One wrote the memo, one wrote the myth

I’ve mentioned before that the tools we use aren’t just products, they’re extensions of another country’s foreign policy.

That’s nothing recent, it’s been true since before most of us started even using them.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, digging up a speech Al Gore gave back in the late 1980s ^[1]. He wasn't shy about it: dominating computing wouldn't just juice the US economy, whichever country "most completely assimilates high-performance computing" would own the next century. Not a hunch, a plan.

Then, in 1996, came the perfect cover story, which I admit I fell for at the time. John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace ^[2]: “Governments of the Industrial World … You have no sovereignty where we gather”. I later found out he wrote this at Davos, schmoozing with the actual heads of government he was telling to get lost. The irony wrote itself.

Barlow’s declaration became scripture for a whole generation of internet policy: governments out, the network self-governs, cyberlibertarian jazz all the way down

What it actually did was keep everyone's eyes off the one government that had already decided this was a dominance play. While everyone pretended Cyberspace was above nations, one government let them, and built the locks underneath.

So when you suddenly find your cloud contracts, your generative AI tools, or your dependence on US platforms being used as leverage, that’s not a new threat showing up. It’s a very old one taking off its coat.

The time to plan an exit was decades ago but, now that the mask is off, the next best time is now.

Colin

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990SPIE.1179..526M/abstract
[2] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence