A countdown creates suspense and tension: preparing for 2025
The countdown is a tried and true trope in media. The clock is ticking and you know something important will happen.
It’s the perfect builder of tension.
Unfortunately, we have a real-world countdown happening with the wait for Trump’s presidency to begin and, as with the proverbial ticking bomb, there are things that need to be done before the timer hits zero. We might not be facing a literal explosion, but we’re facing a US president who has declared his intentions to assert control to an unprecedented degree.
Since unpredictability is one of the defining characteristics of Trump as a politician, it’s hard to prepare because you don’t really know what to expect, and even harder for those based in the US because they’re exposed to the full range of possible actions by a Trump regime. They might get lucky and get a Trump that is mostly just a repeat of his earlier presidency. But they might also get unlucky and get something that the US has never experienced before. You tick the obvious boxes – tariffs, renew your passports and documentation – but the range of possibilities defies thorough preparation.
It’s a little bit simpler for those of us outside the US, even if we live in countries as dependent on it as Iceland is.
Between the tech industry’s preexisting partnership with US security services, the enthusiastic support for Trump of many tech billionaires, and the seeming willingness of Trump’s prospective government to wield regulatory cudgels such as the weakening of Section 230, we can’t rule out the possibility that social, streaming, print, and broadcast media in the US will effectively end up under Trump crony control. Even outlets that aren’t directly controlled are likely to exhibit the Counterculture Switch I wrote about last week. What is normal and mainstream will shift even further under political pressure. The same shift could happen in both finance and computing.
To those of us in the software industry as well as those who work in media, this presents less as risks to our personal security – though you have to put a question mark to any notion of travelling to the US – but more as a set of new risks to our livelihoods.
Authoritarians are very bad for business and lethal to free enterprise. They favour oligopolies and monopolies because those are both easier to control and easier to loot. They will wield institutions and regulations as weapons.
This means that a number of systems we rely on are likely to become less stable in the future. Some of these are less likely scenarios than others, but speaking as an Icelander, just because a 7.0 richter earthquake in my region is unlikely, that it’s at all possible means you want to prepare. These aren’t predictions. Saying something like “Iceland will see a 6.5-7.0 richter earthquake at some point in the next hundred or so years, somewhere in the south”, isn’t really a prediction because it isn’t describing a specific event but a risk. It’s possible. We can’t nail it down to specific odds or a specific time. But we know that the odds are too high for us to pretend it can’t happen, so we need to at the very least consider it and then decide whether to prepare or not.
These are a quick and roughly sketched list the concerns that come to my mind. Yours is likely to be different.
Payment systems #
Even though online payments are heavily regulated here in Europe, the companies involved tend to be owned or controlled by US-based corporations. Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly that has been hard to unseat, and the nearest competitor – Paypal – is both still US-headquartered arguably just as heavy-handed as the credit card companies.
These companies already impose their ideologies on the world. For example, if you are a solo entrepreneur or small company, US cultural norms take precedent over those of the country you are based in. US puritanism outweighs our definitions of what counts as non-sexual nudity.
The risk we’re facing is that this bias could become more overt, heavy-handed, and political and this risk is most acute when you’re based outside the US but using a US-based payment processor. Authoritarian politicians in general also have fewer compunctions about setting wide-reaching laws. We don’t know whether the proposed tariffs will be limited to imported goods, and we don’t know if they’ll set their sites on services as well.
Another risk is that companies in authoritarian countries – China is a great example of this – obeying in advance to what they think the authorities want because they want to either curry favour or want to minimise their odds of becoming a target. The authorities in the US do not need to set specific rules or laws to create a hostile environment.
If we want to keep on selling to a largely global audience, we have to deal with credit cards somehow, so the only way we can mitigate this risk is to start looking for locally run payment processors as a backup. EU regulation covering domestic processors, for example, might temper the worst behaviours even if it won’t be able to prevent them all.
These processors likely won’t provide the same features or convenience, but having done a bit of research in advance can be the difference between losing all your sales for a couple of months and losing them for only a couple of weeks, if not days.
Distribution, media and promotion #
We can expect the app stores to remain tightly controlled and, judging from how readily these app stores have adjusted to the expectations of authoritarian governments in the past, it seems likely that their cooperation with US authorities will be as ready and enthusiastic.
The risk posed to small to medium-sized businesses, though, is deregulation and cronyism. These app stores already aren’t fair or free markets but are instead the closest modern analogue we have to the closed and controlled Soviet markets managed by a corrupt central committee. One set of rules for the entire world. One central authority for what can and can’t be sold. A single global set of rules for moral purity. These app stores are already biased against newer, smaller entrants and deregulation and cronyism is very likely to make it worse.
The same thing applies to search and other forms of discovery. They have been declining for a while, and it’s likely that the incoming US administration’s actions will make it worse, though exactly how is hard to guess.
We, outside the US, will probably see the biggest impact when it comes to media and promotion. Control over the media is step one in the modern authoritarian’s playbook. I would be very surprised if we didn’t see a constant drumbeat of media takeovers and overt acts of compliance over the next few years. This is likely to both make these platforms and outlets dysfunctional and to push them towards favouring specific US companies. If you’re relying on a mainstream social media platform or on mainstream media promotion to get your message out, there’s a non-zero chance that you will simply get cut out at some point.
Creating and maintaining a direct relationship with potential customers using tools that are harder to centrally control – feeds, newsletters, podcasts, federated or syndicated platforms, web apps – will give you a more robust foundation that’s less likely to fall apart at the smallest nudge from a disgruntled US bureaucrat.
US-based services, partnerships, and customers #
Even if the chaos of a Trump presidency is primarily limited to the US itself, that can affect the rest of us in tech because of how reliant we are on US-based services and partners.
Deportations or “security” actions could leave even large organisations effectively crippled if they happen to sweep up key employees, even if it’s genuinely by accident. Arbitrary legal restrictions can hamper normal operations. A culture of fear does not promote rational decision-making. Deregulation and cronyism can effectively sabotage the operation of a non-crony competitor. Their already wide-ranging police powers mean we already have to assume that the US government has access to anything that’s stored in US-based servers. An authoritarian government means we have to consider the possibility that it won’t have any hesitation to act on their access to further the interests of those it favours.
Any service we use that’s based in the US needs to be questioned.
- Is the information we store sensitive? Would it impact our business if an insider fed it directly to a competitor or to the police?
- Would our business suffer if the key employees or executives of a service we use were swept up in a police action, rendering the service dysfunctional for unpredictable stretches of time?
- Would it still be possible for us to use the service if it was taken over by a political group or a US-based competitor who was currently favoured by the local authorities?
- Do we have partners or customers in the US whose actions and data might be retroactively criminalised by the US? (Abortion laws is an example of this already happening. It showed the US right wing that it can be done.)
- Do our employees need to travel to the US on a regular basis? Could the data stored in these services, on social media, or other communications stored in the US cause them to be detained at the US border?
It’s unsafe to expect business as usual #
Many of these concerns may seem like hyperbole or paranoia, but they are genuinely toned down concerns because I’ve dismissed the idea of dealing with some of the possible worst case scenarios because they would be of a magnitude that’s hard for anybody to prepare for.
The good news is that even though events can move quickly and at a fast pace, they don’t happen all at once. If we are decently prepared for some of the small- or medium-sized events, that leaves us with time and energy to react to and deal with the big ones.
Even if we have to hope that we don’t have to.