korea. But ironically, this is really never brought up in international spaces, it's always about EU regulation, when they're pretty mild.
I'm willing to bet money the US won't threaten Korea much at all, because its public would rightly tell them to fuck off and it would cost the ruling party significant votes. The politicians would have to be super discreet about somehow deregulating without the public noticing.
I say this spending my time between both Europe and Korea and being ingrained in both culturally.
fifteen1506•1h ago
And this is the only framework I can look to this news with. Either that or mercantilism, I'm told.
gsf_emergency_2•1h ago
https://www.lacittafutura.it/cultura/il-vecchio-muore-e-il-n...