No smoke without …
On the other hand, it might just be letting off steam.
Quote of the Day
”AI is the asbestos we’re shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society.”
- Cory Doctorow
Nice metaphor.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Haydn | Symphony nº 33 Hob. I: 22 Der Philosoph 1st movement: Adagio
Long Read of the Day
Living without America
If you think that what’s going on in the US is nothing to do with you then can I respectfully request that you think again. Reading this remarkable blog post by my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser would be a good place to start.
Quentin sees a big problem looming on our horizons now:
Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta are all American companies. And (as the recent minor AWS outages demonstrated), a very great number of other organisations depend on infrastructure which is either physically in the USA, or is owned by companies which are.
And as Donald Trump seems ever more keen to become the new Putin, this may be a problem, and it may affect you. Sooner than you think.
There was a scare earlier this year when Trump regime imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court because he didn’t like them criticising Israel, and shortly afterwards the ICC prosecutor who was his main target lost access to his Microsoft services. Later, Microsoft denied that these were in any way connected, but further information has been scarce, and the thing that really worried people was not whether it actually happened, but the fact that it now seems totally plausible that it might. In October, the ICC announced that it was ditching Microsoft Office in favour of an Open Source alternative. Mmm.
This is a pattern that is starting to become more common, as the idea of ‘digital sovereignty’ becomes ever more desirable. The German State of Schleswig-Holstein moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice is one recent example. A ministry in Denmark has been doing the same thing. The Austrian Ministry of Economy started the adoption of Nextcloud, hosted on its own hardware, when its licence for Teams and Sharepoint expired. And just last month the main Belgian DNS registrar announced that it was leaving AWS, and put out a request for proposals from European alternative platforms. “The geopolitical reality is forcing us to think more carefully about our infrastructure”, they said. “Ten years ago, we made the decision to switch to AWS, which has certainly benefited our services. But the world has changed, and those benefits no longer outweigh the risk we run if the US suddenly imposes restrictions or tariffs on cloud usage.”
So let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland…
Do read on.
How the media made Nick Fuentes
My recent Observer column…
Nicholas Joseph Fuentes is an American political commentator, far-right white nationalist, activist and livestreamer. He hosts America First, a YouTube livestream. Like most of the far-right crowd, he specialises in provocation. One source reports a few choice examples of his rage-bait: describing Hitler as “awesome” is one, while calling interracial marriage “degenerate” is another, as is claiming marital rape is “impossible”. Also, describing women as “fundamentally lower” in intelligence and insisting that Jim Crow segregation benefitted black Americans.
His misogyny is pathological. In May 2023, he said that he wanted a 16-year-old wife when he is 30, “when the milk is fresh”. In November 2024, immediately after Donald Trump’s victory, he tweeted “Your body, my choice. Forever” on X, mocking the pro-choice slogan “My body, my choice” adopted by protesters before (and after) the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade in June 2022. Predictably, it went viral with 100m-plus views.
Basically, then, Fuentes is an equal-opportunity dog-whistler, so much so that many social media platforms have excluded him (but YouTube has had no qualms about hosting America First). His big break came in 2024, when Elon Musk let him back on X, where he now has more than 1 million followers.
Given the number of rightwing fanatics on X, you’d have thought that just adding one more might not be such a big deal. Big mistake. Fuentes is suddenly ubiquitous in American political discourse…
Read on.
PDF How the media made Nick Fuentes | The Observer
My commonplace booklet
Apropos Quentin’s piece above, for years I’d thought about Silicon Valley as a contemporary manifestation of what Joe Nye called ’soft power’ — the ability of a country to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Think Hollywood in the post-war period.
The way Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump after the election should have alerted me to a seismic shift. The commercial interests of the tech industry are now inextricably linked to US national interests — as defined by Trump. First signs of that were his warnings that European attempts to regulate ‘American’ companies like X and Meta would be interpreted as acts of economic warfare and dealt with accordingly. He has already imposed travel restrictions on five officials of the European Commission for “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
And then (as Quentin says) there was his sanctions on the International Criminal Court for, among other things, “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant”. Shortly afterwards the ICC prosecutor who was his main target mysteriously lost access to his Microsoft services. Microsoft denial that they were in any way responsible for singling out this individual. But their statement says only that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC” while carefully avoiding the case of the individual prosecutor.
The new reality we have to contend with is not only that the US is no longer a reliable ally, but also that it is currently governed by a capricious and vengeful president who perceives no limits on his authority and can do what he likes. And if anyone doubts that if he were to instruct Microsoft to pull the kill switch on an individual — or an institution — I bet they would comply.
Which is a sobering thought when one works in a university that has handed over management of all its email services to, er, Microsoft.
In the meantime I’ve just figured out out to download and safely archive all of my Gmails, and am wondering if I should activate my Proton email account.
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