The other day, I asked my ride-share driver which platform offered him the best deal. He told me Didi gives more back to the driver, but he has to use the Uber app because “everyone knows Uber. It’s the first thing they think of”.

True. “I’ll grab an Uber” is the default when booking a lift, despite the other options, like Didi and Ola.

Uber is not alone in capturing pole position in our minds. US brands are ubiquitous in contemporary life. Their names have become our default language. We binge on “Netflix”, we go onto a “Zoom” call, we order a gadget on “Amazon”, we meet up at “Maccas”, we drink a “Coke”, we eat a bowl of “Kellogs”, we “Google” things, we post on “Insta”, we check our “iPhone”, we plug in a “Tesla” and now talk to “ChatGPT”. I’m sure you can think of more.

This privatisation of our language is coming into stark relief with the sudden change in our relationship with the US. Previously, its goods and services were synonymous with life. Our days were spent consuming American drinks, snacks, news, films, TV series and platforms. There was little reason to question. But now that the Trump regime has declared a zero-sum world order, we realise that we are losing our mental sovereignty.

Becoming the default language provides US corporations with free advertising that is beyond price. They are already making huge profits from other countries. In Australia alone, Google made $8.7 billion in 2022-2023. We give them free product endorsements countless times a day as a favour.

We’ve been here before. In  The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-century Australia, historian Jay Mary Arthur detailed how the settler perspective on the land was filtered by an English language that was adapted to the European environment. So, the dry summers that regularly occur across the continent became known as “droughts”, implying a deficiency of the land.

This was reflected in the Gothic perspective of writers like Marcus Clarke: “In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours.”

With the fall of Singapore in 1942, we changed spectacles for viewing the world, swapping our austere English bifocals for cool US Ray-Bans (there it is again).

Now, with the threatened fall of Canada in 2025, the world is changing again. Countries once thought to be friends of the US are shocked to find themselves in a shakedown. In response, citizens of countries like Canada are up in arms (or elbows), calling for boycotts of US goods.

Divesting ourselves of US hegemony is quite a challenge. Their products are ubiquitous. It’s one thing to find an alternative to Oreos, but who can compete with Google? Now’s the chance for genuine competition as countries seek to develop equivalents. China is beginning to show the way with EVs and DeepSeek. We’re beginning to discover alternatives.

At a more structural level, the US dollar’s status as the default reserve currency has come under question. The BRICS nations are considering a  gold-backed currency, called the “unit,” as an alternative. Where will this stop? Will the Academy Awards no longer be the global recognition of film excellence? Will the world’s children no longer dream of visiting Disneyland?

The US branding goes beyond consumerism. It’s worth revisiting the US spelling of the Australian Labor Party. The original decision was promoted by our proto-Trump politician, King O’Malley, who moved from the US to Australia, where this “unscrupulous self-promoter ‘gave’ an appearance of solidity to pure wind”, which helped him rise in politics to become minister of health. One of his fateful achievements was to take the “u” out of “labour”. It’s time to put “you” back into Labour.

While we are at it, let’s rid ourselves of the diminutive “Aussie” as a term for the harmless, and sometimes cute, people across the Pacific Ocean. And as for our friends on the other side, how do they get to call themselves “Americans” when they are only one country of the two American continents? I prefer “Unitedstatesians”. I’m sure us Aussies can find a diminutive for that.

The tone of this is getting curmudgeonly. There’s much to love about US culture. We can thank them for their sparkling wit and revolutionary technology, not to mention soul, rock’n roll and all that jazz. But it will be much easier to enjoy all these when we come out of their shadow.

Yankee go home! Yankee come home!