There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.
This means digital rights activists who’ve been trying to get rid of the “anti-circumvention” laws have a new potential ally: investors and technologists who’d like to make a hell of a lot of money raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable companies the world has seen.
There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product
There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.
Some more valid reasons in my opinion:
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Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)
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Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.
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US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.
On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.
There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.
Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)
One way to combat this is with bridging / interoperability that allow for partial transitioning. This obviously isn’t applicable to many, many things. But a chat program (e.g. Whatsapp) is actually an example where it is applicable.
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As much as I love Cory Doctorow’s work, this is a stretch. The crack in the door only comes once everything supporting the consolidation and oligarchy of the tech industry comes crashing down. The broligarchs have their contingency planning in place already, so a crack in the door might exist one day, but it’s going to take a lot more than EFF and a few niche rights groups to make any change there. The tech money is digging in, and doing so in ways that are edge cases for even digital rights groups.
The post-WWII order is gone, the post-Cold War model of economics is over, and the post-9/11 surveillance state is now wearing a mask with hoses that feed it super-strength drugs. It’s that the costs of the old bargain are double for everyone that isn’t a FANG, and now gone for them. Just like the Western economy, it’s bifurcating towards different planes of existence that know of each other but barely interact IRL. Which is not sustainable, but for how long we’ll wobble, it’s hard to say.
Digital rights and privacy groups need to be proactive and demonstrate uses cases for both, and make use of them while expecting the non-sustainability of the current system to one day give way to something new.
So step 1 is, for now, strap the fuck in and get your house in order. Build skills, teach others. Step 2 one day is going to be on the heels of massive cultural and political change.
Interesting perspective.
It’s a great point that if you’re getting threatened anyway might as well go in for a pound instead of a penny.
One can only hope!
Make [noun] [adjective] Again is a tainted phrase for all time at this point. It’s etched in innocent blood.
No. We need to make them not have the relevance and power they want so much, and even symbolic things like using such a phrase is empowering.
