Post-Trump Internet: From Surveillance to Sovereign Digital Public Goods
Doctorow argues that removing Trump will not restore American stability because he is an effect of a far-right coalition, not its cause. The essay's distinctive claim is that US platform infrastructure has become an immediate coercive weapon and that the only resilient response is a post-American internet built from sovereign public digital goods.
The novel claim in this source is that Trump is not an independent cause of the American far right but a convener of factions that were already committed to authoritarian criminality; by this reading, removing Trump will not undo the conditions that produced him. The essay updates familiar Snowden-era concerns by asserting that American platform infrastructure has become usable as an immediate coercive instrument, shutting down officials' accounts, financial systems, agricultural equipment, and national phone fleets, rather than merely as a surveillance backchannel. What is genuinely new is the move from 'post-Trump' as a chronological event to 'post-American internet' as the only stable endpoint.1
Context
The source is a blog post dated September 3, 2026, on Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow. It presents an opinion essay rather than an empirical report and embeds it in the author's standard link-blog format. The claimed episodes concerning the ICC prosecutor, a Brazilian judge, and the tax and privacy concessions from Canada, the UK, and the EU are contained in the essay as assertions and are not independently documented within the piece.1
Assessment
On the source's own framing, the decisive change is a constraint shift: earlier American elites tolerated sharing the gains from global digital platforms and avoided territorial grabs because they were 'playing an iterated game.' That self-restraint is said to vanish once Trump directly enlists technology companies and once the coalition that will succeed him is dominated by actors who cannot afford to lose power and therefore have no long-horizon interest in preserving a stable world order. The scenario is structurally coherent but depends on premises about universal dependency, single-actor control, and irreversibility that the essay leaves unmeasured.1
Caveats
AI hypothesisWhat would change my assessment is evidence in three directions: if allied governments prove able to substitute or bypass American platform services under duress, if corporate or legal counterweights cause real defection from presidential demands, or if post-Trump institutional restoration revives the iterated-game logic without a sovereign internet. Without countervailing evidence, the warning that a post-Trump internet must be post-American remains a plausible scenario rather than an established forecast.1
Preparing for a post-Trump internet: You'd better hope it's also a post-American internet.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Barnum and Bailey v journalism; Wired's Wikipedia article is a wiki; Singapore's national wifi; Twitter arguments.
Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
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Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.
Preparing for a post-Trump internet (permalink)
What if post-Trump America is even worse?
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
These people hate each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported:
They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them genuinely believe it. It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror.
Donald Trump did not conjure these people out of thin air. They've been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals:
January 6 wasn't the first presidency they tried to steal, it's just the first one they got punished for:
They commit brazen crimes in office that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives, and therefore can't afford to lose power, ever:
Trump didn't invent these creeps, he just emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the mask off:
So what happens when Trump strokes out while watching Kid Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White House lawn that one of Trump's cronies has exclusive pay-per-view rights to? I mean, it's possible that the Democratic leadership will step up and insist on some form of regular order in the succession to Vance, but come on. These are the tiny "Down with this sort of thing" ping-pong paddle people:
More likely is that Vance – a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who is loathed by all of Trump's factions – will end up presiding over a far more chaotic period in American governance than anything that happened under Trump. That could mean ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug in the centers of America's largest cities, drunken generals invading random countries, podcasters declaring "The Purge" with brackets sponsored by Kalshi.
This isn't the first time in living memory that this has happened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually overnight, and the fragile threads that bound its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, leaving behind nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and frightening time for the people whose governments had simply winked out of existence – but it was also terrifying for the rest of the world, who scrambled to secure those nukes before they could end up in the hands of "non-state actors":
The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional leadership politics to be sure, but at least the people involved were beholden to various power blocs who had an interest in keeping things going. As the geopolitics wonks say, "they were playing an iterated game," where some losses had to be tolerated so that the losers could try to win the next time around.
But there are plenty of people who weren't (and aren't) playing iterated games – people who are even more unhinged, more reckless, more short-termist than the maniacs who filled the world with nuclear weapons. These people don't necessarily care if civilization or even the human race persists if they can't get their way. The thought of them running around with these "weapons of mass destruction" ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR's collapse to new heights.
Which brings me to the post-Trump internet. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the internet could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the internet is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike.
But Trump is the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply brick foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu:
And then Microsoft obliged Trump again, attacking the Brazilian judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison over his unsuccessful coup.
America's tech giants have fully, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his campaign. Their CEOs each paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the inauguration dais. Google provides location data for Trump's racist pogroms. Microsoft provides the administrative tools to carry them out. Oracle provides the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its customers when they're about to be snatched:
In exchange, Trump got Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he got the EU to gut its privacy laws; he sanctioned EU officials who tried to regulate social media; and he's told the tech companies to go through EU officials' private messages, looking for anti-Big Tech partisans whom he will ban from ever entering the USA:
Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers:
Tech companies will do anything for any leader who can guarantee those outcomes. There's no capitulation too petty and stupid for Big Tech:
America no longer has allies or trading partners. America has rivals and enemies. Trump's coalition wants him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They want him to help Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has started to tinker with one of the most devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns.
If Trump wants Greenland, he can just order Microsoft to switch off Office 365 for the country and every ministry and significant firm will be shuttered in an instant, along with many households:
He can order Apple and Google to shut off all of Denmark's phones. He can order John Deere to shut off all their tractors:
(One thing we don't need to worry about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to switch off all of Europe's chatbots – sure, he could do that, but if he did, nothing important would break:)
As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are pretty stupid. The big ones destroy the territory you're trying to conquer and leave behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They send clouds of nuclear fallout swirling around the globe, potentially killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, the best anyone's come up with is a neutron bomb, which only kinda renders territory uninhabitable while still killing everyone with massive radiation blasts.
Compared to nukes, tech shutdowns are amazing. Thanks to Big Tech, America – and only America – can brick almost any country on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot. The only thing that prevented this from happening was an American elite bloc that was playing an iterated game and saw more benefit from sharing in Big Tech profits as they looted and spied on the world, as opposed to grabbing territory while scaring the world into breaking all land-speed records to ditch American tech and pursue meaningful digital sovereignty.
Trump's chuds and freaks are not bound by these constraints. They're perfectly happy to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, where everything from your smartphones to your payroll records can be seized at the click of a mouse, and your country had better fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail old man, who is not long for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will be at the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Big Tech into Trump's geopolitical weapon in order to achieve their own purposes – which might well be even stupider, crueler and more unhinged than Trump's.
There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained:
In its own way, the creation of this post-American internet is as urgent and as global as was the creation of the covid vaccines. But whenever I speak to powerful people about this, they ask the same question: "What if this makes Trump mad?"
This represents a grave failure to take this crisis seriously. Trump doesn't need to be "mad" to attack your country. Trump attacked Canada over its wildfires, accusing Canada of polluting America's air:
But even if Trump never gets mad at you, that's no guarantee of safety. Trump is not long for this world, and his death or incapacity is no guarantee of the restoration of a "normal" America. And even if America finds its way to "normal" after Trump, that's no guarantee that it will stay normal. The armed, organized maniacs who have seized power in America and who are cheering him on as he rampages all over the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren are not going to dig a hole, crawl inside it, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves.
But let's say that we find ourselves in the best of worlds, where American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the country embarks on a years-long program of denazification:
Even in that amazing future, the world should still race to build a post-American internet. The world should have built that internet after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian internet. If the post-Trump internet isn't a post-American internet, then it'll only be a matter of time until the next crisis comes along, and the coming years will give Big Tech even more chances to worm its tendrils into the world's governments, firms and households, making that crisis be even harder to survive. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now.
Hey look at this (permalink)
The Scandal That Could Break the Latin American Far Right https://jacobin.com/2026/09/cerimedo-latin-america-far-right-disinformation
Barrister's powerful speech at Filton Trial reminds jury of its right to defy judge https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton
So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial. https://copyrightlately.com/corretjer-brown-public-domain-boricua-en-la-luna/
Neo-ZIRP Slop in the Post-ZIRP Era https://superbowlstevehunt.substack.com/p/neo-zirp-slop-in-the-post-zirp-era
With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Barnum & Bailey hired an ex-CIA spook to destroy a critical journalist https://web.archive.org/web/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/print.html
#20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.net/wired/index.cgi
#20yrsago Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20060901191656/http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html
Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/
Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Recent appearances (permalink)
How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy
Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816
Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory
Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves
Latest books (permalink)
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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