Tech Won't Save Us - Digital Sovereignty in a Time of Rising Fascism

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Paris Marx is doing a solo episode this week to bring together some important issues that have been on his mind lately. This is a recording of a talk Paris gave in Auckland, New Zealand on how Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump forces us to reassess the politics of the internet and challenge our collective dependence on US tech as it embraces the project of American empire.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris co-wrote a white paper on digital sovereignty and has written about the need to challenge US tech in response to Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump.Paris also mentioned the EuroStack and British Digital Cooperative report.Dark Times Academy offers courses on a wide range of topics.Support the show

These businesses who sold themselves as saviors of the world, as the good form of capitalism, are actually having a lot of downsides that we actually have problems with and that we want to see regulated and addressed. And as a result of that, that is exactly what governments have started to do. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get into this week's episode, just a reminder that this month is the fifth birthday of Tech Won't Save Us. And as a result, we are doing a member drive to ask you to support the work that goes into

making this show every single week so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations on important issues that have to do with the tech industry, the technologies we use every day, and how that shapes the world around us. This month, we have set two goals to get 100 new supporters at $5 a month or above over on patreon.com slash tech won't save us. And if we hit that, I will be making a new series on defense tech and this growing relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry and how they are trying to remake military procurement to work for these companies that we typically associate with Silicon Valley and the internet. And then I set a second goal,

you know, an even bigger goal to get to 150 new supporters. And if we get there, then I will make a zine later this year, the first one for Tech Won't Save Us, to try to promote these ideas in a very different format, but one that I think will be actually quite appealing to people. So I'm really excited to potentially try that if we can hit that goal. Right now, we're just over halfway to the first goal of 100 new supporters. So if you want to ensure I can make that defense tech series and a zine later this year, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us. And if you become a $5 a month supporter,

you'll get access to our discord server, you'll get access to bonus episodes of the show that are often associated with some of the series that we do. And I'll have more information on new bonus episodes soon. Or if you join at $10 a month or above, you'll get all those things, plus some Tech Won't Save Us stickers in the mail. And of course, at any tier, you will get a little shout out

at the beginning of the show if you want one of those. So if you enjoy the show, I would hope that you would help us meet our goal this month if you're able to. Now, this episode is going to be a little bit different from some of the episodes that I usually do on the show where, you know, I interview someone who is an expert on, you know, a topic that is related to the tech industry broadly that has a critical perspective that I think you ought to hear. But this week I wanted to do something

different. As you might know, I have been traveling quite a lot lately, speaking in a number of cities, getting to know people and, you know, kind of brushing up on different issues in different places. And that helps me to bring these perspectives to you on the show. So I recently gave a talk in Auckland, New Zealand, where I laid out some of the things that I have been thinking, given the current moment that we're in with the tech industry, right? With this alignment between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump and, you know, the politics of this moment with what I think is an important reconsideration that we need to have for where the internet actually comes from and the politics that have been associated with it for as long as it has been

commercialized. And, you know, we've all been using it in these ways and important discussions that are increasing in particular outside the United States about needing to get off US tech and what that might look like. So this talk kind of brings together a number of those issues that I think are obviously important right now, but are only going to get more important in the weeks, months and years to come. And in this episode, you'll be hearing a recording of that talk, obviously slightly edited. So the audio won't be as good as you know, what you usually get from a tech won't save us episode, because I'm not using my, you know, nice microphone, but hopefully it will still be of

interest to you. We'll give you an idea of where my head is at today, and maybe even we'll help to kind of put some of these issues in perspective for you in a way that maybe you hadn't considered before. This talk was at the University of Auckland. It was put together by Dark Times Academy, a great group headed by my friend Mandy, who has great courses to educate people on important topics, including a forthcoming one called Fighting the Broligarchy that I will be a part of, as well as people you will know from the show like Brian Merchant, Jathan Sadowski, Alex Hanna, and others. I'll put information about that in the show notes. It was also sponsored by the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland as well. And of course, I guess I should

say that, you know, if you're somewhere else in the world and you're interested in having me give a talk on issues like this or broader issues related to the tech industry, you know, feel free to get in touch. I speak in a lot of places and I quite enjoy doing so. So, you know, if you're interested, feel free to contact me. You can find more information on my website. So, you know, if you're interested, feel free to contact me. You can find more information on my website. So with that said, I hope that you enjoy this slightly different episode of Tech Won't Save Us. And of course, if you do enjoy the show more broadly, that you consider supporting us in our membership drive this month so we can hit those goals that I have.

And of course, if you want to do that, you can join supporters like Mia from Berlin, Patrick in Maryland, Zoe in Devon in the UK, Marcelo from Austin, Texas, HK from Brooklyn, James in Winnipeg, another James in Eugene, Oregon, Xiomara in New York City, I hope I pronounced that properly, Pat from Edinburgh, Scotland, Big Ben from Alabama, Raquel from Madrid, Ryan, and Tori in Whitehorse, Yukon by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this slightly different episode of tech won't save us. Thanks so much for coming out, everybody. And thanks so much for all you folks online won't be looking down at the camera also much great to be

back in Aotearoa, New Zealand tend to come back every year. And it's always fun to do something with Mandy when I pop down this way. We have a really great topic. I don't know, maybe that's not the best descriptor for what we're talking about today, but you know, we'll have some fun with it. I was really surprised, surprised is the wrong word, to see the great lineup for the fighting the Brawlogarchy course that Mandy has put together.

Not because I'm also included, but like because of all the other great people who are in there. And I actually recently put together a paper with a friend of mine that talked a bit about decomputing. So I was like, I'm going to have to join this one and learn some more from you on that. So I'm excited for all those things. They look great. You're probably going to get maybe even like a little bit of a preview of what I'll be talking about in that fighting the pro-oligarchy thing in this presentation. But basically, you know, you know who these two folks are, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, you know, representing this alliance between the extreme right in politics and Silicon Valley, of course, at the moment. And we're going to kind of dig into how this alliance takes hold. I want to go back a little bit into some of the

history there. And then we're going to talk about what we might do to try to counter this, right, and to look at something different. You know, a term that I call digital sovereignty, of course, people have different other, you know, words for it. So, you know, when Donald Trump was inaugurated back in January, you had this great site where, you know, he was kind of giving his speech and, you know, getting inaugurated, all these sorts of things. And lined up behind him was basically the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, right? Right there in the center of the frame, demonstrating this alliance that now exists between Silicon Valley and between the MAGA movement in the United States. You know, obviously you have Elon Musk, next to him is Sundar Pichai of Alphabet or Google,

Jeff Bezos, of course, of Amazon, Blue Origin. A couple of people next to him, of course, is Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Facebook, Instagram, you know, those platforms, you know, so they were all lined up here after Silicon Valley really got behind the Trump administration in trying to promote the election of Donald Trump, essentially. Elon Musk alone spent about $300 million in order to try to get him elected, which is like sums of money that are completely hard to imagine being spent in an election. But here you go, because in the United States, that's perfectly okay, apparently. And, you know, they were really hoping to not just make sure that they were going to have this good relationship with Donald Trump, but that they could then use the power and the leverage of the American government to kind of remake society, remake government, push other countries to do the types of things that they want to see happen. So all these folks kind of met with Donald Trump not too long after to have this big meeting. And, you know, it's kind of a reflection of things that happened not too long ago. Right.

And so we talk about now is like this unique moment. Right. They're all talking to Donald Trump. They're all getting behind it. There's this alliance. But they've had this connection to him for a while. Right. You know, they needed to get in with the with the U.S. president. But there is a distinction in the relationship. Right. In this moment, it was kind of like, OK, he's the president. We need to work with him. We'll try to do our best and we'll get the most out of it that we can. This time, though, it's a much closer relationship. And one of the people, of course, who brought them together initially was Peter Thiel, who, you know, is, of course, a major funder, one of the co-founders of Palantir. And that's a company that will come up a bit later. But yeah, so, you know, I think that just like the image of Elon Musk and Donald Trump is kind of one indication of this alliance, I think this one is another one because Peter Thiel is someone who kind of represents that conservative element in the tech industry and has done so for a long time. Of course,

you know, a fellow New Zealander as well. I was like, what am I saying? I don't need to explain to you who Peter Thiel is. But yeah, so we see this now, right? We see this relationship between the tech industry and Donald Trump. We see where this industry has basically gotten itself to after all these years. But how do we get to this moment, right? So I want to go back a little bit to look at how this industry cemented the dominance that it now has before we try to understand where this relationship comes from and then how we try to address it. So if we go back to understand, you know, where this relationship comes from and then how we try to address it. So if we go back to 1989, of course, we could go back much longer if we wanted to. Al Gore, who at the time is a senator, he's not yet the vice president, you know, he's kind of giving

this speech in the Senate. And he says the nation, which most completely assimilates high performance computing into its economy, will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century. So to me, this quote really symbolizes something important, right? Because I feel like when we look back at the early days of the personal computer or the internet, we had these narratives of like personal liberation. We were all going to kind of go online and be able to do these very different types of things. We were going to escape the authority of government or the tyranny of government, however you want to position it. It was going to be this kind of liberatory space. But then when you actually look back at the things

that people were saying in the lead up to the privatization of the internet and its commercialization, you see that they very clearly saw it as a means of asserting power, right? The United States saw that if it expanded computation later, if it expanded the internet, then that would mean that American power would go with it. And in particular, as the Soviet Union is collapsing, as the kind of communist experiment is going capitalist, the United States is looking to kind of cement the dominant position that it now holds. And it sees these information technologies as a way to try to achieve that. Bill Clinton is elected in 1992, along with Al Gore, who is his vice president. You know, at that point, the commercialization of the internet is already ongoing, but it's in 1995, actually April of 1995, 30 years ago this

month, that is the event that we kind of deem like deprivatization of the internet when the NSF, the public backbone, is turned off and that is kind of handed over to the private sector. And so these folks really usher in that moment, you know, kind of kick off what we're now experiencing the legacy of three decades later, right? It starts right here with these two who, on the one hand, you know, Al Gore is kind of imagining a slightly different vision for what ultimately comes of the Internet. He's thinking about what a public lane on the Internet superhighway or the information superhighway, rather, would look like. But Bill Clinton is not so interested in that, is kind of with these more right-wing forces that just want to see this complete opening to the private sector, which is ultimately what happens, right? And so as the internet is privatized, as it begins to go global, these US tech companies have access to capital and are very early to,

you know, taking advantage of the fact that this network is there, it's being commercialized, and they can build businesses on top of it. So as internet connectivity goes to other countries, these companies can go along with it. And before, you know, kind of domestic competitors can really spring up, they can already move into that market. They have the capital to be able to do that in a way that competitors in other types of countries don't necessarily have. And so, you know, after the privatization of the internet, we have this real takeoff, right? You've probably heard of obviously the dot-com boom. And then of course the bus that comes early in the millennium, where you basically have all

this money going into these internet companies because there's this view that these companies are going to take off really fast. They can go global. There's going to be a lot of money that can be made here. So virtually any kind of company that has internet in the name or has some association with it can grab onto capital to funding, regardless of whether there's any real business model, any real kind of fundamentals that are there, right? And yes, there's a lot of people who make a ton of money in that period, of course, people who lose money as well. But it also sets up this kind of model of tech development that has been really key to the past few decades, where it is very financialized, right? The

whole notion of it is not necessarily to build a product or service and sell it to somebody, but to try to gain market share really rapidly and then to take advantage of that growth of that scale in order to have an IPO, you know, to make money that way. It's a very financialized version of capitalism that then takes hold in how technology is developed. And that version of capitalism that then takes hold in how technology is developed. And that version of capitalism kind of births some of these billionaires that are now some of the most powerful and wealthy people on the entire planet.

Of course, Elon Musk is there, Mark Zuckerberg, who we saw before. Yeah, all these folks came up before Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos. But, you know, after this moment, after we have the dotcom boom and bust, the tech industry doesn't just go away, right? It kind of re solidifies it. It takes another crack at growth. And especially after the great financial crisis in 2008, 2009, we see them really take advantage of that moment of the low interest rates that follow that period in order to build a lot of these major businesses that are now some of the most dominant, that are now some of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. And they have really benefited immensely from what happened there. And this is not, you know, if we think about

what's happening right now, it's not that they've just, you know, always been this kind of essentially right wing industry that has always been working with the Republicans, right, in order to achieve a certain political outcome. Obviously, the internet was privatized under Bill Clinton. Of course, there was, you know, the right wing in the United States had influence on that process. Newt Gingrich, of course, who was leading the Republicans at the time. But this is an image of, you know, a bunch of folks in the tech industry with Barack Obama, I believe in 2011, Barack Obama, of course, being right here

on the side. Steve Jobs is next to him. Mark Zuckerberg is there. Eric Schmidt of Google is there on the side. Larry Ellison of Oracle is back here. And that's Reed Hastings of Netflix. You know, plenty of these folks meeting with Barack Obama, you know, having this meeting of the tech industry like we saw earlier with Donald Trump and them all kind of around him in Trump Tower. So these folks are very capable of taking advantage of both sides of the political aisle, so to speak, in the United States to get the types of things that they want. But as these companies have grown so much, there has, of course, inevitably been a backlash to what they are doing. In recent years, we have seen growing protests and growing opposition to the business models of these companies, whether it is what happens on Facebook's platform and its effect on political movements, whether it is how, say, Uber or Amazon treat their workers,

the kind of low pay and poor conditions that they subject them to. And of course, their cooperation with military and a whole other load of issues, right, that people are paying attention to and saying these businesses who sold themselves as saviors of the world, as the good form of capitalism, are actually, you know, having a lot of downsides that we actually have problems with and that we want to see regulated and addressed. And as a result of that, you know, that is exactly what governments have started to do. You know, over the past number of years, we have seen this concerted effort to really start regulating the tech industry, you know, led by Europe, we might say, but the United States followed along and under the Biden administration brought forward a number of antitrust cases. So saying that these companies are anti-competitive,

that there's something there that we need to address with how these businesses work, how their business models work, but also, you know, trying to call out a number of different ways that they function, whether it's in terms of labor, whether it's the way that they control certain markets and, you know, lead to anti competitive behaviors where other companies can't properly compete. And, you know, assuming that that has issues for consumers as well as harmful to consumers. And so there's a number of different issues that, you know, they have been moving forward. And that has, of course, made, you know, the tech billionaires not very happy. You know, increasingly, they have been pulled in front of Congress in the United States. They've been subjected to lawsuits.

But basically, these folks are starting to feel or have been starting to feel what accountability would look like for their companies, right? After evading that for so long, after evading regulation with these positive narratives about what the tech industry would bring. And of course, now they have felt the other side of this. They are not the wonderful founders that are making the world a better place all the time, but they are powerful executives whose businesses need to be held to account when they're not working for the broader public. And they haven't really liked that. So they have still been trying to assert their power in whatever ways they can.

And I would kind of identify two strategies that they have been using here, which is on the one hand to create another threat, right? You know, if they are now perceived as causing harm, as, you know, creating businesses that need to be reined in, that something needs to be done about, then they need to find something else to distract lawmakers or to seem like a bigger issue than what they are actually doing. And then, of course, the other side is embracing the political right, which has shown itself to be more open to working with the tech industry, to not moving forward on particular regulations and, you know, kind of suggesting that these sorts of things that people increasingly have issues with will be allowed to continue as long as the tech industry backs, you know, kind of suggesting that these sorts of things that people increasingly have issues with will be allowed to continue as long as the tech industry backs, you know,

these types of political parties and whatnot. I think one thing to recognize about the tech industry is that, yes, it sold itself as, you know, offering liberation. It sold itself as, you know, having this kind of distance between what it was doing over on the West Coast of the US and the government, basically. But we know that actually there has long been collaboration between these tech companies and the Pentagon and various branches of the U.S. government. It's often just things that they haven't wanted to talk about as much. Right. So Larry Ellison's Oracle, you know, has long had a close association with the CIA. You know, Google and these other companies have also, you know, worked with various intelligence

agencies and the Pentagon and Department of Defense over many years, right? That has become more and more controversial over time, especially as we have, you know, been seeing that collaboration increase. And as people have been paying more attention to, you know, the ways that the U.S. government is using those different agencies to crack down on populations within its own borders, but also kind of exporting these types of military technologies abroad as well. And so what we have started to see or what we, you know, were starting to see in Silicon Valley was the shift away from that kind of, you know, supposed libertarianism or, you know, this presentation that they were skeptical of government toward a greater embrace of it in order to try to stop this effort at regulation and antitrust and

these sorts of things, right? Someone like Peter Thiel, of course, you know, starts arguing that Google is bad for America because it canceled, you know, one of these kind of military programs, one of these contracts that it had and said that, you know, what we really need is for the tech industry to be working with the U.S. government, to be working with the Pentagon, these arms of the state, in order to support the American project, right? And someone like Eric Schmidt, of course, formerly at Google, kind of came back and said, no, you know, we do need to work more closely with the American government. And part of the reason for that is this threat from China that we increasingly face,

that the tech industry increasingly faces, that America and its geopolitical power in the world increasingly face as well. And of course, for someone who's more of a traditional conservative, very much in line with what Peter Thiel was thinking as well, showing this increasing kind of bipartisan position that exists within the tech industry. Eric Schmidt, you know, often considered more on, say, the liberal side of Silicon Valley. And so, of course, beginning in the latter part of the first Trump administration and continuing into the Biden administration, we saw this ramping up in the kind of escalation, the fight against China in wanting to restrict how its tech industry can engage with the world, how its products can export, how it can continue

to develop the technologies within its borders. And of course, part of that is a recognition of something real, right? Of the fact that China's capacities, China's technological capacities are growing, right? The ability of its companies to challenge what companies in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world are doing are very much know, very much a real thing, right? Because it has been able to develop its own domestic tech industry. And as China rises, that does mean the power of the United States is more limited, right? There is something real that these people are grabbing onto. They're not just making it up out of whole cloth.

But the tech industry did recognize that they could use the growing fears on the part of the United States to use that narrative to say, listen, as China grows, as its tech industry becomes more powerful, you will need the size that we have, the size of our companies, you know, what we are able to do so that we can properly compete, so that we can defend American power in the world. And so this is not a time to overly regulate us, to bring forward these antitrust investigations. Now is the time when you need our size. That is kind of what they have been effectively arguing, right, for the past number of years. And that hasn't come without backlash, of course, as the tech industry has begun to work more with the US military, with the militaries of U.S.

allies. We have also seen growing pushback, whether it's with Palantir, with Google, with Amazon, with Microsoft, especially most recently as they have been aiding Israel's genocide in Gaza. Cloud tools, of course, from Google, Microsoft, Amazon have been used as part of that. And Palantir shows very little issue with what is going on over there. Part of that is because the tech industry is now positioning itself as kind of the future of the arms industry in the United States. And so the defense reformation, this is a new report that was published by the CTO, the chief technology officer of Palantir. There's a new book that's out published by the CEO of Palantir called The Technological Republic. And effectively, they are making the

argument that the West is under threat, that the tech industry needs to align with the United States to protect American power through the 21st century, and that the United States and the Pentagon need to work with these new tech companies, you know, these companies that have arisen out of, say, the internet boom and all the money that was made there, instead of these traditional suppliers like Boeing or Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, who traditionally supply a lot of the weapons and a lot of the aerospace capabilities to the US government, to the military, to NASA. And instead to say, we need to sideline those because our companies can do it

more efficiently, more effectively. And this is how we protect American power through the 21st century. And so these people are trying to seize on that. And one of the things that they're trying to do with this relationship with the Trump administration is really to remake how aerospace and defense contracting works to make sure a lot more of that money is being funneled into these tech companies, you know, Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and these other ones that are being formed along with that. And so that is part of the reason why we start to see this kind of alignment between Elon Musk, between this MAGA movement and this broader right-wing movement that we're seeing around the world. So, of course, as Elon Musk launches this Doge agency, is working with Donald Trump, is trying to achieve these broader right-wing

aims and giving it kind of this mystique of a technological efficiency sort of a thing. They're doing mass layoffs. They're shutting down government departments. But they're also making sure that Starlink services offered by SpaceX are being rolled out through many aspects of the federal government, that NASA is being remade and overhauled to be more dependent on SpaceX and kind of its priorities for what the future of the space program should be. And, you know, these other ways that Musk's companies and these other tech companies can be implemented as part of this broader project. We see them very clearly trying to use the power of the American government and, of course, the American government and these new people in it using the power that they have in order to defend the power of the U.S. tech industry abroad from those growing threats of regulation and taxation from other parts of the world. So, of course, you might have seen when J.D. Vance went to Europe last month or maybe it was in February and essentially gave two different speeches in Paris and then in Munich where, you know, he kind of chastised the Europeans.

He said that the United States was going to control AI and everything that came of it, even if the Europeans wanted to start their own industry, it would always be secondary to the American tech industry, to the American AI industry. It would always be secondary to the American tech industry, to the American AI industry. And then, of course, in Munich, you know, just kind of very much lambasting the values of Europe, the fact that it wasn't allowing the extreme right into various discussions in Germany, you know, these other kind of political maneuvers. And of course, we very clearly see that the tech industry is working with these folks to try to use the power of the American government to stop tech regulations that are being proposed in different parts of the world. And we've seen that, of course, with the retaliatory tariffs that were announced on supposedly Liberation Day that I now understand are being delayed again for another 90 days. We'll see how that ultimately works out. But part of

what they were talking about there, of course, we know the actual formula that was used was more about trade surpluses and deficits. But the United States is very much focusing on countries that are levying digital services taxes against American tech companies, doing other regulations that might limit the potential market share of its tech companies, and of course, planning to use the remaining power and leverage that the United States has to try tech companies, and of course, planning to use the remaining power and leverage that the United States has to try to stop those types of policies from moving forward, from being implemented in other countries. And of course, part of the question there is, are countries going to allow themselves to be bullied by the United States in that way? But

that's for a little bit later. So, you know, obviously, we see someone like Elon Musk, who is not just forming these relationships with the extreme right and these extreme right-wing political movements in the United election. Of course, he has a great friendship with the Italian far-right Prime Minister, Giorgio Maloney. And of course, going over to Israel whenever he makes really explicitly anti-Semitic statements so that the problems for that can be kind of whitewashed away because he's supporting what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. So, you know, that's a lot. So I think I would try to pull out a few points there. First of all, I think when we think about the internet, there are a lot of narratives that exist about what it is, what it could have been, you know, what it has ended up

being. And I think I would say for me, one of the maybe narratives or understandings about the internet that we don't often have that, you know, are not the ones that are often what we've been told for the past few decades, but was that the internet was always a project of American power, right? For some people, that might be a bit of a controversial statement, but I think it's quite clear, actually, when you see, one, the statements that people in the American government were making in the 80s and 90s as they were preparing for this thing to go internationally, they very much saw it as a tool of American power. And then, of course, when we see the reality of how it has played out, when we see how

it is ensured that these large American tech companies have basically dominated the digital technology sectors in so many different countries around the world and now do not want to lose that power that they have. Then, of course, that containing China is obviously about geopolitics, right? The United States is worried about its position in the world, does not want to see a rising power that can challenge it, does not want to move into a multipolar global system. But it's also about protecting Silicon Valley, right? Protecting the market share that its companies have globally against rising Chinese competition,

because China has been the only country that has really effectively created a tech industry to be able to compete with what the Americans have in Silicon Valley. And then if we were to really think about countering it or pushing against it, state power will be necessary, both to rein in the industry that

already exists there, but also to set us on a course for something else, right? Certainly, it's great to have open source projects, to have other attempts to create different kinds of technology, to envision different ways of using the internet. But ultimately, if something is going to effectively push back against the you know, the American tech industry and the dominance that it currently has in so many countries around the world, that will require the state to be part of funding and thinking about what that is going to look like. And so what do we do instead, right? You know, we've talked about how we got here. We've talked about this relationship that exists now between the tech industry and the extreme, right? And, you know,

this is a relationship that is growing in many different parts of the world. In Canada, where I am, a lot of the tech billionaires are often explicitly speaking out in favor of the conservatives backing what is happening in the United States, calling for policies that are against immigration, those types of things. You know, they're kind of adopting this project. So what does something else look like? How can we actually challenge this? You know, what does digital sovereignty look like? You know, obviously, more recently, we have seen very direct things that can be done there. Maybe not necessarily what I'm advocating, especially when Tesla has so much excess inventory right now, you know, destroying its cars is probably just allowing them to claim

the insurance on them and get rid of them. So maybe it's not helping. But, you know, we do see that the kind of changing views of Elon Musk are causing very significant declines in Tesla sales around the world. There was just a report that Tesla is sitting on about 2,400 Cybertrucks that it can't seem to sell to anybody, which have a book value of about $200 million. And reportedly, a lot of its dealerships are not even taking trade-ins of Cybertrucks anymore because it knows it can't sell them. And so, you know, you can really see that this public anger, especially on a consumer-facing company like Tesla, can have a real effect. And especially when so much of Elon Musk's wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, you know, causing that stock to decline can have a real effect. And, you know, if you're worried about the environment, there are way more electric

cars you can buy these days than just the Tesla. So that's one piece, right? You know, where we can see how direct public anger and pushing back on this can cause a real decline. But I would say I think there are two different pillars that we need to be looking at here if we're serious about taking on the power that, you know, U.S. tech has in so many of our societies. The first is to use regulation, of course, to try to constrain the power that these American tech platforms, that these American tech companies have. But then the other piece of that is to think about actually building something new, right? And so first, if we think about the regulatory question, obviously Europe has often been seen as a leader here, right? With the GDPR, it's kind of data regulations, it's Digital Markets Act, it's Digital Services Act and the various other things that it has moved forward in order to try to limit what these American tech companies can do, you know, how they can actually act in their market, you know, this is a step in the right direction. There are obviously criticisms

of those regulations, of those policies, but, you know, you got to start somewhere, right? So I would say, on the one hand, if we're thinking about regulations, you have things like digital services taxes that are, you know, expanding in more and more parts of the world, something that is only necessary because the United States has been delaying on implementing the OECD agreement for a global minimum tax for many years now. The Biden administration was pushing it off and pushing it off. And now the Trump administration says they simply won't abide by it. Now you have more countries moving forward with digital services taxes.

And that's part of the reason why the Americans are threatening all of these countries with retaliatory tariffs and things as a result, because so many of these tech companies are not paying their fair share of tax in so many of these jurisdictions. You know, you can also look at regulations on data collection, on its transmission, on how it can be used, strengthening the labor protections that exist on some of these platforms and in some of these companies. So a company like Amazon, for example, cannot use the algorithmic management to increase the pressure on the people who work for it. Or a company like Uber cannot, you know, turn workers into contractors and continually approaches in the world of a more hostile United States, is increasingly working together instead of one country moving forward on one thing all on its own to make sure that there is kind of broad consensus to try to limit what these companies can do. But then we need to think about an alternative, right? And so these graphics

are from a recent report called Eurostack that is trying to lay out an idea of what an alternative might look like in Europe. Right. Because Europe and the European Union have a lot of people. They have a lot of resources and they can use those to actually try to develop something different. key technologies that would make up kind of a technological stack that we might be dependent on going everywhere from the resources that are needed to build these types of technologies through to the infrastructures and then the digital services and platforms built on top of it. You know, we see that the United States and China are really the dominant players in virtually all of those technologies. Some other parts of the world do certain aspects of that, but we can see

that they have a very dominant role. And so then the question becomes, okay, if we're thinking about this stack, if we're thinking about all the layers of it and what this is going to look like, what are the opportunities to try to do something different? It's going to be very difficult to look at that whole stack and say, okay, we just need to replace the whole thing if we're so dependent on what the United States, what US companies are doing. But this is where the opportunity comes to start to identify pieces, to start to reduce that dependence, and then that can grow into something bigger. And then the question then, of course, is if you have an alliance, if you have a lot more resources than, say, just New Zealand or just Canada, and people are working

together, you can kind of pool those resources and start thinking about what it looks like to develop an infrastructure that's different. And so, you know, what might that look like? Well, there are a lot of proposals. And I think this is one thing that is actually exciting, right? We have a digital infrastructure right now that has been built in a particular way over the past several decades, shaped in many ways by what the United States felt would be the best way to organize this kind of system and then have us all adopt it. But what if we were to start thinking about what something different might look like?

I think this brings a lot of opportunities. And so, say, the Eurostack report talks about using state-led investment to develop an alternative infrastructure that looks at all those different layers of the stack and tries to see in the European context, but we could think about broadening that out, how they start to increase their capacities in those different areas. Something like the British Digital Cooperative Report that Dan Hind wrote in 2019 thinks about public tech centers that are rooted in tech development in different communities. So, you know, actually trying to recenter tech development, giving it more public funding

so that it doesn't need to be focused on IPOs and shareholder value and those sorts of things, but thinking about how technology can be used and developed in service of communities and making sure the resources are actually there so that can be properly done. And of course, at the same time as doing that, providing education, helping people to actually understand how to use these technologies and responding to what the communities are actually telling them that would be useful for them. Then, of course, you know, in a paper that I co-authored called Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty, you know, we talked about what an international alliance could look like to build a more sustainable and more sovereign digital infrastructure, because then you basically have the resources to actually be able to push back

on this, right, to be able to develop something different. Whereas, again, if you have New Zealand or Australia or Canada going it alone, that's going to be very difficult. But if you bring together Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, different parts of the world to work on these things together, now you have the capacities, now you have the resources to really start to put this type of thing together and to see who can do what in order to contribute to this broader picture, right? And then I think personally, a key part of this needs to be thinking about what technology looks like for the public good, not just to maximize shareholder value. Going back to what

I was talking about around the dot-com boom, which was associated with a lot of financial deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s, we have been living in this kind of era of tech development that is very financialized, that is very much focused on scale, IPOs, how you are going to kind of maximize the value and the profit that you can make from this. But I think we can see, and I think this realization is only growing with every passing year, that there are a lot of harms and problems that come with developing technology in this way. And now there's a real opportunity to think about how we maybe do something different. And if we think about here in New Zealand, obviously, we can think about the role that

libraries played when Dan Hind was think about the role that libraries played when Dan Hind was talking about, you know, the British Digital Cooperative. That's something that's very much molded off this notion of having libraries that are providing education, that are responding to the community. How can we think about, you know, a role that something like a library might play in tech development, in serving the community that way? Obviously, they're public broadcasters. There's recognition that, yeah, there's this big private media ecosystem that's providing information to the public, but there's also a role for a public institution, for a public broadcaster, or two in this case, to provide that kind of information to provide journalism

to the public. There's a recognition that there's a public postal system and even a public bank because the private market is not going to effectively serve those different areas, right? So we recognize that there are many areas where, yeah, the government does get involved and work on these different things that are going to help the public, but that the market itself might not be able to deliver. So maybe is it time for a Kiwi Digital Cooperative to go alongside Kiwi Bank and these other public institutions that think about how technology can better serve the public good. I think it's time to have that discussion. So thank you so much. So that is the recording of my talk in Auckland, New Zealand, you know, laying out how I'm seeing this moment, the things that I think that we should really be

thinking about. And of course, you know, I framed some of that around New Zealand specifically, New Zealand's institutions because of where I was at the moment. But obviously, I think that these things apply much more broadly. And we need to be thinking about what public technology, what digital sovereignty actually looks like in many different countries around the world, and how many of those countries should actually be working together in order to realize something like that. Late last year, which we've discussed on the show in the past, I co-wrote a paper called Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to learn more about that issue. And of course, if you do want to support our membership drive this month, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, become a supporter, and help me hit my goals that

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