The Empire on My Desk: Microsoft, American Hegemony and the Problem of Digital Dependence

There are prejudices acquired in youth that melt away under the discipline of reading, and there are convictions that reading only hardens. My aversion to the American Empire belongs, I fear, to the latter category. It has survived the usual correctives of age, travel, and second thoughts. Indeed, acquaintance with history has tended less to soften than to confirm it.

I have never been persuaded by the nursery fiction of the “special relationship,” that sentimental euphemism by which British subordination has been dressed as partnership. It has always seemed to me one of those useful lies that empires tell their dependencies, and that dependencies repeat to preserve self-respect. One may admire much in the American constitutional inheritance, much in the older republic, even much in individual Americans. I do. But admiration for fragments does not oblige reverence for the whole. As a civilisational phenomenon, the United States has often seemed less the perfection of the English-speaking tradition than its descent into vulgar obscenity.

This is not merely a complaint about manners, though manners matter more than modern intellectuals often suppose. A civilisation discloses itself in what it honours. Modern America has too often appeared to honour scale over proportion, appetite over judgement, noise over cultivation, novelty over memory. It has shown a peculiar genius for dragging the exceptional downward until it can be sold in bulk. What older societies regarded as things to be veiled by decorum, America has commercialised. What they judged by standards of form, America has too often reduced to preference. There is an imperial vulgarity no less real for being profitable.

But taste is the least of the indictment. What is called the Anglo-American alliance has, from a British perspective, often resembled the management of decline under foreign tutelage. One may begin with the wartime transfer—some would say looting—of British scientific and technological assets under cover of alliance; proceed through the post-war financial coercions that made insolvency a mechanism of policy; pause over Suez, where Washington instructed Britain, with unmistakable clarity, that even secondary independence had become impermissible; and continue through decades in which British foreign policy has too often oscillated between obedience and the pretence of consultation. Empires have usually preferred clients to colonies. Clients are cheaper. America improved the method by teaching dependency to call itself sovereignty.

Even where its power has been cloaked in universalist abstractions—democracy, humanitarian order, collective security—the practical results have too often been devastation accompanied by moral sermonising. One need not enumerate every intervention, every ruined state, every alliance with local monsters, every expensive crusade collapsing into tribal wreckage. The record is before us. What distinguishes the American Empire is not merely reach, though its reach has been astonishing. It is the union of material domination with moral self-canonisation. Older empires conquered and admitted they ruled. This one often rules while announcing liberation.

Its supremacy has not rested only on fleets and airbases. It has rested on reserve currencies, technical standards, entertainment monopolies, educational prestige, software platforms, and those invisible systems of interoperability that make refusal expensive and often absurd. This is empire not merely as command, but as environment. It arranges dependence.

That thought brings me, not without irony, to my desk. For I write these reflections upon a machine running Microsoft software. And I have often wondered whether this should trouble me more than it does. Should one who distrusts the American imperium refuse its machinery? Ought one, on grounds of consistency, to wean oneself from Windows and Office, from file formats born under American corporate sovereignty, from habits drilled by decades of technological occupation? The question is not wholly frivolous. Yet my own relation to Microsoft has never been one of dutiful tributary and grateful customer. It has been, if anything, faintly illicit.

For years I ran a “borrowed” copy of Windows XP without noticeable hardship. I later acquired Windows 7 under a concession so generous it barely counted as tribute. By a telephone call to a help desk somewhere on the Subcontinent, I managed to talk someone into giving me a free activation code for Windows 10. That gave me a free upgrade to Windows 11. My long dependence on Office began with installation discs inherited from a friend, and later licences have often arrived by way of those obscure markets where activation keys circulate at prices so low one suspects some crack in the juridical fabric of the age.

I have not so much subscribed to empire as poached upon it. The phrase may sound playful, but it conceals a serious point. There is a difference between underwriting a power one despises and taking practical advantage of institutions one has had little choice but to inherit. Most of us do not choose the structures in which we live. We find them already standing around us like roads, currencies, languages and legal systems. One may object to them, exploit them, evade them, criticise them. But one does not abolish them by refusing a software suite.

There is in modern politics a puritan fantasy that innocence can be restored through abstention. Consume correctly. Boycott the tainted. Purify one’s tools, and one imagines one has purified one’s soul. I have never believed this. There is no Archimedean point outside civilisation from which one may live unstained. We are implicated in everything. We speak languages formed by conquest. We inhabit institutions shaped by confiscation and war. We use roads built by governments we distrust. Why then should software alone acquire a mystical moral burden? Especially when one’s relation to it has often been faintly parasitic.

Indeed, there is at least a mischievous argument that evading the tolls of monopolistic power may partake less of vice than of self-defence. When a corporation’s strength derives not only from excellence but from lock-in, standards capture, and rents sustained by network effects, the moral character of sidestepping some of those rents becomes ambiguous. I do not overstate this. But I note it.

And from here one reaches the larger question. May one oppose a hegemonic order while employing the instruments through which it is maintained? History does not merely permit this thought. It presupposes it. Roman roads carried the missionaries who dissolved the Roman sacred order. Roman law survived Rome and helped build a civilisation the Caesars did not foresee. The Latin tongue, vehicle of empire, became also vehicle of Christendom. The British Empire spread English, and in spreading English furnished anti-colonial nationalism with one of its chief weapons.

Power habitually generates instruments whose uses exceed the intentions of those who first impose them. Why should software be exempt from an ancient pattern? To criticise empire on imperial machinery is no contradiction. One uses the roads. One need not worship the emperor.

I would go further. The demand for immaculate disengagement often seems to me a species of vanity. Purity is frequently performance in ethical costume. The mature political question is not whether one can stand wholly outside inherited systems. One cannot. The question is whether one can remain inwardly uncolonised while living among them. Use the system where necessary, but do not mistake necessity for loyalty. Limit dependence where prudence allows. Refuse needless entanglement. Preserve the capacity to walk away.

That last phrase points from theory to practice. For I do think there is a case, not for theatrical repudiation of Microsoft, but for gradual emancipation. I suggest a slow secession. Begin perhaps with the cloud rather than the desktop. Leave OneDrive before abandoning Windows. Remove daily dependence before touching the operating system. Use Firefox instead of Edge, and perhaps Thunderbird in place of Outlook. Replace habits before replacing machines. Then weaken dependence through formats. Write more in plain text or Markdown. Use PDF for finished work. Experiment with LibreOffice or OnlyOffice for drafts. Learn Pandoc as a form of intellectual self-defence. The man who can move among formats is harder to govern.

That is not merely technical advice. It is political advice in miniature. One may even keep Windows while ceasing to belong psychologically to Microsoft. There is freedom in that.

And only then, if inclined, one may experiment at the margins — a second machine running Linux Mint, a dual-boot partition, a quiet migration of one task after another. Not a dramatic renunciation, but a thinning of dependence. The point is not purity. It is sovereignty. For the deepest servitude is not to type in Microsoft Word. It is to absorb unexamined the categories, assumptions and moral conceits of the civilisation that produced it. Political subordination begins inwardly before it becomes institutional. A people conquered in mind have little use for independence. A people inwardly free may preserve something of themselves even under hegemony.

That is why I cannot take seriously the suggestion that I ratify the American imperium by using its software. Instruments are not allegiances. A pen does not convert the writer. Indeed, there is perhaps a certain austere amusement in using imperial machinery to compose indictments of empire. The old dissidents wrote on the occupier’s paper. One may do no less.

And if, over decades, I have taken what I could from Microsoft while giving back as little as prudence allowed, I am tempted to regard this not as moral embarrassment but as a tiny example of a much older political art. It is not rebellion. That would be too grand. It is something older. It is something rather English. It is smuggling.