noa ks
There is a growing movement to escape the american tech companies. I am all for this: the united states has too much power and is acting very badly, and i frankly don’t trust them with my data. But a large part of this movement is not only focusing on avoiding american tech corporations, but rather on actively embracing european ones.
I’m not going to do that! I think focusing on europe misses the point. What we should be doing is embracing smaller companies with sustainable business models, regardless of their country of origin. There is still a place for boycotting companies in countries that are doing terrible things right now (like the us, for example), but europe is not by itself the producer of perfect, user respecting software.
I tried to think of some european tech companies, and the first ones i could think of were spotify and klarna, neither of which provides what i would describe as a good, user-respecting service. This does not mean that there aren’t a lot of smaller, nicer companies making smaller, nicer software. But neither does the existence of silicon valley culture, or facebook, google, openai, apple, and so on being based in the us, mean that the us is not also capable of having smaller, nicer software companies.
European countries, and also the european union, have some good laws, and they also have some bad laws, and ultimately switching out some predatory silo in the us with a predatory silo in europe doesn’t strike me as a great deal.
Furthermore, the avoidance of other continents leaves a bit of a sour taste. There may be some particular countries that people wish to avoid software from, for various reasons, but the majority of the world is capable of making good, respectful software; and as i said, so is the us, and it’s a shame for those independent developers that their government is doing their very best to make everyone else feel uncomfortable with spending money to support these developers.
If i’m going to use a service, i don’t look at the country it’s based in so much as i look at the way it is run: spotify is a terrible company, and it would be terrible regardless of where it’s from. Codeberg on the other hand seems to be doing a lot of the right things, but being based in europe is not a necessary condition for it to be doing those good things.
One company i’ve had almost entirely good dealings with for multiple years is fastmail, and i will continue to keep paying for them as long as the good vibes continue. Given that they’ve been around for over twenty-five years, i feel fairly confident that that will be a good while. But they are not a european company: they are simply a company who saw a niche, built the best product in that niche, and then made people pay a reasonable amount of money for it rather than giving it away for free, which is a famously bad business practice in the world of honest business practices. I’ve seen some people actually suggest that australia be considered an honorary european country, in the same way that it is in the eurovision song contest: this gives me the same kind of bad taste in my mouth, as if europe is even more of a special club than a politicised geographical area with a shared history of philosophy and colonialism, and that any country can get into it if it wants as long as the population is majority white, a criterion backed up by the fact that these same people have also suggested christening canada as honorarily european as well.
The solution, to me, is not to call australia and canada european so that you can feel happy that you are “choosing europe” while using australian and canadian tech, but rather to stop talking about “choosing europe” and start talking about “choosing companies that rely on making a high quality product and charging a fair price over companies that give you their shit for free and then suck up all your data in order to please an ever more thirsty crowd of investors they sold out to in order to not go bust in their first year of business”.