Comment by bflesch

Sorry to be blunt, but it is extremely inconvenient to be force-exposed to internal politics of some religious shithole country which twice votes against their own interests. Where people don't believe in healthcare but accept school shootings. Where society cares about body positivity until Ozempic arrives. A country which talks bigly about geopolitics and ignores agreements they have signed.

It is inconvenient to buy a Tesla to help save the planet and then see emerald nepo baby Elon Musk doing hitler salutes, and US citizens downplaying it due to their special understanding of freedom of speech.

Or a sweaty Peter Thiel morphing from startup evangelist to religious nut babbling about the antichrist.

Or a Jeff Bezos who ships stuff from china to europe being so unhappy with his life that he needs to marry the wife of his neighbor.

On top of this there's this still unresolved child sexual abuse scandal that basically implicates all of US upper class including senior leadership of US tech companies, who suddenly come out of retirement like Sergey Brin because they keep being mentioned in the Epstein files.

For more and more non-US people the inconvenience of seeing all this outweighs the benefit of being able to use some sort of web application. We have survived before on Nokia phones and TomTom navigation systems, and we'll be able to do so again.

US tech companies had US government support and helpful non-US regulatory environment to capture value from our countries. In their core, they are rent-seeking middlemen, parasitic to our economies.

The parasite needs a host, but the host can always find a new parasite.