Suddenly the software’s gone!

via unsplash

In this article, entitled “International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger” and published in “The Dissident”, the authors articulate the threat to civil society that the US corporate monopoly and Trump’s aggressive and unaccountable sanctions capability poses to progressives and the merely decent around the world. Trump has the International Criminal Court. The Dissident’s article asks how long it’ll be before progressive NGO’s are similarly targeted and whether US Banks and payment processors will similarly be mandated, as the US has done before by instructing the US cloud providers to sanction in this case the ICC again, but posted by Amnesty International.

It’s another example where the USA’s current erratic and selfish political agenda must lead once friendly foreign governments to consider their “security of supply”. Most of the code required to run a cloud is open source, at the moment, and I would recommend that the British and EU governments ensure they can sustain access to this code as well as other critical open-source resources such as Office productivity and email products. We should be looking at distributive governance models like mastodon and diaspora. Fortunately, the EU has a massive, distributed computing capability and while the basic architecture of supercomputers and Internet platforms differs, they are in fact exceedingly similar.

Escaping from the US monopoly control requires will and knowledge and I am unsure that it exists within the UK’s political leadership, equally I’m unsure that it exists within the leadership of the EU member states. I should also add, it’s not really about the hardware, nor the land and electricity.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.