I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto (TOMORROW!), San Diego and Seattle! Full schedule here.
In their 2023 book Underground Empire, political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe how the modern world runs on US-based systems that other nations treat(ed) as neutral platforms, and how that is collapsing:
Think of the world's fiber optic cables: for most of the internet's history, it was a given that one end of the majority of the world's transoceanic fiber would make landfall on one of the coasts of the USA. US telcos paid to interconnect these fiber head-ends β even ones on opposite coasts β with extremely reliable, high-speed links.
This made a certain kind of sense. Pulling fiber across an ocean is incredibly expensive and difficult. Rather than run cables between each nation in the world, countries could connect to the US, and, in a single hop, connect to anywhere else.
This is a great deal, provided that you trust the USA to serve as an honest broker for the world's internet traffic. Then, in 2013, the Snowden leaks revealed that America's National Security Agency was spying on pretty much everyone in the world.
Since then, the world has undergone a boom in new transoceanic fiber, most of it point-to-point links between two countries. Despite the prodigious logistical advantages of a hub-and-spoke model for ocean-spanning fiber networks, there just isn't any nation on Earth that can be entrusted with the world's information chokepoint, lest they yield to temptation to become the world's gatekeeper.
Don't get me wrong: there are also advantages to decentralized (or even better, distributed) interconnections in the world's data infrastructure. A more dispersed network topology is more resilient against a variety of risks, from political interference to war to meteor strikes.
But connecting every country to every other country is a very expensive proposition. Our planet has 205 sovereign nations, and separately connecting each of them to the rest will require 20,910 links.
In complexity theory, this is an "Order N-squared" ("O(n^2)") problem β every additional item in the problem set squares the number of operations needed to solve it. We aren't anywhere near a world where every country has a link to every other country on Earth. Instead, we're in an unsettled period, where warring theories about how to decentralize, and by how much, have created a weird, lopsided network topology.
Obviously, fiber interconnection isn't the most important "neutral platform" that the US (formerly) provided to the rest of the world. The most important American platform is the US dollar, which most countries in the world use as a reserve currency, and also as a standard for clearing international transactions. If someone in Thailand wants to buy oil from someone in Saudi Arabia, they do so in dollars. This is called "dollar clearing."
The case for dollar clearing is similar to the case for linking all the world's fiber through US data-centers. It's a big lift to ask every seller to price their goods in every potential buyer's currency, and it's a lot to ask every Thai baht holder to race around the world seeking someone who'll sell them Saudi riyals β and then there's the problem of what they do with the change left over from the transaction.
Establishing liquid markets for every pair of every currency has the same kind of complexity as the problem of establishing fiber links between every country.
Since the mid-20th century, we've solved this problem by treating the US dollar as a neutral platform. Countries opened savings accounts at the US Federal Reserve and stashed large numbers of US dollars there (when someone says, "China owns umpty-billion in US debt," they just mean, "There's a bank account in New York at the Fed with China's name on it that has been marked up with lots of US dollars").
Merchants, institutions and individuals that wanted to transact across borders used the SWIFT system, which is nominally international, but which, practically speaking, is extremely deferential to the US government.
Issuing the world's reserve and reference currency was a source of enormous power for the US, but only to the extent that it used that power sparingly, and subtly. The power of dollarization depended on most people believing that the dollar was mostly neutral β that the US wouldn't risk dollar primacy by nakedly weaponizing the dollar. Dollarization was a bet that America First hawks would have the emotional maturity to instrumentalize the dollar in the most sparing and subtle of fashion.
But today, no one believes that the dollar is neutral. First came the Argentine sovereign debt default: in 2001, the government of Argentina wiped out investors who were holding its bonds. In 2005, a group of American vulture capitalists scooped up this worthless paper for pennies, then sued in New York to force Argentina to make good on the bonds, and a US court handed over Argentina's foreign reserves, which were held on US soil.
That was the opening salvo in a series of events showed everyone in the world that the US dollar wasn't a neutral platform, but was, rather, a creature of US policy. This culminated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw the seizure of Russian assets in the USA and a general blockade on Russians using the SWIFT system to transfer money.
Whether or not you like the fact that Russian assets were transferred to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russian aggression (I like it, for the record), there's no denying that this ended the pretense that the dollar was a neutral platform. It was a signal to every leader in the world that the dollar could only be relied upon for transaction clearing and foreign reserves to the extent that you didn't make the USA angry at you.
Today, Donald Trump has made it clear that the US's default posture to every country in the world is anger. The US no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. Today, every country in the world is America's adversary and its rival.
But de-dollarization isn't easy. It presents the same O(n^2) problem as rewiring the world's fiber: creating deep, liquid markets to trade every currency against every other currency is an impossible lift (thus far), and there's no obvious candidate as a replacement for the dollar as a clearing currency.
As with fiber, we are in an unsettled period, with no obvious answer, and lots of chaotic, one-off gestures towards de-dollarization. For example, Ethiopia is re-valuing its foreign debt in Chinese renminbi:
But fiber and dollars aren't the only seemingly neutral platforms that America provided to the world as a way of both facilitating the world's orderly operation and consolidating America's centrality and power on the global stage.
America is also the world's great digital exporter. The world's governments, corporations and households run on American cloud software, like Google Docs and Office365. Their records are held in Oracle databases. Their messages and media run on iPhones. Their cloud compute comes from AWS.
The Snowden revelations shook this arrangement, but it held. The EU extracted a series of (ultimately broken) promises from the US to the effect that America wouldn't spy on Europeans using Big Tech. And now, after a brittle decade of half-measures and uneasy peace with American tech platforms, Trump has made it clear that he will not hesitate to use American tech platforms to pursue his geopolitical goals.
Practically speaking, that means that government officials that make Trump angry can expect to have their cloud access terminated:
Trump can β and does β shut down entire international administrative agencies, without notice or appeal, as a means of coercing them into embracing American political goals.
What's more, US tech giants have stopped pretending that they will not share sensitive EU data β even data housed on servers in the EU β with American spy agencies, and will keep any such disclosures a secret from the European governments, companies and individuals who are affected:
But the Eurostack's proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It's not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation's GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they're crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America's widely exported IP laws.
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called "adversarial interoperability." Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing's manufacturer:
The problem is that adversarial interoperability has been mostly criminalized in countries all around the world, thanks to IP laws that prohibit study, reverse engineering and modification of software without permission. These laws were spread all over the world at the insistence of the US Trade Representative, who, for 25 years, has made this America's top foreign trade priority.
Countries that balked at enacting laws were threatened with tariffs. Virtually every country in the world fell into line:
But then Trump happened. The Trump tariffs apply to countries that have voluntarily blocked their own investors and entrepreneurs from making billions by supplying products that unlock and improve America's enshittified tech exports. These blocks also exposed everyone in the world to the data- and cash-plundering scams of US Big Tech, by preventing the creation of privacy blockers, alt clients, jailbreaking kits, and independent app stores for phones, tablets and consoles.
What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:
These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:
On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:
Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in times of extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.
This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated). But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.
And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:
And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.
Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:
Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down any tractor in the world β including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:
The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.
True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.
This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a massive project.
It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years ahead of schedule in just a few years.
The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is hard has no bearing on whether it is necessary.
It is necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing the dollar, or replacing the fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.
Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack. It can be a commons, a set of core technologies that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, that everyone adds features to, that everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.
It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone β even adversaries β can rely upon.
This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:
The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Historians will remember 2008 as the first significant breaking point in European history since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Without going into depth on a subject that we are all too familiar with, suffice it to say that the debt crisis ushered in the first crisis of legitimacy for the European project. Compounding this situation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a fit of misplaced altruism, decided to invite millions of migrants from Asia and Africa into Europe in 2015. This not only upset tens of millions of Europeans but also worked to exacerbate a growing migrant crisis, as it also threatened the security of the continent due to the fact that Islamist radicals were embedded in these masses. Merkelβs folly also served to legitimize traditionally-marginalized political forces ranging from populists to xenophobes. Moreover, it served to give Britons of an anti-European bent all the rhetorical artillery they needed to pull their country out of the EU.
Niccolo Soldo,Β βEuropeβs Retrenchment in the Wake of Brexit: Part Oneβ (February 15th 2020).
Canada is strengthening its relations with China to diversify its partners, reduce dependence on the United States, and increase its economic autonomy in an increasingly unstable and multipolar global order.
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And thatβs why Iβll raise two cheers for the (partly) sovereign state. A world made up of contending nationalisms is hardly a utopia, with the ever-present possibility of conflict and war and many obstacles to mutual cooperation. But trying to fit a diverse humanity into a uniform box is doomed to failβand no small source of trouble as well. Even if we hold certain values to be sacred and are tempted to act when other states violate them, continued respect for boundaries and sovereignty is also a norm that can keep simmering rivalries in check. Libya would not have multiple powers interfering in it today had Britain, France, and the United States not decided to meddle there back in 2011.
As A.J.P. Taylor once archly observed, leaders in the 19th century βfought βnecessaryβ wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the 20th century fought βjustβ wars and killed millions.β Looking ahead, greater respect for national sovereignty and fewer efforts to force the whole world into one way of living will help emerging rivalries stay within bounds and help countries with very different values cooperate on those critical issues where their interests overlap.
Stephen Walt,Β βCountries Should Mind Their Own Businessβ (July 17th 2020).
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Secessionism appears rooted principally in issues of national identity β ethnicity, religion, race, language, culture and βthe mystic chords of memoryβ β most of which Jay identified as both uniting Americans and separating us from our British βbrethren.β Yet these issues of identity appear not to be receding but rising in the Caucasus, Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
The Kurds, the Palestinians, the Baluch and many more seek their own nations. Taiwanβs secession is not recognized by China. The secession of Russian-speaking Donbass is not recognized by a U.S.-armed Ukraine, or by us.
As more and more people identify themselves by who they are, and are not, secessions of people from each other will continue. These are not inconsequential matters. In 1939, the question of whether 300,000 Germans in a Polish-controlled city, Danzig, should be restored to German rule led to the worst war in the history of the world.
The peace of mankind in the 21st century may well depend upon our ability to accommodate this inexorable secessionist drive to some degree.Β In June 1945, the U.N. had 50 members. It begins 2020 with 193.
Last week, Bougainville, a South Pacific island cluster of Papua New Guinea, voted 98%, in a nonbinding referendum for independence, to become the worldβs newest nation. Papua New Guinea won its own independence from Australia when Gerald Ford was president.
And the beat goes on.
Pat Buchanan,Β βWill the Secessionist Epidemic Ever End?β (December 17th 2019)
