The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives, says science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow
Everyone thinks they can leverage trump for their own agenda because he’s a wildcard. But unless you’re directly putting money toward his whatever you’re very unlikely to get the result you want. And even if you do send money his way, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll turn on your at some point.
That isn’t what the article is proposing. The premise is that Trump’s tariffs and policies have functionally brought into reality the only action that previously acted as threats to keep other countries from reverse engineering American tech and creating solutions to de-shittify products and services. If the threats are no longer valid, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so, and providing better versions of existing products, or products that remove the enshittification from the existing options.
In short, they aren’t calling on Trump to take action, they’re calling on others to leverage the actions Trump has already taken.
Everyone thinks they can leverage trump for their own agenda because he’s a wildcard. But unless you’re directly putting money toward his whatever you’re very unlikely to get the result you want. And even if you do send money his way, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll turn on your at some point.
That isn’t what the article is proposing. The premise is that Trump’s tariffs and policies have functionally brought into reality the only action that previously acted as threats to keep other countries from reverse engineering American tech and creating solutions to de-shittify products and services. If the threats are no longer valid, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so, and providing better versions of existing products, or products that remove the enshittification from the existing options.
In short, they aren’t calling on Trump to take action, they’re calling on others to leverage the actions Trump has already taken.