digital ash

It seems more and more plausible. One Nobel snub too far. One performative soldier in Greenland too many. Macron makes a joke with Merz at Davos and looks in Donny's direction afterward, laughing cruelly. It's caught on camera and published on TikTokStaBook by end of day. By midnight it’s had 40 million views. It boils over, and before we can say joint security initiative, America chooses the nuclear option and announces that American companies may no longer sell digital services in Europe until Greenland is theirs. The clock starts running. We have 30 days to escape the American cloud or give up Greenland.

In the first week, digital panic sets in. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud announce their exit. Software as a service companies inform their customers that they are exploring all options but that unless the USA changes course, they will not be able to continue delivering services. Salesforce sends an awkward email. Github repos are set to read only and a countdown clock no one asked for is displayed prominently on every page. American payment services, Visa, Mastercard, ApplePay, and GPay, all announce they are monitoring the situation closely. The run on ATM machines ends in riots. Who would have thought that cashless would come bite us in the ass so fast? Governments and companies go into triage mode. They all knew the situation was dire and they knew how dependent they were, but they never thought it would go this far.

In week two, the great digital egress begins, but our networks can't go any faster. Physics doesn't care about a geopolitical crisis. Even worse, we do not have sufficient resources at European cloud providers to cover the need. They currently cover 15% of our cloud services. They can't make up the difference without divine intervention. While the Euro plummets, the cost of a TB at OVHCloud becomes 10x as expensive. Sales reps at Scaleway stop taking calls. European cloud TBs become more valuable than Bitcoin, making them literal bit coins. Citizens queue outside electronics stores to buy hard drives and save their precious family photos. An elderly man is filmed clutching a 2TB hard drive. “My wife died last year and my only memories of our last year together are on iCloud.”

National governments step in and begin rationing cloud services based on criticality. Healthcare, security, and financial systems take precedence. Small companies and startups can no longer deliver services without American cloud products and begin to collapse. The layoffs start when people realize that without services to deliver, they won't make payroll within a month.

By week three, European leaders are saying the unimaginable behind closed doors. How can we give up Greenland and still save face? In public they talk tough about sovereignty and de-escalation, but the whispers are getting louder and the word “capitulate” can be picked out of the noise. In backrooms, calls are being made to Denmark and to the United States.

By week four, von der Leyen, Mark Rutte, and Mette Frederiksen announce a joint statement. The words “lease” and “temporary” are thrown around in conjunction with North Atlantic security. A new exclusion zone called the Danish-Originated North Atlantic Leased Domain is created. Fox News calls it Donland. It will be under full American control. The servers start spinning again, but the damage is done. The trust is eroded, and the whole world knows that Europe has no cards left to play.

I'll be the first person to admit that when the word sovereign gets thrown around that I quickly think of an armed white American from a limited gene pool refusing to show their driving license to a police officer. But digital sovereignty in Europe isn't about tin foil hats or mistrust of the government. It's about not putting all of our digital resources including finance and government in the hands of a select few foreign companies. So I suppose before we continue on this adventure of open source and European alternatives to foreign technology it's important to define what we mean with digital sovereignty.

Sovereignty as a concept is the authority of a state or nation to govern itself without outside interference. In the context of digital sovereignty, it refers to a nation's or individual's ability to exercise control over its own digital activities, data, and infrastructure. Already, it is noticeable that digital sovereignty diverges from the central concept in that the individual becomes more important.

Why is the individual important in this case? Well, unlike in some countries like China where the government has strict approval over what can and can't be accessed via the internet (there are some limitations in Europe granted but it's pretty lax comparatively), we for the most part have freedom to choose how we live our digital lives. This has unfortunately led to us mostly choosing foreign companies and the vast majority of our digital lives being controlled by companies outside of our borders.

But individuals aren't the only ones at risk. European governments, institutions, and companies are all dependent on foreign technology companies. This makes digital sovereignty significantly more complex as it plays out on various levels.

And theoretically this isn't an issue. In fact one might argue that in a global economy it's perfectly normal to depend on another nation to handle certain aspects of your society. However, when this ultimately makes an entire continent dependent on external companies and countries, we no longer control the terms. Slowly we become a digital vassal state.

#digitalsovereignty

A few days ago I informed my friends on Instagram and Facebook that I would be leaving the social media platforms for greener pastures. The constant harvesting of our data and low-quality, scroll-inducing brain junkfood has made remaining on these platforms untenable. So instead of mindlessly scrolling I thought I would try once again to contribute.

Since starting my role at SURF as a technical advisor I have been made acutely aware of the current digital domination of American tech companies (more commonly referred to as Big Tech). I still believe we can turn the tide and I will continue to work on this daily as part of my job, but I also want to contribute outside of that.

One of the most beautiful rights we have as humans is the right to choose, but without information we are sure to choose the wrong things. Through this blog I hope to share my adventures in digital sovereignty, both professional and personal, and show people that we can tip the scales if we make the right choices.

So if you are interested in joining me or feel like sharing something yourself, let me know. I hope to be making my first real post this week.

For the music nerds: The title of this blog and the first post are homages to my favourite band Bright Eyes

#introduction #digitalsovereignty