The enshittification of American hegemony

"It's MAGA baby ... it's a brave new world"

In the middle of yet another exciting week in the deranged relationship between the United States and the international economy, Abe Newman and I have a new piece in WIRED (online version here; a slightly shorter version appearing in the next print issue) that lays out a way of thinking about the new world that Trump is creating. What we talk about is different from the 50% tariffs on Brazil, in retaliation for the prosecution of coup-fancying former president Jair Bolsonaro, and the 35% tariffs on Canadian goods (sort-of) and 30% tariffs on the European Union. But it’s connected.

Our core argument:

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the … platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. … For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. … So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network.

To see where we go with this, click the link and go read the piece at WIRED. But the broader insight is a mindmeld of our ideas and Cory’s.

Back in 2019, Abe and I wrote an academic article on what we called “weaponized interdependence.” In this, and our later book, Underground Empire, we explained how the U.S. was able to piggyback on US businesses’ dominance of the networks that wove the global economy together. If you wanted to transfer money from one country to another, it was hard to avoid the US dollar. If you wanted to communicate, you used the Internet, likely sending your information through chokepoints that the US could tap into. Semiconductor supply chains were lined with the fishhooks of US intellectual property and critical inputs. And so on. We explained how the US has increasingly turned its control of infrastructure into political dominance.

Then, Cory coined the term “enshittification” to describe the degradation of online platforms such as Google search and TikTok over time. Cory’s basic insight involves a fundamental clash of interest between the platform owners, and its users and vendors, which becomes increasingly problematic fo the users and vendors, as they get locked into a platform, so that they don’t have real alternatives. There’s nothing stopping the owners from abusing those who rely on them.

So what we did in the WIRED piece was to bring together our argument together with Cory’s, to explain what is happening to American power under Trump. The networks and infrastructures that we described, could just as well be described in Cory’s language as global platforms, which support the dominance of the United States of America. If you, as a US ally, buy into the F-35 weapons platform, or Starlink, or the US dollar, you are making yourself dependent on the goodwill of a foreign government that doesn’t even pretend to have your interests at heart any more. In the second Trump administration, America has entered into the stage of “hegemonic enshittification,” when it barely even bothers to pretend that its actions are in the collective interest. Instead, it uses its control of global finance to sanction the International Criminal Court, and threatening to deny Starlink access to Ukraine to force concessions on minerals.

The Trump administration bet is the same bet that Google, and Facebook, and X/Twitter are making. No matter how shitty their platforms get, their users are going to put up with wading through the sewage. They don’t have anywhere else to go.

In the WIRED piece, we get into the details of what American allies can and can’t do. How can they disentangle themselves from weapons systems or the US dollar? Europe, Canada, and other erstwhile allies of the U.S. have started working together formally and informally to figure out their options. In the article, we look at the “EuroStack” initiative, in which Europeans are trying to figure out how to build their own independent tech stack and platform economy, independent of U.S. influence. This is the most promising initiative by allies looking to disentangle themselves - but getting it up and running is going to be really expensive, tough and politically vexing.

Equally, many of the actions of the Trump administration over the last week suggest that America’s dominance is shakier than it would like. Trump’s tariff threats, as opposed to its use of the dollar etc are not platform enshittification under any reasonable interpretation. Global trade is a market, not a platform. But it is notable that the Trump administration is employing trade threats to bully allies so that they don’t abandon US dominated platforms.

Even before he won election, Trump was talking about deploying tariffs to stop allies from moving away from the US dollar. As per the New Republic, worries about BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) appears to be an important part of the reason why Trump is targeting Brazil. BRICS has not, to put it mildly, been a cohesive alliance. But the more that the US looks to hegemonetize and to pull the Delian League Switcheroo on its allies, the more attractive any alternative, no matter how problematic becomes:

As the BRICS bloc gradually consolidates itself as a viable alternative to the postwar U.S.-led global order—with its own infrastructure bank, think tanks, and annual fora—Washington will be faced with the question of how to respond. Will it adapt to a multipolar order it cannot fully control or insist on increasingly forceful displays of raw power?

The answer is obvious to Steve Bannon, MAGA’s leading anti-globalist, who said Brazil can easily solve its problem: “If you drop the trial and drop the charges, the tariffs go away.” When asked how this policy approach—which treats tariffs like sanctions—differed from extortion, he remarked that “it’s MAGA, baby … It’s a brave new world.”

The most profound problem that America’s European and Asian allies face is that U.S. platforms are increasingly being deployed as a tool of attempted regime change against democracies that choose to be democratic in ways that the Trump administration dislikes. America’s measures against a judge who has demanded that Xitter take down content that he saw as threatening Brazilian democracy, has been widely interpreted as an implied threat against the European Union’s regulation of US platforms and US AI, which J.D. Vance and the U.S. State Department have condemned. The current administration is remarkably frank about its implacable hostility to European efforts to protect basic democracy, claiming that the EU is:

trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.

The way to a better relationship with Europe, in their view, is the replacement of the existing political elite with one that is illiberal, and committed to the same values as the Trump administration. By preventing European platform regulations from being implemented, the US is doing everything it can to tilt the table in favor of a regime transition in the European Union.

If the U.S. wasn’t enshittifying the platforms that it controls, then other countries wouldn’t be considering how best to get away. It is quite amazing how rapidly the public debates in places like Europe and Canada have shifted, even while they are still looking for practical ways to protect themselves from their past protector. As the US tries to use platforms to re-engineer democracy in many of these countries, their choices are going to be increasingly difficult. Equally, they should note that if the US was truly secure in its platform power, it wouldn’t be making increasingly deranged threats against other countries that dare to consider other options. Trade uncertainty and trade wars are painful, but the alternatives are so much worse.