Latest / The Nation Podcasts / We Need to Cut Our Dependence on US Tech. Here’s How to Start. | Tech Won't Save Us

Transcript

We Need to Cut Our Dependence on US Tech. Here’s How to Start. | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The US government can always demand access to that data, and so those governments are never really sovereign.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't have proper control over the information that is within their jurisdiction, which is kind of a wild thing to say and to have to admit.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with the nation magazine.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Paris Marks, and this week my guest is, well, I don't have a guest.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just doing this myself this week, and for good reason, Tech Won't save Us is at episode 300, which is honestly hard to believe.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's hard to believe that I have been doing this show for five and a half years that I started in the middle of a global pandemic, or I guess not even in the middle of it, but quite early on in it.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to think that after all of that time, I have now interviewed hundreds of people, made some series on special shows, got to learn so much about so many different aspects of the tech industry and hopefully shared a lot of people's perspectives and ways of thinking about these issues with you as well.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that hopefully you learned some things from that over,
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure I say it every single time I hit one of these milestones, but it's always hard to believe that I have been doing the show for this long, for this many episodes, and admittedly I don't really have plans to stop doing so anytime soon.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I figured with that milestone, I have a right.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: to comment here this episode for myself.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're a regular listener of the show, you will know that I don't do this very often.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't usually have an episode without a guest, where I just kind of talk about an issue that I think is important.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's probably only happened a few times in the history of tech won't save us itself.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe once in every hundred episodes, we might say.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I figured if I'm going to do an episode like this, why not do it on episode 300?
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, before we get into that, I think maybe it's worth talking a little bit about what the show has looked like this year.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, obviously we have continued to have fantastic interviews with
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: experts on all manners of what is going on with the tech industry these days, but I think you will probably have also noticed that there has been a greater focus on the geopolitics of technology over in the past, I would probably have described the show, you know, where thinking kind of like, you
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: big picture and not trying to worry about the accessibility of the language I'm using or something.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the show was probably broadly about the political economy of technology.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the politics of technology more generally, right?
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is not necessarily a technical show where we're interested in the technical workings of the technology.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're interested in how the technology interacts with society, the effects that that has,
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and also how that technology kind of skewer the way that power is used within society.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, I feel like this year, things have changed a little bit with a focus on geopolitics, but it's really just been kind of broadening the scope of what I'm interested in with the show and, you know, not focusing as exclusively or as narrowly on the United States and what's going on in the US tech industry, though, of course, there has still been
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: plenty of that on the show because it was impossible to ignore it, but hopefully you will have also seen that there's a bit more focus on some other different parts of the world, what is going on in those different parts of the world.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also how we got to this moment,
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: geopolitically, thinking about the way that the United States and the way that Silicon Valley uses its power to understand now why it's so difficult for so many other countries to deal with an administration like the one that Donald Trump leads and a newly empowered class of tech billionaires who are benefiting from the way that Donald Trump uses his power and uses the U.S. government in particular
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: not just to serve himself, but to serve the interests of key groups around him.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would argue that the tech industry has really kind of closely aligned itself with Trump for part of that reason.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why I think, you know, it's worthwhile to dig into aspects of that a bit more.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what we might try to do in order to
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: try to get off of U.S. technology, but also try to weaken the whole that U.S. technology has not just on us individually, but on us collectively.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, when we think about our governments, when we think about the societies that we live in, and what it might look like to try to take a different path, to go in a different direction, which is I think something that especially for those of us outside the United States is really something that's important to think about and to try to grapple with right now in this moment.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: seeing what's happening with the United States and seeing how the Trump administration is wielding its power.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so before we get further into this, I would probably just say that given that we are, at episode 300, if you have been enjoying the show so far, you know, if you do feel like you learn a lot from the show,
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: your support is always appreciated and that can take many different forms.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously you can go to wherever you listen to your podcast and leave a five-star review so people can see that you like the show.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can of course share the show including this episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues so you think would learn from it who you think would gain some insights from listening not just to this episode but maybe some other episodes of the show as well.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, Tech won't save us as possible because of the support of listeners like you.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, if you do enjoy this episode, if you do enjoy the work that I put into making this every single week to spread these critical perspectives on the tech industry, you can become a supporter which allows you to get ad free episodes of the show, which allows you to get stickers if you support at a certain level.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, just allows us to keep making the show every single week, and you can do that by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and sign up there to show your support.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So with that said, let's continue on this topic, because I think it is an important one that we need to dig into in a little bit more depth, especially given what we have seen over the past year, and I think one of the things that
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Trump administration has done really effectively for those of us who pay attention to the way that the United States wields its power and in particular the way that the tech industry within the United States is able to kind of piggyback on that for its own benefit is really just to show us how US power works right and to kind of peel back.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: the layers and any dissections that might have been there and the way that the United States basically bullies other countries in order to benefit itself.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, and often that is couched in a whole range of different kind of language to make it seem acceptable to make it seem like something that we should all be open to or welcoming to, but actually, you know, is often very beneficial to the United States at the end of the day.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so,
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, when Donald Trump and people in his administration and even these tech billionaires, now go around threatening tariffs, if countries don't do the things that the United States wants them to do.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, if they try to pass digital services taxes or bring in new regulations on technology that are going to affect US tech companies and then the administration comes out with threats of retaliation, with threats of tariffs.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: it becomes very clear that the United States sees its interest being served by allowing its tech companies to spread and to not be effectively regulated and now it's going to come out very directly and try to push back against that.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we pay a lot of attention to it when Donald Trump does it because of the way that we perceive the Trump administration and the U.S. government under his leadership, the
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I also think it's important for us to understand or to not lose sight of the fact that while this is much more visible under Donald Trump because of the way he approaches power and because of the way he wields the power of the U.S. government that this is not an entirely novel thing and that we have actually seen actions like this for quite a long time from U.S. presidents of both political stripes.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we can easily go back to previous administrations and see them using what are often termed free trade agreements in order to insert clauses within them that limit the ability of the countries that they were making those agreements with.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order to regulate US tech companies, right?
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order to try to make sure that those tech companies operate according to the values, the expectations,
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: the usual regulations that those countries would have, but that don't align with what the United States government and what those tech companies might want to do within those markets.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while yes, it is another kind of Trump example, if we look back to the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is now called
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: the U.S. Canada Mexico agreement, or, you know, in Canada, Mexico, it has slightly different names.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because, of course, you know, we can't just make it easy and have a single name for this trade agreement.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what we see there is that there are clauses within that agreement that make it difficult for Canada and Mexico to regulate the flows of data across borders.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and to bring in a whole range of regulations that would potentially constrain the types of things that US tech companies and, you know, that any tech company really can do within their borders, right?
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The, you know, things that would maybe allow the Canadian government or the Mexican government to exert a bit more control over how those companies operate.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But of course, things that those companies would not actually want to have to abide
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: right?
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the OS government goes into these negotiations and makes sure that those sorts of things are put in the agreement, so it's much more difficult for governments that should be sovereign in their own territory to actually regulate these companies and try to address some of their more harmful impacts.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But beyond that as well, we have also seen the United States for many years used the leverage that holds over many different countries and use its diplomatic apparatus through the State Department in order to pressure governments, whether it's in Canada, whether it's in Europe, and I'm sure in other parts of the world as well, to try to stop them when they are trying to move forward on different regulations of the tech industry that the companies certainly don't want to see.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we have plenty of examples of this during the Biden administration.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was regularly pressuring the Canadian government, for example, as it was moving forward with various regulations targeting the tech industry when Canada put in rules around, basically the amount of Canadian content that streaming services had to show.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The US government was really not happy about that and made it very clear.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was also really not happy when Canada moved forward with a digital services tax such that the Biden administration actually challenged the Canadian government's ability to implement attacks like that.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, we finally saw it repealed under Donald Trump when Trump basically said he was walking away from trade negotiations with Canada after imposing heavy tariffs on the country.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unless it got rid of the digital services tax altogether,
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he still does not have an agreement with the United States, and, indeed, as I record this, Donald Trump is not long after making yet another ultimatum around a set of advertisements that the government of Ontario, one of the provinces in Canada, was running in the United States targeting Trump's tariff policy.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he said, again, he would not negotiate until the ad stopped
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the provincial government in Ontario said the ads would not run anymore to try to keep these negotiations going if anything ever comes of them.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we can go back before that as well, say during the Obama administration, when there was reporting on the fact that former officials from the Obama administration use their contacts in various embassies within Europe, for example, in the Netherlands and in France,
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: to try to use the leverage of those diplomats to stop those governments from regulating Uber as its model was rolling out across Europe and as it was increasingly finding itself in the crosshairs of European governments and of course didn't want to have to abide by taxi regulations and so again the power and leverage of
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: the U.S. government was put to use to try to protect Uber and to try to protect its model of degrading the labor rights of taxi, ride, hail, food delivery work and really a lot of these workers who have jobs that can be folded into the gig economy where they then become contractors instead of employees and lose many of the rights that come with employment status.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I guess what I'm just trying to hammer home here is that certainly the Trump administration really stands out in what it has been doing and with how it talks about the policies that it is bringing forward, right?
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And is very explicit and open about the fact that it is trying to defend the interests of the United States and it really does not care if that goes against the interests of countries that it traditionally considers to be its allies.
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, even in previous administrations, these things were happening.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were just framed and talked about in a different way to try to make it seem like these were mutually beneficial things, or you just try not to talk about them at all and just kind of sweep them under the rug and make sure they don't become a story that other people are hearing about and interacting with and responding to.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even then, I think it's still fair to say that we have seen this ramp up even further.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we see that earlier this year when JD Vance, the Vice President went over to Europe and appeared in Munich and Paris in order to essentially scold the Europeans to tell them that their values are basically not good ones, to scold them for not allowing the alternative for Deutschland, the far right neo-nazzi party, to be included in governing conversations.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And basically to tell them that they will always remain secondary on technology that the United States will always be the leader and that their role is only ever to kind of back them up right to maybe do some things around the edges but that they can never be leaders because the United States has to remain the leader and you can see how that would.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, obviously, I know of the Europeans, right?
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even after that, there have been clear indications of the power and the leverage that the United States holds because of the fact that whether it's people in Europe, whether it's people in Canada where I'm from, or in so many different parts of the world, are dependent on these platforms, on these infrastructures that have been created by US tech companies, that we now just kind of all accept that
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: we're using or that we should be using.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But actually, that that gives the U.S. government that it gives those companies a lot of power.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for example, earlier this year, the United States sanctioned the head of the International Criminal Court after he released arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and his former defense minister.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A couple months after that happened, it was revealed that Karin Khan, who was the head of the International Criminal Court,
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that his Microsoft email account had actually been cut off as a result of being sanctioned.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is an infrastructure, again, that's so many people, that so many governments, that so many companies rely on, and how quickly that could be taken away.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he moved over to using an account on Proton Mail, a Swiss service instead.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then, in June, a legal and public policy representative for Microsoft France was in front of the Senate in France, and he was asked under oath whether he could and whether the company could say no to a request from the United States for data stored on French servers that was regarding, say, Frencher or European citizens.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And whether the company could say no to that request, if the French government had not authorised it to continue, and it effectively had to tell the French Senate that no it could not guarantee that it would deny that request, because the truth is that the United States has a law on the books called the Cloud Act.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that basically forces these companies to abide by requests like that.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So as governments, as companies, as various organizations around the world, are storing their data on servers controlled by U.S. companies, whether that's Amazon or Microsoft or Google or many smaller data center companies or cloud companies that people will be less familiar with, that the U.S. government can always demand access to that data.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so those governments
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: are never really sovereign, you know, they don't have proper control over the information that is within their jurisdiction, which is kind of a wild thing to say and to have to admit.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this was always a problem, this has long been a problem, but it really comes to the fore when all of a sudden the American government is being clear at that
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not your friend in the way that you previously assumed, but is willing to be very hostile toward you in order to extract concessions that are going to benefit itself at the expense of everybody else.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so naturally, that brings us to a point of asking what we are really going to do about this, right?
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: How are we going to respond to the fact that the United States is such a hostile actor within the world system?
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even when it comes to countries that previously assumed, they were friends with the United States, that they were allies with the United States.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's nothing off limits for Donald Trump.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He will punish anybody in order to try to benefit the US, at least in the short term, right, by trying to bring jobs back, by trying to bring in more investment.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does a matter of its unraveling, these relationships that many people had with the United States for a long time, losing trust in the United States,
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: getting other countries to use different currencies for transactions that reduces the hegemony, the global power of the US dollar itself, and many other repercussions that come of this that suggests that maybe this action that might look beneficial in the short term, and I know there are a lot of Americans who would even debate that characterization.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even if we said, OK, there are benefits that are accruing in the short term, there are many reasons to believe this is not going to continue into the long or medium term.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that prompts the question of what do we do in response to that?
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: As I was saying earlier, the show has taken much more of a focus on geopolitics over the last year.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And over that time, as well, I have been doing a lot of work in speaking about and writing about
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and thinking about and formulating what digital sovereignty could look like and of course digital sovereignty meaning how our governments that represent us really, you know, or at least that are supposed to, can start to take back this control and can start looking at and thinking about technology in a different way.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to talk a little bit more about that in just a minute, but before we do that, I want to get to part of what I saw as one of the key points of making this episode, which is that, while I think that the structural aspect of this is the most important in my view, right?
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because that really creates choices for people to be able to do something different.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And ultimately, I think our governments need to be very rapidly acting to try to get off of
• 19:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: their dependence on these U.S. technologies and platforms, but I also did an experiment to see to what degree I could get off of these technologies myself.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: To see whether it was really possible to use fewer American services and platforms
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and rely on those from other parts of the world admittedly primarily Europe instead.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while I don't think that reducing the number of U.S. based services that we use is going to transform everything, I do think it potentially does help to make a difference, right?
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it does provide a bigger customer base for those alternatives, especially if those alternatives also have, you know, a different set of values, maybe, then the ones that are being
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: based in the United States and then also kind of gives them more customers to hopefully be able to to do more things and to expand what they're doing.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I did this experiment to say, are there ways I can replace my email service and, you know, the office software that I use and are there alternative options for social media and, you know, the types of entertainment that we use and interact with, you know, if we think about streaming and things like that.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And really, I found that, in some cases, it was actually really easy to get off of a USB service and in other instances, it was a lot more difficult to do that.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But on the whole, I felt that it was worth the experiment.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was worth it to try to do something different, to use some different services, and to make sure that, you know, I'm not using the American stuff as often, which is not to say that I've completely gone off of it, right?
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like one of the things that I tried to emphasize and I wrote about this on my newsletter
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: that it doesn't make sense to be a purist here, right?
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: These US companies are so dominant, they control so much of the cloud market, they control so many of the services that we use.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're like cookies and trackers are embedded in so much of the web that it's going to be really difficult to fully get off of US technology, or sometimes you might even find, like, say a service that is not a US-based service, but is still run on US-based servers, say the servers of Amazon web services,
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that sucks, right, but maybe in some cases it makes sense to still get off of the Google service and use the one that's hosted on the servers of another big US tech company because at least it helps to get off of it to a certain degree and maybe at some point encourages that company to use servers that are not kind of run by these major US cloud giants.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so,
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought it might be useful to maybe run through a few of the things that I learned through that experiment and maybe some of the services that I found are useful in order to get off of US technology and then we can pivot back near the end of this to talk a bit more about digital sovereignty as I wrap up this monologue episode.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so maybe the first thing that I would say is that if you're looking to get off of US technology, if you're looking to try to use some services that are not being run by the major US-based companies like Google Apple or Microsoft, I think one of the easiest ways to do that is actually just to find a suite of services offered by one of these alternative companies.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's one of the reasons why the Google's and Microsoft are so
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: successful is not just because they offer one thing, but because they offer all of these different services.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you think of Google, it's Gmail and it's Google Docs and, you know, the various other services that it offers, and so it kind of locks you into that ecosystem.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so then if you can find another suite of services that can replace a lot of those, it becomes a lot easier to move over, at least in my view.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like I mentioned with Karim Khan, the head of the International Criminal Court, having to switch over to a proton male email address, proton is also the suite that I have found to be the most useful and the easiest to move over to for this kind of transition.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I use it for
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Email now.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's my VPN.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I use its cloud storage services.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's my password manager.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure there's probably a few other things in there too.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm also in the process of moving my calendar over to proton as well.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they are working on like a docs service, you know, like an online word processor and productivity suite.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But personally I haven't been using that yet because I think it still needs to develop a little bit further first.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Proton certainly isn't perfect.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has had its own share of controversies.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been annoyed because it released a Bitcoin wallet and has been doing some stuff with AI.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course many people will also point out that the CEO of Proton made some comments.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe it was early in 2025.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Basically expressing some positive opinions about some picks that Donald Trump had made for his administration.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I think the criticism there was a bit overblown, but still this is worth paying attention to and I think people are more than welcome to have their opinions about this and to choose something else as a result.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so while I have chosen Proton, there are other alternatives there, too.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a service like Mailbox, for example, based out of Germany.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It offers a number of different services as well.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And from the people who I've heard use it, they have found it to be a really great option.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know that there's another one called Tuta, T-U-T-A, based in Germany as well.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure there are other ones out there, too.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But again, the thing that I found easiest about using a suite of services is that, instead of having to find a bunch of individual services from many different companies, it's like, okay, all of your key things are right here in the suite of services.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can easily move to it, and especially for someone who is less technical, which is much more of my focus rather than, people who are obsessed with open source communities and who have a lot of that technical knowledge,
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really easy then just to move over to a service like this, effectively.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then, if we're moving away from the sweets and if we're thinking about individual services, again, there are a lot of things there, right?
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for email, like I already mentioned, you think of something like proton mail or mailbox or tuta, as I mentioned, there's also another one in Germany called postio.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these services like proton, treat encryption is very important, you know, security is one of their higher values.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something that might be a little bit different from the Google's and Microsoft's that are trying to get a lot of data on you to feed, whether it's ad targeting profiles or other parts of their business.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's often not going to be the same case with these smaller services that are trying to offer a different kind of an alternative to attract in customers.
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's also search, of course, you know, most people will be relying on Google search, possibly even Bing, but there are some alternatives out there as well.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I've been using one called Quant QWNT, which is based in France.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a very similar one called Ecosia, based in Germany, or start page in the Netherlands.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And essentially, these companies are trying to offer a different search experience that is not so based on the US companies that were currently using.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks here is that they're often reliant on search indexes that come from the major US companies.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So again, it's not fully kind of pulling yourself out of that ecosystem, but Ecosia and Quant in particular are in the process of working on a European search index
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: on the US companies, which I think is a really good move, right, and it's something that's worthwhile to take a look at.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it's worth me saying as well, that if you're trying to like mark down the names of all these services and things like that, I will include a link in the show notes to an article I wrote for my newsletter, Disconnect, that lays out a lot of this stuff.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can just go over there, click through to the ones that sound interesting to you.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of having to remember all this stuff and so I'll run through a few more and then we can zoom out again So on the browser front, I think most people will be relying on say Chrome or Safari or even Firefox over there I've been using Vivaldi which is a Norwegian browser both on my computer and my phone to do something a little bit different there
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's still based on Chromium, so it's similar to Google Chrome and can use those extensions, but your data is not being fed back to Google for everything that you do.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're looking for Office software, something like Libra Office is an alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite, maybe it won't look as nice, though you can get some themes to make it look a little bit better.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there are other like online productivity suites and unfortunately haven't experimented enough with many of them to say, you know, which ones might be the best ones to look at.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some of them also do require a bit more technical knowledge.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Say for example, if you're trying to set up an installation of next cloud, but there's more information on that in the newsletter.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: These days, I get a lot of my information from my RSS feed reader rather than from social media.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for that, I use Eno reader, which is actually a bulk area company.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are plenty of options for password managers and two-factor authentication.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: like proton again or one password, something like key pass in Germany or ages, which is an open source option.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that was a little bit more difficult for me was looking for alternative for mapping and navigation software.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of us, I think, would be using Google Maps or something like that.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe there are people that are using Apple Maps as well.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But again, these are services from US-based companies.
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what is the alternative?
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I found that a service called here we go, which is Dutch to be probably the most comprehensive alternative that had many different kinds of navigation that had some degree of information about businesses and things like that within the map itself.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: but there are other ones like CityMapper and MAPI, which I heard to be good.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't mind having an app that just has say navigation for specific ways of getting around, then you can look at options like Tom Tom Go for driving directions specifically transit, which is good for public transit directions or certain open street maps, which are particularly good for walking and cycling
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: but there are different approaches that you can take.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I found it really interesting to look at alternatives to streaming services, as well.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm sure most people might have the Netflix subscription or Disney Plus, or they might get Amazon Prime, and that might be the way that they basically consume.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Film and television and you know things like that right, but at least in Canada where I am I found that there were a number of local alternatives A service called Crave has a lot of Canadian in international content the public broadcaster has a streaming service and their other non-US services available like brickbox and movie as well
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I know this is the case for other countries too, right, where there are different streaming options available.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But one of the things I've found intriguing is really even to think about whether we should be streaming so much at all, right?
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether there's a moment to think about going back to physical media a bit more, I've been buying more blue rays personally, which is not something that I've done in a while.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm even meaning to check out my local public libraries options for DVDs and blue rays, blue rays in particular, you know, because of the higher quality of the image, to see if that movie rental experience is something that I want to try out again rather than just having.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, this huge library of content that you often don't even know what you want to find in it because it can be so hard to navigate.
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on that too, you know, streaming music is another option there where, again, I think most people will be using Spotify, which is technically Swedish, but I would consider to be in that category of like, no-goes, or maybe it's Apple Music, but I switched over to Deezer, which is a French company that basically has all the same music,
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there are many other things like a talk about on this front.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But maybe the one that I'll end with is really social media.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the ones that prove to be most difficult for me.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, we could just say I'm getting off social media completely because I don't want to be on these platforms.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if that is what you want to do, more power to you, I wish I could do the same thing.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for me, where I feel like I need to be on these platforms for work or at least on some of them for work,
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: getting rid of them in that way didn't seem as possible and while there are kind of like decentralized alternatives to the major social media platforms that exist today, if you think about say, master it on as a text based social media platform or even other ones like peer tube which is more like a YouTube alternative or other social platforms like
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: These do offer similar experiences to some of the existing social media platforms that are run by major US companies or in the case of TikTok, a major Chinese company, but it's not the same experience.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to have as many people on there.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's not going to be as much content as many things being shared and
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's the experience you want.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, maybe that is what social media should look like more in the future.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I do think we're going to have to look a bit more at how social media works and different ways of developing different kinds of social media and different social media experiences if we even want to call it that at all.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I would argue social media is a pretty deceptive term at this point that hides and masks what these platforms are actually doing and the harm that they're causing throughout society.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, that is a whole other conversation, I guess, but that is probably one of the most difficult places for me, right?
• 34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm still on these social media platforms.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I of course still have a massive on account as well, but the path to getting off of those platforms is much more difficult.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: than these other services that I've talked about or that I wrote about in that newsletter.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so with all of that said, I want to circle back to this question of digital sovereignty, right?
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: To me digital sovereignty is not an individual kind of thing.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I talk about getting off of US-based services,
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: that to me is not a form of digital sovereignty, right?
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's more a form of like consumer choice, you know?
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, what are we talking about doing?
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And our choices are inherently limited because it has been so difficult for basically companies from other parts of the world or even if we think about governments developing digital public services, to actually develop something that can rival what these US companies are doing.
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, yes, while we can seek out alternative services, alternative platforms, that is always going to be limited by the fact that these US companies dominate our markets and until we reign in their market share until we reign in the power that they have.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's always going to be difficult for alternatives to the thrive and to gain a foothold in the way that they really need to.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why it can't just be about thinking about what we as individuals do and which services we choose to use because the choices that we can make are shaped by
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is out there, right, and if the choices are simply not there, then we can't choose to use something else in the way that we might like to do and that is why convincing governments to pursue digital sovereignty to think seriously about the platforms and services and infrastructures that we rely on.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: is so important in a moment like this and I think why the Trump administration for all the terrible things about it actually offers us an opportunity to have this conversation properly because this dependence on US technology, US tech companies is a real hindrance and creates real vulnerabilities for governments and other organizations all around the world and that needs to change.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to me that requires doing a few things, it requires getting really serious about the regulation of technology and tech companies.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can't allow them to continue getting away with what they have been able to get away with over the past few decades, right, rewriting labor law effectively, if we look at the gig economy or even what Amazon has done with its union-busting campaigns and its use of algorithmic management.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can look at the way that social media has upended how we communicate and how the broader information system works, and especially at a moment when all of these companies are embracing generative AI.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can see a further degradation that social media companies already began.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: that basically poisons the information environment, what we think reality even is in some senses.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, even broader than that, seeing the way that these generative AI tools are creating forms of dependence.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: among so many different parts of the public, causing people to have mental breaks because of their dependence on chat bots and sometimes to even take things a step further into really terrible territory.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We see the mass surveillance that these tools have enabled.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not solely as a government thing, but because these companies built out this mass surveillance apparatus so that they could collect data on us for advertising profiles for targeting and the like, right?
• 38:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They needed to collect a ton of data, so they needed to surveil us and then other people could take advantage of an infrastructure that these private companies built out to benefit themselves.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is really just the tip of the iceberg of the problems that these infrastructures and that these companies have created.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's why we need to change, it's why we need to get off of this.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that also requires us to think differently about how things work, right?
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we need to get serious about regulation to stop the amount of data that is being collected, to stop the way that data can be transferred, to stop the ways that the data can be used,
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and even to limit how long it can be stored at all, right, to really crack down on this business model that is based around data collection and use that has been built up for so long.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also to think about the many other ways that these companies have gotten away with evading regulations.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and trying to change the norms and expectations and so many societies around the world that might not be completely in line with the expectations of U.S. society.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's fair to say that Canadians and Europeans have some slightly different values, some slightly different expectations for how the economy is supposed to work than what the United States traditionally has and that has been basically allowed to be surrendered in order to please the tech companies in order to allow them to roll out and do
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: whatever it is they want to do.
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So now is a moment when governments need to get much more aggressive in regulating these companies, not just to try to minimize the harms that they're causing within societies, but that regulation I would argue also opens the room to think seriously about what alternatives are going to look like.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the major U.S. tech companies, the dominant tech companies today are not raining or not constrained, it's effectively impossible for alternatives to grow alongside them or to offer something different when these companies so dominate the space.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so then if they are constrained effectively, maybe even in some cases excluded from markets.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the way that we saw Brazil get really aggressive earlier this year with companies like Twitter and Rumble, which of course I talked about on the show with Lays Martens.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then if they are rained in, that gives us options to start thinking about doing something different.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that isn't just developing more European and Canadian and maybe Brazilian and Australian and whoever else, solutions and platforms and things like that, you know, actually
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: working on developing more domestic tech capacity, but actually thinking about the model that Silicon Valley created several decades ago that basically made technology something that is solely or overwhelmingly about shareholder value and shareholder returns over the benefits to the public, which don't seem to matter at all these days.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that if we are to take back this control, if we are to think about what sovereignty looks like in the digital age and making sure that these technologies are not being used against us, it's not just to develop different Silicon Valley's and different parts of the world that do the exact same thing that exploit the public in the way that these companies have gotten away with, but that also say that model of developing technology.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: that model of treating technology is something that is primarily about shareholder value then benefits to the public has to change as well.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we need to think about developing technology in a very different way that actually benefits the broader public first and foremost.
• 41:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: even if that means making less or no profit sometimes and even thinking about not just seeing technology is something that is the realm of the private sector to develop into deploy, but is something that can be much more in the public sector that can be developed for the public good without a profit motive attached to it.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That seems almost impossible to imagine today
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that is a direction that we absolutely need to go in.
• 42:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just where we try to do it for national benefit or to build the next unicorn in a certain country that can then sell the technology to different countries and companies around the world and make money off of it that way.
• 42:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: but that is focused on developing technology and then sharing the benefits of that with allies and partners and other countries around the world to allow them to use it and benefit from it as well.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know taking advantage of the fact that there might be more resources in richer countries in Europe.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: or North America, or in larger countries like Brazil that can then develop some of these technologies and then share them with less resourceful countries with countries that have less wealth to put into technological development so that they can benefit from these sorts of technologies as well.
• 43:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: All in all, I think there is a great opportunity right now, and it's one that we need to seize instead of allowing to be lost to negotiations with Donald Trump and trying to keep the Americans happy for another three years in the hopes that there's going to be some democratic administration that comes to power and puts everything back to the mean, to the norm, to where they were before.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: that seems increasingly unlikely to me, something that is not really going to happen and that is that even desirable anyway?
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do we want to go back to this dependence that we don't even talk about, that we don't even acknowledge is there, but that leaves us vulnerable in the ways that we have been for a very long time?
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a moment to completely up in.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: the way that we think about technology, the relationship that we have with it, the way it has been used to advance American power in particular for the past several decades to ensure that China doesn't just completely step into that place as the United States leaves a bigger vacuum of power around the world, but where we actually think about technology differently, where we actually collaborate to build a different kind of technology,
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: where we see technology as something that can primarily be used in deployed as part of a political program that is focused on benefiting the public over benefiting shareholders and capitalists and investors.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that is possible.
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly takes political will and action and won't be easy to do, but it should certainly be what we're working toward and fighting toward.
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so with that, I would say, I hope you enjoyed this 300th episode of Tech Won't Save Us.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, I know it was a little bit different than usual episodes, so thank you for allowing me to basically talk into your ear for the better part of an hour.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, there are more great
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: interviews and conversations coming in the weeks ahead and stay tuned of course for December when we'll have our usual end of year round up.
• 44:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not to mention our worst person in tech contest which I know listeners always really enjoy participating in every single year.
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So thank you again for listening to the show.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you did want to know more about digital sovereignty, you can find links in the show notes to a report that I co-authored at the end of last year, along with a couple newsletter posts, including the one that I mentioned earlier about different ideas, different services platforms you can use to get off of U.S. technology.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm looking forward to experimenting a bit more with that in the weeks and months ahead and of course I'll continue to update that post as I do have more things to add to it.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So with all of that said, Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Production is by Kyle Huesen, Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep running critical perspectives about the tech industry.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to episode 300 and make sure to come back next week.