RE: https://mastodon.social/@harold/117146045089521164
If #MarkCarney knew the US was negotiating in bad faith, he certainly didn't show it by understanding the necessity of urgently developing Canadian #digitalSovereignty. Someone please sit him down in front of a @pluralistic talk (as Doctorow's a Canadian source, and Carney appears to trust journalists well enough to appoint them Ministers: though urgently read also the books by the experts cited below), and persuade our PM that our #sovereignty and #nationalSecurity depend on freeing #Canada from all Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon (AWS) dependence, with wartime urgency.
Hon. @Paulatics, @KristopherWells, @SenKarenAb, or @colindeacon: Can any of you talk some sense into our Honourable bank executive about this? I'd be happy to volunteer to explain anything in Cory's presentations or books that you or Mark doesn't understand. (I have over 20 years' paid experience explaining tech stuff to non-tech people, if that'd be useful.) I'm sure plenty other Canadians such as those in the @linuxassociation and the Canadian #selfHosting community could help explain this too.
Perhaps this needs to be more diplomatically phrased, but if we need funds to accelerate Canadian digital sovereignty, I suggest taking them from Evan Solomon's tax-abyss Ministry of Slop. Evan's an uncritical career tech hype-man with less qualification to run a technology ministry than the historically and catastrophically incompetent #PeteHegseth has to run the US DoD. Solomon's education is in English literature and religious studies, not anything even remotely related to computing, and it shows. His religious fanaticism for, as Drs. @emilymbender and @alex aptly put it, The AI Con, ought to disqualify him from leading a tech ministry.
Meanwhile, the very existence of such an office as "Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation" shows that our illustrious economist mistakenly believes that, in the Empire of AI (per Karen Hao), Canada can become a colonizer, not return to its prior status as a colony: exactly as Trump and the coterie of technofeudal "AI" CEOs backing him are seeking to coerce us into becoming. The promises of "economic efficiency" (i.e., mass layoffs, wage deflation, and metastatic rent extraction) promised by the #TESCREAL (@timnitGebru) dogma of the AI cult system may resound with confirmation bias in the heart of the true believer in the religion of neoclassical economics (may the Earth become infinite and Homo economicus cease requiring infinite compute power), but alas, our first priority in tech policy should not be proliferation of climate- and community-destroying hyperscale #datacentres for the Slop God, but instead, in removing Trump's ability to do to all #Canadian government and business what Donald did the the #ICC with a few sanctions.
I wonder if PM Carney always knew that the US was negotiating in bad faith, and that their terms could be changed after the fact, but waited until the final humiliating demands were made by the US team before walking away. Now Carney has widespread national support and perhaps more respect from our other allies and partners.
