Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech

Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Here’s what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it. By MATHIEU POLLET Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO 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 iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments. 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. When U.S. 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. Dumbphones and FOMO The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal. On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection. Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict. “The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both. I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call. One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed. It all took me