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It won’t be much of a surprise to regular readers or listeners of my podcast that digital sovereignty and getting off US tech has been on my mind a lot this year. It actually started in 2024, when I worked on a white paper about digital sovereignty with some European and Latin American colleagues even before Donald Trump won reelection in the United States. It was published weeks later, and set the tone for my work heading into 2025 and the tumult that Trump brought to global politics. Throughout this year, the Trump presidency and the billionaires of Silicon Valley have made it abundantly clear that the world’s dependence on US tech companies, the products they’ve deployed, and the infrastructure they’ve built over the past few decades was a mistake that must be addressed. That dependence gives the US and its tech companies significant leverage over countries that now hesitate to take strong action against the United States in light of Trump’s trade war for fear of repercussions, but also of losing potential investment from some of the largest and most well-capitalized companies and investors in the world. That fear, particularly of short-term economic pain, helps to explain how despite so much talk of digital sovereignty in 2025, little real progress seems to have been made in the countries with the greatest capacity to pursue it. But paired with those discussions of state action is another element: what we ourselves can do to reduce our personal dependence on the products made by US tech companies, and especially the massive giants we’re all familiar with. I’m the kind of person who is skeptical of the power of individual action to force change, but I also believe that if enough of us commit to it that it can make a difference — and hopefully show our governments they should be doing more. Back in July, I published a guide (that I’ve continued to make occasional updates to) giving some suggestions for how readers can begin to carve themselves out of parts of that tech apparatus. It’s not an easy task to reject services that have become so ubiquitous and are made to be easy to use. That’s why I always said we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves and should simply do the best we can. Target one thing at a time, and make incremental progress. That’s what I’ve been trying to do this year. I didn’t get as far as I hoped, in part because my capacity has been so low these past few months between an intense travel schedule and writing my next book (which I’m doing edits on right now). But I still made progress. In the piece, I explained how I thought finding a good suite of services made the process easier, and that’s certainly what I found. I was already using Proton 🇨🇭 for email, VPN, and cloud services before July. But I’ve now started using its password manager, calendar, video calling service, and online word processor — though I still get dragged back into Google Docs from time to time. I’m still on Vivaldi 🇳🇴 and using Qwant 🇫🇷 as my search engine. My choice of Vivaldi was reinforced when I saw how Firefox is now pushing generative AI features onto its user base. I also switched back to Ghost 🇸🇬 from Substack this year. Recently, when I ran the Worst Person In Tech contest for Tech Won’t Save Us, I swapped out Google Forms in favor of Forms.app 🇧🇪, though I was initially going to use Tally 🇧🇪 until I realized it didn’t let me easily share results publicly. I got rid of Apple Music and replaced it with Deezer 🇫🇷, started using the Anytime Podcast Player 🇬🇧 for podcasts, and cancelled all my regular subscriptions to US-based streaming services, with the exception of Apple TV. I still pay for a bundle of Apple services, but need to finally cancel that in the new year. Otherwise, I have Mubi 🇬🇧 and subscribe to Crave 🇨🇦 (basically Canada’s HBO Max) when there’s something I want to watch, as I recently did for Heated Rivalry — a great, made-in-Canada show that I’m thrilled to see so many people outside our borders excited about too. I do still need to try browsing my library’s Blu-ray collection — the last real video rental stores. It hasn’t all been successes though. After switching over to Here WeGo 🇳🇱, I fell back into the habit of relying on Google Maps during a period of heavy travel, in large part because of its detailed business listings. That’s something I need to change in the new year. I also still have a Microsoft 365 subscription to make sure the Word files for my book are appearing exactly the same for me and my editors. Once this book is done, I’ll be making a more concerted effort to switch over to LibreOffice 🇩🇪. Though, with that said, while Word is what I typically use for edits, most of my writing happens in Ulysses 🇩🇪. I also haven’t moved my notes out of Apple Notes yet — another 2026 project. I’m leaning toward the Canadian option: Obsidian 🇨🇦. Overall I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, but I want to do better. I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to pull myself out of the Apple ecosystem, but that will take longer than replacing services. My Macbook isn’t very old, and I’ll need to really road test Linux before committing to such a big change. The future of my devices also depends on my future relationship to digital technology altogether. As I’ve been writing about the need to get off US tech, I’ve increasingly been thinking a lot about how much of this tech we really need and the tradeoffs that have come with the transition to digital. I’ve reined in my smartphone this past year, and have been increasingly toying with the idea of pulling back even further on streaming services in favor of more physical media. I’ve already done that with books — I used to only read ebooks and now almost exclusively read physical books — and could see myself trying to move in a similar direction with movies and possibly even music. I started getting back into magazines this year too. I’ve been intrigued by groups like the Luddite Club ditching their smartphones for a while, and was quite taken by a recent piece where Janus Rose described cancelling her streaming services and going back to cassette tapes. I’m not much of a Reddit user, but I regularly visit the r/dumphones subreddit to see the interesting collection of gadgets people are replacing their smartphones with. I haven’t made the jump to a flip phone or something like a Light Phone. But I have been deleting apps, setting increasingly strict screen time limits (I’m planning to try out Brick too), and targeting my social media use. By the end of 2025, the only social apps I’ll have on my phone will be Bluesky (set to chronological, not algorithmic, feed with a growing list of muted words and blocked accounts), Mastodon (which I don’t often use), and Letterboxd (if we’re counting that). I’ve stopped posting on Twitter/X altogether and will finally remove Instagram before the new year because it has been pulling me in far more frequently than I’d care to admit. The only game on my phone is MiniMetro 🇳🇿 (which I play on planes when I need a break from reading or working) and I’m toying with using Smile App Launcher 🇩🇰 to make the screen even less appealing. I’m exhausted by the world Silicon Valley has foisted upon us — one we’re just expected to accept and adopt en masse, with little say into the direction of technological travel or input on whether the technology that benefits companies and CEOs is actually benefiting the public that’s expected to use it. Typically, I would call for better technology, and that’s at the core of the argument my colleagues and I made for digital sovereignty last year — not just for non-US technology, but for technology with a wholly different set of economic incentives and social values at its foundation. But as we wait to see if that will ever arrive, there is a stronger argument forming with every passing month that rejecting the technologies being sold to us — and even going back to physical and analog alternatives — is the right move in the present. Maybe not everything has to be digital or digitized, maybe the internet shouldn’t be inserted into absolutely everything, maybe we shouldn’t be constantly connected in the way we’re now expected to be, and generative AI certainly does not need to be forced into every facet of society. Just as getting off US tech isn’t easy, reassessing our relationship with digital technology seems like it will be similarly challenging. It’s what I’ll be trying to grapple with more in 2026 — both through Disconnect and Tech Won’t Save Us. I hope you’ll come on this journey with me.
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