I’ve written about Cory Doctorow’s concept of platform enshittification before. In summary it’s a 3 stage process where platforms - think Facebook, Google, Amazon etc - move from providing value to their users, to providing value only to their suppliers, to finally providing value to only themselves once the customers and suppliers are locked in. Once you’ve grasped the idea you can see this at play everywhere. It’s part of why the many parts of the internet are a lot less fun, pleasant or useful than it used to be.

Secondly, let’s note that, without doubt, the US has consistently wielded its hegemonic power in many unpleasant ways in the past. Let us not forget its various self-interested proxy wars as one of many examples. Even my own country, which traditionally thinks of itself as being the USA’s preferred ally and friend, gained a derogatory reputation as being nothing more than a ‘US poodle’, unwilling to say no to any demand the made of us.

But now something a bit different seems to be happening that combines the two ideas together to the detriment of us all: enshittification at a nation-state level, namely the enshittification of the US.

In a recent Wired article, Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman refer to this as the enshittification of American power.

Start by thinking of the USA as a “platform” and the parallels become obvious.

For decades, allies of the United States lived comfortably amid the sprawl of American hegemony. They constructed their financial institutions, communications systems, and national defense on top of infrastructure provided by the US.

And a platform it surely, in practice, is:

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The “network logic” of platform enshittification makes it very hard to de-Americanise, amongst other vital things, the national defence of many heretofore allied countries.

Which worked out OK for many of us so far. But, by showing contempt for the international order, the Trump administration has changed the deal.

America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States

The current rogue administration of the US is certainly not shy of leveraging our dependence for personal gain.

Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal.

Excessive “monetization” is surely the root of much decline in the modern life experience. And now a whole country is foisting it on us at a global scale. Per Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada:

The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.

The whole premise of the system of course is that us dependent allies have no real alternative but to do whatever is demanded of us in order to continue to leverage the American systems for our commerce, communication, defence and more. The Wired article shows several examples of this in practice:

Regarding military defence, many countries having invested heavily in the American F-35 stealth fighter jet and other military technology to handle their defence, they now effectively don’t have the ability to use their own weapons if the US doesn’t want them to.

There is, as one former US defense official described it, a “kill chain” that is “essentially controlled by the United States.” Complex weapons platforms require constant maintenance and software updates, and they rely on real-time, proprietary intelligence streams for mapping and targeting. All that “flows back through the United States,” the former official said, and can be blocked or turned off.

Cases in point: When the UK wanted to allow Ukraine to use British missiles against Russia last November, it reportedly had to get US sign-off on the mapping data that allowed the missiles to hit their targets.

Then, after Trump’s disastrous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in late February, the US temporarily cut off intelligence streams to Ukraine, including the encrypted GPS feeds that are integral to certain precision-guided missile systems. Such a shutoff would essentially brick a whole weapons platform.

Famously, America extorted Ukraine into giving up its mineral reserves in order to survive against Putin:

…the Trump administration reportedly threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine unless the country handed over rights to exploit its mineral reserves to the US.

The world’s dependence on American cloud computing is another clear point of vulnerability:

European governments and banks often run on cloud computing provided by big US multinationals like Amazon and Microsoft, and leaders on the continent have begun to fear that Trump could choke off EU governments’ access to their own databases.

Microsoft has already cut off the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor’s access to email, for reasons unstated, but coincidentally soon after he participated in a decision that Trump didn’t like.

Microsoft has failed to publicly explain its reported denial of email access to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor.

The potential implications are both extensive and horrendous:

…the traditional platform economy is being reshaped as commercial platforms and government institutions merge into a monstrous hybrid of business monopoly and state authority.

As an important footnote, the authors remind us that it is not only those of us who live in countries that are problematically dependent on the goodwill of the US administration to function that need worry. American citizens themselves are in many ways most vulnerable to the leverage of US state/business monopoly enshittification.

After all:

US citizens are, ostensibly, the true customers of the US government. But as difficult and expensive as it will be for US allies to escape the enshittification of American power—it will be much harder for Americans to do so, as that power is increasingly turned against them. As WIRED has documented, the Trump administration has weaponized federal payments systems against disfavored domestic nonprofits, businesses, and even US states. Contractors such as Palantir are merging disparate federal databases, potentially creating radical new surveillance capabilities that can be exploited at the touch of a button.

It is an issue of critical importance to us all. As Trump continues to make America weaker in the world, globally diminished in status, an embarrassment to its citizenry, the rest of us may eventually find satisfactory solutions - active efforts are certainly being made, as incredibly difficult as the problem is to solve - but their aforementioned citizenry may have fewer solutions.

…US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.