If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it)
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:
Crises precipitate change: Trump's incontinent belligerence spurred the world to long-overdue action on "digital sovereignty," as people woke up to the stark realization that a handful of Trump-aligned giant tech firms could shut down their governments, companies and households at the click of a mouse.
This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.
Now, more than a decade into the Trump era, the world is finally confronting the reality that they need to get the hell off of American IT, and transition to open, transparent and verifiable alternatives for their administrative tools, telecoms infrastructure and embedded systems for agriculture, industry and transportation. And not a moment too soon:
But building the post-American internet is easier said than done. There remain huge, unresolved questions about the best way to proceed.
One thing is clear: we will need new systems: the aforementioned open, transparent, verifiable code and hardware. That's a huge project, but the good news is that it benefits tremendously from scale, which means that as countries, businesses and households switch to the post-American internet, there will be ever more resources to devote to building, maintaining and improving this project. That's how scientific endeavors work: they're global collaborations that allow multiple parties to simultaneously attack the problems from many angles at once. Think of the global effort to sequence, understand, and produce vaccines for Covid 19.
Developing the code and hardware for the post-American internet scales beautifully, making it unique among the many tasks posed by the post-American world. Other untrustworthy US platforms – such as the dollar, or the fiber links that make interconnection in the USA – are hampered by scale. The fact that hundreds of countries use the dollar and rely on US fiber connections makes replacing them harder, not easier:
Building the post-American internet isn't easy, but there's a clear set of construction plans. What's far less clear is how we transition to the post-American internet. How do people, organizations and governments that currently have their data locked up in US Big Tech silos get it off their platforms and onto new, open, transparent, verifiable successors? Literally: how do you move the data from the old system to the new one, preserving things like edit/view permissions, edit histories, and other complex data-structures that often have high-stakes attached to them (for example, many organizations and governments are legally required to maintain strict view/edit permissions for sensitive data, and must preserve the histories of their documents).
On top of that, there's all the systems that we use to talk to one another: media services from Instagram to Tiktok to Youtube; chat services from iMessage to Discord. It's easy enough to build alternatives to these services – indeed, they already exist, though they may require additional engineering to scale them up for hundreds of millions or billions of users – but that's only half the battle. What do we do about the literal billions of people who are already using the American systems?
This is where the big divisions appear. In one camp, you have the "if you build it, they will come" school, who say that all we need to do is make our services so obviously superior to the legacy services that America has exported around the world and people will just switch. This is a very seductive argument. After all, the American systems are visibly, painfully defective: riddled with surveillance and ads, powered by terrible algorithms, plagued by moderation failures.
But waiting for people to recognize the superiority of your alternatives and jumping ship is a dead end. It completely misapprehends the reason that users are still on legacy social media and other platforms. People don't use Instagram because they love Mark Zuckerberg; they use it because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg:
What's more, Zuckerberg knows this. He knows that users of his service are hamstrung by the "collective action problem" of getting the people who matter to you to agree on when it's time to leave a service, and on which service is a safe haven to flee to:
The reason Zuckerberg knows this is that he had to contend with it at the dawn of Facebook, when the majority of social media users were locked into an obviously inferior legacy platform called Myspace. Zuckerberg promised Myspace users a superior social media experience where they wouldn't be spied on or bombarded with ads:
Zuckerberg knew that wouldn't be enough. No one was going to leave Myspace for Facebook and hang out in splendid isolation, smugly re-reading Facebook's world-beating privacy policy while waiting for their dopey friends to wise up and leave Myspace to come and join them.
No: Zuckerberg gave the Myspace refugees a bot, which would accept your Myspace login and password and then impersonate you to Myspace's servers several times per day, scraping all the content waiting for you in your Myspace feed and flowing it into your Facebook feed. You could reply to it there and the bot would push it out to Myspace. You could eat your cake and have it too: use Facebook, but communicate with the people who were still on Myspace.
This is called "adversarial interoperability" and it was once the norm, but the companies that rose to power by "moving fast and breaking things" went on to secure legal protections to prevent anyone from doing unto them as they had done unto their own predecessors:
The harder it is for people to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat them without paying the penalty of losing users. This is the source of enshittification: when a company can move value from its users and customers to itself without risking their departure, it does.
People stay on bad platforms because the value they provide to one another is greater than the costs the platform extracts from them. That means that when you see people stuck on a very bad platform – like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – you should infer that what they get there from the people that matter to them is really important to them. They stick to platforms because that's where they meet with people who share their rare disease, because that's where they find the customers or audiences that they rely on to make rent; because that's the only place they can find the people they left behind when they emigrated.
Now, it's entirely possible – likely, even – that legacy social media platforms will grow so terrible that people will leave and jettison those social connections that mean so much to them. This is not a good outcome. Those communities, once shattered, will likely never re-form. There will be permanent, irretrievable losses incurred by their members:
"If you build it, they will come" is a trap. Technologists and their users who don't understand the pernicious nature of the collective active problem trap themselves. They build obviously superior technical platforms and then gnash their teeth as the rest of the world fails to make the leap.
All too often, users' frustration at the failure of new services to slay the inferior legacy services curdles, and users and designers of new technologies decide that the people who won't join them are somehow themselves defective. It doesn't take long to find a corner of the Fediverse or Bluesky where Facebook and Twitter users are being condemned as morally suspect for staying on zuckermuskian media. They are damned for loving Zuckerberg and Musk, rather than empathized with for loving each other more than they hate the oligarchs who've trapped them. They're condemned as emotionally stunted "attention whores" who hang out on big platforms to get "dopamine" (or some other pseudoscientific reward), which is easier than grappling with the fact that legacy social media pays their bills, and tolerating Zuckerberg or Musk is preferable to getting evicted.
Worst of all, condemning users of legacy technology as moral failures leads you to oppose efforts to get those users out of harm's way and onto modern platforms. Think of the outcry at Meta's Threads taking steps to federate with Mastodon. There are good reasons to worry about this – the best one being that it might allow Meta to (illegally) suck up Mastodon users' data and store and process it. But the majority of the opposition to Threads integration with Mastodon wasn't about Threads' management – it was about Threads' users. It posited a certain kind of moral defective who would use a Zuckerberg-controlled platform in the 2020s and insisted that those people would ruin Mastodon by bringing over their illegitimate social practices.
I've made no secret of where I come down in this debate: the owners of legacy social media are my enemy, but the users of those platforms are my comrades, and I want to help them get shut of legacy social media as quickly and painlessly as possible.
What's more, there's a way to make this happen! The same adversarial interoperability that served Zuckerberg so well when he was draining users off of Myspace could be used today to evacuate all of Meta's platforms. We could use a combination of on-device bridging, scraping and other guerrilla tactics to create "alt clients" that let you interact with people on Mastodon and the legacy platforms in one context, so that you can leave the bad services but keep the good people in your life.
The major barrier to this isn't technological. Despite the boasts of these companies to world-beating engineering prowess, the reality that people (often teenagers) keep successfully finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the "impregnable" platforms, in order to build successful alt clients:
The thing that eventually sees off these alt clients isn't Big Tech's technical countermeasures – it's legal risk. A global system of "anticircumvention" laws makes the kinds of basic reverse-engineering associated with building and maintaining using adversarial interoperability radioactively illegal. These laws didn't appear out of thin air, either: the US Trade Representative pressured all of America's trading partners into passing them:
Which brings me back to crises precipitating change. Trump has staged an unscheduled, sudden, midair disassembly of the global system of trade, whacking tariffs on every country in the world, even in defiance of the Supreme Court:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd6zn3ly22yo
Ironically, this has only helped make the case for adversarial interoperability. Trump is using tech companies to attack his geopolitical rivals, ordering Microsoft to shut down both the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian high court in retaliation for their pursuit of the criminal dictators Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro. This means that Trump has violated the quid pro quo deal for keeping anticircumvention law on your statute books, and he has made the case for killing anticircumvention as quickly as possible in order to escape American tech platforms before they are weaponized against you:
I've been talking about this for more than a year now, and I must say, the reception has been better than I dared dream. I think that – for the first time in my adult life – we are on the verge of creating a new, good, billionaire-proof internet:
But there's one objection that keeps coming up: "What if this makes Trump mad?" Or, more specifically, "What if this makes Trump more mad, so instead of hitting us with a 10% tariff, it's a 1,000% tariff?
This came up earlier this week, when I gave a remote keynote for the Fedimtl conference, and an audience member said that he thought we should just focus on building good new platforms, rather than risking Trump's ire. In my response, I recited the arguments I've raised in this piece.
But yesterday, I saw a news item that made me realize there was one more argument I should have made, but missed. It was a Reuters story about Trump ordering American diplomats to fight against "data sovereignty" policies around the world:
The news comes from a leaked diplomatic cable, and it's a reminder that Trump's goal is to maintain American dominance of the world's technology and to prevent the formation of a post-American internet altogether. Worrying that Trump will hit you with more tariffs if you legalize jailbreaking assumes that the thing that would upset Trump is that you broke the rules.
That's not what makes Trump angry.
What makes Trump angry is losing.
Say you focus exclusively on building superior platforms. Say by some miracle that everyone you care about somehow overcomes the collective action problems and high switching costs and leaves behind US Big Tech services and comes to your new, federated, cleantech, post-American alternative.
Do you think that Trump will observe this collapse in the fortunes of the most important corporations in his coalition and shrug and say, "Well, I guess I lost fair and square; better luck next time?"
Hell, no. We already know what Trump does when his corporate allies lose to a superior foreign rival – Trump steals the rival's service and gives it to one of his cronies. That's literally what he last month, to Tiktok:
The fear of harsh retaliation for any country that dares to be a Disenshittification Nation is based on the premise that Trump is motivated by a commitment to fairness. He's not: Trump is motivated by a desire to dominate. Anything that threatens the dominance of the companies that take his orders is fair game, and he will retaliate in any way he can.
It's never a bad idea to opt out of having your data sold or shared.
It's essential to opt out of allowing Tumblr to sell your Tumblr content to OpenAI. This place is one of the last frontiers. The internet will be remarkably worse. Right now, the search function doesn't work right, and that is actually a gem of a feature that protects content and originality to a significant extent. This website is where all the other sites get their content from. Those other sites are already being scraped and analyzed to generate AI products [and also contribute to social control protocols and institutional behavioral influence]. OpenAI is not our friend.
This is not an anti-tech or anti-futurism take. I know what these industries are up to behind the scenes and this is Bad News. As usual, the process for opting out is occluded.
Instead of being available on mobile, you have to access the desktop site (no actual desktop necessary, one may just toggle the option in your browser on mobile). Instead of being under "Privacy" it is under "Visibility". Instead of a simple click, in some cases, you have to go through a few clicks. That should always be a red flag, but at least there seems to be an option available. I am going to look for some more literature on the matter about how they are publically claiming to use the bought data. They say "public accounts" as if there are private ones here beyond "password protected" and "private posts".
Are content in drafts included? Chatrooms? DMs? Faces? Will original art be stolen without credits in the metadata? Are they planning to flag and ID communities and identity based social networks of political interest? Are they selling data to law enforcement or gestapo variants? Are the bios and self introductions going into the US version of the social credit score (which is real, btw)? Are our personal stories, tastes, and niche-audience jokes being immortalized out of context for digital IDs and digital profiles that will be used to limit and determine our opportunities and experiences in the world of biodigital convergence?
You may think, "Oh, there is nothing that serious on my pages, I have nothing to hide". The reality, however, is that there are malicious actors in the business of bad-faith interpretations. These are used for human profiling and categorization for sale to whomever is willing to pay. They are not interested to see if you really "meant it like that" or if you really know any of the hundreds or thousands of people behind the accounts you follow, or if you deserve the limitations to your individual or group rights and opportunities to follow. They don't care about the constitution or the laws meant to protect the common citizen. They have no qualms about providing the data to have you put on A List. They are counting on you not knowing what is going on for long enough to profit enough to where they can afford settlement payoffs, silencing, and disappearances.
It's always a good idea to opt out of having your data sold or shared.
The White Stones of Reaction: Go, Democracy, and the Networked Counter-Offensive in the Work of Alfons Scholing
AbstractThis paper analyzes Alfons Scholing’s self-described position as the “white stones” in the game of Go—a reactive yet principled stance against an initiating “black stone” of ideological aggression. Framed through Scholing’s digital corpus (2013-2025), we examine how his trans-cultural philosophy , technical systems , and autobiographical narratives model a democratic resistance to fascist…
Indigenous groups are developing data storage technology that gives users privacy and control. Could their work influence those fighting bac
“The threats of data colonialism are real,” says Tahu Kukutai, a professor at New Zealand’s University of Waikato and a founding member of Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network. “They’re a continuation of old processes of extraction and exploitation of our land—the same is being done to our information.”
To shore up their defenses, some Indigenous groups are developing new privacy-first storage systems that give users control and agency over all aspects of this information: what is collected and by whom, where it’s stored, how it’s used and, crucially, who has access to it.
Storing data in a user’s device—rather than in the cloud or in centralized servers controlled by a tech company—is an essential privacy feature of these technologies. Rudo Kemper is founder of Terrastories, a free and open-source app co-created with Indigenous communities to map their land and share stories about it. He recalls a community in Guyana that was emphatic about having an offline, on-premise installation of the Terrastories app. To members of this group, the issue was more than just the lack of Internet access in the remote region where they live. “To them, the idea of data existing in the cloud is almost like the knowledge is leaving the territory because it’s not physically present,” Kemper says.
Likewise, creators of Our Data Indigenous, a digital survey app designed by academic researchers in collaboration with First Nations communities across Canada, chose to store their database in local servers in the country rather than in the cloud. (Canada has strict regulations on disclosing personal information without prior consent.) In order to access this information on the go, the app’s developers also created a portable backpack kit that acts as a local area network without connections to the broader Internet. The kit includes a laptop, battery pack and router, with data stored on the laptop. This allows users to fill out surveys in remote locations and back up the data immediately without relying on cloud storage.
The CLOUD Act and Your Data in India: What Your Hyperscaler's Sales Team Never Told You
Picture this: your cloud sales representative has just given you a very polished presentation. Your data, they assure you, lives in AWS Mumbai or Azure India.
Picture this: your cloud sales representative has just given you a very polished presentation. Your data, they assure you, lives in AWS Mumbai or Azure India. It never leaves India. They point to the MeitY empanelment certificate as the final proof that everything is compliant, secure, and fully within Indian legal jurisdiction. You nod. You sign the contract.
What they did not tell you, and what this article will, is that a United States federal law signed in 2018 gives American law enforcement the legal authority to compel that same cloud provider to hand over your data, regardless of which country it is physically stored in, without requiring the consent or even the knowledge of the Indian government or your own organisation.
That law is called the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act. The world knows it as the CLOUD Act. And if your organisation stores data with any US-headquartered cloud provider, whether on servers in Mumbai, Hyderabad, or the moon, you need to understand what it means for you.
Why this matter right now
In July 2025, Microsoft abruptly suspended access to all its services for Nayara Energy, India's second-largest private oil refiner handling 8% of the country's refining capacity. The suspension, triggered unilaterally by Microsoft based on EU sanctions, happened without a court order, without prior notice to the company, and without any involvement of Indian regulatory or judicial authority.
Nayara Energy had to go to court to regain access to its own data and systems. This was not a data extraction event, but it demonstrated, graphically, what it means to depend on a US company for your business-critical infrastructure: that company can act on foreign legal and political pressure at any time, and India may have no immediate remedy.
for more details visit Zeacloud's The CLOUD Act and Your Data in India: What Your Hyperscaler's Sales Team Never Told You Blog
The Role of Sovereign Cloud in Southeast Asia’s Digital Future
The Southeast Asia Hyperscale Data Center Market is fundamentally being reshaped by the rising importance of data localization and national digital sovereignty. As countries like Malaysia and Indonesia implement policies to keep sensitive data within their borders, the demand for localized hyperscale infrastructure has surged, creating a new wave of localized investment. Southeast Asia Hyperscale Data Center Market recorded a value of USD 12,900 million in 2024 and is estimated to reach a value of USD 89,683 million by 2033 with a CAGR of 26.3% during the forecast period. This trend is empowering local operators to form joint ventures with global giants, transferring critical technological expertise to the domestic market.
Analyzing the sea hyperscale data center capex drivers reveals that governments are now active participants in the infrastructure race, often providing land grants and tax incentives to attract major cloud regions. This collaborative approach between the public and private sectors is shortening permitting timelines and unlocking access to critical utility upgrades. However, the complexity of these projects remains high, as operators must balance the geopolitical tug-of-war between competing international tech stacks. The ability to provide a secure, neutral, and high-performance environment is becoming the ultimate competitive advantage for data center providers operating in this complex regional theater.
Looking toward 2033, the focus will shift toward integrating these sovereign data centers into a wider, interconnected fabric of regional hubs. This will require the continued expansion of subsea cable networks and ultra-low latency backhaul infrastructure to link the disparate markets into a cohesive regional ecosystem. For hyperscalers, the goal is to create a seamless experience where data can flow securely across borders while remaining compliant with local mandates. As the infrastructure matures, the Southeast Asian market will not only support its own growing digital population but will also provide a robust, reliable, and compliant home for the global data that powers the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models.
