On choosing tech

I think that noa makes a great point about the nascent “choose European!” trend going on over there. While moving away from American hegemony is a necessary step (and not only in the tech or services realms), replacing one hegemon for another is a mistake humans have made again and again throughout our history. Online, we’ve seen the Twitter-to-{Threads,Bluesky,Mastodon} exodus (I include Mastodon, even though it’s part of the larger fediverse, because it’s positioned itself as a platform more like Twitter—at least as of the last time I paid attention), as well as the Blogger-to-Medium-to-Substack movement for blogs (this is, of course, a gross oversimplification). There are plenty of cases geopolitically as well: see the French revolution(s) and many others. We are, after all, only human. It takes massive amounts of imagination and will to effect meaningful structural change, which is the kind we’re talking about here. It’s much easier to replace a “bad” thing with a “good” one of…