Why I’m getting off US tech

At least as much as feasibly possible

In January, we watched Donald Trump be inaugurated as president for the second time, but there was something new: the billionaires of Silicon Valley had a front row seat. They’d funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, then millions more into his inauguration fund. The tech titans made it clear they were aligned with his agenda as they sought to evade taxes and regulations in the United States, and hoped to use the administration’s leverage to bully other countries into backing off too.

That alliance became necessary because the old, naive narratives about the widespread benefits and better future being ushered in by Silicon Valley are long dead. The platforms we use have been continually degraded to serve the bottom lines of the companies that run them. Amazon is full of poor-quality goods, Facebook is flooded with AI slop, Twitter is a right-wing cesspool, Google sacrificed its trusted reputation for confidently incorrect AI Overviews, Microsoft is forcing generative AI on its clients, and the list goes on.

Our dependence on US tech isn’t the product of the past few months. It’s been a decades-long project, built on the false notions that digital technology had to be left to the private sector and that governments had limited power to shape it within their jurisdictions. Those assertions were crafted to benefit not just the US tech industry, but the global power of the United States itself. As its tech companies dominated markets around the world, they not only grew larger and became more profitable, but the influence of the US government expanded along with it.

For a while, that didn’t seem to be too much of a problem. The industry was surrounded with optimistic narratives and it was growing so quickly that crumbs could be thrown to other countries to keep them from questioning the unfavorable deal they’d tacitly accepted. But as it’s come under threat and seeks to defend the power it’s accrued, we’re seeing the consequences of that trade off.

Silicon Valley is enlisting Trump in its war against higher taxes

Countries are being threatened with tariffs for applying digital services taxes and enforcing regulations that seek to make foreign tech companies align with local rules and values. The United States is restricting chip exports not just to China, but even to countries that thought they were its close allies. Most recently, fears have been growing that US cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — which so many companies and governments have come to depend on — could even be shut off if Trump’s trade war deepens.

After watching the industry’s embrace of the extreme right and how that enabled Trump’s aggression toward so many around the world, I’ve had enough.

A proper response to the dominance of US tech firms and the belligerence of the US government won’t come through individual actions; it requires governments in Europe, Canada, Brazil, and many other parts of the world to strategize and deploy serious resources to develop an alternative. That’s why I’ve been arguing for them to take digital sovereignty seriously, and particularly a form of it that challenges the foundations and incentives that modern Silicon Valley was built on.

But the more I see what the Trump administration and the tech billionaires are doing, the more I feel I can’t wait for governments to get their acts together. For the past several weeks, I’ve started identifying digital services from companies outside the United States and testing them to see if I can find reasonable alternatives to the US platforms and companies I currently rely on.

The United States has gone rogue. There must be consequences.

There are still places where reasonable alternatives are hard to find, or where the only ones available are made by coders for their own — the type of thing I can never recommend to a wider audience. But even with that said, I’ve found there are more options than I expected — and many of them don’t require the compromises I thought would be necessary. There is always the friction of switching and getting used to something new, but that honestly doesn’t take long to get over.

I know I’m not going to be able to fully disconnect from the US tech economy. Some platforms will be harder to give up than others, particularly when I need to use popular social media platforms to share my work. I’m also not getting rid of my Macbook and iPhone, at least for now, and even when I do find good alternatives, some of them are still on AWS or another US cloud service.

I still have some more testing to do and categories to explore, but in the next few weeks I plan to do a much longer write up on what I’ve found and what services you might consider if you want to join me in reducing your reliance on US tech platforms. It won’t change the world, but maybe if more people join in, it can start to send a signal to governments and even to companies that the support for another way is there — and they should do more to support these efforts.