← Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
The Post-American Internet (39C3, Hamburg, Dec 28)
This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here). Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that... more
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Well, hello and welcome to a Cory Doctorow podcast for the New Year. If this sounds different, it's because I'm recording it using my phone in a hotel room in Hamburg. And I'm recording this on December 29, the day after I gave a big news speech at the Chaos Communications Congress here in Hamburg called an inshidification Resistant Post American Internet. And this speech is kind of the working notes for the book I'm going to be writing this month and in the next couple of months, my next book. Well, not really my next book. My next book's out in June. It's called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. And that'll be out from Farar Stress and Giroux. But the book I'm writing to be published after that, I assume next winter, maybe early in 2027, or if I'm lucky, very late in 2026, is called the Post American Internet. And this is the first draft of is the thing that's giving me hope and keeping me going, this theory of what we can do in this otherwise very bleak moment. And the folks at ccc, well, they're of course, very technical. And so they recorded it and put it online right away, and they released it under a Creative Commons license, which meant that I could it and rip it and put a copy on the Internet Archive and that I could also rip out the audio, which I'm sending to John today along with this short introductory piece so that you can give it a listen. I hope you had a great New Year's Eve. By the time you've heard this, I will be in Canada with my family for New Year's, and I'm sure I will have had a wonderful time. I'm in charge of making some short rib using my friend Paul's wonderful recipe. And so I will be, as you hear this, probably lying in bed, stuffed to the gills and digesting my delicious short rib and my champagne. I hope you have a great 2026, and I look forward to seeing you in 2026. And, you know, as I record this, it occurs to me I should mention that I will be in Colorado this month. You can catch me in Denver on January 22nd at the tattered Cover. And then I'll be in Colorado Springs at Cosine Science Fiction Convention as guest of honor from January 23rd to 25th. So maybe I'll catch you there. If this speech inspires you, I hope you'll get involved. I hope you'll consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I hope you'll get involved in local groups where you live and yeah, that's
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all I gotta say.
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Greetings from Hamburg.
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Thank you. Hey. Wow, look at that. Hi. Hello. Thank you very much. Hi. So the joke about the podium here is that this was the only non USB C compatible podium they could find for me. So, as many of you know, I'm an activist with the Electronics Toronto Frontier Foundation. Next month I start my 25th year there. And I know I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there is no group anywhere on earth that does the work of the caliber that EFF does for our digital rights. And I'm an activist there. And so for the past quarter of a century, my job has been fighting something that I call the War on General Purpose Computing. Now, if you were at 28C3, 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. Those are the trenches I have been in with EFF since my very first day on the job. That was a day when I flew to Los Angeles and crashed the inaugural meeting of something called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. This was an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters and cable operators. And they'd gathered at the invitation of this lavishly corrupt American congressman, a man called Billy Tozin, who had promised them a new regulation, a rule that would ban the manufacture and sale of digital computers unless they had been damaged to specifications set by that group. Specifications for technical measures to block the execution of code that their shareholders did not want to see executed in the wild. Now, that rule was called the Broadcast flag and it actually did pass through the American regulatory system. The Federal Communications Commission passed it as a rule. So we sued the fcc, we overturned the rule. So thank you, it was a good day, so we won that skirmish. But my friends, I have very bad news. Although it's not news that will surprise you. Despite wins like that important one, we have been losing the war on general purpose computers for the past 25 years. But that's why I've come to Hamburg today. Because after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new good Internet, one that delivers the technological self determination of the old good Internet and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends come and join the party. That door has been unlocked. Today it is open a crack. I mean, it's open a crack. And here's the weirdest part. The guy who unlocked that door is Donald Trump. Now, he didn't do it on purpose, but thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are on the cusp of the post American Internet, a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An Internet that we can build together without worrying about America's demands or its priorities. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not happy about Trump or his policies. But as my friend Joey de Villa likes to say, when life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla. The only thing worse than living through all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America and the world would be going through all of that and not salvaging anything of value from it. So that's what I'm here to talk to you about today. The post American Internet that we can wrestle away from Trump's chaos. The post American Internet, that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to fight on our side. Now, in politics, coalitions are everything. Anytime you see a group of people suddenly make a breakthrough in making a change that they failed to make for years and years, it's a sure bet that they have found coalition partners, new allies who don't want all the same things that they want, but want enough of the same things to fight on their side. And that's where Trump came from. He's at the front of a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and of course, self described libertarians who've got such a scorching case of low tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd take 5 cents off their tax bill. And that's what's got me, And that's what's got me so excited, is that we've got a new coalition in the war on General purpose computers. A coalition that includes digital rights activists who've been on the lines for decades, but also now people who want to turn America's tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty. My thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition, which is good news, because for the first time in decades, I think victory is in our grasp. So let me explain. Fourteen years ago, I stood in front of this group and I talked about the war on General Purpose computing. Now, that's my snappy name for the fight. But the boring name that they use in legislatures for this fight is something called anti Circumvention law. Under anti circumvention law, it is a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product or service unless the manufacturer approves of your modification. And crucially this is true whether whether or not your modification violates any other law. Anti circumvention law it originates in the USA with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright act of 1998, which establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work. So practically speaking, if you design a service or device with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent mod of its application code or its firmware, it is a felony. It is a jailable felony to modify that code or that firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass the access control. Which means that pen testers who even describe how they access a device or a system face criminal liability. And so anti circumvention law allows any manufacturer to trivially turn their product into a no go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of disclosing its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects. This is a law that Jay Freeman quite rightly calls felony contempt of business model. Now, anti circumvention law became the law of the land in America in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, I want you to know this. Every other country in the world has passed a law just like this one in the years since here in the EU we got it through Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. Now it makes a certain kind of twisted sense for America to enact a law like this. After all, they are the world's tech powerhouse. Home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world. By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America enhances the rent extracting power of the most valuable companies on its stock exchanges. But why would Europe pass a law like this? After all, Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protections to tech companies that want to steal European users data and money, the EU facilitates a 1 way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this? Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which all the other countries came to enact their anti circumvention laws. And maybe you'll spot a pattern that answers the question. Australia got its anti circumvention law through the US Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anti circumvention law. Mexico and Canada got their anti circumvention law through the U.S. mexico, Canada free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anti circumvention laws. Andean nations like Chile got their anti circumvention laws through U.S. bilateral free trade agreements which obliged them to enact anti circumvention laws. And the Central American nations got their anti circumvention laws through cafta, the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the usa, which obliges them to enact anti circumvention laws. Now, I assume you spotted the pattern by now. The U.S. trade Representative has forced every one of America's trading partners to enact an anti circumvention law to facilitate the the extraction of their own people's data and money by American tech firms. But of course, this only raises a further question. Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its people's money and data and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that prevents this theft? Well, here's an anecdote that might unravel the riddle. Many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban took over Hungary, I used to guest lecture at a PhD program in political science at European University in Budapest. And one summer after I'd lectured to my students on anti circumvention law, one of them approached me. Now, they had been the information minister of a Central American country during the CAFTA negotiations. And one day they'd received a call from the trade negotiator calling from the CAFTA trade negotiating room. And the negotiator said, you know how you told me not to give the Americans anti circumvention law under any circumstances? Well, they've told me they will not take our coffee unless we give them anti circumvention. And I'm sorry, we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy could collapse. So we're going to get anti circumvention. I'm really sorry. That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed us big tech companies to declare open season on their own people's private data and ready cash. The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we have tariffs now. I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So, Happy Liberation Day. So far, every country in the world has come up with one of two responses to the Trump Tariffs. The first one is give Trump everything he asks for except Greenland and hope he stops being mad at you. And this has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation has been a failure, but so has been the other tactic, the retaliatory tariff. Now that's what we have done in Canada. Like all the best Americans, I am Canadian. It's a cheap laugh. Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things that we buy more expensive. Now this is a very weird way to punish America. It is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbor says ouch. And worse, it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans? That guy never did anything bad to Canada. But there is a third possible response to tariffs, one that is just sitting there begging to be tried. What about Repealing Anti Circumvention Law? Now if you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that repeals its anti circumvention law, you can go into business the disinfectificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports and allow the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those ways are bad for the shareholders of the company that made the product. Think of John Deere tractors When a farmer's John Deere tractor thank you. There's going to be a lot more of that when a John Deere tractor When a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, to swap in the new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But that tractor will not recognize the new part and will not start working again. Not until the farmer spends $200 on a service callout from an official John Deere service rep whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console to initialize the part and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit. Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anti circumvention law. Meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this rip off garbage because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables this parts pairing check in this American product. So what if Canada repealed Bill C11, the Copyright Modernization act of 2012? That's our anti circumvention law. Well then a company like Honeybee, a Canadian company that already makes tractor front ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science graduates. I'm a proud U of W dropout. And it could put them to work jailbreaking John Deere's defective tractor firmware. And then they could offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell that crack to anyone with an Internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans were currently tariffing. It is hard to convey just how much money is on the table here. I'm going to use just one example. Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its own payment processor and charges them a 30% commission on every euro spent inside of every app. 30%. That is such a profitable business that Apple is making $100 billion a year on it. Now if the EU were to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a little hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores. And they could sell that dongle along with the infrastructure to operate an app store to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors. Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store, offer them a 90% discount on payments and save still make $10 billion a year. Now maybe Finland's never going to see another Nokia, but Nokia, that's a hard business to be in. You've got to make hardware and that's expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple has to incur the expense and the risk of making and fielding hardware. And those Finnish geeks get to cream off the hundred billion dollar digital tax that Apple imposes on the world in an act of disgusting rip off rent seeking. As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, your margin is my opportunity. Now with these guys, it's always disruption for thee and never for me. When they do it to us, it's progress. If we do it back to them, it's piracy. And of course every pirate wants to be an admiral. Well, screw that. Let's move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Let's move fast and break kings. Now. It's funny. I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative. And in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight, but I did develop a kind of grudging respect for the skill with which the USTR had bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantage to America and its tech firms, giving them free reign to loot the world's data and economies. So it has been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world, continuing to arrange its affairs to protect the interests of America's capital class. I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough. But I'll take this massive own goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist. I mean, is Trump a comrade now, you may have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open up its app store, and this has been a complete failure here in the eu. When they hit Apple with enforcement under the Digital Markets Act, Apple's response was to say, sure, we'll allow third party apps, but only allow them to sell the apps that we permit. And also those stores can use their own payment processors, but we're going to charge so many junk fees if they do that, it'll be more expensive than using our payment processor. And if we think an Apple user's phone has left the EU for 21 days, we'll delete all of its apps and Data. When the EU explained that this was not going to satisfy the DMA's terms, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. And then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen legal objections to this order, hoping to tie this up in court for a decade the way Google and Meta did with the gdpr. Now it's not clear whether the EU can force Apple to write code to open up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods. But there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability anytime it wants, the EU can decide not to allow Apple to use the EU's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers from Apple's rip off by legalizing jailbreaks. All the EU has to do. All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive and in so doing strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably break iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the usa, where Apple doesn't just use its veto power over which apps can run on your phone to suck 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover. Back in October, Apple kicked an app called Ice Block out of the App Store. Now this is an app that warns you if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to a gulag. Apple internally classified ICE officers as a protected class and then declared that ICE Block infringed on the rights of those poor beset ICE goons. And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who fled the USA this year one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children in a concentration camp. These skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who would like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, not by how many Trump coins they buy. Apple's margin could be their opportunity Legalizing jailbreaking Rating the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs. For one thing, it's a targeted response. Go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million dollars out of their own pocket to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais. Rating Big Tech's margins. It's not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It is a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these rip off companies. It beats the shit. Thank you, thank you. It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers in the hope that someday a sector that has lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs someday that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they turn them on. So here's a new ally in the war on general purpose businesses and technologists who would want to make billions of dollars rating Big Tech's margins and policymakers who want their country to become the disinfitification nation. The country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather the country that makes billions of dollars selling that privacy and pocketbook defending tech to the rest of the world. Now that's a powerful alliance. But those are not the only allies that Trump has pushed into our camp. There is another powerful ally waiting in the wings. You remember last June when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the Geneseed era, Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump denounced the icc. And then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books and its calendars. Now, Microsoft says they didn't brick the icc. They say it's just a coincidence. But when it comes to a he said clip, he said, between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists at Microsoft, I know who I am. Believe this is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms infrastructure. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business, every household in the world have locked themselves into a US Based cloud service. The handful of US big tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump administration. And that means that Trump can brick an entire nation. The attack on the ICC was an act of cyber warfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power generation facilities. Except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC. Microsoft owns Outlook. Under the US Cloud act of 2018, the US government can compel any US based company to disclose any of its users data, including the data of foreign governments. And this is true no matter where the data is stored. Last July, Anton Carneo, the Director of Public and Legal affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he, quote, couldn't guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US Government even if that data was stored in a European data center. Under the Cloud act, the US Government can slap gag orders on companies that it forces to cough up this data. So there'd be no way to know if this is happening or if it's already happened. It doesn't stop at administrative tools either. Do you remember back in 2022 when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and all those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed a kill signal over the air to those tractors and bricked them. John Deere is every bit as vulnerable to the Trump administration as Microsoft is. And they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are pro made by Massey Ferguson, the number two company in the agtech cartel, also an American company just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US Government. Now none of this is news to global leaders. Even before Microsoft and Trump bricked the icc, they were trying to figure out a path to digital sovereignty. But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over the past 11 months has turned digital sovereignty from a nice to have to a must have. So finally we're starting to see some movement like Eurostack, a really cool project to clone the functionality of US Big tech silos in free and open source software and build EU based data centers to run this code on. But the Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of big tech. But you also need to build the adverse adversarial interoperability tools that allow for the mass export of millions of documents, sensitive data structures and edit histories. We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions still housed in US data centers and US clouds. Because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their products. Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS app store. And now imagine the thermonuclear foot dragging, tantrum throwing and malicious compliance that they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of businesses and governments in a 27 nation bloc of 500 million affluent consumers. Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of American big tech companies. Otherwise you're just building housing in East Berlin for people who live in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great that housing is, no one's going to move into it until you tear down the wall. Step one of tearing down the wall is killing anti circumvention law so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware, and generally seize the means of computation. Than. So this is the third bloc in the disentionification army. Not just digital rights hippies like me, not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions, but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on America's platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable. This is how we're going to get a post American Internet with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsack hawks. This has been a long time coming. Since the post war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange. What the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Neumann call the underground empire. But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions. And that process only accelerated under Trump. Take transoceanic fiber cables. The way transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall in the usa and those interconnections happen there. Now there's a good case for this hub and spoke topology, especially compared to establishing direct links from every country to every country. That's an order N squared problem. And directly linking each of the Earth's 205k countries with each other would require 20,910 fiber links. But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality. And while many people worried what the US could do with the head ends of the world's global fiber runs, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub. But it's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds. After the sovereign government of Argentina had declared bankruptcy. They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that those debt collectors had never issued, but instead had bought up for pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else were they going to use? Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued. But then under Biden, Putin aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the Swift system for dollar clearing. Now dollar clearing is when Goods like oil are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world. Now again, there's a sound logical case for dollar clearing. It's not just it's just not practical practical to establish deep liquid pairwise trading markets for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies. It's another order N squared problem. But this only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy, whether or not you agree with those policies, it's not a neutral platform anymore and the world has to go looking for an alternative. Now, no one knows what that alternative is going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber layers links are going to end up taking. There are kilometers of new fiber being stretched across the open floor and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits for dollar alternatives like Ethiopia, which just revalued its national debt, and Chinese renminbi. But without a clear alternative to America's and shittified platforms, the post American century is off to a bit of a rocky start. But there is one post American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our industry institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors and replace them with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code. This project is the only project that benefits from economies of scale rather than being paralyzed by the exponential crises of scale that everyone else in the post American world are confronting. That's because any open free tool for adopted by any public institution like the Eurostack services can be audited, localized, pen tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every country. It's a commons. It's more like a science than a technology in that it is universal and international and collaborative. After all, we don't have dueling Western and Chinese standards for structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure our buildings don't fall down. And we adapt them to local circumstances. We would not tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright. And we should not tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games, consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks and governments working. Thank you. The thing is. The thing is, software is not an asset. Software is a liability. Now the capabilities that software delivers, automation, production, analysis, administration, those are assets. But the software itself, that is a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies even in systems that have performed well for years. Shifting software to commons based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players. Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset, which is why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. This is why they think that it's good that they have a chatbot that that quote, produces 1,000 times more code than a human programmer producing code that isn't designed for legibility or maintainability, that is optimized rather for the speed of production. That's just incurring tech debt at scale. Now this. Thank you. This is a neat encapsulation of the entire AI story. The chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chat that can't do your job. Your boss is such an easy mark for a chatbot hustler because your boss hates you in their secret hearts. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stop coming to work, the business would chug along just fine. But if the workers stopped showing up, the business would ground to a halt. Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really they fear that they are strapped in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drivetrain. It is the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers. When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood with the striking writers, a writer told me that you prompt AI in exactly the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room. Make me et but make it about a dog and give it a love interest and a car chase in the second act. Now, you say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you why don't you fuck off back to your office and make a spreadsheet you knit with? The grown ups are here making a movie. Meanwhile. Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a screen exactly to your spec. Now, the fact that that script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot. Suit AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders. When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American has three friends but wants 15 friends and that he was going to solve this by giving us chat bots, we dunked on him as an out of touch billionaire Martian who doesn't understand what friendship is. But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms and thus how many revenue generating ads he gets to show you. Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationships with you to the benefit of Mark Zuckerberg's shareholders. So Mark Zuckerberg's over there in Menlo park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way he can finally realize the dream of a social network with no socializing. Rich, powerful people are at root solipsist. The only way to amass billions of dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. And the only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that is to convince yourself that those people aren't real. That in some important sense they don't exist. Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an npc. Or those effective altruists who claim the moral high ground by saying that they cared about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today. Or think of how Donald Trump fired all the US government scientists and then announced the Genesis program, declaring that the US was about to begin generating annual moonshot scale breakthroughs with chatbots. It's science without scientists. Chatbots can't do science. But from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare into an eclipse, not to inject bleach. A chatbot will never tell him that trans people exist or that climate change is is real. Powerful people are suckers for AI because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people, just a boss and a computer, and no ego shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things and tell you no. AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete and lose money at a rate not seen in living memory. Now compare AI with the project of building a post American Internet. This is a project to reduce tech debt to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide them among the world's entrepreneurs, for whom they represent untold profits, and the world's technology users, for whom they represent untold savings, all the while building resiliency and digital sovereignty. Now, I imagine some of you are feeling a little cynical right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual incompetent deference to the United States and an inability to act even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively to take on the climate emergency, what hope do we have of them taking this moment seriously? But crises precipitate change. Remember when another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine and Europe began to experience a dire energy shortage? In three short years, this continent's solar uptake has skyrocketed and the EU went from being 15 years behind its energy transition to a decade ahead of schedule. Because when you're shivering in the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it suddenly become existential battles that you cannot afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic tamper tantrum at the thought of solar panels hanging from their other neighbor's balcony. But when it's winter and there's no rushing gas and you're shivering in the dark, that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners and shove it up their ass. Besides, it doesn't have to be Europe that leads the charge on a post American Internet by repealing anti solutions convention. Any country can do it and the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to everyone else in the world. It gets to be the disinfitification nation. And everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US tech companies, monetary and privacy plunder. Just one country has to break the consensus and the case for every country doing that is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on U.S. aid had to worry about losing medical, food and cash supports if they pissed off America. But Trump killed usaid, so now that's a dead letter. Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by decades of anti worker pro billionaire policies. Today, the US is in the third of its K shaped recoveries. This is an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America has papered over that growing inequality with easy credit with Everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages, so long as they could all afford to keep buying. Other countries had to care about America as an export market. But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education and medical expenses that they can't hope to pay down thanks to 5050 years of wage stagnation. The Trump administration meanwhile, has firmly sided with debt collectors, price gougers and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent fixing platforms like RealPage. He restarted debt payments for 8 million American student borrowers and killed a plan to make life saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world. Now every dollar spent servicing alone is a dollar that does not go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on their behalf, like snap, the food assistance program that helps an ever larger slice of Americans stave off their hunger. America is chasing the world without people dream where working people have nothing, spend nothing and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money into the stock market shitcoins or gambling sites. But I repeat myself. Even the US military, long a sacrosanct institution, has been kneecapped to enhance rent seekers. Congress just killed a military right to repair law. So now US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping generators and Jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup. Because the Pentagon is still going to routinely sign contracts that ban them from teaching a Marine to fix an engine. Now that post American world, it's coming on fast. As we repeal our anti circumvention laws, we don't have to care about what America thinks. We don't have to care about their tariffs because they're whacking us with tariffs. And the only people left in America who can afford to buy things are rich people who just don't buy enough stuff. There are only so many Lambos and sub zero freezers that even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own. But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of Europe's anti circumvention laws? Well, there's good news there too. Good news because the EU firms that rely on anti circumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable. Anti circumvention is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with diesel gains by imposing legal liability on reverse engineers who might have discovered the lethal crime. Article 6 of the Copyright directive created a chilling effect. And thousands of Europeans died every year. Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers from Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine. If you buy a much monthly subscription to BMW that rents you an automated system that automatically dims your high beams if there's oncoming traffic, legalized jailbreaking, and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscriptions for one price and not share any of that money with BMW or Mercedes, then yeah, it's good. But let me go, let me cook. Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends to be Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest medtech company, having purchased all of its competitors and then undertaken the largest tax inversion in history, selling itself to an Irish firm in order to magic the profits into a state of untaxable grace. Floating somewhere over the Irish Sea. Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators. And it booby traps them in exactly the same way that John Deere booby traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit will not recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to carry out a repair that the hospital's own technician probably performed. It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals every time a ventilator breaks. Now this would be bad enough, but during the COVID lockdowns, when every ventilator is desperately needed and the planes weren't flying, there was no way for Medtronic technicians to come and bless the hospital technicians repairs. It was lethal. It killed people. There's one more European company that relies on anti circumvention that I want to bring up here because they're all friends of ccc. I'm talking about the Polish train company, Nuvog. Nuvog sabotages its locomotives, booby trapping them so that if they sense they've been taken to a rival service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Nuvog about this mysterious problem, the company helpfully remotes into the locomotives computers to perform diagnostics, which is just sending an unbricking command to the vehicle for which they charge €20,000. Now, last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon sector presented this research, their research on this disgusting racket in this hall. And now they are being sued by Nuvog under anti circumvention law for making absolutely true disclosures about Nuvog's deliberately defective products. So these are Europe's stakeholders for anti circumvention law. There's the diesel gate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your accelerator and your high beams. The medtech giant that bricked all the ventilators in the world during COVID And the company that tied Poland to the train tracks. Now I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels as they show up and cry, won't someone think of the poor train saboteurs. The enshitification of technology, the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on, has many causes. The collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of the power of tech workers. But most of all, enshitification is the result of anti circumvention law's ban on interoperability. By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general purpose computer, our policymakers created an enshitogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty and ushered in the Enshita scene, the era in which everything turns to shit. So it's time to call time on inshidification. It's time to seize the means of computation. Let's build drop in free, open alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on. Let us end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird that you have to care which network someone is using if you want to talk to them instead of just deciding who you want to talk to? The fact that you have to figure out whether the discussion you want to join is on Twitter or Bluesky, Mastodon or Instagram. That is just the most prodigy, AOL, CompuServe ass way of running a digital world. I mean, 1985 called and it wants its walled gardens back. Powerful allies are joining our side in the war on general purpose computation. It's not just people like us who've been fighting this for the whole goddamn century, but also countries that want to convert America's tech hoarded billions into fuel for a single use rocket to boost their national tech sector into a stable orbit. And it's the national security hawks who are worried about trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, but who are also worried with just cause about Xi Jinping bricking their solar panels or their batteries. Because after all the post American Internet is also a post Chinese Internet. Nothing should be designed to be field updatable without the user's permission. Nothing critical should be a black box. Now like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double locked and deadbolted and now that door is open a crack and God damn it, I am hopeful, not optimistic. Fuck optimism. Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. And I know what we do matters. Hope is the belief that we can improve things even in small ways, and that we will then ascend a gradient towards the world that we want and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at this lower elevation, will be revealed. Hope. Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you, don't despair. All decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We have had big muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the U.S. under Biden, but also under the first Trump administration in Canada, in the U.K. in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain, in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil and in China. This is a near miraculous turn of affairs. All over the world, governments are declaring war on monopolies, the source of billionaires wealth and power. Now even the most forceful wind is invisible. We only see it by its effects. And what we're seeing here is that whenever a politician bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, no matter where in the world that politician is, that sailor fills with wind that propels the policy in ways we have not seen for generations. The long becalming of the fight over corporate power has ended and a fierce unstoppable wind is blowing. It's not just blowing in Europe or in Canada, or in South Korea or Japan or China or Australia or Brazil, but also in America. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has a experienced and continues to experience a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the state, local and even the federal level. And never forget that the post American Internet will be good for Americans. Because in a K shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, the trillions that American tech companies loot from the world do not trickle down to everyday Americans. The average American has a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero and that includes stock in US big tech companies. The average American is not A shareholder in Big Tech. They're a victim of Big Tech liberating the world from us. Big tech is also liberating America from us big tech. Now that's been the EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been what I've done there for 25 years. And if you want to get involved in the fight, and I hope you do, it can be your mission too. You can join EFF and you can join groups in your own country like Netzpolitik here in Germany, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, like Quadraturtenet in France, the Open Rights Group in the uk, EF Finland, ISOC Bulgaria, xnet, dfri, Quintessence Bits of Freedom, Open Media, FSFE or any of dozens of organizations around the world. The door is open a crack. The wind is blowing. The post American Internet is upon us. It's a new good Internet that delivers the technological self determination of the old good Internet and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends use it too. And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there because it's going to be great. Thank you. All right, thank you, Thank you very much. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So we've got a little. Thank you enough. Thank you, thank you. So we have a little time for questions. A good question has one part, not two. It's not more of a comment than a question and almost without exception it's not about AI. Alright Thomas, I'll let you run the Q and A.
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Thank you.
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Thank you Corey, so much. So we do have time for questions. Let's start over there. Hi, thank you so much for talking here. So I wondered how do we convince governments like in Germany where we rely so much on export in our country and also on import of technique like technology in general. Yeah. So how do you convince the German government where you rely so much on exporting things to America and rely also on importing technology from around the world? I think I've just laid out the arguments right, you have to make them. But I mean America's capacity to consume is in free fall. It's really the case that consumer spending consists almost entirely of the top decile of income earners. They just don't buy enough stuff. Right. That's one of the reasons we have an asset bubble is because there's not enough places for people to put the money they've stolen from all the rest of us. And so how many Mercedes can, you know, some guy In Palo Alto, buy like it's just. Eventually you just run out. Right. So consumption is tapping out in the U.S. it's one of the sources of secular stagnation. And then as to imports, it is. It is a bug and not a feature that Europe is importing technology from America. You just say, you know, how would you like your ministry to be bricked the way the ICC was? It's time to time to get away from it. Yeah. Microphone number three. Hi, Corey, thank you for the talk and thank you for everything you do. I wanted to ask you about the jailbreaking. To be a little bit of a devil's advocate. Should we jailbreak our grandparents iPhones? Should we jailbreak our grandparents iPhones? The average consumer, should we do it? Is it safe? Yeah. Should we break down? Should we. Should we jailbreak for like our normie friends? Yeah. So I think if it's not legal, it's putting them in risk they might not understand, although it might be the right thing to do sometimes. My experience of people who are not technical is that they're very motivated to figure out how to do things with technology the manufacturer didn't intend when it's to their benefit. And generally, people who have less money, which also correlates with being non technical, really want to do things that the manufacturer doesn't want because they're the ones who are the easy pickings for the manufacturers. So the first person I ever met who had a phone with two sims in it was a minimum wage worker at my daughter's nursery in East London, because they wanted to get the plan from the carrier that gave them unlimited texting to their seven friends. And they want to get the other plan from the other carrier that gave them unlimited calling. And for them, figuring out how to put two sims in a phone was absolutely worth it for the savings because it wasn't a nice to have. It was a must have. They just couldn't afford to talk to their friends unless they could do this. And so it was a powerful motivator. I think that what you get if you formalize jailbreaking, because there's jailbreaks for all this stuff. I mean, you can jailbreak an iOS device. We all know about Checkmate. Eight generations of iOS devices that have been unpatchably broken. Right? You can jailbreak a tractor. There's blobs floating around that are just like John Deere tractor firmware that if you want to, you know, pick up that dirty needle you found on the street and stick it in your arm. By all Means, Right. But what we don't have is like a reliable supply chain with named parties who have insurance and are subject to regulation in a stable country where we can call them up and say, you just bricked my tractor with your third party firmware, you bricked my phone or whatever. That's the thing that I think makes us doable and usable. And I think that you can imagine a supply chain that goes like, okay, you've got a company that buys every printer as it comes off the line, flashes it with every firmware mod as a company comes over the air and then keeps an up to date set of jailbreaks that they sell for €25amonth to people sitting at the back of the dry cleaner or the news agent with a folding table who will jailbreak your printer for, you know, €15 and then sell you refillable ink cartridges. Right. And so that's like, that's what the supply chain looks like. It's not like the person on the front line necessarily has to be super technical. They just have to have a toll free number they call when the jailbreak's not working and that their customers can call if there's an over the air update that breaks the jailbreak microphone number one. To add to your comment about Medtronic during the COVID lockdowns, it was also found that you could jailbreak their very inexpensive CPAP machines to turn them into ventilators. And there were, you know, millions of these all around the country. But Medtronic would not enable that. Yeah, they claimed that there was a medical certification reason for doing so. But should that exemption exist or is that just marketing? I don't know if it, I mean, look, a lot of people did a lot of things during lockdown that weren't formally permitted under the regulatory system. And when generally if they help people, we assumed a state of exception and kind of let them get away with it. I think, you know, this is like the worst of all possible worlds. You have a company that is both incredibly rich, risk averse and refuses to do things that might save people and that dominates everything and is incredibly abusive and locks things down so that everything not forbidden is mandatory. I mean, what an awful. Like you wouldn't want anyone to be in charge of the world's medical technology, but especially not those people. Signal angel, do we have questions from the Internet? We have a question from the Internet and especially in Germany, but all over the world, politicians don't really understand the impact of IT laws and in some cases like chat control, opening up Devices would actually go against the intention. How do we convince them to still open up devices and enable those laws? So it's a, it's a common. I think it's a common fallacy that policymakers have to know how something works in order to make good policy about it. Most congresses and parliaments don't have, say, water safety experts in them. And yet in most of the rich world, you can drink the water that comes out of the tap. It's not because they learned how microbiology works or water safety works. It's because they have a system of expert regulators who they defer to and they take these problems seriously. And I think when you say that our policymakers don't understand technology, what you're actually identifying is them not taking technology seriously. And as a certain fellow once said, you may not care about technology, but technology is very interested in you. And there will come a time when not taking technology seriously will come and bite you in the ass. So we've got two minutes left. What if we take three questions really quick and I answer them in a speed round? Okay, let's do that. Microphone number. 4, 2 and 1. Make them quick. Yeah, like in 2022, on the blockchain Socialist podcast, you've been asked about tornado cash privacy protocol and it being sanctioned and its founders being persecuted. And you quite expectedly said that that code is speech and we should only prosecute the application. Yeah. But at the same time, you've been pretty explicitly that if you combine anonymity and finance, you're rolling out the red carpet for serial scammers. So where do you put turn up cash? And if there is a line which segregates blockchain liability. Okay, got it. Next question. With EU legislation happening in Brussels with all the quirks and more lobbyists there than representatives, do you see a viable path for EU becoming the first bastion of disenchantification? Yeah, Brussels lobbyists. Okay, next one. Yeah, thank you so much. By the way, how do you respond to the thing about safety? Like when I try to hack my Toyota, and in US you can do it, in EU there is a safety law, product safety. Got it? Yes. Okay, so blockchain liability, actual facilitation of a crime where you, you knowingly participate in it, you form a conspiracy. I think that that is fair game. I think making a general purpose tool that gets abused. You know, we have this idea in American copyright law that's more or less intact, that things capable of substantial non infringing uses are presumptively lawful things. Capable of presumptive legal uses should be presumptively lawful. Abusing them should not be what do we do about Brussels lobbyists? Well, we had lots of Brussels lobbyists for the oil industry before we took a great leap forward in solar. It just turns out that when you're shivering in the dark, no one gives a shit what they have to say. Again, I'm not an accelerationist, but I'm not not an accelerationist. And safety, that's the thing, right, is that you have to have a real safety, privacy, consumer rights and labor rights regime. If you're not going to have the manufacturers decide what can and can be done with their products, you need to have democratically accountable institutions. Now, it may be that today they're too conservative and they're blocking things, but that should be the final arbiter of which mods you can do not whether the manufacturer thinks that they're good or not because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest. They cannot distinguish between things that are bad for society and bad for their shareholders. So we can't put them in charge of this. Thank you all very much.
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That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast License Since 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 our because we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing
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B
to it, yodel it.
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A
We wrote it and that all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor Williams of Rynek 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.