History may not repeat, but it rhymes: The (Digital) Opium Wars

We’ve successfully resurrected the colonial trading companies:

As a reminder, the First Opium War ¹ involved the British Empire declaring acts of regulating or interfering with the distribution of opium into China by private companies a direct aggression against the Empire and eventually involved the use of the Royal Navy to enforce said policy.

Big Tech, at this point, is waving their pet president around to make sure every country remembers their infrastructure dependence on American Tech means that any attempt to regulate or tax them will be hit with immediate tariff action.

Countries are badly prepared and slow to adjust to the wielding of tariffs as a tactical tool to directly interfere with national sovereignty and further entrench the colonial scale dependence on such technology.

Overwhelmed by the tariff and AI Blitzkrieg, states are prone to yield ground and will find it very difficult to regain it.

An example of entrenching coercion for example is coupling StarLink approval in African countries to tariff rates ²

StarLink, directly to device and built into Apple and Google phones bypasses digital borders / border routing - the last remaining control countries assert as sovereign nations on the internet - further disintermediating governments from their constituents.

AI infrastructure and model proliferation carries the same risks. While countries today have complex processes for managing their origin story and national narrative, for example through textbook selection in schools and government, the AI blitz involves pushing the adoption of US trained AI models in schools, silently replacing sovereign decisions with US techbro AI models.

Especially countries like the UK, hell bent to push ChatGPT into public service or even population, seem to be rushing head first into complete dependency and loss of control to the increasingly autocratic US tech-business complex. ³

It seems to me that more than anything, governments need to urgently lead and take control of their technology vision, strategy & narrative framing because the easy choice of just "leaving it to the market", of following Big Tech's self serving, tech optimistic narratives leading them deeper into dependence.

Yielding on this point, sacrificing regulation and taxation of technology (the US conveniently did not include the massive digital service surplus in their tariff calculations), would prove terminal in a world where the choice may come down to forced outsourcing of knowledge labor to the fully observable US platforms - platforms in a position and with a history of disintermediating entire industries (Amazon Basics…)- or building your own infrastructure, likely leveraging Chinese provided Open Source.

I believe it very likely that future US hardware, especially in AI, will include model signing akin to how game publishers handle content on consoles, locking out Open Source undermining US tech dominance.