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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Enshittification of American Power
FOR DECADES, ALLIES of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.
And right about now, theyre probably wishing they hadnt.
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked inby network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching coststhe tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.
People dont usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But thats what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, theyre getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are theyll rely on a constellation of satellitesStarlinkrun by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musks SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.
More worth reading and understanding at:
https://archive.ph/NVwaS

WSHazel
(532 posts)Every business that goes into decline overestimates its customers' switching costs right before it starts its decline.
Customers of Facebook have virtually no switching costs. That company could become MySpace as easily as it made MySpace into MySpace. Microsoft has serious network effects, but Apple and Google's are much less. It is worth noting that IBM dominated technology for about 20 years in a way that none of Microsoft, Google and Apply have been able to do. Things change.
It is a lot easier to switch from the dollar than that article says. To be honest, the world doesn't really need a reserve currency anymore in the electronic age when financial transactions can occur in an instant. All Trump has done is pushed the world towards operationalizing this future reality.
There is a tendency among all people, including political and economic writers, to view the world through their own biases. That view will miss a lot of outcomes. It is naive to think that much of the rest of the world has not been preparing for an American dictatorship or decline given the two terrible Republican Presidents of this century. I think we will find that the rest of the world is more capable of moving away from the U.S. then writers like the one of that article think.
UpInArms
(53,136 posts)I do appreciate your thoughtful and reasonable response.
I needed that.