Calls for “digital sovereignty” are still everywhere. They are a central narrative of contemporary European economic policies, they serve as powerful justifications for corporations to call for subsidies and they are also omnipresent among progressive digital policy NGOs and activists. Aline has already written expertly about the nationalist elements of “tech sovereignty” in the name of European competitiveness. In this blog post I want to focus on another aspect. I want to comment on the trend of leftists voices advocating to switch from Big Tech services to “less bad” alternatives in order to establish their individual digital sovereignty and (presumably) play a small role in fighting Big Tech. While this is good advice, it is not good enough. Limiting the horizon to merely deciding what company should be in charge of our digital life is not enough. Creating the impression that choosing the right company is a meaningful way to change systemic problems is not enough. Sometimes “less bad” is still progress. But when it actively limits our imagination, it becomes harmful. I want to encourage people to be aware of this and always keep in mind how much more vast the horizon of possibility actually can be.
To be more specific, I want to point to some examples of what I am talking about. In Germany a group of prominent people, digital civil society and corporations joined forces and – at the 39th Chaos Computer Congress – announced the “Digital Independence Day“, a campaign that encourages people to adjust their individual tech use by switching services (my initial remarks on Mastodon were met with remarkable pushback). Popular German writer (and personal friend) tante as well as bloggers like Mike Kuketz published similar recommendations. I myself am currently trying to warm up to Ubuntu Linux in an attempt to move away from Apple and MacOS as well. All this is not a German phenomenon, of course. Cory Doctorow wrote about how “interoperability” can help you to leave a service and set up elsewhere in Wired magazine. And Paris Marx, host of the popular podcast “Tech Won’t Save Us”, published several newsletter and blog posts about how he tries to use alternatives to Big Tech services. He also spoke with Aline about Europe’s dependence on US tech in an episode of the podcast. I want to be very clear that this blog post is not a general criticism of those behind the German campaign or of the individuals I just mentioned. To the contrary: tante and Paris especially are much needed critical voices who I respect and value a lot. These are only examples and the following thoughts are neither addressed at specific organisations nor people (except where explicitly so).
This blog post also is not covering everything that is to say on the topic. Much can be said about how naming a European campaign after the US declaration of independence “Digital Independence Day” trivialises colonialism. Lorena Jaume-Palasí or Lilith Withmann and others already voiced these concerns and this aspect certainly deserves an extensive elaboration. That however, will not be the focus in this text. I would like to focus on how recommending people to switch away from Big Tech to (supposedly better or at least “less bad”) services run by corporations in other nations runs the risk of reinforcing a misplaced trust in “good and ethical capitalism”. There is no such thing like a good or ethical corporation. This post is also meant to elaborate on a general issue I see with how such a framing of digital sovereignty can actually limit our ideas of the future.
How meaningful is “less bad”?
The whole premise of campaigns and calls for switching services is based on two premises: a) The idea that there are alternatives that qualify as better or good enough in a substantial way and b) that switching to those alternatives does actually achieve something meaningful. Both premises live and die with the idea of a “better” alternative. And this – to me – is at the heart of the matter. What you call “better” depends on your goal post. If the goal post is to simply be more independent from certain corporations like Google or Microsoft, then switching to another cloud storage, web search or mail hosting provider will achieve just that. If the goal is to not let Meta know with who, when and how you message on Whatsapp (where the content of the message can not be accessed by Meta but loads of communication metadata is collected), then switching to Signal or Threema (which appear to collect no to little metadata) will also achieve just that. And if you think that consumer choice is a viable instrument for substantial change, then, yes, encouraging people to exercise that choice is a reasonable path.
As you might suspect, I consider the goal post to be misplaced. To be clear: I very much support people getting away from corporations that currently support a fascist regime. I support people thinking about how the interests of tech giants can actually impact their own personal life. Talking about switching services is definitely a good recommendation. Either way, it will politicise technology and put the toxic effects that Big Tech has on the world on the agenda. My issue with all this is that, to me, it is not [just] about Big Tech. It is about privatised, commercial tech in general. My issue is that it is not a matter of personal choice, but a systemic matter. And with all the good it does to encourage people to switch to “less bad alternatives”, these alternatives are only better within a very limited horizon of thinking. They are better in the same sense that it is better to be ruled over by Timotheus Höttges (the head of Deutsche Telekom) or Arthur Mensch (the CEO of Mistral) instead of being ruled over by Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman. To me, it is very important to not be limited to such narrow ideas of “better”. “Better” doesn’t have to be another corporation that appears less terrible right now. Instead, I would love to talk about how to categorically free ourselves from having our digital lives being ruled over by private enterprises and corporations altogether. My issue with recommending people to switch services and providers is that this limits our imagination by shifting the goal post by too little.
The goal post
Setting a goal post only within a limited set of coordinates runs the risk of reinforcing the idea that these coordinates are actually to limits of possibility. Recommending Ecosia or Startpage (European search providers) over Google Search or Bing does question the dominance of US corporations but it does not question the idea that digital services should be under private corporate control. European services might be less harmful but they are still harmful, not in a moral sense but in a systemic sense. They are part of a system of domination to the perpetuation of which they contribute. They are bound by the same economic conditions that made the economic giants of Big Tech into what they are today. Monopolies are nothing unusual in capitalism, especially not with digital platforms where network effects have a natural tendency to consolidate users in one place. The historical conditions that made Big Tech such dominant economic forces can be traced back to Silicon Valley, military funding and the role of universities. These conditions certainly were specific to a time and place (in the United States). There are reasons why Big Tech originated from the US just like there are reasons that Germany developed a car industry. But this does not mean that car companies from Sweden are “better alternatives” to German corporations or that tech companies from Switzerland are “less bad alternatives” to those from the US. While the specificities and cultural peculiarities between different regions of the world vary a lot, the economic order of the world is – on a systemic level – shaped by the same dynamics: Pretty much all nations are capitalist societies organised around for-profit private corporations that compete for profit on purposefully maintained markets. Some nations of course are dominating this global order while other regions are exploited. The profits are always and everywhere coming from labour exploitation, financial speculation and rent extraction.
The oppressive nature of AWS or Microsoft Office365 is the result of capitalist competition not of personal attitudes of individuals or the ethics of the communities they were shaped by. Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft or Amazon are not what they are because of moral failings of their managers. The difference between Nextcloud and Amazon Web Services is that of scale, not of ethics. European startups will not fail to change the world because they cannot compete with Big Tech, but because they will – once they compete successfully and reach a similar scale – be just as terrible, heartless and exploitative as them. That is because they have to be, because competition works that way. The only difference will be that their economic power would be serving European domination instead of another nation’s rule. For some people in Europe, that might feel like an improvement. It may mean more or better paid jobs in Europe, it may lead to more taxes being due in European states or it may improve the global bargaining positions of European heads of states. For the majority of people, however, the difference is sentimental at best. You could exchange the dominance of Whatsapp in private communication with a European messenger like Threema, you could replace Microsoft’s grip on personal computing with SAP and German Telekom, you could imagine Instagram and Tiktok being replaced by Xing or StudiVZ but that can hardly be the goal post.
Larger cages
Recommending people to switch to “European tech” tends to obfuscate the uncomfortable truth that the corporations at home are bound by the same dynamics of capitalism like their US counterparts. Proton, the Swiss technology company may offer privacy focused cloud storage, but it is still a shareholder company, bound by the rules of competition. The result is that their popular encrypted storage service (as of now) offers no dedicated support for Linux while the company invested in a crypto wallet and “AI assistants”. Ecosia, the German search provider, recently announced that they invested into “the world’s greenest AI” in order to stay competitive in the “AI race”. These are decisions driven by a market-logic and with a view on the competitive position in it. These decisions are neither democratic nor do we – the people using the tech – have any way in participating in how they are constructed. In my view, such participation would be essential for even thinking about individual and collective agency in a meaningful way.
“These days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages,” David Graeber and David Wengrow wrote in their 2021 book. These words neatly summarise my concerns with equating “choose another company” with “digital sovereignty”. This limiting effect, however, is not inevitable. I would love to see messages and campaigns that combine tips for less terrible alternatives with systemic critique and calls for substantial action. I would love to use the attention that these campaigns get to not only talk about why Signal is better than Whatsapp, but also about why Signal is also just as undemocratic as Whatsapp, or how Hetzner (a popular German hoster) is just as driven by profits as its competitors. I would love to talk about how to democratise and socialise the infrastructure and services we use. Talking about better services without talking about better ways to organise and govern them pretends the metal rods of the bigger cage do not exist. And it runs the risk of drawing much needed attention away from systemic issues towards mere symptoms. If a critique of capitalism and a call to engage in thinking about and moving towards alternatives is not part of a campaign about “digital sovereignty” then such a campaign is a trap that sells us freedom in the form of a larger cage.
Article header by Aayudh Bhattacharya (from Unsplash)