Clearly, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty drawback – Trump has means, motive and alternative to order his tech corporations to close down any public official, giant company, or particular person who displeases him:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize
However Individuals face the identical digital sovereignty danger. America is a lawless place now, the place a pliable Supreme Courtroom and supine Congress have affirmed that “it is not against the law if the president does it.” The identical tech giants who offered out to Trump for tax breaks and safety from antitrust enforcement will fortunately disconnect any member of the American public, any American firm, any American official who displeases Trump.
It is a unusual irony that on this second when so many people are struggling to “de-Google” our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling quantities to a type of digital demise penalty:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/expertise/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there’s each cause on this planet to hunt safety and insulation from these corporations which are “too large to care” – and but, the exact same dominance that makes these corporations such a hazard additionally makes them indispensable.
Take “ICE Block,” an iOS app that warns you if there’s an ICE thug looking folks such as you in your neighborhood, which could prevent from being kidnapped, disappeared, despatched to a focus camp, pressured into slave labor in El Salvador, or just murdered. As a way to defend its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly energy and tariff-free entry to Chinese language labor that that relationship ensures), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class after which eliminated ICE Block from its App Retailer:
https://pluralistic.web/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
Huge Tech is vital to Trump’s pogroms. With out Oracle’s databases, Microsoft’s administrative instruments, Amazon’s cloud, and Google’s location knowledge, ICE could be frozen in place. Huge Tech is the supply of Individuals’ danger from authoritarian oppression. That implies that Individuals can’t depend on Huge Tech to guard them from that authoritarianism.
And but, after many years of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Huge Tech has pressured practically all its rivals out of enterprise. Who can compete with corporations that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privateness legislation?
There is a joke from japanese Canada I consider typically in conditions like this. Its punchline goes, “If you happen to wished to get there, I would not begin from right here.”
However right here we’re. And talking of Canada, whereas it has many issues, it’s not (as of time of writing) the USA, however it’s linked to the USA by way of the web. Which implies that Individuals might – hypothetically – supply their computing infrastructure from suppliers that have been based mostly in Canada, and who strictly ensured that that they had no dependency on US providers and scrupulously prevented a US “enforcement nexus”:
https://pluralistic.web/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/
That’s precisely what some American – and worldwide – human rights nonprofits have executed. The Expertise Freedom Cooperative is a model new group based by the Human Rights Knowledge Evaluation Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Knowledge Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/techfreedomcoop-stuart-flack-8eipc/
All of those organizations are longstanding, extremely efficient human rights fighters. They’ve lengthy, storied histories of accumulating, analyzing, and presenting knowledge to handle systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, battle crimes and genocides. They’ve concluded that they cannot depend on US tech and US servers with their knowledge. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the net accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the Worldwide Felony Courtroom to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant in opposition to Netanyahu:
https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3
Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing assets in Canada, the US, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their knowledge and computation throughout a number of jurisdictions, they search to make sure that a US seizure or deletion of their knowledge won’t halt their work.
This federated system serves as a substitute for Huge Tech’s administrative instruments – e-mail internet hosting, cloud storage, doc collaboration. Greater than that: Tech Freedom Coop can be constructing out its personal AI infrastructure, domestically hosted and managed.
Teams like HRDAG have many years of expertise utilizing leading edge statistical strategies to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes dedicated throughout civil wars, scorching wars, genocides and secret wars. They constructed the most important human rights database ever created, to trace each demise within the Colombian Civil Conflict and estimate the probability that every killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian army:
They performed the primary ever census of killing by US law enforcement officials:
They partnered with Innocence Challenge New Orleans to sift by mountains of arrest stories to floor instances much like profitable exonerations, serving to extra innocents to win their freedom:
How Structuring Data Unburies Critical Louisiana Police Misconduct Data
Right this moment, they’re energetic throughout the USA, monitoring and analyzing the crimes dedicated by the Trump regime:
And they’re working in Gaza, to doc the genocide in order that sometime, the reality could be acknowledged and the perpetrators dropped at justice:
Estimated Gaza toll may have missed 25,000 deaths, study says
I’ve identified Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who based HRDAG, for greater than 20 years, and each time we meet, I study one thing from him. He is the one that involves thoughts every time folks inform me that AI is ineffective and that programmers who declare in any other case are deluded. Patrick is among the finest programmers I do know, he’s the easiest statistician I do know, and he is discovered many, some ways to make use of coding assistants to assist him carry out huge data-analysis tasks which are important to human rights struggles. He is a “centaur” if ever there was one:
https://pluralistic.web/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
It is thrilling to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to start constructing the post-American web and a type of post-bubble AI, the place AI instruments are handled as regular applied sciences, able to serving to expert practitioners who’ve discernment born of expertise to use them correctly to realize necessary issues:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
For greater than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the issues we will do utilizing superior statistical evaluation. The present era of AI instruments are based in superior stats, too. Nobody ought to assume that superior stats can clear up all of your issues in fact. The AI bubble is insanity and can result in smash – environmental, financial, political:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves
The world could be a greater place with out the AI bubble. However AI? It is tremendous. It is one other type of statistical evaluation and inference. There is not any cause to make use of all of the planet’s power, computing and water to carry out that evaluation, however the right and fascinating quantity of helpful AI-style computation is nowhere close to zero.
The coop is constructing good AI instruments – ones grounded in a sensible evaluation of their usefulness and an affordable dedication of assets to them. They’re operating open fashions based mostly on their very own knowledge, on computer systems they personal and management. Their said purpose is to “assist organizations take a look at whether or not fashions are correct, reproducible, safe, and acceptable for particular human rights use instances.”
Which brings me to the ultimate part of Tech Freedom Coop: coaching. They’re instructing individuals who work in human rights the way to administer their very own servers, safe their knowledge and communications, and analyze knowledge. As their press launch says, these are all “expertise which are more and more crucial for human rights organizations documenting abuses of energy.”
I’ve identified this was coming for some time now, and I am so happy to see that it is lastly launched. Eventually, the primary steps in the direction of a post-American web.
#25yrsago Asia Carrera’s make-up suggestions http://www.asiacarrera.com/make-up/welcome.html
#25yrsago Tommy Chong’s Urine Luck https://net.archive.org/net/20010818124925/https://hempmasters.com/urineluck/
#15yrsago German cops name airport full-body pornoscanners “ineffective,” EU requires choose out from scanning https://www.schneier.com/weblog/archives/2011/08/german_police_c.html
#15yrsago Write an journey novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock means https://net.archive.org/net/20110705155756/https://wetasphalt.com/?q=content material/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock
#10yrsago DRM: You will have the fitting to know what you’re shopping for! https://www.eff.org/recordsdata/2016/08/06/eff_request_for_investigation_re_labeling_drm-limited_products.pdf
#10yrsago Bureaucrats disqualify Hong Kong legislative candidates for inadequate loyalty https://globalvoices.org/2016/08/05/hong-kong-election-officials-disqualify-six-legislative-candidates-for-not-being-loyal-enough-to-china/
#10yrsago The Vlogbrothers information to voting in each state within the union https://www.youtube.com/c/howtovoteineverystate
#10yrsago Vocal fry, uptalking, nasal: girls’s voices can by no means be “proper” https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/female-voice-anxiety-c-v-r.html
#5yrsago Fb escalates battle on accountability https://pluralistic.web/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck
#5yrsago Drone supply crashes https://pluralistic.web/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned
#5yrsago Anti-vaxers cool the mark https://pluralistic.web/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#goffman
#5yrsago Meet the brand new era of pro-abortion activists https://pluralistic.web/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#never-again
#1yrago Bragging about changing coders with AI is a sales-pitch https://pluralistic.web/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype
“The Reverse-Centaur’s Information to AI,” a brief ebook about being a greater AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
“Canny Valley”: A restricted version assortment of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.web/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
“Enshittification: Why Every thing Abruptly Received Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Purple Workforce Blues,” concerning the heroic period of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Purple Workforce Blues,” about prison-tech and different grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
“The Misplaced Trigger:” a solarpunk novel of hope within the local weather emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
“The Web Con”: A nonfiction ebook about interoperability and Huge Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at E-book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/ebook/9781804291245).
“Purple Workforce Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that can depart you realizing extra about how the world works than you probably did earlier than.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: Methods to Beat Huge Tech, Tame Huge Content material, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on the way to unrig the markets for artistic labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“The Put up-American Web,” a geopolitical sequel of types to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
“Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel tailored from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
“Enshittification, Why Every thing Abruptly Received Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
“The Memex Technique,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Right this moment’s prime sources:
At the moment writing:
“As soon as Is Enemy Motion,” a science fiction novel concerning the origins of recent technofascism. Right this moment’s phrases: 692 (692 whole).
“The Put up-American Web,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” concerning the higher world the remainder of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft accomplished. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother brief story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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