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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
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PLURALISTIC

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01.12.2025 à 17:02

Pluralistic: Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from hurting Meta's feelings (01 Dec 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4951 mots)


Today's links


A 1950s image of a cop with a patrol car lecturing a boy on a bicycle. Both the cop's head and the boy's head have been replaced with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The ground has been replaced with a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The cop's uniform and car have been decorated to resemble the livery of the Irish Garda (police) and a Garda logo has been placed over the right breast of the cop's uniform shirt.

Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta (permalink)

"Regulatory capture" is one of those concepts that can seem nebulous and abstract. How can you really know when a regulator has failed to protect you because they were in bed with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, and when this is just because they're bad at their job. "Never attribute to malice," etc etc.

The difficulty of pinning down real instances of regulatory capture is further complicated by the arguments of right-wing economists, who claim that regulatory capture is inevitable, that companies will always grow to the point where they can overpower the state and use it to shut down smaller companies before they can become a threat. They use this as an argument for abolishing all regulation, rather than, you know, stopping monopolies from growing until they are more powerful than the state:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Despite this confusion, there are times when regulatory capture is anything but subtle. Especially these times, when the corporate world, spooked by the pandemic-era surge in antitrust enforcement, have launched a gloves-off/mask-off offensive to simply take over their governments, abandoning any pretext of being responsive to democratically accountable processes or agencies.

You've got David Sacks, Trump's billionaire AI czar, who is directing American AI policy while holding (hundreds of?) millions of dollars worth of stock in companies that stand to directly benefit from his work in the US government:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.Nb2d.3L204EF4nliq

Sacks has threatened the New York Times, demanding that they "abandon" the story about his conflicts of interest:

https://protos.com/david-sacks-sends-silly-legal-threat-to-the-new-york-times/

And he's hired the law-firm that is at the center of a decades-long open conspiracy to end press freedom in America, bankrolled and overseen by the same people who planned and executed the destruction of American abortion rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

This isn't a strictly US affair, either. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer rang in 2025 by firing the country's top competition regulator and replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, whose tax evasion, labor abuses, and anticompetitive mergers and tactics had been on the Competition and Markets Authority's agenda for years:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Today, this same swindle is playing out in Canada. Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell – recently endowed with the most sweeping enforcement powers of any competition regulator in the world – has resigned early. Now, Canada's monopolists are openly calling for one of their own top execs to take over the office for the next five years, citing a bizarre Canadian tradition of alternating between civil servants and revolving-door corporate insiders in turn:

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/competition-commissioner-matthew

However, there is one country that always, always brings home the gold in the Regulatory Capture Olympics: Ireland. Ireland had the misfortune to establish itself as a tax haven, meaning it makes pennies by helping the worst corporations in the world (especially US Big Tech companies) hide billions from global tax authorities. Being a tax haven sucks, because tax havens must also function as crime havens.

After all, the tech companies that pretend to be Irish have no loyalty to the country – they are there solely because Ireland will help them cheat the rest of the world. What's more, any company that can hire lawyers to do the paperwork to let it pretend that it's Irish this week could pay those lawyers to pretend that it is Cypriot, or Maltese, or Dutch, or Luxembourgeois next week. To keep these American companies from skipping town, Ireland must bend its entire justice system to the facilitation of all of American tech companies' crimes.

Of course, there is no class of crime that American tech companies commit more flagrantly or consequentially than the systematic, ruthless invasion of our privacy. Nine years ago, the EU passed the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a big, muscular privacy law that bans virtually all of the data-collection undertaken by America's tech companies. However, because these companies pretend they are Irish, they have been able to move all GDPR enforcement to Ireland, where the Data Protection Commissioner could always be relied upon to let these companies get away with murder:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

If you have formed the (widespread) opinion that the GDPR is worse than useless, responsible for nothing more than an endless stream of bullshit "cookie consent" pop-ups, blame the Irish DPC. American tech companies have pretended that they are allowed to substitute these cookie popups for doing the thing the GDPR demands of them (not spying on you at all). This is an obvious violation of the GDPR, and the only way an enforcer could possibly fail to see this is if they served a government whose entire economy depended on keeping Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai happy. It's impossible to explain something to a regulator when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

Incredibly, Ireland has found a way to make this awful situation even worse. They've appointed Niamh Sweeney, an ex-Meta lobbyist, to the role of Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Her resume includes "six years at Meta, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was head of public policy, Ireland for Facebook before becoming WhatsApp’s director of public policy for Europe, Middle East and Africa":

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-tech-lobbyist-named-to-data-protection-commission/

In their complaint to the European Commission, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties lays out a devastating case against Sweeney's fitness to serve – the fact that she has broad, deep, obvious conflicts of interest that should automatically disqualify her from the role:

https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/complaint-v-ireland-to-european-commission-re-process-appointing-ex-meta-lobbyist-as-data-protection-commissioner/#_ftn11

Among other things, Meta execs – like Sweeney – are given piles of stock options and shares in the company. The decisions that Sweeney will be called upon to make as DPC will have a significant and lasting negative effect on Meta's stocks – if Meta is banned from surveilling 500m affluent European consumers, they will make a lot less money.

But that's just for starters. Meta execs also sign contracts that bind them to:

  • Nondisparagement: ex-Meta executives are permanently barred from "making any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta's] products, services or programs; its business affairs, operation, management and financial condition…"

  • Nondisclosure: ex-Meta executives are broadly prohibited from discussing their employment, or disclosing the things they learned while working at the company.

  • Forced arbitration: if Meta believes that a former exec has violated these clauses, they can order the former exec to be silent, and bill them tens of thousands of dollars every time they speak out. Former executives sign away the right to contest these fines and orders in front of a judge; instead, all claims are heard by an "arbitrator" – a corporate lawyer who is paid by Meta and is in charge of deciding whether Meta (who pays their invoices) is right or wrong.

We know about these contractual terms because they have been applied to Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former top Meta exec who published a whistleblower memoir, Careless People, which discloses many of Meta's most terrible practices, from systemic sexual harassment at the highest echelon to a worldwide surveillance collaboration with the Chinese government to complicity in the Rohingya genocide, to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg cheats at Settlers of Catan and his underlings let him win:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Meta dragged Wynn-Williams in front of Meta's pet arbitrator over the statements in her book (without disputing their truthfulness). The arbitrator has fined Wynn-Williams $111,000,000 for speaking out ($50,000 per violation), and has barred her from promoting her book in any way. The company has ordered her not to testify before the US Congress or the UK Parliament. The clauses in Wynn-Williams contract are very similar (if not identical) to the clauses that the US National Labor Relations Board ruled unenforceable:

https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/employment-law/nlrb-rules-metas-7200-confidentiality-agreements-unlawful/499180

Wynn-Williams appeared on stage with me last month at London's Barbican Centre, in a book-tour event moderated by Chris Morris. Whenever we talked about Meta or Careless People, Wynn-Williams would fall silent and assume a blank facial expression, lest she make another statement that would result in Meta seeking another $50,000 from her under the terms of her contract.

In their complaint to the EU, ICCL raises the extremely likely probability that Sweeney is bound by the same contractual terms as Wynn-Williams, meaning that Meta's top regulator in Ireland, the country where Meta pretends to be based, will be contractually prohibited from saying anything that makes Mark Zuckerberg feel bad about himself.

This isn't just a matter for Ireland, either. Given the nature of European federalism, most of Meta's violations of European privacy laws will start with the Irish DPC – in other words, all 500,000,000 Europeans will be forced to complain to someone who is legally barred from upsetting Zuck's digestion.

Tax havens are a global scourge. By allowing American tech companies to evade their taxes around the world, Ireland is complicit in starving countries everywhere of tax revenue they are properly owed. Perhaps even worse than this, though, is the fact that these cod-Irish American companies can always out-compete their domestic rivals all over the world, because those companies have to pay tax, while Meta does not. Ireland has been every bit as important in exporting US Big Tech around the world as the US has been.

But Ireland has another key export, one that is confined to the European Union. Because every tax haven must be a crime haven, and because Big Tech's favorite crime is illegal surveillance, Ireland has exported American tech spying to the whole European Union.

That's how things stand today, and how they've stood since the passage of the GDPR. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said that this is as terrible as things could get. But now that Ireland has put an ex-Meta exec in charge of deciding whether Meta is invading Europeans' privacy, without confirming whether this dingo babysitter is even allowed to criticize Meta, it's clear that things could get much worse than I ever imagined.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Custom M&Ms: just don’t mention the war, your hometown, or nouns https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/28/custom-mms-just-dont-mention-the-war-your-hometown-or-nouns/

#20yrsago Sony CD spyware installs and can run permanently, even if you click “Decline” https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/28/mediamax-permanently-installs-and-runs-unwanted-software-even-if-user-declines-eula/

#20yrsago Programmers on Sony’s spyware DRM asked for newsgroup help too https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.sdk/c/kWKbc54lLxo?hl=en&pli=1#cf2c1677c4ce5138

#20yrsago Vacuum-bag dust houses sculpted by former house-cleaner https://web.archive.org/web/20051127031640/http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/001661.php

#20yrsago Sony knew about rootkits 28 days before the story broke https://web.archive.org/web/20051202044828/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051129_938966.htm

#20yrsago How the next version of the GPL will be drafted https://gplv3.fsf.org/process-definition/

#20yrsago No Xmas for Sony protest badge https://web.archive.org/web/20051203044536/https://gigi.pixcode.com/noxmas.gif

#20yrsago HOWTO defeat Apple’s anti-DVD-screenshot DRM https://highschoolblows.blogspot.com/2005/11/take-screenshot-of-dvd-player-in-os-x.html

#20yrsago EFF: DMCA exemption process is completely bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20051204031027/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004212.php

#15yrsago Paolo Bacigalupi’s SHIP BREAKER: YA adventure story in a post-peak-oil world https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/30/paolo-bacigalupis-ship-breaker-ya-adventure-story-in-a-post-peak-oil-world/

#15yrsago Walt Disney World employees demand a living wage https://thedisneyblog.com/2010/12/01/disney-world-union-takes-offensive/

#15yrsago Hotel peephole doctored for easy removal and spying https://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/5221903189/

#15yrsago DC-area county official says TSA patdowns are “homosexual agenda” https://dcist.com/story/10/11/30/loudoun-county-official-tsa-pat-dow/

#15yrsago Dmitry Sklyarov and co. crack Canon’s “image verification” anti-photoshopping tool https://web.archive.org/web/20110808200303/https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/113010-analyst-finds-flaws-in-canon.html

#15yrsago TSA scans uniformed pilots, but airside caterers bypass all screening https://web.archive.org/web/20101125095532/https://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots/index.html

#15yrsago BP sued in Ecuador for violating the “rights of Nature” https://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/headlines/bp_sued_in_ecuadorian_court_for_violating_rights_of_nature

#15yrsago Four horsemen of the information apocalypse: Cohen, Fanning, Johansen and Frankel https://web.archive.org/web/20101126191152/https://time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html

#15yrsago Winner-Take-All Politics: how America’s super-rich got so much richer https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/29/winner-take-all-politics-how-americas-super-rich-got-so-much-richer/

#15yrsago EFF on US domain copyright seizures https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seizes-82-websites-draconian-future

#15yrsago Where’s Molly: heartbreaking reunion with developmentally disabled sister institutionalized 47 years ago https://web.archive.org/web/20101129193304/http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/28/sunday/main7096335.shtml

#15yrsago “Death-row inmate” seeks last meal advice on Amazon message-board https://web.archive.org/web/20101130212132/http://www.amazon.com/tag/health/forum/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1EO24KZG65FCB&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx3FNFNI6N592DI

#10yrsago You’re only an “economic migrant” if you’re poor and brown https://historyned.blog/2015/09/09/the-wandering-academic-or-how-no-one-seems-to-notice-that-i-am-an-economic-migrant/

#10yrsago Pre-mutated products: where did all those “hoverboards” come from? https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/29/pre-mutated-products-where-did-all-those-hoverboards-come-from/

#10yrsago Millennials are cheap because they’re broke https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/millennials-arent-saving-money-because-theyre-not-making-money/383338/?utm_source=SFFB

#5yrsago Attack Surface in the New York Times https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#times

#5yrsago RÄT https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#honey-morello

#5yrsago Open law and the rule of law https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago Twitter is more redeemable than Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/30/selmers-train/#epistemic-superiority

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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28.11.2025 à 10:00

Pluralistic: (Digital) Elbows Up (28 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (8457 mots)


Today's links


A rectangular motif suggestive of the Canadian flag, flanked by red bars. In the centre is the Jailbreaking Canada logo, a complex vector illustration of a maple leaf mixed with a keyhole, buildings, and various abstract figures.

(Digital) Elbows Up (permalink)

I'm in Toronto to participate in a three-day "speculative design" workshop at OCAD U, where designers, technologists and art students are thinking up cool things Canadians could do if we reformed our tech law:

https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

As part of that workshop, I delivered a keynote speech last night, entitled "(Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology."

The talk was recorded and I'll add the video to this post when I get it, but in the meantime, here's the transcript of my speech. Thank you to all my collaborators at OCAD U for bringing me in and giving me this wonderful opportunity!

==

My theory of enshittification describes the process by which platforms decay. First, they are good to their end users, while finding a way to lock those users in.

Then, secure in the knowledge that they can make things worse for those users without risking their departure, the platforms make things worse in order to make things attractive for business customers. Who also get locked in, dependent on those captive users.

And then, in the third stage of enshittification, platforms raid those business customers, harvesting all available surpluses for their shareholders and executives, leaving behind the bare, mingy homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform and businesses locked to the users, such that the final, ideal stage of the enshittified platform is attained: a giant pile of shit.

This observational piece of the theory is certainly valuable, inasumuch as it lets us scoop up this big, diffuse, enraging phenomenon, capture it in a net, attach a handle to it and call it "enshittification," recognising how we're being screwed.

But much more important is the enshittification hypothesis's theoretical piece, its account of why this is happening now.

Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy.

The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win.

The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not – cannot – end enshittification.

Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product.

So what about the companies? What about the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian failures who have appointed themselves eternal dictators over the digital lives of billions of people? Can we blame them for enshittifying our world?

Well, yes…and no.

It's obviously true that it takes a certain kind of sociopath to run a company like Facebook or Google or Apple. The suicide nets around Chinese iPhone factories are a choice, not an integral component of the phone manufacturing process.

But these awful men are merely filling the niches that our policy environment has created. If Elon Musk ODs on ket today, there will be an overnight succession battle among ten horrible Big Balls, and the victor who emerges from that war will be indistinguishable from Musk himself.

The problem isn't that the wrong person is running Facebook and thus exercising a total veto over the digital lives of four billion people, the problem is that such a job exists. We don't need to perfect Zuck. We don't need to replace Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck.

So where does the blame lie?

It lies with policy makers. Regulators and politicians who created an enshittogenic environment: a rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will fare best.

These are the true authors of enshittification: the named individuals who, in living memory, undertook specific policy decisions, that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene. Policymakers who were warned at the time that this would happen, who ignored that advice and did it anyway.

It is these people and their terrible, deliberate misconduct that we need to remember. It is their awful policies that we must overthrow, otherwise all we can hope to do is replace one monster with another.

So, in that spirit, let us turn to the story of one of these enshittogenic policy choices and the men who made it.

This policy is called "anti-circumvention" and it is the epicenter of the enshittogenic policy universe. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to modify a device that you own, if the company that sold it to you would prefer that you didn't.

All a company has to do is demarcate some of its code as off-limits to modification, by adding something called an "access control," and, in so doing, they transform the act of changing any of that code into a felony, a jailable offense.

The first anticircumvention law is America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone modify code behind an access control is a serious crime, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Crucially, this is true whether or not you break any other law. Under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do a perfectly legal thing becomes a jailable crime, if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with an "access control."

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What's property? Well, let's use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

"Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe."

The printer is yours. It's your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.

But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you're using HP ink, and if it suspects that you've bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying "If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too." That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.

But because HP puts an "access control" in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.

Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company's shareholders.

So another way of saying "anticircumvention law" is "felony contempt of business model." It's a way for a corporation to threaten you with prison if you don't use your property in the way they want you to.

That's anti-circumvention law.

The DMCA was an enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers – and competitors who might help those customers – with criminal prosecution.

Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar.

Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, a UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties," and in 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress."

This guy, Bruce Lehman, is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible.

But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers.

Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort.

Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law three times. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte – a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government – tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through.

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only 53 responses offered support for the idea.

How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,138 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law.

Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes.

It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.

Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so that any new parts installed in a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator have to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.

This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking." Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturer uses an access control to block the repair.

Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers.

Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's official one, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app.

That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives.

It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter.

A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy.

And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.

The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that you wanted to see.

Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance.

Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.

Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you.

Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad.

That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp. Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against. They decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes.

The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway.

Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification.

Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it. Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors.

Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, you folks. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're losing.

Let's talk about how we start winning.

Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want some of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight.

That's the Trump story, all over. The Trump coalition is basically, all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation.

Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democratic Party are a bunch of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist.

Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done.

To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one.

Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?"

After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads.

But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian businesses leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for.

So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books?

Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law.

Remember, digital products are slippery. If America bans circumvention, and American companies start screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy!

So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods.

The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have.

Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits.

That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity." $100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity.

With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, not for me." When they do it to us, that's progress, when we do it to them, it's piracy (and every pirate wants to be an admiral).

Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?

It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch."

Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada.

I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part.

Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere.

Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.

This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American.

Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.

But that's not what we've done. Instead, we've decided to make everything in Canada more expensive, which is just about the stupidest political strategy I've ever heard of.

This might be the only thing Carney could do that's less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing them with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent.

Which is just, you know, stupid. It's like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive. Human beings are not word-guessing programs who know more words than ChatGPT.

Now, it's clear that the coalition of "people who care about digital rights" and "people who want to make billions of dollars off jailbreaking tech" isn't powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars from enshittification.

But Trump – yes, Trump! – keeps recruiting people to our cause.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. It has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapons for attacking his foreign adversaries are America's tech giants.

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Bejamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them, and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts.

The chief prosecutor and other justices immediately lost access to all the working files of the court, to their email archives, to their diaries and address books.

This was a giant, blinking sign, visible from space, reading AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

Trump's America only has adversaries and rivals, and Trump will pursue dominance by bricking your government, your businesses, your whole country.

It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to. Remember when those Russian looters stole Ukrainian tractors and they turned up in Crimea? John Deere sent a kill-signal to the tractors and permanently immobilized them.

This was quite a cool little comeuppance, the kind of thing a cyberpunk writer like me can certainly relish. But anyone who thinks about this for, oh, ten seconds will immediately realise that anyone who can push around the John Deere company can order the permanent immobilization of any tractor in the world, or all the tractors in your country.

Because John Deere is a monopolist, and whatever part of the market Deere doesn't control is controlled by Massey Ferguson, and Trump can order the bricking of those tractors, too.

This is the thing we were warned we'd face if we let Huawei provide our telecoms infrastructure, and those warnings weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer.

Because that means we are at risk from the manufacturer, from governments who can suborn the manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack the manufacturer's control systems, and from criminals who can impersonate the manufacturer to our devices.

This is the third part of our coalition: not just digital rights weirdos like me; not just investors and technologists looking to make billions; but also national security hawks who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or someone else shutting down key pieces of their country, from its food supply to its administrative capacity.

Trump is a crisis, and crises precipitate change.

Just look at Europe. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, the EU was a decade behind on its energy transition goals. Now, just a few years later, they're 15 years ahead of schedule.

It turns out that a lot of "impossible" things are really just fights you'd rather not have. No one wants to argue with some tedious German who hates the idea of looking at "ugly solar panels" on their neighbour's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that's an argument you will have and you will win.

Today, another mad emperor is threatening Europe – and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to a new anti-enshittification coalition: digital rights advocates, investors and technologists, and national security hawks; both the ones who worry about America, and the ones who worry about China.

That's a hell of a coalition!

The time is right to become a disenshittification nation, to harness our own tech talent, and the technologists who are fleeing Trump's America in droves, along with capital from investors who'd like to back a business whose success isn't determined by how many $TRUMP Coins they buy.

Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size.

It's unlike everything else we've tried, like the Digital Services Tax, or forcing Netflix to support cancon, or making Facebook and Google pay to link to the news.

All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude richer than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do.

Time and again, they've shown that we don't have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does.

We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops, our nonprofits, who want to jailbreak America's shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity.

In a jailbroken Canada, we don't have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place.

And if we don't do it, someone else will. Because every country was arm-twisted into passing an anti-circumvention law like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lickspittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who'd do America's bidding, a quisling who'd put their nation's people and businesses in chains, rather than upset the US Trade Rep.

And all of those countries are right where we are: hit with tariffs, threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere bricks their businesses, their government, their farms.

One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity, the opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by US Tech giants, and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come.

That gives them the hottest export business in living memory: a capital-light, unstoppable suite of products that save businesses and consumers money, while protecting their privacy.

If we sleep on this, we'll still benefit. We'll get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disenshittify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment.

But we won't get the industrial policy, the chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with the global reach and influence of RIM or Nortel.

That'll go to someone else. The Europeans are already on it. They're funding and building the "Eurostack": free, open source, auditable and trustworthy versions of the US tech silos. We're going to be able to use that here.

I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on metal running in Canadian data-centres, and we'll debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else.

Because that's how IT should work, and it should go beyond just the admin and database software that businesses and governments rely on. We should be building drop-in, free, open software for everything: smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches, phones, cars, tractors, powered wheelchairs, ventilators.

That's how it should already be: that the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity, our lives should be running code that anyone can see, test, and improve.

That's how science works, after all. Before we had science, we had something kind of like science. We had alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science, in that an alchemist would observe some natural phenomena in the world, hypothesise a causal relationship between them, and design an experiment to validate that hypothesis.

But here's where alchemy and science diverge: unlike a scientist, an alchemist wouldn't publish their results. They'd keep them secret, rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where your enemies seek out every possible reason to discredit your work. This let the alchemists kid themselves about the stuff they thought they'd discovered, and that's why every alchemist discovered for themself, in the hardest way possible, that you shouldn't drink mercury.

But after 500 years of this, alchemy finally achieved its long sought-after goal of converting something common to something of immeasurable value. Alchemy discovered how to transform the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of knowledge, through the crucible of publishing.

Disclosure is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. Openness is the difference between dying of mercury poisoning and discovering medicine.

The fact that we have a law on our statute books, in the year of two thousand and twenty-five, that criminalises discovering how the software we rely on works, and telling other people about it and improving it – well, it's pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it?

We don't have to keep on drinking the alchemists' mercury. We don't have to remain prisoners of the preposterous policy blunders of Tony Clement and James Moore. We don't have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices.

We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology.

Like the EU's energy transition, this is a move that's long overdue. Like the EU's energy transition, a mad emperor has created the conditions for us to get off of our asses, to build a better world.

We could be a disenshittification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamned fortune doing it.

And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border, and rescue our American cousins to boot.

What's not to like?

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago Ten (sensible) startup rules https://web.archive.org/web/20060324072607/https://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

#20yrsago Bosnian town unveils Bruce Lee statue of peace http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4474316.stm

#20yrsago Sony rootkit author asked for free code to lock up music https://web.archive.org/web/20051130023447/https://groups.google.de/group/microsoft.public.windowsmedia.drm/msg/7cb5c4ad49fa206e

#20yrsago Singapore’s executioner gets fired http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4477012.stm

#20yrsago Pre-history of the Sony rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20181126020952/https://community.osr.com/discussion/42117#T3

#15yrsago Support the magnetic ribbon industry ribbon! https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ecr1t/ill_see_your_empty_gesture_and_raise_you/

#15yrsago Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners https://web.archive.org/web/20101125192455/https://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010/11/tsa-x-ray-backscatter-body-scanner.html

#15yrsago Wunderkammerer front room crammed with nooks https://web.archive.org/web/20101125184317/http://mocoloco.com/fresh2/2010/11/23/villa-j-by-marge-arkitekter.php

#15yrsago Delightful science fiction story in review of $6800 speaker cable https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I8VKTCITJCX6/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000J36XR2&nodeID=172282&tag=&linkCode=

#15yrsago German Pirate Party members strip off for Berlin airport scanner protest https://web.archive.org/web/20101129043459/https://permaculture.org.au/2010/11/26/full-monty-scanner-or-enhanced-pat-down-the-only-options/

#10yrsago Dolphin teleportation symposium: now with more Eisenhowers! https://twitpic.com/3aqqa0

#10yrsago Vtech breach dumps 4.8m families’ information, toy security is to blame https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/when-children-are-breached-inside-the-massive-vtech-hack/

#10yrsago A Canadian teenager used America’s militarized cops to terrorize women gamers for years https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html?_r=0

#10yrsago What the 1980s would have made of the $5 Raspberry Pi https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/raspberry-pi-five-bucks-us/

#10yrsago Workaholic Goethe wished he’d been better at carving out time for quiet reflection https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/the-aged-herr-goethe-never-had-enough-time-for-himself/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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27.11.2025 à 13:00

Pluralistic: Normie diffusion and technophilia (27 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3785 mots)


Today's links


A supercomputing data center with a drop ceiling. Hanging upside down from the ceiling is a young girl, tinted acid-green, with a halo of light radiating off her body. Around the data center are several young children, running towards her or pointing at her.

Normie diffusion and technophilia (permalink)

It's an accepted (but wrong) fact that some groups of people are just more technologically adventurous by temperament, and that's why they adopt technologies before the rest of society (think here of pornographers, kids, and terrorists).

As I've written before, these groups aren't more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Whenever a new communications technology arrives, it is arriving into a world of existing communications technologies, which are, by definition, easier to use. They're easier to use for two reasons: the obvious reason is that you're more likely to be familiar with an existing technology than you are with a new technology. After all, it's literally impossible to be familiar with a technology that has just been invented!

But the other reason that existing communications technologies are easier to use is that communication is – again, by definition – something you do with other people. That means that if you want to use a new communications tool to talk with someone else, it is not sufficient for you to master that technology's use – you must also convince the other person you're hoping to reach to master that technology, too.

In economic terms, the "opportunity cost" (the amount of time you lose for doing other things) of mastering a new communications tool isn't limited to your own education, but also to the project of convincing someone else to master that tool, and then showing them how to use it.

If the existing communications technology is working for you, mastering the new tool is mostly cost, with very little upside. Perhaps you are a technophile by temperament and derive intrinsic satisfaction from exploring a new tool, and that's why you do it, but even so, you're going to find yourself in the bind of trying to convince the people you'd like to communicate with to follow your lead. And if they're all being well-served by the existing communications tools, and if they're not technophiles, you're asking them to engage in a lot of labor and endure a high opportunity cost for no obvious benefit. It's a hard slog.

But there are many groups of people for whom the existing technology does not work, and one of the biggest ways an existing technology can fail is if the authorities are using it to suppress your communications and/or spy on your usage in order to frustrate your goals.

This brings us back to sex workers, kids and terrorists. All three groups are typically poorly served by the existing communications technology. If you're a pornographer in the age of celluloid film, you either have to convince your customers to visit (and risk being seen entering) an adult movie theater, or you have to convince them to buy an 8mm projector and mail order your reels (and risk being caught having them delivered).

No wonder pornographers and sex workers embraced the VCR! No wonder they embraced the internet! No wonder they embraced cryptocurrency (if your bank accounts are liable to being frozen and/or seized, it's worth figuring out how to use an esoteric payment method and endure the risk of its volatility and technological uncertainty). Today, sex workers and their customers are doubtless mastering VPNs (to evade anonymity-stripping "age verification" systems) and Tor hidden services (to evade "online safety" laws).

The alternative to using these systems isn't the status quo – making use of existing websites, existing payment methods, existing connection tools. The alternative is nothing. So it's worth learning to use these new tools, and to engage in the social labor of convincing others to join you in using them.

Then there's kids. Unlike sex workers, kids' communications aren't broadly at risk of being suppressed so much as they are at risk of being observed by authority figures with whom they have an adversarial relationship.

When you're a kid, you want to talk about things without your parents, teachers, principals, or (some of) your peers or siblings listening in. You want to plan things without these people listening in, because they might try and stop you from doing them, or punish you if you succeed.

So again, it's worth figuring out how to use new technologies, because the existing ones are riddled with censorship and surveillance back-doors ("parental controls") that can be deployed to observe your communications, interdict your actions, and punish you for the things that you manage to pull off.

So of course kids are also "early adopters" – but not because being a kid makes you a technophile. Many kids are technophiles and many are not, but whether or not a kid finds mastering a new technology intrinsically satisfying, they will likely have to do so, if they want to communicate with their peers.

For terrorists, the case for mastering new technologies combines the sex-workers' cases and kids' cases: terrorists' communications are both illegal and societally unacceptable (like sexual content) and terrorists operate in an environment in which entities far more powerful than them seek to observe and interdict their plans, and punish them after the fact for their actions (like kids).

So once again, terrorists are apt to master new communications technologies, but not because seeking to influence political outcomes by acts of violence against civilian populations is somehow tied to deriving intrinsic satisfaction from mastering new technologies, but rather because the existing technologies are dangerously unsuitable for your needs.

Note that just because being in one of these groups doesn't automatically make you a technophile, it doesn't mean that there are no technophiles among these groups. Some people are into tech and the sex industry. Some kids love mastering new technologies. Doubtless this is true of some terrorists, too.

I haven't seen any evidence that being a kid, or a terrorist, or a sex-worker, makes you any less (or any more) interested in technology than anyone else. Some of us just love this stuff for its own sake. Other people just want a tool that works so they can get on with their lives. That's true of every group of people.

The difference is that if you're a technophile in a group of people who have a damned good reason to endure the opportunity cost of mastering a new technology, you have a much more receptive audience for your overheated exhortations to try this amazing new cool thing you've discovered.

What's more, there are some situational and second-order effects that come into play as a result of these dynamics. For example, kids are famously "cash-poor and time-rich" which means that spending the time to figure out new technologies when they're still in stage one of enshittification (when they deliver a lot of value at their lowest cost, often free) is absolutely worth it.

Likewise, the fact that sex-workers are often the first commercial users of a new communications technology means that there's something especially ugly about the fact that these services jettison sex workers the instant they get leaned on by official prudes. The story of the internet is the story of businesses who owe their commercial existence to sex workers, who have since rejected them and written them out of their official history.

It also means that technophiles who aren't kids, pornographers or terrorists are more likely to find themselves in techno-social spaces that have higher-than-average cohorts of all three groups. This means that bright young technologists can find themselves being treated as peers by accomplished adults (think of Aaron Swartz attending W3C meetings as a pre-teen after being welcomed as a peer in web standardization online forums).

It also means that technophiles are more likely than the average person to have accidentally clicked on a terrorist atrocity video. And it means that pornographers and sex-workers are more likely to be exposed to technologically adventurous people in purely social, non-sexual online interactions, because they're among the first arrivals in new technological spaces, when they are still mostly esoteric, high-tech realms, which means that even among the less technophilic members of that group, there's probably an above-average degree of familiarity with things that are still way ahead of the tech mainstream.

My point is that we should understand that the adoption of technology by disfavored, at risk, or prohibited groups is driven by material factors, not by some hidden ideological link between sex and tech, or youth and tech, or terrorism and tech.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TSA makes flier remove body jewelry https://web.archive.org/web/20051129025951/https://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/s_397618.html

#20yrsago Microsoft caught subverting UN process, censoring FOSS references https://web.archive.org/web/20051128030303/https://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39238443,00.htm

#15yrsago Zimbabwean law will put legislation, parliamentary gazette, etc, under state copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20101129133649/https://www.theindependent.co.zw/local/28907-general-laws-bill-inimical-to-democracy.html

#10yrsago Steiff Japan’s centaur teddybears http://www.steiff-shop.jp/2007w_ltd/037351_seet.html

#10yrsago Woman adds vaginal yeast to sourdough starter, Internet flips out https://web.archive.org/web/20180808194241/https://anotherangrywoman.com/2015/11/25/baking-and-eating-cuntsourdough/

#10yrsago Party like it’s 1998: UK government bans ripping CDs — again https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-music-industry-it-is-illegal-to-make-private-copies-of-music-again/

#10yrsago Devastating technical rebuttal to the Snoopers Charter https://www.me.uk/IPBill-evidence1.pdf

#10yrsago AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/25/turing-refuses-to-lower-cost-daraprim-hides-news-ahead-thanksgiving-holiday/

#10yrsago US credit union regulator crushed Internet Archive’s non-predatory, game-changing bank https://blog.archive.org/2015/11/24/difficult-times-at-our-credit-union/

#10yrsago The last quarter-century of climate talks explained, in comics form https://web.archive.org/web/20151126142914/http://www.nature.com/news/the-fragile-framework-1.18861

#10yrsago The Paradox: a secret history of magical London worthy of Tim Powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/26/the-paradox-a-secret-history-of-magical-london-worthy-of-tim-powers/

#1yrago Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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26.11.2025 à 13:33

Pluralistic: O(N^2) nationalism (26 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5004 mots)


Today's links


The Earth seen from space. Hovering above it is Uncle Sam, with Trump's hair - his legs are stuck out before him, and they terminate in ray-guns that are shooting red rays over the Earth. The starry sky is punctuated by 'code waterfall' effects, as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

O(N^2) nationalism (permalink)

In their 2023 book Underground Empire, political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe how the modern world runs on US-based systems that other nations treat(ed) as neutral platforms, and how that is collapsing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Think of the world's fiber optic cables: for most of the internet's history, it was a given that one end of the majority of the world's transoceanic fiber would make landfall on one of the coasts of the USA. US telcos paid to interconnect these fiber head-ends – even ones on opposite coasts – with extremely reliable, high-speed links.

This made a certain kind of sense. Pulling fiber across an ocean is incredibly expensive and difficult. Rather than run cables between each nation in the world, countries could connect to the US, and, in a single hop, connect to anywhere else.

This is a great deal, provided that you trust the USA to serve as an honest broker for the world's internet traffic. Then, in 2013, the Snowden leaks revealed that America's National Security Agency was spying on pretty much everyone in the world.

Since then, the world has undergone a boom in new transoceanic fiber, most of it point-to-point links between two countries. Despite the prodigious logistical advantages of a hub-and-spoke model for ocean-spanning fiber networks, there just isn't any nation on Earth that can be entrusted with the world's information chokepoint, lest they yield to temptation to become the world's gatekeeper.

Don't get me wrong: there are also advantages to decentralized (or even better, distributed) interconnections in the world's data infrastructure. A more dispersed network topology is more resilient against a variety of risks, from political interference to war to meteor strikes.

But connecting every country to every other country is a very expensive proposition. Our planet has 205 sovereign nations, and separately connecting each of them to the rest will require 20,910 links.

In complexity theory, this is an "Order N-squared" ("O(n^2)") problem – every additional item in the problem set squares the number of operations needed to solve it. We aren't anywhere near a world where every country has a link to every other country on Earth. Instead, we're in an unsettled period, where warring theories about how to decentralize, and by how much, have created a weird, lopsided network topology.

Obviously, fiber interconnection isn't the most important "neutral platform" that the US (formerly) provided to the rest of the world. The most important American platform is the US dollar, which most countries in the world use as a reserve currency, and also as a standard for clearing international transactions. If someone in Thailand wants to buy oil from someone in Saudi Arabia, they do so in dollars. This is called "dollar clearing."

The case for dollar clearing is similar to the case for linking all the world's fiber through US data-centers. It's a big lift to ask every seller to price their goods in every potential buyer's currency, and it's a lot to ask every Thai baht holder to race around the world seeking someone who'll sell them Saudi riyals – and then there's the problem of what they do with the change left over from the transaction.

Establishing liquid markets for every possible pair of currencies has the same kind of complexity as the problem of establishing fiber links between every country.

Since the mid-20th century, we've solved this problem by treating the US dollar as a neutral platform. Countries opened savings accounts at the US Federal Reserve and stashed large numbers of US dollars there (when someone says, "China owns umpty-billion in US debt," they just mean, "There's a bank account in New York at the Fed with China's name on it that has been marked up with lots of US dollars").

Merchants, institutions and individuals that wanted to transact across borders used the SWIFT system, which is nominally international, but which, practically speaking, is extremely deferential to the US government.

Issuing the world's reserve and reference currency was a source of enormous power for the US, but only to the extent that it used that power sparingly, and subtly. The power of dollarization depended on most people believing that the dollar was mostly neutral – that the US wouldn't risk dollar primacy by nakedly weaponizing the dollar. Dollarization was a bet that America First hawks would have the emotional maturity to instrumentalize the dollar in the most sparing and subtle of fashions.

But today, no one believes that the dollar is neutral. First came the Argentine sovereign debt default: in 2001, the government of Argentina wiped out investors who were holding its bonds. In 2005, a group of American vulture capitalists scooped up this worthless paper for pennies, then sued in New York to force Argentina to make good on the bonds, and a US court handed over Argentina's foreign reserves, which were held on US soil.

That was the opening salvo in a series of events which showed everyone in the world that the US dollar wasn't a neutral platform, but was, rather, a creature of US policy. This culminated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw the seizure of Russian assets in the USA and a general blockade on Russians using the SWIFT system to transfer money.

Whether or not you like the fact that Russian assets were transferred to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russian aggression (I like it, for the record), there's no denying that this ended the pretense that the dollar was a neutral platform. It was a signal to every leader in the world that the dollar could only be relied upon for transaction clearing and foreign reserves to the extent that you didn't make the USA angry at you.

Today, Donald Trump has made it clear that the US's default posture to every country in the world is anger. The US no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. Today, every country in the world is America's adversary and its rival.

But de-dollarization isn't easy. It presents the same O(n^2) problem as rewiring the world's fiber: creating deep, liquid markets to trade every currency against every other currency is an impossible lift (thus far), and there's no obvious candidate as a replacement for the dollar as a clearing currency.

As with fiber, we are in an unsettled period, with no obvious answer, and lots of chaotic, one-off gestures towards de-dollarization. For example, Ethiopia is re-valuing its foreign debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

But fiber and dollars aren't the only seemingly neutral platforms that America provided to the world as a way of both facilitating the world's orderly operation and consolidating America's centrality and power on the global stage.

America is also the world's great digital exporter. The world's governments, corporations and households run on American cloud software, like Google Docs and Office365. Their records are held in Oracle databases. Their messages and media run on iPhones. Their cloud compute comes from AWS.

The Snowden revelations shook this arrangement, but it held. The EU extracted a series of (ultimately broken) promises from the US to the effect that America wouldn't spy on Europeans using Big Tech. And now, after a brittle decade of half-measures and uneasy peace with American tech platforms, Trump has made it clear that he will not hesitate to use American tech platforms to pursue his geopolitical goals.

Practically speaking, that means that government officials that make Trump angry can expect to have their cloud access terminated:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

Trump can – and does – shut down entire international administrative agencies, without notice or appeal, as a means of coercing them into embracing American political goals.

What's more, US tech giants have stopped pretending that they will not share sensitive EU data – even data housed on servers in the EU – with American spy agencies, and will keep any such disclosures a secret from the European governments, companies and individuals who are affected:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

All this has prompted a rush of interest in the "Eurostack," an effort to replicate the functionality of US tech companies' cloud services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

But the Eurostack's proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It's not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation's GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they're crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America's widely exported IP laws.

Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called "adversarial interoperability." Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing's manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The problem is that adversarial interoperability has been mostly criminalized in countries all around the world, thanks to IP laws that prohibit the study, reverse engineering and modification of software without permission. These laws were spread all over the world at the insistence of the US Trade Representative, who, for 25 years, has made this America's top foreign trade priority.

Countries that balked at enacting laws were threatened with tariffs. Virtually every country in the world fell into line:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

But then Trump happened. The Trump tariffs apply to countries that have voluntarily blocked their own investors and entrepreneurs from making billions by supplying products that unlock and improve America's enshittified tech exports. These blocks also exposed everyone in the world to the data- and cash-plundering scams of US Big Tech, by preventing the creation of privacy blockers, alt clients, jailbreaking kits, and independent app stores for phones, tablets and consoles.

What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.

This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated). But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.

And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.

Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down any tractor in the world – including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.

True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.

This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a massive project.

It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years ahead of schedule in just a few years.

The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is hard has no bearing on whether it is necessary.

It is necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing the dollar, or replacing the fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.

Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack. It can be a commons, a set of core technologies that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, that everyone adds features to, that everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.

It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone – even adversaries – can rely upon.

This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Transformers costumes that turn into cars and jets https://web.archive.org/web/20051127021810/http://www.marksprojects.com/costumestrans.htm

#15yrsago London police brutally kettle children marching for education https://web.archive.org/web/20101126000126/http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest

#15yrsago Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/nov/25/times-paywall-cory-doctorow

#10yrsago Ifixit is the new Justice League of America and Kyle Wiens is its Superman https://web.archive.org/web/20151125125009/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-fix-everything

#5yrsago Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#merger-to-monopoly

#5yrsago A state-owned Amazon https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#correo-compras

#5yrsago Office 365 spies on employees for bosses https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

#5yrsago Tech in SF https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#asl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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