← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
(Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU, November 27, 2025)
This week on my podcast, I play the audio from (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology, a speech I delivered on November 27, 2025 at OCADU in Toronto, Canada (video here, transcript here). I recognize that this is all... more
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Well, hello and welcome back to my first Cory Doctorow podcast of the New year. I know I had one out on New Year's Day, but I recorded that last year. I sound bad because I have a cold. I have been sick like all this year. I got a genuinely disgusting bout of viral gastroenteritis just as I was leaving Toronto on like January 3rd and I just got over that and now I've got a rotten cold. Not Covid thankfully, and not the flu I think just a gross cold. But I do have some talks coming up and I will ideally not sound like this when I get there. So if you're in Denver, you can catch me at the tattered cover on 22 January. I believe there are a few tickets left for that. I will be in Colorado Springs to be the guest of honor at the Cosine science fiction convention January 23rd through 25th in Ottawa. On January 28th, catch me at Perfect Books. And again, there are just a few tickets left for that. On January 30th I will be with Tim Wu in Toronto at the Tiff Theatre doing something called Inshidification and the Age of Extraction. Come see us there. I bet that's gotta be nearly sold out because both of us, the last events we've done in Toronto have been sold out. So I haven't hear heard from them. But I'm assuming that if you don't get your ticket soon, you won't get one at all. I will be back in Victoria B.C. on March 3rd through 5th to keynote the 28th annual Victoria International Privacy and Security Summit. I will be in Berlin from May 18th through 20th to keynote republica. And I will be in hay on why for the how the Light gets in festival May 22nd through 25th. Please think about attending some of those if they're convenient to you. It's going to be fun. So it's been a busy start to the year. I am supposed to be not working this month. I'm supposed to be close to home at least. If not not working at least close to home and taking it easy because this is the month that I'm starting my cancer therapy. Those of you who weren't listening last year or missed it, I have follicular lymphoma. They initially thought it was stage one. I had it radiation treated and then it came back so it's stage two. So now I'm getting a systemic therapy. Just a few years ago that would have meant a very harsh round of chemo. That would have been very debilitating thankfully, we live in an age of wonders. So I'm getting something called immunotherapy and I've been learning lots about how that works. Basically, they find in the wild an antibody that attacks proteins that preferentially are expressed by cancer cells. And then they clone that antibody 10 gazillion times and. And then they just drip it into your arm and it goes around and it finds all the cancer cells and it kills them. So, you know, a normal human may every now and again express an antibody that can attack a cancer cell, but it's not a thing that your body is good at producing, so they just make just fuck tons of them and stuff them in your arm. So I had my first infusion last week. It was literally and figuratively painless. I had no side effects. I'm told that I might get side effects later, but that they would consist of these like, chills and stuff that arise from the waste products of the dead cancer cells being processed by your body. You just get a lot of like mineral salts, potassium, and just being overloading your body's ability to cope with it temporarily. But you know, really the only part of it that was unpleasant was it just took a really long time. They are understandably very conservative when they give you your first infusion because they don't know how you're going to react to it. So they tighter the dose and they start at whatever, you know, 5 milligrams per half hour per hour and then they crank it up to 10 after an hour and then, and whatever. I don't remember the actual numbers, but you know, by the end it was going in at a good clip. But for the first like three hours they were barely infusing anything. And I was just on this infusion couch for like six hours and I was working, but it was very boring. And they tell me the next time they're going to double the rate and so it'll be a much shorter, not a six hour bout of couch time. And I had to go straight from that to the airport to fly to Las Vegas to hang out with Ed Zittron, who is doing his annual Consumer Electronics show podcast, podcasting extravaganza. If you tune into his podcast better offline, you can hear me in the last three episodes from that. I think they're 8, 9 and 10 maybe. But basically Ed has brought in all kinds of tech journalists. Ed Onguesso Jr. Was there, Robert Evans, me, a bunch of people I didn't know, but who I came to know and admired. And we all walk the floor and then come back and are pretty snarky about what we saw on the floor, but also very enthusiastic about the stuff we liked. And there was a bunch of stuff we liked as well. It was really good fun. And we all slept in a couple of suites that he had booked out. It was great. It was like having a pajama party for tech criticism. They're really fun. So, yeah, as I said, January is supposed to be my off month, and it is not my off month. I am living through one of the most professionally and creatively fertile periods of my life. I'm working on edits to three books at the moment. One is a young adult graphic novel called Unauthorized Bread, adapted from my story in Radicalized, and we're doing pretty close to finals on that, going through it very closely and making edits. The other is a graphic novel for adults, adapted from Inshidification. Working with the illustrator on that. It's still in the pencils and he's inking and finalizing. And my AI Critical book, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI, that just went through a round of very intensive edits over Christmas week, which was tough, especially since I was also in Hamburg giving that big speech. And speaking of big speeches, I am writing a big speech right now. I'm off to Ottawa soon. You heard that I'm going to be in Ottawa on January 28th at PerfectBooks. But what's actually bringing me to Ottawa is a keynote speech for the Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada who holds this annual summit where she brings in the CIO and CTO of every federal and provincial ministry and every major firm in Canada. And they've asked me to come keynote the conference and to talk to them about this idea, the idea that is the subject of my last podcast, this Post American Internet. And it is the subject of today's podcast, as you'll hear shortly. I'm also just having so many ideas for blog posts that are really working out the ideas for the post American Internet. One of the great things about the way that I work where as I am developing an idea, turning it into a book, as you hear in a minute, I'm working on this Post American Internet book right now. As I'm doing that, I'm publishing the subsections or sub components of the argument that I'm developing and often people who hate me and want me to fail will make fun of me and say, oh, look at Dr. O. He never thought of this. And I'm like, oh yeah, no, no, I totally have an answer for that. That's great. I am now going to make sure that that's in the book. So breaking this argument down into chunks and turning those chunks into blog posts and speeches, it makes them a lot more fluid. But it also is a way for me to inadvertently conscript my haters into being my red team who identify the weaknesses in the argument, which I then shore up. So this is adversarial peer review in action. And I have so many great blog posts.
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Que?
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I've got one I'm writing today for publication tomorrow, but I've got like at least seven, which is unusual for me because usually my blog posts are responding to current events and obviously there's a lot of current events right now, but that's not what's happening right now. I just have this giant backlog of ideas I want to develop. I'm also supposed to be taking time off and yet I'm writing blog posts and yet I'm writing this Canadian speech, and yet I'm traveling to Canada. But I'm also on Monday spending most of the day in front of a camera because Al Jazeera is coming by to adapt my reverse Centaur speech about AI into a short film for Al Jazeera International. So that's going to be fun tomorrow. And it's going to be dueling camera crews because the people making the Inshitification documentary are coming by to record me being recorded on Al Jazeera as a kind of behind the scenes thing. So I'm going to have two camera crews jammed into my office tomorrow and that's going to be fun. And like I mentioned, I am writing this new book, the Post American Internet, which really fuses all of the arguments that I made in Inshidification and in the Reverse Centaur book and since into one big metathesis, grand unified theory, if you will, of what we should be doing about tech policy in this moment and how, more importantly, we can actually make that idea into a reality. And I am so excited about this book. I'm hoping to have it done by March 30th. I'm doing a thousand words a day, five days a week. I have not missed a day so far. I've done the first four days of it. And despite the fact that I've got lots of other projects, I neglected to mention I'm also writing an introduction for the paperback of inshidification that's due February 3rd that is about the post American Internet. So I'm writing many things about the Post American Internet all at once. All in parallel. Each one is sharpening the other ones. It's such a exciting moment. If I wasn't so kind of logie and sick and downbeat, I'd be worried that I was having a manic episode because it's just so cool, all these ideas popping off and the way that they're kind of feeding into each other. So this week's podcast is the audio from a speech I gave that is the forerunner to the post American Internet speech that I gave at ccc. That is the precursor to the post American Internet speech I'm going to give for the CIO of Canada. It is the speech that I gave at OCAD U. This is the art school Interactive. Toronto used to be called the Ontario College of Arts. Then it became the Ontario College of Art and Design and then it became a university. And so now it is ocadu. Ocadu. And I was invited there in November to run a week long workshop on what we would do in Canada if we could repeal the laws that block people from fixing bad American technology. And it culminated with a big keynote called Digital Elbows How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade War and Disinfitify Our Technology. And that is the speech that I gave at ocadu. It is the substance of this week's podcast. I just ripped the audio out of the video file that ocadu Emma Westacade was my host. There was good enough to upload to Vimeo, but I cranked it out of there and turned it into an MP3 and John is going to butt that up against this intro which is now gone on for far too long. And you will get to listen to
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the speech in the Q and A.
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Anyway, thank you very much for tuning in. I hope your new year is as exciting as mine and not in the bad people getting shot in the streets way, which is obviously a thing that I am not happy about. And I don't know if I've mentioned it, I know I have. I write when I am anxious and that's probably a big part of what's going on in terms of this extraordinary digital ferment, this creative ferment that I'm in the midst of. But I hope your year is going well, despite Venezuela, shootings in the street, incipient fascism, all of those things. And I hope this speech gives you hope, because I have hope. I think there's stuff going on right now that is worth being hopeful about. Anyways, I'll talk to you next week.
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I am but an EFF staffer of 25 years tenure. But I I stand on the shoulders of giants. What a pleasure to be here tonight. To give you an idea of the order of service here, I'm going to give a talk about Jailbreaking Canada. They'll take questions. A good question has one part, not two. It's not more of a comment than a question, and almost as an exception, it's not about AI after that. I have this thing I bought on the Internet. It has the technical capability to make books non returnable and I'm going to sit outside and I'll give you demos of it if you'd like. And I will be joined by my colleague Madeleine Ashby, who's a brilliant science fiction writer and my colleague in running this workshop. And I had the great privilege and honor of publishing her very first story. So what a treat to continue to be a colleague of hers all these years later. So my theory of initiatification describes the process by which platforms decay. First they're 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 more attractive for business customers, who also get locked in dependent on those captive users. And then, in the third stage of initiatification, platforms raid those business customers too, 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 initiative platform is attained. The giant pile of shit. Now, the observational piece of this theory, I think, has some certain value in as much as it lets us scoop up this big diffuse enraging phenomenon, capture it in a kind of net, attach a handle on it, and call it inshinification, recognizing exactly how we're being screwed. But much more important than initiatification is the inchitification hypothesis Theoretical piece, the account of why this is happening now. So let me start by saying that I do not attribute the blame for inchinification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices are not the arbiters of policy. The reason billionaires are always urging you to vote with your wallet is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. The it is the only numeric advantage that billionaires enjoy, because otherwise they are in every regards an infinitesimal and unimportant minority in a vote of Ballots rather than wallets. Billionaires lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet voting nonsense. The wallet vote is the only vote that billionaires lose can win. The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable and bitter council of despair. You cannot shop your way out of a monopoly any more than you can recycle your way out of the wildfires. Shop as hard as you like. You will not. You cannot end inshidification. Insidification is not the result of your failure to grasp that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. You are the product. If you pay, you're the product. If you don't pay, the determinant of whether you're the product is whether the company can get away with treating you as the product. Okay, so what about the companies? What about ketamine? Adult Zucker, Muskian failures who have appointed themselves eternal dictators over the digital lives of billions of people. Can we blame those people for inshinnifying our world? Well, yes, we can, but not entirely. It is obviously true that it takes a certain kind of sociopath to run a company like Facebook or Google or Apple. Those suicide nets around the Chinese iPhone factories are a choice. There is nothing intrinsic about the process of manufacturing a phone that demands a suicide net. But these awful men, they are merely filling the niches that the policy environment created. You know, If Elon Musk ODs on Cat Tonight, there will be an overnight battle of succession among 10 horrible big balls in which everyone emerges victorious, will be indistinguishable from Musk himself. The problem isn't that the wrong person runs Facebook and thus exercises a total veto over the digital lives of 4 billion people. The problem is that that job exists. We do not need to perfect Zuck. We do not need to replace Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck. So where does the blame lie? It lies with policymakers, regulators and politicians who created our inshytogenic environment. A rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will come out. On top of these are the true authors of our inshidification. The named individuals who in living memory undertook specific policy decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the Enshita scene the era in which all of our platforms are turning into shit. Policymakers who were warned at the time that this would happen, who ignored this advice and did it anyway. It is these people and their terrible deliberate misconduct that we need to remember and it is their awful policies that we must overthrow. Otherwise, all we can hope to do is replace one group of monsters with another. So in that spirit, let us turn to the story of just one of those in shitogenic policy choices and the men who made it. This policy I'm going to speak about tonight, it's called anti circumvention. And it is the epicenter of the enshydogenic 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 the company has to do in order to invoke this law is demarcate some of its code as off limits to modification by adding something called an access control. And in so doing, they transformed the act of changing any of that code into a felony, a jailable offense. The first anti circumvention law was 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. It's punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. And crucially, this is true whether you break any other law. When you break the access control under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do something perfectly legal becomes a jailable crime if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with some kind of access do control. Now I recognize this is all very abstract, so I'm going to make it concrete. When you buy a printer from hp, that printer becomes your property. So what's property? Well, I like to use the standard definition that every first year law student learns in their first year property law course. It comes from Sir William Blackstone's 1753 treaties on property, and he describes it thus. Property is that soul 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. So the printer, it's yours. It's your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of every other individual in the universe. But HP printers ship with a program that checks to make sure that you're using HP ink. And if the printer suspects that you're using generic ink, the printer will refuse to use that ink. Now, Congress never passed a law saying when you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink. That would be a weird law given this whole solen despotic dominion thing. But Because HP puts an access control in the ink checking code, they get to conjure up a brand new law. A law that effectively requires you to buy HP ink. So anti circumvention, it's a way for legislatures to outsource lawmaking to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to a product, they can conjure up a new felony for using that product in ways that benefit you and the expense of of their shareholders. So another way of saying anti circumvention 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 that they want you to. That is anti circumvention law. Now the DMCA was therefore an initiatifiers charter. An invitation for corporations to deploy tactical access controls to write invisible private laws that let them threaten their customers and the competitors who might help those customers with criminal prosecution. Now the dmca, it has a living author, a guy called Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was a corporate IP lawyer who got to do a turn in government service when he served as Bill Clinton's IP czar in the 90s. Now Lehman tried in several different ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid anti circumvention idea, only to be rebuffed. So undaunted, Lehman traveled to Geneva to the home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or wico, the special, the UN specialized agency that makes all the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, Whitehall passed a pair of treaties in 1996, the treaties that we call the Internet treaties. And in 1998 he got Congress to pass the DMCA in order to comply with the treaties. This is a move that he has since repeatedly publicly described as doing an end run around Congress. This guy, Bruce Lehman, he is still with us breathing the same air as you and me. We share a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible. But Bruce Lehman, he only inshitified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms that we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada initiate, we have to introduce you to some Canadian initiatives. Specifically two of Stephen Harper's ministers. The first is James Morton, who was the Heritage Minister. And the second is the disgraced sex pest Tony Clement, who was then the Industry Minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti circumvention law and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort. Now everybody knew at the time this was going to be a hard slog because Canadians had already rejected anti circumvention three times before they took the brief. Back in 2006, a Liberal MP named in Paul Martin's government tried to get this law passed through. It was so unpopular that this mp, Sam Baltay, she lost herself seat in Parkdale. It flipped to the NDP for a generation because people rejected this idea so hard. So Moore and Clement, they hatched a plan to sell anti circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided the way to get us to accept it was to do a consultation on the law. The, the thinking was that if we all felt heard through this consultation process, then we wouldn't be angry when they rammed it through Parliament. But that really backfired because when they did the consultation, 6138 of us wrote in to the ministers to say this sounded like a really terrible idea to us. And only 53 respondents wrote to them and said they liked the sound of it. So how are Clement and Moore going to spin this consultation? It's simple. Moore went to a meeting here in Toronto of the International Chamber of Commerce where he was invited to do a keynote. And during that keynote he denounced everyone who didn't like the law, everyone who filed comments in his consultation as quote, babyish radical extremists and disregarded all of their feedback. And then in 2012, Harper whipped his caucus and they passed Bill C11, the Copyright Modernization act. And we got a made in Canada all purpose omni and shittificatory anti semitic circumvention law. So let's be clear about what this law does, because this law makes no exemptions for circumvention for a lawful purpose. Canada's anti circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, your phone, your digital device. If the thing that you do runs counter to the wishes of the manufacturer, it is an invitation for foreign firms to use use Canada's courts to publish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding the ways to make the products that we buy and use less shitty. Anti circumvention. That's the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add what's called an initialization routine to their devices so that when you install a new part in a car or a tractor or a phone or a ventilator that has to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device recognizes that it's there and installed. And it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic or a farmer or a repair shop or a hospital technician to fix a car or a tractor or a phone or a ventilator. This wheeze is called parts pairing or VIN walking. Now, we did pass bill C244 last. This is the right to repair legislation. It's Canada's first national right to repair law. But that law, it's a useless ornament because it doesn't override anti circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturer uses some kind of access control to block the repair. Anti circumvention means that we can't fix our things when they break, but it also means that we can't fix our things if they arrive pre broken from the manufacturer. Think about the iPhone. The iPhone is broken. It can only use one app store, the one that Apple provides. And everyone who puts an app in Apple's app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which then takes $0.30 out of every dollar that you spend in an app and sends it to Apple. That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 a month to a Canadian podcast or independent news outlet, $3 out of that $10 got sucked out of the transaction and it lands in Cupertino, California, where it's divvied up by Apple's executives and shareholders. It's not just news sites that lose 30 cents on the dollar. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, a software author, that dollar takes a round trip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter. Now, a Canadian company could bypass the Apple the iPhone's access controls and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installs a Canadian app store on your phone, one that uses something like the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Apple's entire mobile digital economy. And indeed, we do have another law. 2024 is Bill C294, the interoperability law that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law, it's also a useless ornament because it doesn't repeal the anti circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to replace the app store in your phone or reverse engineer a product to make it better if there's no access control in the way. And of course, every company that is in a position to rip you off just adds an access control and invalidates the interoperability law. The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a thought of endless inshittification. Do you remember we told Facebook that they had to pay for links to the news and discussions in the news, and Facebook's response was to just remove all the news from your Facebook and you your Instagram feed. Our anti circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternate app, one that slurped up everything Facebook wanted to show you in your feed. All the updates from your friends and your groups, but then blocked all the surveillance and all the ads and all the slop and all the recommendations and then mixed in the news that you wanted to see, but then Facebook refused to show you. Do you remember we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti circumvention. That's the only reason some Canadian company couldn't jailbreak your Netflix app and give you an alternative client that let you stream all your Netflix movies, but also showed you research results from the NFB and any other Canadian library of audiovisual content that you wanted to see while also blocking Netflix's surveillance of your usage. Anti circumvention means that Canadian technologists are not allowed to seize the means of computation, which means that we are at the mercy of the American companies and we only get the rights that American companies think that we deserve. Shall I wait until the mic comes back on for the video? We have lost the mic. It must be an Apple mic. How are we doing on that mic? I can use a handheld if you want to pass one down. Oh, yeah, here we go. Here's some handhelds. There we go. We have the technology. I hope it's not Google too. Say again? Yeah, this one's the Google mic. So anti circumvention means that Canadian technologists cannot seize the means of computation, which means that we are at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide we deserve. Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but Apple will not block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone. And they won't let to gather exactly the same data that Facebook. Facebook steals from you for exactly the same purpose. To target ads to you using Apple's ad network. 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 on 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 happened in October when Apple kicked an app out of the app store called iceblock. Ice Block is an app that warns Americans if mass thugs are at large in their neighborhood waiting to kidnap them and send them to a camp. Apple decided that those ICE thugs were quote a protected class and that Ice Block was discriminating against them and they removed it from the app store. They decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings. And with Apple, what they say goes the road to inshinification is is paved with anti circumvention. We told our politicians this a decade and a half ago and they called us babyish radical extremists and they did it anyway. Now I've been shouting about this literally for decades. I was one of those activists who got who helped get Sam Bolte 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 and shifting. Bruce Lehman, James Moore and Tony Dick Pic Clement are way better at insidifying the world that I am at disinhitifying it. Now, of course they have an advantage over me because they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors. Whereas my coalition is basically you people. People who care about human rights, people who care about workers rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you this, but we are losing. So let's talk about how we start winning. Anytime you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long time, it's a sure bet that what's happened behind the scenes is that they found some coalition partners, people who want the same things, who've been willing to set aside their differences and join the fight together. I mean, that's the Trump story all over. The Trump coalition is basically all the billionaires plus all the racists, plus those dopes who both vote for a slime mold if they promise to lower their taxes by a dime, even though they somehow expect to have schools and roads, although maybe not schools, you know, Ford Nation, plus everyone who thinks correctly that the Democratic Party are a bunch of do nothing sellouts who can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy's a fascist. Billionaires, racists, freaks with low tax brain worms and people who hate the sellout dens. Trump's built a hell of a coalition that gets stuff done. Now it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they are getting it done to escape from the inshinificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policies. We need a coalition too, and thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we are getting that coalition. So let's start with the Trump terrorists. When I was telling you about how anti circumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers from two different parties, 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 the existence of anti circumvention law. Sure it does. Let Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder so you have to pay for Rogers pbr, 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 that Rogers makes off of this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian businesses leave on the table every year by not going into business disin shittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that American companies rip off every Canadian for with every hour that God sends. So why were these Canadian MPs and these Canadian Prime Ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anti circumvention onto our law books? Well, simple. The US Trade Representative told them that if we didn't get an anti circumvention law, they'd slap our exports with tariffs. Well, happy Liberation Day. 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 the disinfitifying products that any American with an Internet connection and a payment method can buy from them downloading jailbreaking code. After all, it's much easier than importing reasonably priced insulin from a Canadian pharmacy. So the U.S. trade Representative'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 predatory conduct and to prevent non American tech companies from going into business disinfitifying America's defective goods. The threat of tariffs was so serious at the time that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect them from the spread of tariffs. And then comes Trump. And now we have tariffs anyway. Let me tell you, if 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 tariffs by legalizing circumvention and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business rating the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen. Sure, Canada might not ever get another company like Research in Motion again, but we could have a company that sells the tools to geography iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iOS iPhone store. Bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high handed judgments about which apps you are and aren't allowed to have. The payment processing business in the app store makes Apple $100 billion a year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still have a 10 billion dollar matrix in Canada industry. And unlike Apple, we would not have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of actually making the phones. We can stick Apple with all that risk and all that expense and we could just cream off the all profit service revenue. I mean, that's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how big tech operates. You know, when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he famously told the publishers, your margin is my opportunity. $100 billion a year made from a 30% payment processing fee. That is a hell of a margin and it's a hell of an opportunity. With Silicon Valley, it's always disruption for thee, but never for me. When they do it to us, that's progress. If we do it to them, that's piracy. And every pirate dreams of being 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've decided to make everything we buy from America more expensive here. Which is a pretty weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbor says ouch. Plus, it's kind of indiscriminate. After all, 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 never did anything bad to Canada. I mean, I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor which costs him an extra 200 bucks every time he fixes it. Himself because he then has to pay $200 for one of John Deere's technicians to come out and type the unlock code into the tractor's console, because they use parts pairing to make sure that they can control repairs. So instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tools that let him fix his own goddamn tractor without giving 200 bucks to John Deere every time. Instead of ticking at Elon Musk for his Nazi salute and giving him the attention he so clearly craves, we could just sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features, all the software upgrades, does not send a dime to Tesla, and kicks Elon Musk squarely in the dongle. This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building giant Canadian tech businesses and exporting to a global market whose products make everything cheaper in Canada and everywhere else in the world, including for every American. Because the American public are also getting screwed by these companies. We could stand on guard for them too. We could become the definitionification nation. But that is not what we have 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. The only thing Carney could do that would be less popular than making everything we buy more expensive expensive over the only thing Prime Minister Carney could do that would be less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest, weirdest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we just keep shoveling words into the word guessing program, it will wake up and become intelligent, which is, you know, pretty stupid. It's like he thinks that if we just keep breeding horses to run faster, eventually one of the mayors will give birth to a locomotive. I mean, human beings are not word guessing programs that know extra words. So it's clear that the coalition of people who care about digital rights and people who want to make billions off of jailbreaking tech is not powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars on inshinification. However, Trump yes, Trump keeps recruiting people to roi. Cause Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. America has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapon for attacking his foreign adversaries is America's tech giants. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts. The chief prosecutor and the other justices of the International Criminal Court immediately lost access to all of their working files, all of their email archives, their diaries, and their address books. Now, this is a giant blinking sign that is 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 goddamn country. It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to, either. Do you remember those Russian looters stole a bunch of John Deere tractors from Ukraine, and they showed up in Chechnya, and the John Deere company pushed a kill signal to those tractors and rendered them permanently immobile and useless. Now, this is quite a cool little comeuppance if you're a cyberpunk writer like me, but anyone who thinks about this for, like, 10 seconds will immediately realize 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, they're a monopolist. And whatever part of the market that John Deere doesn't dominate is controlled by Massey Ferguson, who are also in a position to be pushed around by Trump and brick them tractors at a distance. This is the thing we were warned about if we let Huawei into our telecoms equipment. And those warnings, they weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget, any system that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer, because that means that we are at risk from that manufacturer, from governments who can suborn that manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack that manufacturer's authority without their permission, and by criminals who can impersonate those manufacturers when they talk to our devices. So this gives us the third part of our coalition. Not just digital rights weirdos like me, not just investors and technologists who are looking to make billions, but also national security hogs who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or anyone else shutting down key pieces of our 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, three years later, the EU is 15 years ahead of its energy transition goals. It turns out that one of these impossible things that stopped them from transitioning were just fights that they would rather not have. No one wants to argue with a tedious German who hates the idea of looking at ugly solar panels on their neighbor's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that is an argument you will have and you will win. Today there's another mad emperor who's threatening Europe and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to the new anti insidification coalition. Digital rights advocates, investors and technologists and national security hawks, both the ones who worry about America and the ones who are worried about China. And that is a hell of a coalition. The time is right for us to become the decentridification nation, to harness our own tech talent and the technologists who are fleeing America ahead of these mass thugs in droves, along with capital from investors who'd really like to back a business whose success will not be determined by how many Trump coins they buy. Jailbreaking is how Canada can cut American big tech down to size. It's unlike everything else we've tried. It's not like the digital services tax. It's not like forcing Netflix to support Cancon. It's not like making Facebook and Google pay for links to the news. All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude larger than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do. Time and again they have shown that we do not have the power to make them do these 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 techno nonprofits, our co ops 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 datas and our data with impunity in a jailbroke. In Canada, we do not have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the wealth that the tech giants have stolen from us. And in jailbroken Canada, we can do pre distribution. We can stop those tech giants from stealing the money from us in the first place. And if we don't do it, someone else is gonna. Because every country was arm twisted into passing an anti circumvention law just like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lick spittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who do America's bidding. A quisling who would put their nation's people and businesses in chains rather than upset the US Trade representative. And every one of these countries is right where we are today, hit with tariffs threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere Bricks, their businesses, their government and their farms. One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity. The opportunity to consume the billions in monopoly rents stolen by US tech giants and use those billions as fuel for a single use rocket booster that will launch their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come. That gives them the hottest export economy 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're still going to benefit. We're going to get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disinfectify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment. But we're not going to get the industrial policy. The chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with a global reach of RIM or Nortel. That's going to go to someone else. And the Europeans, they're already on it. They're building and funding something called Eurostack. These are free, open source, auditable, trustworthy versions of US tech silos. And we're gonna be able to use those here. I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on Canadian metal running in a Canadian, in a Canadian data center and we'll be able to debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else. Because that's really how it should work. And it should go beyond just the admin, admin and database software that, 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 and ventilators. That's how it should be. That's the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity and even our lives. They should be running code that anyone can see, test and improve. I mean, that's just how science works. Before we had science, we had something that was a lot like science, called alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science in that an alchemist would observe two phenomena in the universe, hypothesize a causal relationship between them, design an experiment to explore that hypothesis. But here is where science and alchemy diverged. Unlike a scientist, an alchemist won't doesn't publish their results. They keep them a secret rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where the people who hate you most in the world call you an idiot for making mistakes. And that's why every alchemist discovered for themselves in the hardest way Possible that you really shouldn't drink mercury. 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 disclosure. 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 in this year of 2025 that criminalizes discovering how the software we rely on works and telling other people about it and improving it, that is pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it? We don't have to keep drinking this alchemist's mercury. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger and all of 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. Everyone can rely upon something more like a science than a technology. Like the EU's energy transition. This is a move that is long overdue. And like the EU's energy transition, a mad emperor has created the conditions for us to finally get off our asses and build a better world. We could be a disenchantification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new good Internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We can make a goddamn fortune doing it. And once we do, respect. We could protect ourselves from the spineless digital vassals of the Mad King on our southern border. And we could rescue our American cousins from them. Taboo. So what's not to like?
- [52:33]
A
Thank you.
- [52:44]
B
So we. Take your questions now. Stick your hand up and you say it and I'll repeat it and then we'll, we'll see how, how we get on. All right, go ahead. Who's the Tony Clement of disenchantification? Who's the Tony Clement of disenchant? Like which. Which Canadian politician is going to sell us out? Or which Canadian politician is going to do. Who in the polito sphere is going to carry forward how to find. Yeah, yeah. So which Canadian politicians gonna have a spine? Well, it's interesting. Remember that Tony Clement and James Moore, it wasn't that they had a spine. They had no principles. They didn't wake up one day. Actually, maybe James Moore did because he talked a lot about this. But broadly, I don't think Tony Clement and James Moore woke up one day and said, what we really need is A world in which Canadians can't fix their stuff or modify their stuff, where they can only use the app stores that Americans decided they could use. What they said was, we really need to do a thing for Canada's domestic policy that will ensure that we are free of tariffs. Right? So I don't know that we need a principled politician. We just need one with a sense of self preservation. And I don't know if that's Carney. I mean, I lived in the UK when Carney was running our national bank and he was austerity crazed then and did not cover himself in glory. But I think that, you know, we saw in the last election that Carney is kind of an empty vessel that people can project their hopes onto. And whether he'll follow the political winds, I don't know. But I do think that this is up for grabs. This is someone's for the taking. It's a free issue to campaign on that no one can oppose with a straight face. Right? We must give Americans rent on everything we buy and let them spy on us. Is a very weird political cafe. And if you take me off opposite side, you can force your opponent to defend the indefensible questions.
- [54:39]
C
Yeah, so the military budgets are the largest right now, as per the budget. So, you know, that's part of the coalition of the willing that you talked about. So what is the best way to kind of mobilize the budgets in the military with folks who may be a little bit so into working with the military?
- [55:01]
B
So the question is how, you know, the military's got this giant budget. How do we make the military part of this? How do we bring them on side? To use a hockey metaphor, I will skate to where the puck is going to be. You just wait. So, you know, I think that broadly procurement, like what governments buy is a really powerful leverage. Again, like governments can't control what American companies do because they're bigger than part of government, but they can't control where they spend money on. And it is just like a bedrock of prudent procurement that you should buy stuff that you can maintain. Right? Like this isn't novel, nor is it new for the military. Like when Abraham Lincoln was outfitting the Union army, he insisted that all the armors that supply them, right. And ammunition had to use standardized tooling because it would be very embarrassing to stand on the field of Gettysburg and say, as the commander in chief and say, like, war is canceled this week, boys. They shut down the factory for a holiday. Right? And so this idea of like Interoperable material is very strong. And in particular, when you're thinking about being an extremist, you know, there are all these grotesque stories from the American military of, you know, the auction occupations in the Middle east and Afghanistan where, like, they would have a generator break and they would have to mail it to Iowa to get it fixed because they had done a deal with the manufacturer that they wouldn't fix it themselves. And it's not limited to the military. I mean, this is. This is across the board, all these systems that assume that, like, the repair depot is within shoving distance, break down the minute things don't go the way you hoped. I mentioned the talk a few times. Ventilators. So the largest med tech company in the world is a company called Medtronic. Nominally, they're Irish. They did the largest tax inversion in history. So they sold themselves to a tiny defunct Irish company. And now they. They do a thing called profit shifting where they remit all of their profits to this company as IP licenses because Ireland doesn't tax ip and so they don't pay any tax. So they get to pretend that all their money is floating in a state of untaxed I. And having all that liquid capital meant that they can buy every med tech company in the world, which means that they make all of our ventilators and they use parts pairing to block repair of ventilators. So normally what that means is if your ventilator breaks down wherever, you know, Western, you've got to like, wait a day for a technician for Medtronic to come out and like, bless the repair that your own technicians have done. But during the pandemic, no one could go anywhere and bless these repairs. And so you just had mental injection breaking down all over the world because they're all meditronic ventilators. This is a problem for the military, too. The military sort of default state when they're campaigning. The thing that they worry about is the condition in which the unthinkable has happened that, you know, there is no way to get a resupply. You are cut off from your lines, you know, all those other things. So it is very prudent. But it needn't be limited to the military. Like, no city should have a carpool full of cars that they can't maintain themselves. And every car made in, to a first approximation today encrypts the diagnostic messages on the internal network on the car so that if you're a Mechanic, you pay $10,000 per manufacturer per year to turn a check engine light into a diagnosis. It's just bullshit. It's pure rent extraction. Right. And so if you're the city, you should just say I'm sorry. We don't buy cars from people who won't let us choose who fixes them. Right. And they need to sell cars to you. Right. They really do. We should say we won't buy any ed tech, we won't buy another Google classroom license unless we can plug anyone's assessment tools, anyone's E textbooks, anyone's E learning platform into it. Not because we're like opposed to Google, but because we're not rubes. Right. We just buy things that we can maintain and modify and adapt ourselves because we'd be suckers to do it otherwise. Right. That's what prudent procurement looks like. Again, I think, I think, you know, often when these things end up in legislatures or in administrative agencies, they can be subverted by this sort of complicated behind the scenes process. The US military had an executive order that was going to mandate repairability for all material and it's just been scrapped in favor of a thing where they can do independent repair, but they have to pay per use for the diagnostic tools and the part then like parts Perry man. That whoever repairs it has to to pay rent to the primary military contractors. And like that's a thing that can happen sort of behind the scenes in these esoteric political realms. But imagine standing up in front of the public and saying we have committed to spending public funds on things we can't fix. Right. And we've decided to capitulate on the idea that we're going to have a carpool full of a motor pool full of cars we can't fix. We're going to have snow piles we can't fix. We're going to have ventilators. Ventilators in the OPEX system. Mechanics. You just look like an asshole. Whereas contrariwise if you stand up and say my opponent, Minister Dingleberry bought a bunch of ventilators that we can't fix for our goddamn health system, I will never make that mistake. That is a great thing to run on. So I think it's good political sense. Other questions? Yeah, very back. So you've talked a lot about physical devices and the ability to repair and modify them. Yeah. When we're talking about software, how do you actually sell software where anyone is able to modify it and potentially redistribute it rapidly? How do you sell software that anyone can modify and redistribute? You probably don't. I mean what you probably sell are services around it, which is fine. Like how do you sell science that anyone can peer review, right? Well, like sure, you could be an academic publisher and you could have this weird business where you get to charge infinity and pay nothing, but for the most part, and that's a stick racket and we should shut it down. But mostly like we just make science, right? And like the way that we get software is that the core products are sort of publicly funded as public goods and then you get maintenance to the periphery, not as a source of revenue but as like a way of improving business operations. You know, you've got, it's like when you need to improve the, you know, the furniture in your office. You buy new furniture when you need to improve the software running on the desks in that office. Maybe you pay a developer to improve the software and you don't worry about like the fact that other people can buy the same design of furniture that you bought. You don't worry if you pay a contractor to install custom fittings that that contractor might install custom fittings somewhere else that are identical. It's just, you know, like, it's just part of your operational stuff. Like the fact that we have this software business, it might be a short lived aberration in how we sell it. Certainly. Like we shouldn't hold software quality hostage to a business model that arose kind of as a blip in the long sweep of computer science. It's already the case that like if you look at the back end of the big tech companies, it's all open source, right? You know, like everything's sitting like almost all the critical operational software running at Google and Oracle and Microsoft and whatever, it's just open source. You can Download it off GitHub and run it yourself. And that doesn't stop that software from being like of high quality for extremely sensitive, extremely high load, extremely high salience applications. Thank you. Other questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for your talk. I was wondering what your thoughts are on data centers, the increased use of data centers and do you see a future where data center can be used for this idea of liberation? So what about data centers? Can they be used for liberations? I assume you're talking about AI data centers, is that right? So like I said, I said that good questions are not about AI. I will say a brief thing about AI. I've got another book coming out in June about AI because I got sick of explaining why I thought AI was done. So I will deliver the thesis of that book in very brief terms. So let me say that if AI was not a big disgusting bubble that was threatening the world's economy, we would just call most of the useful parts of it like a plugin, right? Oh, I got a plugin that slightly improves my text speech. I got a plugin for my video editor that lets me move that eye lines of 200 Astros in a scene. It's cool, right? It's only because we have these people who've convinced us that it's either going to destroy or save the world and make every worker redundant and also be worth trillions of dollars and also maybe become God and turn us all into paperclips that we talk about this stuff. But AI, it's like it's a losing business, right? They have spent $700 billion in capex on the AI sector today. Globally, the entire AI sector by its own account makes $60 billion a year. But that's a grossly inflated number because at least 10 billion of that 60 billion is the 10 billion that Microsoft gave to OpenAI and OpenAI gave back to Microsoft. That is not revenue, right? Like if you're, you know, walking in the street and someone in a green apron outside of Starbucks hands you a coupon for a free latte and then you redeem the coupon. Starbucks does not get to book $7 revenue because you handed them the coupon back, which is what Microsoft has done. And OpenAI has looked at its investment capital. It's just a gross little accounting shell game. In fact, to call it an accounting shell game is to do violence to good hard working accounting shell games. So you've got like $50 billion tops revenue, 6 to $700 billion in capex. So how long do they have to work these assets in order to recoup the capex? Well, they depreciate these GPUs over five years. So they would somehow have to make enough money at $50 billion a year in just five years to recoup 600 to $700 billion before they make a penny in profit. Except even though they depreciate them over five years, they only last two years. So that's how long they have to turn $50 billion a year into $600 billion. And then you have the magnificent seven seven companies that are 31 to 33% of the S&P 500 that just pass around the same hundred billion dollar IOU over and over again, rebook it as revenue. So the whole sector is coming for a crash. It's going to make 2008 look like the best day of your life. It's going to be disgusting and terrible. And when it's over, we will have some productive residue. Like you're going to be able to buy some GPUs at 5 cents on the dollar. There'll be a lot of unemployed mathematicians looking for work. And you're going to have like these open source models that barely been optimized. Right? They already do pretty cool stuff on commodity hardware and probably have lots of room for improvement. Because the whole thing about AI is it's a way for companies that obtain monopolies and therefore have no more room to grow. Google has a 90% search market share. How does Google grow? I mean, yes, they can raise a billion humans to maturity and make them Google users, but Google Classroom takes a while to mature and in the meantime they need to have a growth story for investors. And so they say, oh, we're going to conquer this other market over here. For 10 seconds it was like, we're going to conquer Facebook's market, but Google failed. Now it's like, we're going to conquer this other market. We're going to conquer the thing that will either be God and turn us into paper clips or God and save us from climate change. And that's the thing we're going to make. So the political economy of these things is that they are trying to convince people that they're surprised of infinite wealth there. It's not going to be there. And so we're going to have, and so you have these open source models and they're, they're trying to convince investors that they're serious about AI. And the investors don't really understand AI. All they understand is that there must be some correlation between expenditure and expected return. It's kind of like a pile of ship that's sufficiently big, has to have
- [66:28]
A
a pony underneath it.
- [66:29]
B
And so they spend as much money as they can on AI. And so you have all this expenditure on AI, you have these open source models that can probably be optimized, you'll have cheap GPUs and so on. So some of these data centers, they'll be useful right, when the, when the dust clears. But they are so optimized for the kinds of GPUs that are in turn so optimized for the kind of operations they're doing, which even the foremost proponents of, of these techniques are now saying are reaching diminishing returns.
- [66:57]
A
Right.
- [66:57]
B
So training models on a very larger data set is not producing a linear return and certainly not a geometric return. It's producing a diminishing return. And so you will be able to do some stuff with those data centers, but they're going to be really hard to repurpose. It's a little like when people are like, oh, we have these office towers and other people are working from home. We have a housing shortage. Why don't we turn the office towers into houses? It's like, well, sure, except there's only one toilet per floor and they're like three times as deep as an apartment block. So if you want to have a window, your apartment is going to be like 8ft wide and 20 meters deep. And so they're just, they're really hard to repurpose in this way. And the same is going to be true of these data centers. Most of them are just white elephants. It's like trying to figure out what to do with an old Kmart, right? Like, sure, you can like turn it into a, like a skating rink maybe, or you can do like there's like three things you can make an old Kmart into, but mostly you just knock it down, which is what we're doing with most of the old Kmarts. RIP Other questions? Yeah, go ahead. Is it possible for changing the way corporate boards get elected to put a dent into inchitification? Can changing corporate governance improve initiatification? Yeah, so linkedification is the result of the collapse of discipline on firms, right? Companies, all other things being equal, would like to charge infinity and pay nothing for their inputs. But again, unless you're an academic publisher, you can't do that, right? People won't work for you, they won't pay for your goods. And so you have to reckon with competitors. You have to reckon with the possibility that your workers, your customers and your suppliers will defect. You have to reckon with regulators, the possibility that if you cheat your suppliers, your customers or your workers, that the cost of doing that in fines and other state oriented consequences will exceed the expected revenue. You have to reckon with your workers. So historically tech workers were really short supply and they were really productive. You know, the average Silicon Valley worker was adding something like a million dollars a year. Their boss's bottom line. Which is why tech workers got such great treatment, right? You know, the free kombucha massages in a certain to freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years. It wasn't because they like tech workers, right? It's because they were scared that when the tech worker left that a million dollars would leave with them. So they tried to keep them happy but then, you know, they didn't consolidate that scarcity based power to solidarity based power by unionizing because they all thought that they were temporarily embarrassed founders. And so now that supply is caught up with demand. Half a million tech layoffs in the US in the last three years. October was the worst year month for tech layoffs since the crash of 2020. Tech workers just don't get to tell their bosses to go to hell anymore. And then the other source of discipline was interoperability. It was circumvention and making better products, new competitors. So when you lose all this discipline, you have boardrooms full of people who have been chosen through not great processes, right? Who wake up one day and say why don't we do something really shitty? And even if there's people around the table who are like no, I don't like that idea. The only thing they can say in an environment in which doing something shitty is likely to make you rich is I just feel uncomfortable with getting rich that way. To which everyone else says shut up. Right? So you know, this is not a hypothetical thing. In the Google trial last year, the antitrust trial over search monopolization, the Department of Justice published all these internal Google memos that revealed a bunch of internecine power struggles in Google in particular. One struggle that played out in 2019 and 2020 when search growth had maxed out again because they had 90% market share. So there was no way to grow search. And you had two different factions within Google. So there's a guy called Pravagar Raghavan who was an ex McKinsey got his trained as an engineer, but he came out of an MBA program and he was in charge of search revenue. And you had this other guy called Ben Gomes who was an old school Googler who had been in charge of their server infrastructure from the time there was one server over a desk to the global network of data centers. And then ultimately to be in charge of search technology itself. And Prabhupada Raghavant's idea for making search more profitable, growing search revenue was making search worse, right? So they rip out spell check, they rip out context awareness. So you remember the guy threw the sandwich at the national guardsman in D.C. if you search for a submarine sandwich, it would know this must be about this current event and show you results like that. At the top they rip out what's called query stemming, where you search for trousers, it runs a parallel search for pants. You know, all these things that let you one shot a query, because if you can't one shot a query you have to three shot the query and that's three chances to show you ads. So in the memos you see this raging fight between the executives backing Kravoga Ragavan, who go all the way up to the corporate government, settle the C suite, the board and the executives who are backing Ben Gomes. And ultimately all the Ben Gomes side can say is, I would feel icky about this. And what the prior guard Ragamund side can say is, we will make so much goddamn money. And now Google sucks. Right? So what corporate governance, fix it. Yeah. If there's like, if there's enough people on the board who will say, I don't care how much money it makes, we're going to do the right thing. Maybe you do the right thing. What's happening going to be much easier for them to argue that they should do the right thing is if they won't make money doing the wrong thing. And so the policy environment, I call it an inshydogenic policy environment. The policy environment has to be oriented around consequences for being bad. So we have to reinvigorate our competition law. And I don't know if you follow this, our competition commissioner has just stepped down. Historically, the way that Canadian competition ministers, competition commissioners work, I don't know, I'm making this up. It is this crazy system where you get one five year term from someone from the permanent civil service. So like an actual, like a bureaucrat. And then you got one five year term from a Bay street lawyer who specializes in mergers and acquisitions. And they trade off term on term. And we've just gotten two terms from a member of the permanent civil Service pretty good. And Bay street is like, we need to have the next guy in that job be a Bay street mergers and acquisitions lawyer. Right. Which is bananas. Right. We need a fox guarding this hen house. And so if that happens, the fact that we got a new competition law in 2024, that really invigorated our Competition Bureau. One of the reasons that Canadians are cynical about competition in Canada is the statutory basis for our Competition Bureau sucked until last year. So the number of merger challenges that the Competition Bureau had launched in its history, the number of times that it challenged a merger was three in all of its history. And the reason it only launched three merger challenges in all of its history is it never succeeded in challenging a merger in Canada, never once succeeded succeeded in challenging a merger. So last year's bill gave them a bunch of new powers, but the person sitting at the seat to use those powers as Bay street mergers and acquisitions lawyer. We're not going to do anything about it. And what's going to happen is that board that has some nice people on it that we like and the corporate governance has been changed and so on, they're going to buy their competitors. And when the person who says I don't think we should do this, what if people go to our competitors and we lose money, Says that all the other board members are going to laugh at them because they will have done the Ted Rogers thing, they will have done the Galen Weston thing, they will have done the Irvings thing and bought the province out. Right? And they won't have to worry about competitors. So we want the good people in an organization, whether that's at the governance level or within the firm as executives or rank and file employees, to do the right thing. We have to empower them by making being bad unprofitable. That has to be at the root of this. It's funny because conservatives, one of their mantras is incentives matter. Oh, we just let people go to the doctor whenever they want. People with hangnails will go to the doctor and use up the system. We should have co pays on our medical insurance. Oh, if we give people welfare, they won't want to work. Incentives matter. When you're like, if we let bosses maim their workers with impunity, they might, they're like, what are you talking about? Incentives don't matter. So we have to make the incentives matter, at least for the rich people. Other questions? Yeah, you.
- [75:16]
C
Yeah, I actually have two questions. So one is about your opinion regarding copy left.
- [75:24]
B
Uhhuh.
- [75:25]
C
Like why it's less effective than like people hope for.
- [75:30]
B
Uhhuh.
- [75:30]
C
And the second question is that the ancient creation, I feel like it's also developed because people didn't give a shit about the internal functioning of the software. So even if the, Even if Canada has led the way and succeeded in creating this jailbreaking app and became a leader tech reader, I still feel like it will be in the hands of a few people.
- [75:59]
B
Okay, so it's a two part question. The first is why has copy left this idea of free software licenses and other kinds of free content licenses too? Why didn't it live up to its promise? And the second is, is it the case that Canadians or the world, the reason we got shitty software is we just stopped caring about how the software worked internally and as a result we left it with all these sort of backend knobs that could be twiddled by corporate bosses to rip us off and harm us in all these ways. And so we kind of reaped what we sowed. So the original term for Open Source software, which is a term that I think most people know, is free software. And the person who came up with this was Richard Stallman. He's a guy who really likes wordplay. And when he talks about free software, he says, oh, well, it's kind of a way of talking about things that are both free as in freedom and free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in beer. Right. And that I want things that are free as in speech. I don't care if they're free as in beer or not. You can charge money for them, but you have to have software freedom. And the problem with this term is it's quite ambiguous. Richard says that the reason he used it is he couldn't think of a better one. He also really likes wordplay. I don't know if I take him at his word, because he really does like wordplay, and he relishes the opportunity to explain this kind of stuff to people. Maybe it's just a habit he's fallen into after decades of this. But another group of people came along. They said, you know, we talked to business executives about free software. They think that all the software has to be given away for free, and they get scared. So we're going to call it Open Source, and we're going to discuss the instrumental benefits of transparency, where you can look at the source, you can improve the source, you can inveigle your users and to contribute, and they can make it better for you. And so you can kind of harness an army of sort of crowd workers, crowd suppliers, who will make your software better. And, you know, with enough eyeballs, all bugs will become shallow. And when the term Open Source was coined, open source and free software, they meant the same thing, right? In terms of like the software, they pointed to the licenses they described. They were functionally equivalent, but they evinced different morals propositions because free software was about freedom and Open Source was about quality. And then in the decades that ensued, there were a series of junctures in which the movement or the community or the body, whatever you want to call it, the people who cared about this stuff had to make a call. Is this thing that has just arrived, cloud software, software as a service, tivoization, which is what you ship a product that has software embodied on the hardware, but you don't ship the software separately. All these other things, do these things fall inside or outside the remit of software freedom? Or open source. And with open source, the question was a very bright line. Can you see the source, the software freedom? The question was like, it's one that has to be socially negotiated. It's a lot more context dependent. People of God requires a lot more thoughtfulness. And what happened was open source, by dint of having this bright line, by dint of harnessing commercial interests, it became the dominant model. And so today we end up in this world where, as I said before, all of the software that the cloud companies use is open source. You can go and download all the software that Google uses on its serves and you can modify that software. If you had your own servers, you could run it on your own servers. You can contribute patches to the code that Google uses and make their software better. So you have open source, but Google has software freedom because they can choose how the software is deployed in the data center. And since all of our applications loop through someone's cloud, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, whatever, we don't have software for you. We only get to use their cloud in the way they chosen to configure it. And so at the end of like a couple of decades of divorcing software freedom from its ethical core, expressing only the instrumental benefits, we've lost both. We've lost both the instrumental benefits and the ethical ones. So we, it turns out that. And I think that's why, and I think where you see a commitment that's unwavering to freedom and free content or free culture, you actually do see things living up to their potential or to their promise. And the big example being Wikipedia. Wikipedia is absolutely uncompromising. You cannot add a thing to Wikipedia unless it is free, as in free software, unless it is free for anyone to reproduce for any purpose, including commercially, including if you disagree with them, including if you want to use it to tell lies or, or harm the person who made it in the first place, whatever, it doesn't matter that software or that content is free. And because it's free, because every time they are faced with is this in or outside of our remit, they have always asked the question, is it free? They have remained free, right? Wikipedia has remained free. I think this is a big part of it. So that's my answer to the first question. The second question is, is it because people didn't care? I don't think so. I mean, I think that that's a variation on the did people fail to shop hard enough to stop the monopolies argument. It is the case that even the proprietary services that we use today were better when they faced discipline. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has never been a good guy. Right. Facebook was invented so he could non consensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergraduates. Right. So it's never been a service founded with the aim of being something that makes people's lives better. Right. He's always been a creep. So Sarah Wynn Williams was a Facebook executive who was their first government liaison, international government liaison. She's a former New Zealand diplomat and she wrote a tell memoir called Careless People about her life there. She became quite disillusioned with it. She as a condition of signing up to be a Facebook executive, she had to sign a non disparagement and non disclosure agreement. Now Facebook says that she owes them $111 million for publishing this book. But in the book, among the many things that you learn about Mark Zuckerberg is you learn that he cheats at settlers of Catania. This is not a good guy, right? This is a terrible guy. You weren't imagining it. Facebook was good to use in its early years.
- [82:36]
A
It was good.
- [82:37]
B
I mean, do you know what Facebook's original pitch was? This is weird because we forget because under late stage capitalism we all lack object permanence. But when Facebook launched, when they opened up to the general public in 2000 and said you no longer need like a edu address you get from an American university to join Facebook, they had this problem which was that everyone who wanted to use social media was already a user of MySpace. So the pitch they made to MySpace users was like, sure, you love your friends on MySpace, but did you know that MySpace is owned by evil crapula and senescent immortal vampire Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends come to Facebook. We're like MySpace, but we're not owned by an evil billionaire and we will never ever spy on you. And they didn't until they started. And the reason they started is because they knew they had us locked in. And the reason they had us locked in was because they had anti circumvention law. Because when Facebook was kicking off and trying to drag users over from MySpace, they didn't just say come use Facebook and reread our privacy policy all alone until your stupid friends realized that they should be here with you. They gave those MySpace users a bot, and you gave that bot your login and password and it would go to MySpace several times a day, impersonate you to the service, grab everything waiting for you on MySpace and stick it in your Facebook inbox so you could read it and reply to it. The switching costs were zero. There was no collective action problem. You could use Facebook to read MySpace. But if, if you were to do that to Facebook today, they would nuke you until you glowed. They'd say you violated anti circumvention law, that you were a malicious portfoliezer because you interfered with their contracts with their users, that you violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and were a felony cyber security violator, that you violated their employees trade secrets, that you violated their copyrights, their past, their trademarks. The rubble would bounce. Right? So why is Facebook better to you? Well, because they needed you. Why did Facebook turn on you? Because they made it so you couldn't leave. And that's not because you failed to look into the future and anticipate the day that Facebook would break the rules and supine and cowardly regulators would let them. It's because the supine and cowardly regulators let them. Facebook would be better if it were free and open source software, Right? But the reason Facebook is terrible is not that it's free open source software. The reason Facebook is terrible is because Mark Zuckerberg figured out how to make more money by being terrible to you than he was making by being good to you. And that's because people like Tony Clement and James Moore and Bruce Lehman and a host of other lawmakers gave them exactly what they asked for. How are we doing for Tom?
- [85:18]
A
That is perfectly time.
- [85:19]
B
That is perfectly time. Okay, so thank you very much.
- [85:32]
A
That was the Cory Doctorow podcast. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0. Or as Woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years. And anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ours. Cause we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Wryneck Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer, and a musician. In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.