The inescapable nation

American tech and media have captured European minds.

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At my local coffee shop in Brussels the card machine always asks if I want to tip. This is odd because there’s no tipping culture in Belgium. Once the barista even apologised for the constant requests: It wasn’t the staff hustling, he explained, but rather a feature of the American card machine software that couldn’t be turned off.

Having to tap ‘no thanks’ every time I buy an overpriced coffee is the very definition of a first-world problem. And yet, in an economy built around infinitesimal gains to consumer convenience, it stands out as a market failure. If there’s a feature that no-one uses, why can’t it be turned off?

It’s because the product was designed by Americans, for Americans. In a country where everyone tips for everything, the feature makes perfect sense. What’s more surprising is that the software maker can export this product to Europe and face so little competitive pressure that they don’t think to adapt it at all to the local market.

There’s nothing inevitable about this. In Southeast Asia, a region poorer and less integrated than Europe, Uber’s operations were bought out in 2018 by Grab, a Singaporean rival whose payments and motorcycle taxi offerings were better aligned to local demand. Europeans being stuck with American tech is a result of our own failure to innovate.

Everywhere you look, Europeans are consuming services and content made by and for Americans. If not an indispensable nation, America is certainly an inescapable one. On an individual level, one can get the impression of living in an imperial province rather than a sovereign country. More importantly, it leaves us culturally lost and unable to act cohesively as Donald Trump rips away the American security blanket.

Dispatch from the provinces

Last month an American friend sent me a long, deeply researched article in the New York Times about how Denmark had avoided the rise of right-wing populism seen in almost every other European country. It made the case that the centre-left Social Democrats’ decision to take a tougher approach to migration and integration had allowed the centre to hold.

There’s a narrative among European leftists that if mainstream politicians and media adopt ‘far-right’ talking points – by which they mean any scepticism about mass migration or society’s ability to integrate large Muslim communities – that will only legitimise and strengthen extremists. If one takes this to be true, elites have a moral imperative to suppress any discussion of these issues lest the uneducated masses are provoked into race riots.

The study of Denmark suggests that the opposite is true. The Social Democrats tackled migration head-on; commentators on the left duly accused them of “apeing the far right in a race to the bottom”. And yet the far-right has collapsed, the Social Democrats remain in power and the social trust underpinning Denmark’s generous welfare state is restored.

The article ought to be required reading for any European with an interest in social policy. European nations are similar enough to each other that what’s true of Denmark is probably broadly true elsewhere in Europe. Certainly, the Danish experiment is more instructive to Poles and Spaniards than it is to Americans.

But because the article is in the New York Times, a newspaper written by and for Americans, it’s crammed full of American reference points. There’s a large digression into the economic effects of migration in various US cities; another into differences between US and European crime statistics and school bussing policies. Rural corners of Denmark are compared to blue-collar counties in Pennsylvania. The Great Migration of black Americans is invoked. We hear of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

None of this is relevant to European readers, and getting through the 8,000 words was consequently a bit of a slog. That’s no fault of the New York Times: Like the company that makes the card payment software, its mission is to serve the American market. If Europeans are also consuming it, it’s because our own publications failed to write the story for us.

Culture through tech

By overconsuming American cultural and news media, Europeans have begun to see our own societies through whichever prism is fashionable across the Atlantic. But there is a less obvious, and perhaps profounder impact on our minds that comes from using exclusively American tech platforms.

Consider Google Maps. In giving people access to an easy navigation tool, it has eroded their ability to plan journeys by other means. But because it’s American, it doesn’t understand how European trains work. As a result, young Europeans are no longer able to read a train timetable, but nor do they have an app that will do it for them – so more and more of them give up on train travel altogether and take short-haul flights, which Google Maps understands well.

Google Maps is similarly useless for cyclists because it was developed in car-dependent America, where almost nobody cycles except for sport. Drivers who use Google Maps have all sorts of tools to customise their journey, such as avoiding tolls and low-emission zones. But there’s no tool for cyclists to avoid particularly dangerous or polluted roads, or to plot a route using only segregated cycle lanes. If Europeans had developed a decent mapping app it might include such features – and more people might feel safe enough to cycle, making our cities better places.

Just occasionally, though, the intrusion of American culture can be darkly amusing. Bumble, a dating app, allows its users to show support on their profiles for various ‘causes’ on the cultural left (being right-wing is nasty), from Black Lives Matter to disability rights. But because the product isn’t adapted to other markets, Europeans have the option to signal their support for ‘indigenous rights’, which doesn’t mean what the Californians think it means.

Speaking of irony, it’s worth noting that most American tech and cultural exports, from the New York Times to Bumble, come from the coastal states where woke ideology has put down its deepest roots. How odd it is that the prophets of post-colonialism have themselves colonised Europe – and nobody has even told them.