The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence. My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.
But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours. No Google Search or Maps.
No Facebook or Instagram feeds. I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk. For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight.
It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?” Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.” Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like. Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations.
A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations. In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.
Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices. The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
