Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service.
Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that the US-centric technology catalog (from hardware to software to services to clouds) cannot be trusted long term, as just a single bad administration will expose how easily the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China or Russia. Welp, now we’re here.
Would love to see a ditching of not just tech in favor of homegrown options.
I admit that I was initially on the globalization bandwagon, but in hindsight it resulted in products being made in countries with the cheapest costs which led to a decrease in quality and the destruction of smaller, more local businesses.
Go to a tourist area anywhere in the world and you'll be confronted by the same businesses--Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple Store, H&M, Zara. It's the homogenization and boringification of the world.
Making more stuff in the countries with the cheapest costs also means that people in those countries are being lifted out of poverty. China's GDP per capita went from ~350USD in 1990 to 12.500USD in 2023 and similar growth happened for India, Bangladesh and lots of other poorer countries. Globalization brought affordable goods to wealthy nations and better living standards to poorer nations. In addition, closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict.
Smart wealthy countries understand these benefits and move their own economies to higher value creating activities like deep research, high tech development or financial services. Less smart wealthy countries try to erect trade barriers to force a return of uncompetitive manufacturing...
> closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict
This was 100% what Europe believed and the Merkel administration in Germany more than anyone. Not to bring politics into HN intentionally, but I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and threats of invading Poland, Finland, and Germany from Russian spokesmen or MPs kind of throws cold water on this theory.
No matter how well meaning you are, you can't expect dictators and "strong men" to ever act in anything but bad faith. It is time the west realizes this and acts accordingly. As an American, I'm sad to see the "de-americaning" happening due to those here who elected a bad administration, but I can't say it is surprising. Ultimately, a less weak and less dependent on the US Europe is a net good for the world. Europe collectively being able to put a check on the US forces the US to not do stupid things, so this is good long term.
I agree with what you're saying, but lowering the risk does not mean completely eliminating the problem. It's always hard to argue the counterfactual, but I feel the number of conflicts since 1990 that HAVEN'T happened due to countries being economically dependent on each other is significant.
Note that I said specifically dictators, and most of Europe isn’t that. The closest would be Orban and maybe Erdogan. But Hungary is seemingly a disliked minor player. Turkey is actually interesting in that Erdogan is a strong man and he’s actually really good at it seemingly. He’s also got a very modern and well trained military.
The US also isn't a dictatorship yet and certainly wasn't when we started becoming so dependent on them.
You can try avoiding dealings with any autocracies, but that's really hard given our modern world and it's not like other democracies can never screw you over. I think it's more realistic to demand that we diversify our imports so that we can react to things like Russia's Ukraine invasion better.
This reasoning completely ignores NATO essentially trampling over red lines established with Russia in the past, doing a soft coup in Ukraine in 2011 and reverting their stance on Ukraine joining NATO.
NATO is the reason Russia attacked, not because "Germany was soft". Over-reliance on an external parter for a strategic economic input (cheap gas) was also a huge mis-step (all while shutting down self-reliant nuclear plants), but doesn't really dispute the "closer trade lowers likelihood of conflict" argument.
Or put in another way, Ukraine can't be free and get a shot at democracy because imperialistic Russia deems it its sphere of influence.
And no amount of denouncing US hypocrisy in defending democracy will make me change my mind. Two wrongs doesn't make a right and if it happens that Pax Americana allows a country to take a more democratic route, then let it happen.
Or as some Ukrainian said :
"We are not Russian doorstep, we are free, independent Ukraine. F** you"
Sorry, could you elaborate on "Meanwhile people in the West are being dropped into poverty."?
As for " lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?" - pretty well, thank you. Deaths in armed conflicts have massively decreased since the 1980s with most of them originating from local wars in Africa prior to 2022. (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) - the Ukraine conflict is a return of exactly the kind of imperialist expansion that we've seen in the leadup to World War 1 which happens when isolated countries with territorial ambitions seek to expand.
I'm curious - in 2021, the top 1% earned 26% of all income in the united states. What % of total contribution to the country's federal income tax would you consider fair?
I’m all for poorer countries getting a slice of the pie. Long term I’m not convinced it’s beneficial for the whole population of richer countries to continue, but rather only the elites of those countries. The amount income inequality has skyrocketed in recent decades sort of undermines the theoretical benefits economists love to tout.
Nowadays manufacturing does not have to be uncompetitive. Advances in automation balance out wage disparities. They also provide more chances for a country to retain its skilled workers. Unions in developed nations can help the systematic power imbalance between capitalists and workers.
It's especially beneficial for the poorest people in the developed nation. In the 1940 US, the poorest 20% spent almost their entire income on basic needs, such as food and basic clothing. Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations. Yes, globalization has massively increased market sizes, making the richest much richer. But it also made the poorest much richer.
> Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations.
Well 1940’s being a wartime era would be a bad time to compare to. It’d be best to compare to compare to just before globalization, probably 1960’s, 70’s, or even early 80’s.
Smartphones and flatscreen TVs aren’t necessities. Sure it’s great they’re cheap but they’d be cheap anyway. Only a fairly small fraction of manufacturing costs are due to labor based on leaked iPhone costs I’ve seen that were like 10’s of dollars.
At the same time housing costs have increased massively in the last 2 decades. Worker wages in most fields have not kept apace productivity gains. It’s worse in affluent areas where “free” money has skyrocketed housing prices. Perhaps it’s not related to globalization but it seems partly due to it.
> countries with the cheapest costs which led to a decrease in quality and the destruction of smaller, more local businesses.
So, you alone declare that it has led to these things so everyone should isolate and drive up costs and share less? I get that we can't let the free market go unchecked, but free trade seems fundamental to competition and innovation.
Despite the McDonald'ses, Amsterdam is not very boring or like, say, Prague.
I don't go to a touristy city for the shopping. Thanks to the Internet, I can already do that from anywhere, really. Sometimes I go to a touristy city for restaurants, but the presence of McDonald's doesn't take away from the dizzying array of typical food options in these places. Plus, globalization, to some degree, made it easy for a Dutch chef to come to my city to open a restaurant.
While I don't like the politics giving rise to this, de-globalization combined with the great social media unbundling and other trends means we might finally see decentralization be a major trend (outside of the cryptocurrency ghetto).
Overall I think this is a good thing. It could mean the end of the monolithic closed SaaS era, which is the absolute worst possible model for software if you care about privacy or any kind of personal or business sovereignty.
I would guess that for the most part we won’t have “true” decentralization, but given the EU has mandated interoperability between big providers like Apple and Facebook I can imagine that we will eventually have major services that are EU centric (either in certain markets or most/all of the EU), and there will be ways for people to use their own setup as well (basically multi polar distribution, plus the ability for someone to do it themselves).
> I can imagine that we will eventually have major services that are EU centric
I work in a research project in a EU country that looks at how educational certificates (diploma's, degrees, credentials) will be done in the future.
A big part of it, are requirements and frameworks imposed, dictated or assumed by governments, commissions, universities, etc. The most important¹ parts of these requirements are:
- it must be self-sovereign. Not decentralized per-se, but technically often one step further than decentralized. My diploma, in my wallet (mobile?) is mine. I hold it, I am free to share it, delete it, copy it.
- it must be separated from the issuers. A person getting a degree might outlive a university, high school, or their servers/services.
- it must be privacy preserving - GDPR and better.
These constraints tell me that the EU, and EC are serious about decentralization and self-sovereign-identities. Which is very different from what local or current governments like and want - At least one EU government is in conflict with its universities and wants to be the gatekeeper of diploma's - they truly want the ability to deny or retract diploma's from people who they don't like.
Which, ironically, makes these constraints and requirements all the more important and critical in e.g. our projects. It went from a "decentralization is nice because in theory someone could..." to "decentralization is critical to ensure no-one, on any end of any political spectrum can take away diploma's as is currently being attempted".
(And for the curious: I work with W3C, openId, IETF and many more standards and -bodies. Verifiable Credentials, OpenBadges v3, OIDC4VCI, VP, etc)
¹ Edit: well, maybe not "most", as there isn't a clear prioritization. And obvious requirements such as "you cannot just fake a diploma" are probably higher in priority.
There is tech decentralization and and manufacturing decentralization. Both are being treating equally right now; however, frankly, they probably shouldn't.
Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.
Manufacturing, imo, makes a lot more sense to be spread based on strengths and weaknesses and the logistics benefits (localize supply chains closer to end product).
The current US admin has certainly exposed some of the pitfalls of being technologically reliant on America. Honestly, the main outcome of this will be lower economic/job prospects for American tech employees. It will soon be that having a branch of Microsoft in Europe is not quite the same as utilizing actual European countries.
I would really like to see this trend reversed, but I am afraid some of the damage is already done and will take a long time, if ever, to recover. It would not surprise me if some of this damage is intentional, since it will actually take power away from west coast tech - a population that tends to vote in one direction.
> Data is proving to be valuable and should only be managed by very trusted allies - countries with similar ideals that truly are buddies.
Outside Trump — not all Republicans, specifically Trump — the USA was as close to being Europe's buddy as I think it's possible for nations to be.
I'm not convinced nations can actually be buddies, but even with my cynicism, Bush's administration was Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, while Trump is behaving like each "deal" is a completely independent Prisoner's Dilemma.
And yes, that's despite how much we mocked GWB (I even got quoted on the national news for doing so!), and despite how America mocked itself with Team America: World Police, that version of the country still saw itself as needing to go through the motions of friendship.
There is nothing wrong with global software, as long as it is self-hosted open source that you can control and you mitigate the risks by contributing back time and money to the projects you use.
Maybe it's a blessing in disguise, yes. But I wrote up here [0] about
how sad this makes me feel. We've squandered a huge opportunity this
past 20 years by allowing BigTech to emerge and basically destroy the
good political agenda of the original (D)ARPA project. Sure it was
hegemonic. Sure we screwed up with things like "Arab Spring".
But I cannot stop feeling the Internet was the greatest tool of
democracy and liberty - and we messed it up by allowing weak minded
greedy and insecure types to take over.
It's no surprise that the latest brand of technofascist thugs targeted
"data" as the new power-lever. "Flipping" carefully installed
defective leaders is a new kind of threat and a new kind of attack we
need to think about more in cybserscurity.
I don't think it needs us to be Cassandras for everyone to understand
(vigilance is the essence of democracy) that if we want good, nice
things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily. I'm
also quietly optimistic that taking it back won't be such a big deal
as we fear. We'll just have a lot of repair work to do when this sad
episode is over. I think a Euro-centric rebuild will be a useful step
towards a healed global vision again. One day.
My personal perspective is that our (technology evangelists) mistake was constantly lowering the barrier to entry under the guise of removing "gatekeeping" abilities of entrenched players. This idea that technology would be this great equalizer, lifting everyone up together and spreading free access to information to everyone would somehow solve so many of our ills.
The reality is that most people do not care enough about the systems of life to educate themselves, and bad actors exploited this constant lowering of the barrier to entry by flooding these forced-participants with advertising, "free" services, and a glut of cognitohazards. We created a world where authenticity comes not from expertise, but how pretty and usable your website is - and that had knock-on effects our elders tried to warn us about (just look at games like Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, and similar cyberpunk games of the era and how they warned about mass surveillance, forced adoption of technologies, centralization of infrastructure, etc).
> ...if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily.
This is what I've been trying to instill in others for nearly twenty years, since my days of playing SysAdmin in High School and bypassing proxy-based web filters to get to Newgrounds. To truly be participatory in any community, you must volunteer time in bettering it somehow. Maybe volunteer to be a moderator and improve site policies, or donate surplus resources towards self-hosting, or just helping folks move to better, less centralized or more community-supported platforms.
How I see it digital literacy 1.0 was crude stimulus and not at all
disguised, to get globally competitive in the new microprocessor wave,
and in the late 70s and early 80s Japan, and to a lesser extent USA
were players at the time. BASIC for school kids was like cod liver oil
in the workhouse gruel. It made us strong. The "equaliser" worked out
well for the few, ones like me, maybe you. Digital literacy 2.0 is a
different project. It's to enable those two generations removed, who
natural tech users facing de-stimulus and social warehousing, what
that tech is really for and who really controls it. Keep at it.
>the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China
You typed this on hardware made by a hostile state actor: China.
As long as the hardware side of digital civilization is completely dependent on the Chinese communist regime, I certainly don't worry about American tech companies dominating the software side.
There are alternatives on the software side if you want them, meanwhile try to build a computer system without hardware made in China..
It is not perfect, but in a number of areas it is significantly better than MS Office, and this has been the case since it was still OpenOffice back in 2005: I'd import collaborative schoolwork into Open Office to fix the mismatch of styles that other students had used[1] and then (to be fair) I'd export it back to Word format and do final formatting in Word to get the exact layouts and page numering options that was demanded from us.
Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.
If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.
A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.
With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.
List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.
[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)
Good enough for the vast majority. Just not the ones making the decisions. And when it is changed, you have to fight all m$ because it keeps breaking formats and compatibility let alone standardisation with others.
Right, so your argument is that this is easy, and if it turns out that it's not, we'll just be smug and tell them that they were holding it wrong all along?
It sounds like you are picturing in your head that all spreadsheet work is greenfield. Do you have any idea how much Excel code is embedded everywhere? Very often made by people who are no longer around. You can lecture all you want, but this is the situation. I don't like it either.
Did not intend to be smug...honestly..not really. :-) In my defense, I have more than 20 years corporate experience in tech AND finance domains, in more than 25 countries. And in the cultural domains of the five different languages I am familiar and whose grammar I regularly brutalize. Can't recognize the problem you are describing, as the mountain that would stop any company from start using LibreOffice.
All that logic in Excel sheets is just a serious governance problem...
LibreOffice works for 99.99% of the cases where Microsoft Office is being used. Moreover, NextCloud offers a free "LibreOffice on the web" capability if you prefer.
Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice.
Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).
I got access to a NextCloud instance as part of my Hetzner storage.
Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works.
I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!
LibreOffice calc is barely usable for the smallest spreadsheets. Google sheets is better, but comes with its own set of issues and dumb limitations. Excel is at this point in time irreplaceable.
I don't think people realize how much of the world runs off of excel, especially the financial world. Excel still "supports" buggy issues from versions in the 1990s as to not break financial models.
IBM mainframes do the same thing with COBOL because modernizing core code means having to notify and test all the downstream users that have their own code to deal with the legacy issues in the current stack. I was once explained by a retired COBOL programmer (who spends his summers contracting for maintenance) how this tangled mess of thousands of banks feeds in all the way to the US central bank to determine interest rates - in some extreme cases, IBM still has to emulate hardware bugs as to not change expected behaviour. This is not something you just migrate away from or fuck around with. There's a reason IBM still sells mainframes that runs code from the 1960s.
I know what you mean, but now you're talking about a very niche market. Finance, which uses Excel or spreadsheets since 90s. You can't replace these, I agree.
But for other uses of Excel, I can say it can be easily exchanged. This is why I used 99.99% percent, but not more nines. The remaining "three nines" are the niches you're talking about.
It's like how we say "Nah, it's a small set of matrices. just 2, 3000x3000, double precision floating point matrices, and a couple of vectors and some multiplication (i.e. in a range of a couple of billions)".
It sounds like a niche market, but every company in the world has a finance department that plugs everything from sales forecasts, various inputs (goods, employment, supply chain components, etc), to things we don't even think of that flow through it. At some point these companies are talking with other companies and a shocking amount of data interchange is done by emailing excel spreadsheets around (or CSVs exported from excel).
I forget about it myself as I've worked for modern tech companies since 2008, but outside of that world is a very different place where old ways of doing things stick around. Anecdotally, about 2 years ago I got a cold email from a co-op job that I had in 2002 for a manufacturing company that I wrote a perl script for asking for help modernizing it. The perl script consolidated raw EDI(1) files coming into some ancient HP-UX machine, then exported it...to an excel file, MS Access DB, and a SAP DB so that the accountants and the manufacturers could simultaneously get work processing the order. When I started people were inputting these all manually.
I recently switched from Excel. I'm not a FOSS ideologue, but I found that Calc does more of the things I need with less of the distraction, more customisability, and less irritation with bugs and breaking updates.
It's true I'm not a spreadsheet power user - but not many people are.
The trouble is that excel really does have a disproportionate share of all the tiny applications that keep the world running, so it's very very hard to move.
I remember back in the 00s Excel could support millions of rows on an office PC used in a bank department to check approvals for loans. I don't want to know what perversions they're doing now but at some point all that needs to get in normal DBs.
Damn, you might be right. I even made a tutorial on Excel ODBC for our sales department recently and completely forgot it's ancient tech. But even then, why in the hell would you query that much shit outside of management diagrams...
Client company of mine likes to document server rack layouts with Excel sheets (not a bad idea really). I used LibreOffice for years to _read_ those Excels, but any time I would write the smallest change the whole Excel sheet broke... In the end I just bought Office (one-time payment still exists) and while that company is using Macs and I'm using Windows we never have any problems sharing and modifying those xls files.
[1] "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community..."
Nah, it is not gonna be that simple. Office is not just editing software, that would be fairly easy to replace, Office is a collaboration suite, provides documents storage, provides authorization and authentication that can be integrated with practically anything companies, governments, universities are using.
Can we go back to '90 and relay on sending documents by email?
Building an alternative, even on the level of Google Docs, which has editing capabilities on the MS Word 2.0 level, is not gonna be simple, although I am surprised that European Union is ready to spend a lot of money on adjusting caps to bottles (this costed billions), but is not able to invest into its own capabilities in terms of IT infrastructure.
Easier than it looks.The EU is currently still sending 200 Billion EUR a year
in oil and gas imports to Russia per year.
A peanuts project of 100 million EUR ( basically one Microsoft Global Customer Contract...) could get something like this or similar going within 24 months:
Except for emailing Linux kernel patches...:-)
Do people for example do that with Code in 2025?
Or do they use Version Management and Shared Portals
with document locking?
Are most companies having three or four employees working
in the SAME document at the SAME time? Maybe while singing
Kumbaya over Teams? That would not be very efficient...
The files can be on a shared filesystem with open file locking, the word processing suite is irrelevant.
Samba existed long before google docs and already did this.
We only use google because of the convenience of having everything in one interface. I think this is the real issue, we are all so lazy we would rather give away our freedom for a little bit of convenience.
Obama just made a random decision to make a China pivot. We had a large force in the Middle East and instead of just bringing them home, we created this weird apparatus to shift the strategy over to China. This is similar to if your company decided to introduce Agile. That extension of your company will never go away, and will have ideas.
The idea that “someone is stealing our technology” is just an idea, similar to “developers don’t give good estimates or timelines”. An idea that will feel like the right idea to all, and will be copied. Copy cat culture exists in war too (why are you fighting them? Because they are fighting me).
This is a contrived problem, and demagogues like Trump seized on it. Was it all Obama’s fault? Not quite. Bush had already created a war apparatus in the 2000s, and there was no turning it off, just turning it around and pointing it somewhere else.
——
We are the storytellers of this history, we lived it. We are the primary sources, don’t doubt your ability to document this history. AI was never imagined in the halls of Research to create a never ending forever digital war.
Data sovereignty is a piece of cake, you can survive here easily, unless with some inconvenience like lack of access to Netflix fake documentaries.
European Union decided to sing EU–Mercosur Association Agreement, which will make European agriculture unable to sustain in comming years. As a result in case of war, sea routes blockade or Mercosur teaming up with Russia (what is happening anyway) Europeans will die from starvation.
Data sovereignty is the true trend of the next decade. Not Quantum, not AI, but the new multi-pole world order divesting from Americentric technologies and back into the sort of locally-grown economies that children of the Cold War would be familiar with. Local vendors serving local needs with a focus on regional, not global, scale and service.
Us Cassandra types have been screaming for years that the US-centric technology catalog (from hardware to software to services to clouds) cannot be trusted long term, as just a single bad administration will expose how easily the US Government could disrupt “business as usual” or turn into a hostile state actor a la China or Russia. Welp, now we’re here.
Man, I hate being right.