I will not blame a nation for the faults of their leaders. There are many US people I love. But, the leadership of the US is a global problem.
One thing I feel pretty assured about (but sometimes cross-analyse) is that I have a moral compass, and I can recognise when people are operating outside of it.
Asking “who is telling the truth” in a debate with many layers, when you’re looking for “ultimate truth”, is important – and it’s also important to always consider the layers and how they impact people’s decision-making. But ultimately, I feel can tell when somebody is a tyrant or operating from a selfish or narcissistic motive.
It’s also quite easy to see when somebody isn’t in a debate to be reasonable, they’re there to enforce power through force. Trump treated Zelensky like Rome would have treated a defeated Germanic King trying to bargain for their livelihood under Roman rule; Rome retorting “you don’t have a say in your future, we do – take your savage crown off and put on your new Roman armour”.
Sometimes, and I think this is getting more important, we need to not get lost in the philosophical debate of utilitarianist righteousness and just call out evil for what it is. Evil is when somebody, or a nation, is operating out of their own desires over the needs of everyone in the world.
Last night, the US’s leadership confirmed to me my held belief: the US is built on a selfish form of capitalism. It developed neoliberalism to be a puppet show of US power in the global economy.
It’s time to stand against that power. US has been blocking world progress in so many humanitarian and ecological developments since the second world war in the name of [economic] “progress” [for them]. To me, it outweighs all the thanks they think they deserve.
It’s been the thorn in the side of so many attempts to reduce cruelty and pollution worldwide.
It’s given us social networks that have distorted our thinking, politics and culture.
US culture has been keeping us fat – eating its shit fast food. And lazy – using its “I don’t want to walk for over 10 minutes” services. It’s been filling our bodies up with plastic and our landfills up with more plastic. It’s been commoditising our faith, art, values and even love. It’s distorted our etiquette, our morals and our traditions. It’s making us forget how to spell properly. It’s wiping out history with a Babylonic whitewashing claiming that we all need its economic support and practices.
When a superpower gets so big that it doesn’t think it needs allies or that it’s an indispensable ally (asking Starmer if the UK could handle Russia without the US in a press conference), it’s time for a rise of competition.
It seems like they have got us all fighting over small things as a distraction whilst they make big moves we can’t stop by being a solid unit because there’s too much in-fighting to unite against the bigger power. They keep us fighting about [relatively] small problems so that we’re distracted and not united.
These are historically proven political and military tactics and strategies.
All this aside, Zelensky looked like the good guy whilst America looked evil last night, and even trying to reframe it as “Trump is making tough calls on deals that lead to peace” doesn’t add up.
In fact, it could be as insane as some of the old American sales books I’ve read where people judge people for not making a good first impression for not wearing a suit and refusing to do business with them just on that basis.
It’s hard to know what to do on a personal level. I’m grateful our country wasn’t insane enough to put The Conservatives or Farage in power, but now focus for my politics is going to gravitate towards parties that distance themselves from the US, whether that be for a stronger Europe, or a move towards a form of economic nationalism focused on the social needs of its people (🛠️).
To start, I’m going to be winding down ways I am paying towards the US economy. That means cancelling subscriptions to their services (I have to keep what I need for work), but personal internet consumption needs to change.
I want to listen to more vinyl over using DSPs, but I need to think about my portable music consumption methods. Even Bandcamp would be out of the picture in this scenario, so I really need to think how this works.
In general, I will start paying more attention to what is British made and British owned, and start asking “is this British?” before buying it.
It goes without saying I have much love for so many people in the US, and so much of their culture has inspired me in so many positive ways. But the nastiness of the US is spreading faster than the good. I can’t see past the fact their elected leadership is a tyranny. If the world needs to close doors to them and their trade towards a healthier, more competitive economy with more national self-reliance, then that’s the way the world should go. If the world needs to fight wars without them as an ally, that’s the way to go. Globalisation was never an option that was going to be OK.
US tech services are stronger than we give credit for
Since originally writing this, it’s already become clear that this is a very difficult endeavour in the modern world that is going to take a lot of entrepreneurial and political development in Europe to break away from.
Nearly all of the US services I pay for, I use for work.
- YouTube Premium: I can’t do my job effectively with ads interrupting me constantly.
- Spotify: not of US origin but is heavily funded and interwoven with the US stock exchange.
- Notion: I have heavily integrated into this platform to the point it will be very difficult to get off of it.
- Microsoft: Pretty difficult to escape your operating system
- Instagram: Of course, I gave up most social media years before, and could do again, but I finally feel like I’ve got quite a good relationship with it and that it does bring some value to my life (as well as being essential for work).
And so on…
Is Europe actually capable of competing in the tech market?
In my experience, Europe were always the leaders in music tech. Most my favourite music tech software and hardware in my lifetime has come from Europe.
But when I started thinking about what exists in the music tech space (my main arena) now, it was a bit of a struggle…
I went looking for anyone building a European-made fan-focused DSP.
There’s such potential for a platform that does things for fans; like give them awesome gamified data – like how many times they’ve streamed a song (I find myself on a video on YouTube often thinking “I wonder how many times I’ve been here before, and what date I last visited?”), comments/message boards, ability for artists to actually do things on the platform like stream whenever they want?
YouTube videos and their pages actually have potential of becoming like interactive spaces, like memorial sites, if attention was put into the individual pages.
Consider some of the good things about YouTube built in, but with Spotify Wrapped level data everyday…
Then, there’s SoundCloud ~2010. Most of us that used SoundCloud in its glory days see its pivot towards becoming a DSP (with all of the major catalogue available) as part of the reason for its loss of favour with a lot of its core initial userbase.
DSPs are so far from perfect for fans & artists and I just wonder why nobody is building one that actually makes sense for the people who actually use them, instead of the usual approach to a new DSP which always focusing on the royalty, copyright and licensing aspects over actual UI/UX (which made Spotify so powerful in the first place)? Obviously I’m definitely not the naïve outsider who thinks that’s irrelevant, but there are definitely ways to serve the music community without paying the majors for the privilege.
I think AUDIUS are doing great things in this space last I saw, but I’d really love to see a European-based version who go one step further with data and exciting features for fans, as well as something different from the typical DSP offering for artists.
Deezer has been suggested. I was an early user of Deezer and may start paying a lot more attention again now. I must admit, I had become a bit disappointed in them in recent times for pandering to the majors more and more. I don’t see user-centric payments (in the UMG-trojan horse form they’ve been adopted) as a good thing.
Plus, they’re not really doing anything any different for the user than other DSPs from what I know? They used to be quite innovative with the cool algorithmic “just press play” button they had (can’t remember the name), but other algorithmic features on other dsps got well ahead. There is definitely hope for Deezer, but I’d like to see more from them in doing something new to compete in taking more of the market.
I definitely see their struggle. Rewinding to my initial point, I’m suggesting a DSP that doesn’t carry such heavy weight – i.e. boycotting major label music. This will obviously limit user count, but it will allow a focus to be built that’s artist and fan-first – AS LONG AS the UI/UX is convincing enough for users to choose it over the alternatives.
Spotify’s major selling points were UX related. Yes, they ended up securing all of the major catalogues, but it picked up traction before that and then the majors had to buy-in.
UK leaders in AI?
Sir Starmer has been talking an awful lot about the UKs increased investment in AI as we’re “world leaders” recently – but I don’t see any evidence of this.
I’m sure there is a macro area we’re performing well in that is significant, but what about the consumer market?
OpenAI are clearly the mainstream favourite, and all of the other big tech platforms are keeping up well with competing with them. If we can’t compete here, they’ll continue getting all of the market support to develop faster and we won’t hold leadership very long.
Sadly, in capitalism to stay in competition, it needs to be funded. That means consumer-investment, stocks/shares and taxation.
A European Social Media platform
Ultimately, I think Europeans need a European playground to grow from. This comes down to us needing our own social media platform.
This is where Sir Starmer should focus. Building a nationalised ISP (preferably paid for as a tax-based utility service) with a well-supported and highly engaging social platform would be the power move here. A UK-based everything app, on our own infrastructure, regulated by our own government. Now we’re talking 👌