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If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it): Trump wants Big Tech to win, not to play fair.

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If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it) (permalink)

Crises precipitate change: Trump's incontinent belligerence spurred the world to long-overdue action on "digital sovereignty," as people woke up to the stark realization that a handful of Trump-aligned giant tech firms could shut down their governments, companies and households at the click of a mouse.

This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.

Now, more than a decade into the Trump era, the world is finally confronting the reality that they need to get the hell off of American IT, and transition to open, transparent and verifiable alternatives for their administrative tools, telecoms infrastructure and embedded systems for agriculture, industry and transportation. And not a moment too soon:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

But building the post-American internet is easier said than done. There remain huge, unresolved questions about the best way to proceed.

One thing is clear: we will need new systems: the aforementioned open, transparent, verifiable code and hardware. That's a huge project, but the good news is that it benefits tremendously from scale, which means that as countries, businesses and households switch to the post-American internet, there will be ever more resources to devote to building, maintaining and improving this project. That's how scientific endeavors work: they're global collaborations that allow multiple parties to simultaneously attack the problems from many angles at once. Think of the global effort to sequence, understand, and produce vaccines for Covid 19.

Developing the code and hardware for the post-American internet scales beautifully, making it unique among the many tasks posed by the post-American world. Other untrustworthy US platforms – such as the dollar, or the fiber links that make interconnection in the USA – are hampered by scale. The fact that hundreds of countries use the dollar and rely on US fiber connections makes replacing them harder, not easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

Building the post-American internet isn't easy, but there's a clear set of construction plans. What's far less clear is how we transition to the post-American internet. How do people, organizations and governments that currently have their data locked up in US Big Tech silos get it off their platforms and onto new, open, transparent, verifiable successors? Literally: how do you move the data from the old system to the new one, preserving things like edit/view permissions, edit histories, and other complex data-structures that often have high-stakes attached to them (for example, many organizations and governments are legally required to maintain strict view/edit permissions for sensitive data, and must preserve the histories of their documents).

On top of that, there's all the systems that we use to talk to one another: media services from Instagram to Tiktok to Youtube; chat services from iMessage to Discord. It's easy enough to build alternatives to these services – indeed, they already exist, though they may require additional engineering to scale them up for hundreds of millions or billions of users – but that's only half the battle. What do we do about the literal billions of people who are already using the American systems?

This is where the big divisions appear. In one camp, you have the "if you build it, they will come" school, who say that all we need to do is make our services so obviously superior to the legacy services that America has exported around the world and people will just switch. This is a very seductive argument. After all, the American systems are visibly, painfully defective: riddled with surveillance and ads, powered by terrible algorithms, plagued by moderation failures.

But waiting for people to recognize the superiority of your alternatives and jumping ship is a dead end. It completely misapprehends the reason that users are still on legacy social media and other platforms. People don't use Instagram because they love Mark Zuckerberg; they use it because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

What's more, Zuckerberg knows this. He knows that users of his service are hamstrung by the "collective action problem" of getting the people who matter to you to agree on when it's time to leave a service, and on which service is a safe haven to flee to:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

The reason Zuckerberg knows this is that he had to contend with it at the dawn of Facebook, when the majority of social media users were locked into an obviously inferior legacy platform called Myspace. Zuckerberg promised Myspace users a superior social media experience where they wouldn't be spied on or bombarded with ads:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg knew that wouldn't be enough. No one was going to leave Myspace for Facebook and hang out in splendid isolation, smugly re-reading Facebook's world-beating privacy policy while waiting for their dopey friends to wise up and leave Myspace to come and join them.

No: Zuckerberg gave the Myspace refugees a bot, which would accept your Myspace login and password and then impersonate you to Myspace's servers several times per day, scraping all the content waiting for you in your Myspace feed and flowing it into your Facebook feed. You could reply to it there and the bot would push it out to Myspace. You could eat your cake and have it too: use Facebook, but communicate with the people who were still on Myspace.

This is called "adversarial interoperability" and it was once the norm, but the companies that rose to power by "moving fast and breaking things" went on to secure legal protections to prevent anyone from doing unto them as they had done unto their own predecessors:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The harder it is for people to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat them without paying the penalty of losing users. This is the source of enshittification: when a company can move value from its users and customers to itself without risking their departure, it does.

People stay on bad platforms because the value they provide to one another is greater than the costs the platform extracts from them. That means that when you see people stuck on a very bad platform – like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – you should infer that what they get there from the people that matter to them is really important to them. They stick to platforms because that's where they meet with people who share their rare disease, because that's where they find the customers or audiences that they rely on to make rent; because that's the only place they can find the people they left behind when they emigrated.

Now, it's entirely possible – likely, even – that legacy social media platforms will grow so terrible that people will leave and jettison those social connections that mean so much to them. This is not a good outcome. Those communities, once shattered, will likely never re-form. There will be permanent, irretrievable losses incurred by their members:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/when-the-town-square-shatters/

The platforms are sinking ships. We need to evacuate them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

"If you build it, they will come" is a trap. Technologists and their users who don't understand the pernicious nature of the collective active problem trap themselves. They build obviously superior technical platforms and then gnash their teeth as the rest of the world fails to make the leap.

All too often, users' frustration at the failure of new services to slay the inferior legacy services curdles, and users and designers of new technologies decide that the people who won't join them are somehow themselves defective. It doesn't take long to find a corner of the Fediverse or Bluesky where Facebook and Twitter users are being condemned as morally suspect for staying on zuckermuskian media. They are damned for loving Zuckerberg and Musk, rather than empathized with for loving each other more than they hate the oligarchs who've trapped them. They're condemned as emotionally stunted "attention whores" who hang out on big platforms to get "dopamine" (or some other pseudoscientific reward), which is easier than grappling with the fact that legacy social media pays their bills, and tolerating Zuckerberg or Musk is preferable to getting evicted.

Worst of all, condemning users of legacy technology as moral failures leads you to oppose efforts to get those users out of harm's way and onto modern platforms. Think of the outcry at Meta's Threads taking steps to federate with Mastodon. There are good reasons to worry about this – the best one being that it might allow Meta to (illegally) suck up Mastodon users' data and store and process it. But the majority of the opposition to Threads integration with Mastodon wasn't about Threads' management – it was about Threads' users. It posited a certain kind of moral defective who would use a Zuckerberg-controlled platform in the 2020s and insisted that those people would ruin Mastodon by bringing over their illegitimate social practices.

I've made no secret of where I come down in this debate: the owners of legacy social media are my enemy, but the users of those platforms are my comrades, and I want to help them get shut of legacy social media as quickly and painlessly as possible.

What's more, there's a way to make this happen! The same adversarial interoperability that served Zuckerberg so well when he was draining users off of Myspace could be used today to evacuate all of Meta's platforms. We could use a combination of on-device bridging, scraping and other guerrilla tactics to create "alt clients" that let you interact with people on Mastodon and the legacy platforms in one context, so that you can leave the bad services but keep the good people in your life.

The major barrier to this isn't technological. Despite the boasts of these companies to world-beating engineering prowess, the reality that people (often teenagers) keep successfully finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the "impregnable" platforms, in order to build successful alt clients:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

The thing that eventually sees off these alt clients isn't Big Tech's technical countermeasures – it's legal risk. A global system of