- cross-posted to:
- pravda_news@news.abolish.capital
- cross-posted to:
- pravda_news@news.abolish.capital
The author: “Paris Marx is a Canadian tech critic and host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.”
For the past year and a half, the world has been forced to wake up to the great drawbacks that have come from dependence on the platforms, services, and infrastructures provided by US tech companies. What was once framed as a driver of economic growth and dynamism now gives an increasingly hostile US government an unimagined degree of leverage over other countries and their governments. It might seem to have come out of nowhere, but in truth it’s long been part of the plan.
I originally wrote this piece for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, but they’ve allowed me to share it with Disconnect subscribers. There’s some specific mention of Canada as a result, but the takeaway is the same for many parts of the world.
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Concern about the influence of the United States is nothing new in Canadian politics. Left-wing activists have long criticized the country as little more than a vassal of the United States, especially since the original North American Free Trade Agreement. But defending Canada’s sovereignty in the 21st century will require much more than increased military spending and trade diversification. It requires the government to get serious about digital sovereignty.
Until Canada gets off U.S. tech platforms and services, the government, major companies, and even much of the modern military hardware the government is procuring from the United States is in jeopardy. The U.S. government can request Canadian data stored in the servers of U.S. cloud companies, it has weaponized our use of those services to expand its surveillance apparatus, and it can even suspend access to any of those services at a moment’s notice.
It’s ironic how the US depends on China for all of the hardware that runs that tech and currently a majority of the manufacturing as well.
Like USA having debt.
Global dependence on US everything has always been the Americans’ plan.
They see themselves as above everyone else, and they always have.
