I was thinking about this last night. In wars we often issue war bonds and people go around asking everyone to contribute what they can. Why not reinvent this but concepts including co-operatives, employee councils, kickstarter, social awareness, community awareness, inclusion of minorities and socially disadvantaged people, etc.
How about a technology investment bond, or a direct investment fund into new enterprises to build these up.
Shame the rich to invest into them instead but we know that won’t work so let’s all invest so we don’t have to rely on them.
I know it’s politically challenging but I would happily invest my pension pot into companies to improve our European tech in a socially aware and fair system, than the current US stock market it’s half made up of (I will change this!). Hell, just give grants to the open source community to develop things and let everyone in the world benefit
See, this could do something, far beyond what a grassroots boycott can.
However, I have low trust that the way forward on this is dumping money on local competitors. The reality of it is you can’t build a new Amazon where Amazon already exists, you need to remove the anticompetitive foreign agents before you can prop up homegrown ones. There WERE Facebook-like European competitors before Facebook wrecked them. There ARE Amazon alternatives that work just as well in places where Amazon hasn’t encroached its insane web of fully owned logistics.
You want to create a European tech alternative? Start enforcing digital antitrust. Not fines, break-ups and forced sales of local branches. If the US can do it to Tiktok the EU can do it to Meta, Amazon, Google and the like.
You want to create a European tech alternative? Start enforcing digital antitrust. Not fines, break-ups and forced sales of local branches. If the US can do it to Tiktok the EU can do it to Meta, Amazon, Google and the like.
100%.
Thx for saying it. And that’s so much not limited to tech…
Everyday, I look at our French ‘exception culturelle’ with some kind of respect. It’s a law that make it so small bookshops have not been destroyed by Amazon (Amazon is forced to sell books at the exact same price as your local shop) and which, among many other things, make it so it’s mandatory to have 30% or so of local/French content in main media. That’s a great law and because it’s a great law, I wonder for how much longer it will hold against the US endless appetite and against the voracity of many here in the EU too that are more than willing to fill their pockets in the process of killing and burying local cultural productions.
This is long overdue. Why Europeans were so happy to just hop on US services with horrible privacy and abusive practices is beyond me. Had the EU prioritized European alternatives and innovation, much pain would have been avoided.
Maybe because we’ve hopped on US for absolutely everything else? Defense, culture, education, societal values (and priorities/focuses). Even for food (posting that from France, surrounded by fast-foods ;)).
Alas.
Indeed. But for the last 30 or 40 years anyone trying to raise awareness about that was disqualified in one way or another. It was as painful as when people tried to discuss the necessity of, you know, not delegate EU defense to the USA.
Now, the damage has been done and it’s deep. It will be much more difficult and so, so much more costly to try to get out of that situation… without any assurance we will succeed.
Yeah, I want my cafes and restaurants back here in France 🥲
yes. SO much so!
Here in Paris, we still have the choice to go to real nice places (less and less so, mind you or at absurdly fancy prices). I noticed how many restaurants have been replaced or have turned themselves into, well, not restaurants. I mean, not just in those touristic spots where, well, they open to do business with one time customers. I’m talking even in those places where actual Parisians do live and where they want to go eat/have a drink.
There has been a huge shift I don’t know how it happened but I can see the result: many now sell microwaved and over-processed industrial junk food as if it was something real cooking. The same with bakeries btw, which is so effing sad. Many are now nothing more than selling points for bread/pastries that is industrially processed and delivered to their door ready to be heated if not already to be sold. That’s shit.
At the corner of our street, we have that bakery where the owner and his apprentices are still doing every single thing they sell by hand. They work hard, they struggle and, yeah, they’re more expensive than the many non-bakeries everywhere but they’re so fucking tasty and they’re not machines. The guys is doing fine but many like him are not, and they’re forced to close. And then it’s too often one of those ‘bread selling points’ (I refuse to call those a bakery) that is replacing them.
Miss them too…
