Open Indie

Ten walking-minutes from where I live in Oslo, Norway, there's a large pool that opened at the start of this year. I love this pool; I waited many years for it to re-open after it was demolished for subsequent reconstruction.

Yet if I could wave a magic money-back wand and make this pool disappear right now – robbing thousands of people, families and smiling kids of their joyful exercise and community – I would. My fellow locals would surely accuse me of abusing my wizarding powers, but a few more years down the line I'm sure most of them would come to understand this reallocation of resources to have been well worth sacrificing their Sunday swim for.

I would do it because this pool cost $200M USD to build, and right now, for the price of a single swimming pool in Norway, we could turn the tide of our world-wide democratic downfall.

We are in the midst of a second cold war, but the roles are reversed: Germany and its liberal allies in Europe are pitted against a fascistic United States of America intent on world supremacy, even if there’s not much of a world to rule over by the end of it. And the US is winning, because they already own and operate the vast majority of the digital infrastructure we've all come to rely on.

Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers:

European democracy faces a coordinated assault. From the East, Putin is unleashing unprecedented propaganda campaigns that sway elections and erode pro-Ukraine majorities in the European Council. From the West, United States President Donald Trump threatens retaliatory tariffs if Europe enforces its own rules.

In the Information Age, whoever owns the means of communication rules the world. This is self-evident by what the types of assets billionaires and world leaders obsess over.

• Donald Trump runs his own Truth Social.
• China and Russia were way ahead of the game with their entire suites of platforms completely detached from US servers. Other autocracies are following suit, like Turkey with its Next Sosyal.
• Saudi Arabia is heavily invested in American Big Tech and social media companies.

Meanwhile the oligarchs are following suit.

• Larry Ellison's Oracle is conspiring with the US government to acquire TikTok.
• Elon Musk bought Twitter.
• Microsoft bought LinkedIn and GitHub.
• Sam Altman's OpenAI is making its own social media platform.
• Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, having already acquired their way to an unprecedented social media monopoly, is going all in on AI, as is the natural progression for any mass surveillance conglomerate with more data than they know what to do with.
• Google tried and failed many times over to make their own social network, but as a consolation price they own most people's email.

There's immense power in mass-media control, and the ones in power have invested their dollars accordingly. Europe is losing the information war and it knows it. Thankfully saner voices seem to be prevailing. Instead of building moats, Europeans are building bridges for democratic onboarding.

It bears repeating: Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers!

In the short term, Europe needs home-grown social networks to cement political sovereignty. These services must champion algorithmic pluralism, ban recommendation engines that reward outrage and hate, and give users explicit control over what they see, no more “revealed preferences” that mask surveillance. European networks can prove that profit and quality coexist without toxic algorithms, surveillance advertising, or billionaire oversight. Traditional media and advertisers hold the key to success. As Google’s ad monopoly devours media revenues and AI tools harvest content for data, journalism’s financial model crumbles at an alarming rate. When media shift their output to European platforms, advertising dollars will flow, creating mass-appeal services for 450 million citizens. This isn’t a niche experiment; it’s a continent-wide migration from US and Chinese platforms to transparent, democratic hubs that nurture, not destroy, democracy. Eurosky.social is launching building blocks for a trusted European platform in November 2025 and is already attracting huge interest.

The most promising social media venture of the EU, Eurosky, is being made as an interoperable complement to the US-based Bluesky.

What makes Bluesky different from all the billionaire-owned platforms listed above, aside from the fact that it's not owned by a billionaire (yet), is that underneath Bluesky is an open source network-protocol. Just like globally connectable phone numbers and email addresses, that means other platforms can plug into Bluesky's underlying protocol as equal participants in a global network, thus bypassing the cold-start problem that any new social network usually gets stuck on.

By now some of my nerdy colleagues will hasten to point out that there are other, older, purer and more independent protocols and platforms to consider. Why align our efforts with Bluesky?

Firstly, my swimming pool, my bet to make. If you can find your own swimming pool that you're personally willing to magick away and suffer the social repercussions, I'm rooting for you.

Secondly, I'm narrowly focused on Bluesky and its underlying tech because it credibly threatens US supremacy enough that the US state is actively fighting it with both legal and social means.

‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism:

Congress member Clay Higgins send out a letter to the CEOs of Meta, YouTube, TikTok, X, Truth Social and Bluesky. In it, Higgins demands that the platforms are “expected to expeditiously remove all posts that have celebrated the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. Further, the authors of these posts are to be identified and banned from your platform, as well as any new pages they may create.” Higgins also points out his position on committees to compel compliance by the companies. The letter is a clear example of government censorship of legal speech. Regardless, it shows how members of the US government are thinking about Bluesky, as a place where they will try to exert control to limit the ability of people to have free speech.

The White House joins Bluesky:

The administration's accounts are clearly daring Bluesky to take action against them, likely hoping to play the victim in whatever drama follows. It feels like only a matter of time before an account breaks the rules, and when that happens, Bluesky faces an impossible choice: take action and risk political retaliation, or do nothing and face the backlash from a user base that already feels insufficiently protected.

Bluesky's continued liberties are contingent on an ever-closer collaboration with European nations that can act as a backstop against authoritarian censorship by providing an offramp to digital dissidents and a parallel polis for online discourse at large.

Eurosky is currently operating on minimal funds (last I heard it's in the five digits), though I expect the euros will flow more readily once they're demonstrating their real worth in production.

Meanwhile, as per usual, Norway watches on from the sidelines, biding its time until forces beyond our control decide our fate for us. That's where my newfound $200M comes in; let’s build a NorSky.

And since we're dealing with open protocols and shared software infrastructures, we can actually solve this problem the way Norway best knows how: by throwing money at it, much like our fellow petro-peddlers in the middle-east have already been doing to great effect. On our own end all we need is a small server-cluster running on 100% renewable and local hydro energy, amounting to roughly 0.01% of our budget.

As for the rest, there are various ways this money could be distributed. I'm proposing a two-pronged approach:

The first $100 million goes into direct cooperation with the Eurosky project which already has a vision and team in place that’s neatly values-aligned with our national interests. Together we'll build a European network, open to all and distributed across our coordinating nations, each with their sovereign server stack.

The other $100 million is invested in Bluesky PBC, which would be an investment twice the size of what they've received to date. Norway is no stranger to such investments, already owning 1.5% of the shares of all publicly listed companies worldwide. We've just rarely if ever dared to invest venture capital the way other sovereign wealth funds have long been in the habit of doing.

With the press of a button on a we could go from international irrelevance to a position of leverage with every superpower that’s knocking on our door.

What I hope to make obvious with my swimming pool analogy is that this is a trivial amount of money for a country of Norway's immense wealth, and every day we fail to effectively deploy our capital is a strategic failure of historical proportions.

We all know the money is there, what's lacking is the political will and vision. In the 21st century I can think of no better way to safeguard our country's sovereignty than to invest sufficiently in our country's digital self-determination, before our side in the digital divide is determined for us.