This is all much bigger than US politics.
It is a matter of national security for India, Israel, and every other country to maintain a sovereign communications channel for their leaders to reach their people directly.
The world cannot be ruled by American corporations.
Every sovereign needs its own basic internet infrastructure: hosting, payments, anti-DDOS.
Over the long term, crypto is the obvious choice for the 80% of the world population that is neither American nor Chinese, as well as large swaths of both Americans & Chinese.
This is now going to happen.
China is already US-independent when it comes to communication & payments infrastructure.
India, Israel, Russia are obvious candidates to go techno-autarkic next. Then perhaps the EU, South Korea, Japan, Brazil.
Crypto is the demilitarized zone.
To be clear, I respect what Jack & Zuck have built. These decisions are never easy.
But the world is much bigger than the US, which is only 4% of the world.
Decentralization away from US control is not just a technical imperative, it’s a moral one. Self-determination for all.
Mexico’s Obrador is denouncing this, and he’s on the left.
We may be about to see a global reverse bandwagoning against foreign social media companies.
Countries will build their own sovereign apps — and block or regulate the American and Chinese apps. reuters.com/article/us-usa…
How would countries build sovereign apps?
1) Clone the features of WeChat, FB, or Twitter, which is much easier than developing from scratch
2) Encourage or requirr citizens to sign up, which is much easier if you’re a state
That’s product and distribution respectively.
Over the 20th century, many countries built cognates of US government institutions, like the “Japanese FDA”.
Now sovereigns with sufficient scale will build cognates of US & Chinese tech institutions, like social networks, messaging, payments, and hosting.
@India_Stack is v1.
Here’s what people don’t get about sovereign apps: unlike startups, they have guaranteed distribution.
A state can mandate that every citizen install an app by a certain date. With a decent clone, you get 10M users in a few days.
Not all states can pull this off. But some will.
Here’s @navalny, a Russian opposition politician.
People act as if these platforms are implicitly American when Americans are less than 25% of users on both Twitter and Facebook.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.