You are a computer technician. You’ve read the warnings.
Not the headlines—those come too late. The real ones, hidden in the footnotes of policy memos and blog posts by paranoid sysadmins. The whispers in dev forums:
“If the tariffs hit the tech sector, we’re not talking iPhones. We’re talking cloud cutoff.”
You didn’t laugh. You listened.
For months, you’ve prepared your clients, nudging them gently toward digital independence.
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Swapped Outlook for Thunderbird.
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Replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
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Moved websites from U.S. cloud providers to European hosts.
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Urged every business owner you met to abandon Gmail in favor of old-school IMAP servers on modest shared hosting.
But you missed one thing. One critical thing.
You still use Google Calendar.
Executive Order #14331: The Kill Switch
It’s Monday morning when it happens.
Donald J. Trump, back in the Oval Office and emboldened by a second term, holds a televised address. The flag behind him flickers in the artificial wind of a green screen.
He reads from a teleprompter:
“Effective immediately, all American tech companies are hereby ordered to cease providing cloud infrastructure, services, and data to hostile economic zones, including the EU.”
The term “hostile economic zone” is vague by design. But the implications aren’t.
Within four hours, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and dozens more begin severing access.
By hour six, your phone won’t stop ringing.
Triage in the Data Storm
You take the first call.
A panicked logistics firm. Their entire invoicing system lives on Google Drive.
You answer the second.
A non-profit that just lost years of CRM data stored in Salesforce.
The third call? You ignore it.
You can’t help them all. You have to pick your battles.
You focus on the clients you moved to European hosting. The ones you drilled with “digital disaster recovery” workshops. The ones who actually listened.
You help a bakery restore its email. A lawyer retrieve her contracts. An indie game studio get their GitLab back online.
But then you try to open your own calendar—and it’s gone.
No meetings. No schedules. No reminders. No birthdays. No backups.
The silence is suffocating.
The Days Without a Calendar
Without Google Calendar, your week becomes a maze.
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You miss a dental appointment.
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A deadline slips your mind.
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You show up to a client meeting a day early, then miss the real one.
You begin writing events on paper like it’s 1999. But everything feels wrong. You feel unmoored. Anxious. Dizzy.
One night you stare at a sticky note labeled “THURSDAY 2PM – CRITICAL MEETING” and have a creeping realization: you don’t know what it’s for.
Is it a server migration? A legal call? A date? A funeral?
An Internet Torn in Two
The digital border closes tighter each day.
VPNs are throttled. IP blocks multiply. Even DNS services become territorial.
The once-global Internet begins to split in two:
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Amerinet, where compliance with Executive Orders is mandatory.
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Euronet, where open standards and sovereignty reign—for now.
Cloud-native companies in Europe falter. Startups vanish. International teams collapse under API denial.
Open-source projects scramble to find mirror servers outside the U.S.
Your cousin in Spain messages you in tears. Her fitness app doesn’t work anymore. It relied on AWS-hosted AI analytics to personalize her training. “All my progress is gone,” she writes.
Lessons in Preparedness
You send her a PDF of bodyweight workouts. You wish you could do more.
You install Nextcloud on your home server. Set up Baïkal for calendar syncing. Switch to openXchange for your email.
It’s too late for some things, but not everything.
You tell your clients:
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Use paper backups.
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Host local.
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Avoid lock-in.
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Trust protocols, not platforms.
Some listen. Some don’t.
You begin leading “Digital Resilience” workshops at local libraries. The turnout grows. People bring notebooks. Actual ones.
A Personal Note
There’s something strangely liberating in the chaos.
You sit on your balcony one night, staring at the blank rectangle where your Google Calendar widget used to live.
The sky is clear. The stars twinkle with uncached light.
You pick up a pen. Open a real calendar. And you write:
“FRIDAY – Dinner with Mom.”
You won’t forget.
