The United States Is a Hostile Neighbour ⇥ disconnect.blog
Yesterday, I published a little thing about how Quartz slipped and fell into a toxic stew of A.I. slop. If you have not yet read it, I must say I quite like it. What began as a little link I was going to throw to Riley MacLeod’s article became an exploration of an A.I.-generated article with at least two completely fictional sources, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, that article is still up — unchanged — and it still claims “new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March”.
John Paul Tasker, CBC News:
Trump launched a trade war against Canada earlier Saturday by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all goods from this country — an unprecedented strike against a long-standing ally that has the potential to throw the economy into a tailspin.
[…]
These potentially devastating tariffs are slated to take effect on Tuesday and remain in place until Trump is satisfied Canada is doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
I think you have to see “fentanyl” in this context as the equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. It’s not the real reason; Canada isn’t even a major source of fentanyl. It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons — George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.
The president posted today that “Canada should become our Cherished 51st State”, effectively saying the tariffs are part of a hostile takeover strategy. And, sure, maybe he does not mean it; maybe if he gets a series of special edition Trump-branded Timbits, he will call the whole thing off. But we are now on the receiving end of economic warfare from the world’s most powerful nation, and an explicit threat of far worse.
The stance of the Trump administration only exacerbates the growing recognition that allowing US companies to dominate the internet economy across much of the world was a terrible mistake. The harms that have come of that model — for workers, users, and the wider society — have already shone a spotlight on the problems of importing poorly regulated internet platforms based on American norms and practices. But now more than ever it’s clear that cannot continue, and traditional allies of the United States need to come together not just to take on its tech industry, but to protect themselves from a declining superpower that’s decided it can do whatever it wants — even to those it recently called friends.
I maintain my disagreement with the U.S. requirement that TikTok divest or be banned, and will continue to do so until there is compelling evidence to reconsider. There is currently nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies and executives are aligning themselves with this adversarial administration, some more than others. I am not saying we ought to require Canadian versions of Meta’s apps or X. But can users trust their recommendations systems?
It is folly for me, an idiot, to offer geopolitical analysis, so I will anyway. There are a handful of world powers worth worrying about: Russia, and its territorial expansion; China, and its manufacturing dominance combined with human rights abuses. The U.S. has long been on that list for anyone living in Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, formerly, and then the Middle East, and Africa now, too. But those of us in developed nations or who have been allies have had it easy; we have only needed to worry about its potential for demonstrating its power. Now, it has. Yet we are all reading about it using devices running U.S. software. I do not like thinking in these terms — the internet was supposed to be a grand unifier — but here we are.