Pluralistic: America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (16 Dec 2025)


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Uncle Sam staring into a funhouse mirror that has made him painfully thin. The reflection is wearing a Trump wig and has orange skin. He stands atop a map of the world that stretches to infinity. In the background is a shantytown with the TRUMP logomark rising in the sky over it.

America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (permalink)

We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American era and a post-American world. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors.

When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power – the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's soft power that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book The Underground Empire:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global power – it is a global platform. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system.

No one serious truly believed that these US systems were entirely trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, weaponize) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world – lords and peasants, presidents and peons.

Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions.

These systems are now no longer trustworthy. Is as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process – made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question:

https://archive.is/WAMWI

One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).

When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it).

The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners – it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext – and overt message – of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025.

When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands.

This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as The Onion points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue":

https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-affordability/

It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-drug-prices-starmer-trump-tariffs-b2841490.html

But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected – one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the threat of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants.

The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store.

This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.

It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.

So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.

This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet

There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double reverse whammy – making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector – but it's also unambiguously within Canada's power to do. After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/understood-who-broke-the-internet-episode-4-transcript-1.7615096

The EU – a far more powerful entity than Canada – has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

Apple, being a truly innovative company, has come up with a whole lot of exciting new ways to tell the EU to fuck itself:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple_dma_complaint/

But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolutely control over. Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can absolutely decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would work too well. It would inflict too much pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians too much money, and make too much money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry.

Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that don't work, because anything effective would provoke Trump.

When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me – and ultimately, they agree. The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be…intense.

Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out that the US is already imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, they say "well, it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry to be reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKmMEFiLrI

But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be infinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container.

But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore.

America is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped recovery":

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/premiumization-plutonomy-middle-class-spending-gilded-age/

A K-shaped recovery is when the richest people get richer, but everyone else gets worse off. Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest have saw their net worth skyrocket.

The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt. These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties – and the courts and administrative agencies – by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets.

For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages. But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets

The point is that every dollar that goes into servicing a debt is a dollar that can't be used to buy something useful. A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus. But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it.

The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own.

Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment:

https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/

They've killed a monopolization case against Pepsi and Walmart for colluding to rig grocery prices across the entire economy:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

They've sanctioned the use of price-fixing algorithms to raise rent:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-odd-settlement-on-rent-fixing

As Tim Wu points out in his new book, The Age of Extraction, one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/

Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity will, if the alternative is no electricity. Electricity – like health, shelter, food, and education – is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on.

Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis").

But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate.

The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously – seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech – is that the US has historically bought a lot of stuff. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have.

But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less. In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of the an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books.

The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables. The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling.

None of this is good. This is all fucking terrible. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy anything anymore.

America is running out levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding. American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an explosion of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

And the US can't exactly threaten to withhold foreign aid to get leverage over other countries – US foreign aid has dropped to homeopathic levels:

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/

What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks anywhere, even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic:

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/

And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/

Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/big-tech-zeal-to-weaponize-trade

But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business.

And when we do finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be great news for Americans. After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs – we are the victims of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of. No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them.

Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy.

For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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