The Enshittification of American Power | First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech
https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/
Posted by Hrmbee
7 comments
Submission statement:
Under the current administration’s watch, the practice and praxis of American statecraft has taken a turn for the worse, and in the process destroying the global relationships that have been built up since the end of the Second World War. Global institutions that until now have been largely lead, funded, or otherwise influenced by US groups and individuals are now needing to look to create connections and build capacity elsewhere, under the belief that relationships with American policymakers will become increasingly strained in the years to come.
Some key points from this piece:
>For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.
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>And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.
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>Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.
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>People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.
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>For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”
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>Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”
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>So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.
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>In the face of all these affronts to their sovereignty, a chorus of world leaders has woken from its daze and started to talk seriously about the once-unthinkable: breaking up with the United States. In February, the center-right German politician Friedrich Merz—upon learning that he’d won his country’s federal election—declared on live TV that his priority as chancellor would be to “achieve independence” from the US. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” he added.
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>In March, French president Emmanuel Macron echoed that sentiment in a national address to his people: “We must reinforce our independence,” he said. Later that month, Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, said that his country’s old relationship with the US was “over.”
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>“The West as we knew it no longer exists,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU Commission, in April. “Our next great unifying project must come from an independent Europe.”
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>But the reality is that, for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China, can do little more than pray that the bully in the White House leaves them alone.
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>For now, Denmark and Canada are the other US allies most directly at risk from enshittification. Not only has Trump put Greenland (a protectorate of Denmark) and Canada at the top of his menu for territorial acquisition, but both countries have militaries that are unusually closely integrated into US structures. The “transatlantic idea” has been the “cornerstone of everything we do,” explains one technology adviser to the Danish government, who asked to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject. Denmark spent years pushing back against arguments from other allies that Europe needed “strategic autonomy.” And according to a former adviser on Canadian national security, the “soft wiring” binding the US and Canadian military systems to each other makes them nearly impossible to disentangle.
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>…
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>If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.
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>If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.
Applying Doctorow’s concept of enshittification to American hegemnony is an interesting one, and this look brings into focus some of the challenges that face the global community, and in particular allies of the United States. Breaking away from the systems of trade and finance and defence that have governed for the past 80 years is not impossible, but in the short term will likely be incredibly difficult and damaging to the systems of global relationships that have been developed. Whether the current pains are enough to push nations to take this route and sustain the move away from US-dominated systems, and whether another will rise to take the place of the US or whether this will be a true multilateral effort remains to be seen.
Thanks for sharing our piece, here’s some context:
For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.
And right about now, they’re probably wishing they hadn’t.
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow [coined](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/) the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.
For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and [announces](https://www.state.gov/announcement-of-a-visa-restriction-policy-targeting-foreign-nationals-who-censor-americans/) that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”
Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”
Read more: [https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/](https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/)
I’m generally very low on Trump’s “statesmanship” if you can even call it that, but I think this is a very counterproductive argument (assuming the people making it, not just the authors, want the US to have stronger NATOsphere relations).
The US has spent billions on billions of dollars building these relationships over 75 years, and trillions extending its defensive posture to cover its allies and safeguard their shipping lanes over that time. Anyway you measure it, there’s been a tremendous amount of effort and money expended towards building these relationships.
To say that Trump has broken the relationship is to say the relationships were never that durable to begin with and that the funds and effort expended towards them over the last 75 years were always a folly.
Yes, Trump is ridiculous, but every democracy at some point will elect a ridiculous populist type figure, and Trump is neither are first, nor will he be our last. If a relationship can’t survive that it was never going to survive. (And that’s before you get into any of the actually legitimate grievances the US has with allies, of which there are at least a few – ie, high trade barriers and failure to meet commitments)
They’re applying their “break everything and fix where the screams are” development approach with HUMAN LIVES
Sociopaths.
“Enshitification” is lazy. Not going to read lazy
I guess they share a similar tactic: build a consumer base, outspend the competition, then push the costs onto the consumers when they have no alternative. The consumers become the product.
Consumers being countries that benefit from American power. It’s buy-in at a massive scale.
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