However, it seems plausible that the US is turning into a rogue, authoritarian, Russia-like state increasingly more friendly towards Russia and hostile towards Europe. I am a European who grew up in a country still occupied by Russia. I am increasingly more worried about building my projects on American platforms, using an American operating system, etc.
What if the US actually attacks Greenland or finds another way to be openly hostile to Europe? I am not saying it will happen. All I am saying is that it seems prudent to prepare. How would you do it?
It is currently impossible to unhook myself from the US, but I would like to minimize exposure.
I can’t do anything about things like building an alternative to VISA/MasterCard (except wait for the digital Euro), so I will focus on things I can actually do and ignore things like my government buying F-35s and possibly giving my health data to Palantir.
* Mobile phone - there are no real European alternatives; it’s just Apple vs Google. Samsung or HTC with Android seems like a less bad option.
* Operating system - I have been using Linux for ages, getting rid of Windows seems relatively easy.
* Social networks - I grew to hate them before the current US admin, never used TikTok or Instagram, and I mostly stopped using Facebook and Twitter around the time Musk bought Twitter.
* Stripe for payments - this will be hard, but I am experimenting with our local payment processor, and so far it seems surprisingly doable, but it is not a battle-tested solution like Stripe.
* Clerk authentication - doable, but a lot of work and worrying
* AWS - I had a surprisingly bad experience with AWS and switched to a local provider with a lot less functionality (that I mostly do not need) and a lot better support
* GitHub, Cloudflare... dear God, how could we Europeans allow ourselves to be that dependent on anyone? Everything I touch is American.
* Gmail - this will be hard (two decades of emails). Any advice?
* Anything AI-related - fuuu, I am lost here.
What am I missing/forgetting? What do/would you do in my place?
I really hope you will take this as a brainstorming exercise and not an attack on America. I really do love the US and hope its democracy turns out to be more resilient than it currently seems.
EDIT: Please kindly keep responses practical. Let’s not turn this into a political discussion. You might approach it as a “what if” exercise, even if you think what the current US admin is doing is great, Europeans deserve what they get, etc.
Proton Mail or Fastmail.
Do yourself a favor and setup an email address on a domain you own, so it's easier to switch providers if you need to.
However in this context European based email providers would be a better fit.
In the US you also are not arrested for social media posts like you are in the UK or other parts of Europe.
Single-vendor and single-jurisdiction dependencies are fragile regardless of politics. Designing systems that can move providers, jurisdictions, or currencies with limited friction seems like the only practical approach.
There is really no point in worrying about personal independence for smart phones, github hosting and operating systems if the state itself is not independent and self-sufficient.
Bitbucket is also an option, as Atlassian has a headquarters in Australia (but also one in San Francisco).
But ultimately, if things break down to the point where you lose access to the Visa network, you have bigger problems. I don’t expect that to happen, and suspect the news you’re receiving is catastrophizing things.
Depends who's "you": if you are China you just stop answering the US calls, if you are EU you print out "Subsistence agriculture" from wikipedia ;)
And about "What do/would you do in my place?" - I would take a second look at those sometimes ~50% East Europeans that keep popping up in opinion pools saying the Russian occupation was better that EU - maybe they are not just crazy as the MSM paints them to be ;)
PS Linux is also US with over 95% of merges from corporations
I must say that so far I don’t miss ChatGPT or Gemini (which I use at work).
Technically:
Have you looked at Fairphone? I've been using a couple lastig many many years now.
I self-host email, DNS, and a few other few services.
Do not use any part of Meta, and moved from Twitter to Mastodon/Fediverse, at least in part hosted in the EU.
Honestly, sel-hosting email, DNS, etc. seems perhaps too “advanced” for me - I am not sure I would be able to do it without causing more problems than I solve.
I am resigned to the fact that I cannot be completely independent, protected from surveillance by any state, etc. At this point, I am just looking for ways to prevent catastrophic scenarios, such as Trump blocking (or threatening to block) Europeans' access to American clouds and the like.
Granted, Hanko Cloud is still running on AWS (Frankfurt), but we’re working on alternative EU data location options right now.