The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s tech leader, their IT buddy.
Now that we’ve violated everyone’s trust, we will likely never get that position back.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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As they say: it takes decades to grow a forest, but only one match to burn it down.
There are those who learn from the past mistakes of themselves and others...
and there are those who don't...
Judging by the popularity of Germany's AfD party, the US isn't the only one.
Tbf USA weren't having their own Hitler until now. Give em a chance
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Ding ding ding
And that IS a good thing. It's great that it happened, I just wish it had happened 2 decades ago and before IT companies yeeted the fworld off a cliff into hell
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The entire point of the Internet's infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed. At some point, companies and governments decided to cramntheir entire critical IT infrastructure into monolithic services. In this case it was the US, but it could have been anyone anywhere. No matter who, it was a bad practice and everyone is now realizing why.
This isn't a "US bad" problem. This is a "don't be stupid, stupid" issue.
This is definitely a specific problem with the US too.
My point is that had companies and governments no opted to put all their eggs in one basket, it wouldn't have mattered as much whether the US morphed into a fascist hellscape or not.
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.
The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:
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Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data
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Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).
But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.
Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.
And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can't unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.
You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.
Or... if we're moving in the direction it seems that we're moving... we're going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).
You can't unfuck this chicken.
100% I am definitely not offering an easy fix, and I hope my comment didn't read that way. This chicken is...
The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.
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I'm playing my part... Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I've been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.
Yeah also did that for my recent site using StaticBuilder and Codeberg. Took longer but well worth supporting smaller businesses.
Btw, if people are passionate about this topic. There is a community and website on !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world .
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I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I'm working steadily down my list.
So are you moving to other subscriptions, based in another country, that are also at the whim of other corporations?
I think it's time more people learn how to self-host what's important to them. At least make sure to keep multiple backups of all of your media.
The problem isn't necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there's an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there's an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.
Putting fun services behind the wall of 'you must be this technically competent to participate' isn't going to fix the broken system.
Could be a great time for small services and modular subscriptions (e.g. block stores or MTAs). I wouldn't trust many small VPS' to host an organisation, but it is fine for me personally.
Hopefully enough stable income exists to grow a cottage industry of small infra and protocols lower the barrier to entry/migration.
I would pay for access to an artisanal data center of the finest organic hosts, tenderly shepherded by third generation sysadmins.
I agree in principle. I know how to self-host, and I do self-host some things, but I can't always afford the upfront investment (especially with today's hardware costs) and I don't always have time to keep up with the administration (because I'm a wage slave) so I end up renting some of it. I'm not the only one in this position.
I think there's a place for rented tech services just as there's a place for rented housing, but the problem in both cases is regulatory capture by landlords that mean we get stuck renting forever from exploiters. (And with tech there's the surveillance too, so they're the landlord that puts a secret camera in your bedroom.) So anyway, I'm trying to at least pick my tech landlords more carefully until I can afford a better solution, and as far as possible I try to make sure my stuff is encrypted before they see it.
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Obviously because once that country collapses or becomes a pariah state and starts fooling with the data for nefarious purposes, all goes almost anything the rest of the world relies on, including website hosting services. So, yeah, decentralization is necessary.
If most US websites are garbage this can't happen soon enough. You can't even trust basic search anymore thanks to AI bs. People complain about nobody reading articles when they are ad-filled crap usually written by AI, I'd rather spend my time playing video games.
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I was hoping for that for a long time, so... thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
He has made China, Canada and Europe greater.
He only cares about himself and the money he got from them. The better question is why all those tech billionaires supported him.
because once you've reached end-state capitalism, the only realistic way to make sure line continues to go up is either ratfucking public funds or to trigger a crash/credit crunch (enabling you to buy up discounted distressed assets)
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I’m selfhosting most of my stuff now and did closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review. It take times but I always while closing enter a comment like “lost confidence in USA for the next 50 years thanks to Trump” BTW most services don’t let you delete your account, in this case I empty all my personal data, upload blank images for profile, anonymize field, move email to temp mailbox and delete my password.
I did some architecture and implementation to Azure for a big client, now moved to pure AKS with only OSS software, nest step for them is to quit US cloud, a lot easier if you use pure kubernetes.
I think it is good that we reduce our reliance on US stacks, but not at the cost of using Chinese softwares.
Deleting Reddit, instagram, facebook was really the easiest and most satisfying of all.
I plan to organize meetup on sovereignty, privacy and self hosting soon too 😇
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Rightly so, US tech is a dumpster fire with 24/7 surveillance.
Silicon Valley people who wanted Trump are so fucking stupid its absurd.
Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it's absurd.
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I was reading an opinion piece about this sort of thing earlier today, "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native". It opens by saying:
I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money.
Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.
Ramp it up!
The worst crime you can commit under capitalism is not participating, not buying, not renting, etc. These tech companies are built on debt that is serviced by profits.
Moving the needle down and impacting their income by even 5% will have a huge impact on a business’s bottom line and in turn a CEO’s income, bonuses and stock options etc.
If you want to make Trump and his regime change then you have to hit the only people he will listen to… his fellow oligarchs.
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As a QA, I raised the very real risk that should tensions with America escalate, they could effectively cut us off and our business would be kaputt.
What happens if AWS goes down? We use Google. What happens if both go down (or cut us off)? We're fucked.
The answer to me raising the risk was a, "Haha, yeah, true, we'd be in big trouble..." but there's no actual appetite to do anything about it. We're so tied up in AWS that I can't imagine there ever will be.
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But Tech companies gave Trump BILLIONS of Dollars! HOW could he Lose them SO Many Customers?
It's all so unnecessary. But at least we finally do something about digital sovereignty in the EU.
I don't think ICANN
I finally moved my personal dev/blog server to Hetzner and today was the first time in a while that the AWS bill was smaller than what it normally was (I did get rid of everything - EC2, S3 - except for domain registrations since I didn't want to renew ones that just got renewed yet). Obviously I was still just paying for half the month so next month should be even smaller.
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