Long read: The Enshittification of American Power

In this startlingly original article, Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman say that what Trump is doing is simply following a time trend in American society where over the past few decades the tendency has been to monetise power wherever possible. Their core hypothesis is that: “First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.”

To help us understand the mental model that powerful Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with, the authors help us understand how Big Tech played the game: “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 in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the 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.”

Messrs Farrell & Newman say that America as a country is now operating on the same mental model: “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…People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re 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 they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s 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.”

The authors say that Trump is now monetising all of the above. The world is locked into American tech & finance. (Amongst the many examples the authors cite is that of HK’s chief executive Carrie Lam whose life has been made miserable ever since the United States imposed sanctions on her. Her bank accounts across the world have been frozen and she can’t even use Microsoft Office.) Trump knows that and he is milking that lock-in and that dependency: “Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.””

So what should America’s allies do now? In the short run there is little that they can do. They are just too dependant on America: “…for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China…

In March, the outspoken head of Denmark’s parliamentary defense committee grabbed attention on X by declaring that his country’s purchase of F-35s was a mistake: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse,” he tweeted. But in reality, the Danish government is even now considering purchasing more F-35s.

Canada, too, has already built its air-strike capacities on top of the F-35 platform; switching to another would, at best, require vast amounts of retooling and redundancy.”

But over the medium-long run it isn’t hard to imagine what America’s allies will do. Messrs Farrell & Newman write:

“In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.

If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.

In Europe, discussions are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries…

The German and French governments have embraced EuroStack, while major EU aircraft manufacturers and military suppliers like Airbus and Dassault have signed on to a public letter advocating its approach to “sovereign digital infrastructure.”…

The European Union is also putting together a joint defense fund to help EU countries buy weapons—but not from the US. The EU’s executive agency, the European Commission, is patching together a network of satellites that could eventually provide Ukraine and Europe with their own home-baked alternative to Starlink. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, has also started talking pointedly about how Europe needs its own infrastructure for payments, credit, and debit, “just in case.”…”

The authors conclude the article by saying that the only people who cannot escape Trump’s clutches are, ironically, the very people who voted for him: “In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled.”