In the intellectual history of the free market, few ideas have been as influential as David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage.  Over 200 years ago, he argued that nations should specialise in what they produce most efficiently and trade for everything else. If your neighbour grows cheaper apples, you don’t need an orchard.

For decades, this was the blueprint for globalisation.  Every nation leaned into its strengths, and the global supply chain did the rest. It was efficiency in its purest form.

Ricardo’s theory, however, assumed a level of global stability that didn’t account for the “strongman” logic of 2026.  If that apple has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the dream of the free market hits the reality of the missile battery. At that point, saving five pence on the pound matters less than actually receiving the fruit.

The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have been a brutal reminder of the importance of self-sufficiency. They have exposed how energy, food, and critical supply chains are only as stable as the least stable actor involved, and can be weaponised by whoever controls their distribution. In the digital age, that logic extends beyond commodities to something more vital: intelligence. A nation’s data sitting in a foreign cloud is an apple sitting in a contested strait.

The importance of control has never been as apparent. Ownership of the digital infrastructure, the platforms, the off switch.  In other words, data sovereignty.

This all sounds abstract until you realise that data ownership is the plumbing of modern society. Without it, our local economies are leaky buckets. Every time a business transacts through social media, or a resident pays for parking via an app with no stake in their community, a “tax” is paid.  Not just in transaction fees, but in the patterns, behaviours, and metadata of daily life, siphoned away to be absorbed and monetised elsewhere. When we outsource the “how” of our daily lives, we subsidise the R&D of private companies that will eventually sell our own insights back to us at a premium.

This isn’t just a theoretical threat. The fragility of the “global orchard” was made visible earlier this year when a major cloud infrastructure failure in the Middle East triggered cascading outages across UK banking, transport, and government services.  It exposed how vulnerable we are when critical systems are built on infrastructure we don’t control, and in some cases cannot even inspect.

It also highlighted how many air miles our data is clocking up. Every time we tap to pay or check a bus timetable, off it heads on a frantic, 10,000-mile round trip across the seabed just to confirm a transaction happening three feet in front of us.

Data sovereignty is now an imperative for governments worldwide. In April 2026, France ordered all ministries to migrate 2.5 million workstations away from Microsoft toward open-source Linux.  Across Europe, civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp, Signal and Zoom as they move away from “platforms over which we have no control”.  Emmanuel Macron urged his citizens to favour “existing, competitive European solutions” wherever possible.  Ask not what your country’s software can do for you…

These moves are part of a global pivot towards Digital Localism. It’s “shop local” applied to the systems that run our towns and cities.  Leading nations are now building AI Factories, high-performance computing infrastructure, to ensure not only that the data stays in-country, but that the thinking stays local too.  So that when a local hospital uses AI to triage patients, the decision-making logic is executed on a domestic stack, governed by local law, and shielded from foreign subpoena. And when a city uses AI to manage its energy grid, the decisions aren’t being made on a server that can be switched off by another government.  If we are outsourcing critical thinking to algorithms, they should at least be our algorithms, built on the values and priorities of the people they affect.*

*(In any other context, this language would feel like dog-whistle territory. It’s hard to advocate for Taking Back Control from foreign LLMs, coming over here, taking our jobs, without a little shiver up the spine. But the argument isn’t really about nationality. A domestic corporation that hoovers up your data and answers only to its shareholders is just as problematic as a foreign one.)

Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage assumed all we produced and traded was goods. He optimised for the price of the apple, and assumed that the apple grower would always want to, and be able to, sell to the apple buyer. But data isn’t consumed when you use it.  It is a feedback loop that never stops accumulating. And the more of it you generate, the more valuable it becomes to whoever holds it. Ricardo’s model had no category for that.

Digital Localism is about agency. The idea that the systems we use to talk, trade, and govern should be treated as part of our community-owned assets alongside our roads, parks and bridges.  Because if the digital ground we stand on is owned by a landlord with no obligation to us, we are nothing more than tenants whose lease can be cancelled without notice.