Political Memes

Yes, but nobody cares about Spotify. [...] But I can use my own cd collection instead if I want to or play my own music or none at all. Nobody cares.

I really wish this was the case, but a lot of people feel like they're stuck with Spotify, and buying music to own is increasingly difficult. You and I, and people like us who maintain our own collections are outliers.

I recognise however that Spotify isn't an essential service in the sense that say, a word processor is. I'm also not saying that Spotify, Skype or Klarna are good services by any means. Skype doesn't really exist anymore so fuck them, but Spotify and Klarna are terrible corporations.

What I'm saying is that there are services outside of the U.S., as well as popular software that isn't developed in the U.S., though many of these might just exist to cater to needs that U.S. software doesn't fill. For example, we have a software suite that's ubiquitous in government and public institutions here called Platina developed by Formpipe.

I wouldn't say that the ubiquity of American services is because their services are higher quality or in general better than other offerings. I think a lot of it has to do with the absolutely bananas funding of the U.S. tech sector, as well as the anti-competitive practises the tech giants have been engaging in for decades at this point. Word became the de-facto standard not because it was the better software, but because Windows was the de-facto standard.

Had as much time and money been poured into FOSS alternatives, they'd be at the forefront now. We might see this happen now with a lot of European governments attempting to move over to a FOSS software stack to minimise their reliance on proprietary, particularly U.S., technologies.

I'd further argue that a lot of the U.S. tech sector is actually backed up and powered by FOSS software that doesn't necessarily have an inherent "location" to it. Any sort of big media platform that serves video or audio (Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, etc.) will be using ffmpeg to do the heavy work for them. Most of the web runs on Linux servers, and the ecosystem that comes with. None of the tech giants would even function if not for the smaller software projects developed and maintained in large by private individuals.