Global organisations wield power like no institutions in history. More than many nation-states. The responsibility should be considered sacred. Instead, it’s every corporation for themselves: and let the buyer beware.

What’s missing from the mix? Surely … respect. Respect is earned, they often say. Perhaps, then, when big tech fails to respect a lot of us, we are part of the problem. If a Silicon Valley corporate body chooses to ride roughshod over all local and regional rules and regulations, and is able to just because it’s more fleet-of-foot, maybe we haven’t aspired to better.

But “just because you can” doesn’t mean you should. Russia can, and is so doing. Is that the approach big tech continues to want to follow? Is that level of respect’s total absence how the Valley would like history to remember its trajectory and legacy?

I would hope not. Part of the reasoning and thinking behind Nordification, too.

I remember a story I was told at a lunchtime event in the mid-2000s in London. The guest was Bill Patry, General Counsel for Google. He used the example of the Melian Dialogue to describe the relationship the rest of the world had to accept was its place in respect of corporations like the one he worked for.

Read more about this ancient dialogue in the information box.

At the time, even then, I was taken aback by how open he felt he could be. But in the event, recent history has proven him largely right.

Here at Nordification, following the example of places like the Nordics where things in tech are already done differently, we can spread ways of seeing — and therefore ways of doing — in firm and resilient ways.

But what’s more, I think recent events in the fields of big tech make it imperative that we do.

Don’t you?