This enshittified technology, in turn, is downstream of policy decisions made by politicians who were bullied into their positions by the US trade rep, who used the threat of tariffs to push for laws that protected the right of tech giants to plunder the world's money and data, by criminalizing competitors who disenshittified their products, leaving technology users defenseless.

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Trump's tariffs have effectively killed that threat. If you can't tell from day to day - let alone year to year - whether the US will accept your exports, you can't rely on exporting to the USA. What's more, generations of pro-oligarch policies have stripped America's bottom 90% of discretionary income, stagnating their wages and leaving them mired in health, education, and housing debt:

pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-s…

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(Even as the system finds ever more sadistic and depraved ways for arm-breakers to collect on that debt.)

This is terrible for Americans, but when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.

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With the decline of the US market for global exporters, there's finally political space to stop worrying about tariffs and reconsider anti-circumvention laws, to create "disenshittification nations" that stage raids on the most valuable lines of business of the most profitable companies in world history - Big Tech:

pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not…

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People who dream of turning American tech trillions into their own billions are powerful allies in the fight against enshittification, but they're only one group that we can recruit to our side. There's another powerful bloc waiting in the wings: national security hawks.

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These people are *rightly* terrified that Trump will order his tech companies to switch off their governments, businesses and households, all of whom are dependent on US cloud-based administrative software for email, document creation and archiving, databases, mobile devices. Trump's tech companies could also brick any nation's mobile phones, medical devices, cars, and tractors.

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It's the same risk that China hawks warned of when it looked like Huawei would provide all of the world's 5G infrastructure: allow companies that are absolutely beholden to an autocrat who is not restrained by the rule of law to permeate your society, and your society becomes a prisoner to the autocrat's whims and goodwill.

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A coalition of digital rights activists; investors and entrepreneurs; and national security hawks makes for a powerful bloc indeed. Each partner in the coalition can mobilize different constituencies and can influence different parts of the state. These are very different groups, and that's *why* this coalition is so exciting: this is a three-pronged assault on the hegemony of Big Tech.

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That's not to say that this will automatically happen. *Nothing* happens automatically. Fuck pessimism, and fuck optimism, too. Things happen because *people do stuff*:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/aga…

That's where hope comes in. The door to a better technological future has been slammed shut and triple-locked for 25 years. Today, it is open a crack. A crack isn't much, but as Leonard Cohen taught us, "that's how the light gets in":

genius.com/Leonard-cohen-anthe…

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Understand: this isn't a bet on politicians discovering unsuspected wellsprings of courage or principle. This is a bet on politicians confronting *unstoppable political will* that corners them into doing the right thing.

I understand why Europeans, Canadians and Britons feel cynical about their political classes (to say nothing of Americans, of course). It has been decades since a political party delivered broad, structural change that improved the lives of everyday people.

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Instead, we've had generations of neoliberal austerity sadists, autocrats and corrupt dolts who've helped billionaires stripmine our civilization and set the world on fire.

But politics have changed before, and they can change again (note that I didn't say they *will* change - just that they *can*, because *we* can change them). Society may feel deadlocked, but crises precipitate change.

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As I said in my Hamburg speech, the EU went from 15 years behind in their solar transition to ten years *ahead*, in just a few years, thanks to the energy crisis that slammed into the continent after Putin invaded Ukraine.

Crises precipitate change. The fact that the EU pivoted so quickly away from fossil fuels to solar is nothing short of a miracle.

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Anyone who feels like their politicians would *never* buck Big Tech needs to explain how it came to pass that these politicians just told Big Oil to fuck off. The *fossil fuel industry is losing*. This is goddamned wild - indeed, their loss might just be locked in at this point, because fossil fuel and its applications (like internal combustion) are now more expensive and more impractical than the cleantech alternatives:

pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/the…

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Sure, it sucks that Trump has killed incentives to drive an EV and that the EU is dropping its goal for phasing out internal combustion engines, but given that EVs are faster, cheaper and *better* than conventional automobiles, the writing is on the wall for the IC fleet.

That's the wild thing about better technology: *people want it*, and they get pissed off when they're told they can't have it.

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When the Texas legislature tried to pass a law requiring that power companies add a watt of fossil-fuel generation capacity for every watt of solar they brought online, Trump-voting farmers and ranchers from the deepest red parts of Texas (Texas!!) flooded town halls and hearings, demanding an end to "DEI for natural gas":

billmckibben.substack.com/p/fo…

They won.

Politics aren't just terrible today, they're in chaos. Crises precipitate change.

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For reality

A few thoughts on the last day of the old world

^{Bill McKibben (The Crucial Years)}

After World War II, one of Britain's two parties, the Liberals (AKA "Whigs") imploded. With them out of the way, the Labour Party rose to power, with a transformative agenda backed by a mass movement, which created the British welfare state.

Today, the British Conservative Party (AKA "Tories") are also imploding, and look set to be taken over by a fascist MAGA-alike party, Reform.

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As of a couple months ago, that seemed like very bad news, since Labour is also set to implode, thanks to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's austerity, authoritarianism, corruption and cowardice. For quite a while, it looked like when Starmer's Labour is totally wiped out in the next election, they would give way to Reform, plunging Britain into Hungarian- (or American)-style autocracy.

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But all that has changed. Today, the UK Greens have a new leader, Zack Polanski, who has dragged the Greens into an agenda that promises transformations as bold as the ones that remade the country under Clement Attlee's Labour government. Polanski is a fantastic campaigner, and he is committed to the same kind of grassroots co-governance with a mass movement that characterized Zohran Mamdani's historic NYC mayoral campaign.

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In other words, it seems like *both* of Britain's sclerotic mainstream parties will be wiped out in the next election, and the real fight in the UK is between two transformative upstart parties, one of which plans to spend billionaires' dark money to mobilize fascists yearning for ethnic cleansing; and the other wants a fair, prosperous and equitable society where we abolish billionaires, confront the climate emergency, and smash corporate power.

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