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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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a bit like how McDonald's still exists in Russia after McDonald's International left the country

Well, no, for 2 reasons.

First, software isn't fast food. In a restaurant like that you already have a bunch of employees who have the institutional knowledge to remake it from scratch, but for tech the platforms are a lot more complex. Not that a Twitter clone is technologically out of reach of the EU, but they couldn't really re-use anything.

Sure, "but Elon Musk did it by firing 90% of the company", but that only works if you're Elon Musk and still have the infrastructure running. But Twitter EU loses access to a lot of that infrastructure (and the code repos) the second the plug is pulled.

Second, because the product is software, the US alternative doesn't suddenly cease to exist. They don't have to have a corporate presence in a country to sell there. They don't have to have EU divisions for any reason... other than "we'd like to use local labor for things like localization and lock down the smarter workers coming out of the universities in those countries". Which are good reasons, but in the face of EU sanction the best thing to do is likely to pull out and let them fend for themselves while the ad spend continues apace. And in a sanction fight the EU loses for the same reasons they're losing here now: they let the Americans capture the power that comes from building -> owning the international banking system for reasons that had to do with the domestic balance of power, so the EU telling banks to not process payments to US companies because reasons is not going to be particularly enforceable.