I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TONIGHT (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND TOMORROW (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.
My latest Locus column is "There Were Always Enshittifiers." It's a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction:
The MacGuffin of Picks and Shovels is a "weird PC" company called Fidelity Computing, owned by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punchline is deadly serious: Fidelity Computing is a pyramid selling cult that preys on the trust and fellowship of faith groups to sell the dreadful Fidelity 3000 PC and its ghastly peripherals.
You see, Fidelity's products are booby-trapped. It's not merely that they ship with programs whose data-files can't be read by apps on any other system – that's just table stakes. Fidelity's got a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve – for example, it deliberately damages a specific sector on every floppy disk it ships. The drivers for its floppy drive initialize any read or write operation by checking to see if that sector can be read. If it can, the computer refuses to recognize the disk. This lets the Reverend Sirs (as Fidelity's owners style themselves) run a racket where they sell these deliberately damaged floppies at a 500% markup, because regular floppies won't work on the systems they lure their parishioners into buying.
Or take the Fidelity printer: it's just a rebadged Okidata ML-80, the workhorse tractor feed printer that led the market for years. But before Fidelity ships this printer to its customers, they fit it with new tractor feed sprockets whose pins are slightly more widely spaced than the standard 0.5" holes on the paper you can buy in any stationery store. That way, Fidelity can force its customers to buy the custom paper that they exclusively peddle – again, at a massive markup.
Needless to say, printing with these wider sprocket holes causes frequent jams and puts a serious strain on the printer's motors, causing them to burn out at a high rate. That's great news – for Fidelity Computing. It means they get to sell you more overpriced paper so you can reprint the jobs ruined by jams, and they can also sell you their high-priced, exclusive repair services when your printer's motors quit.
Perhaps you're thinking, "OK, but I can just buy a normal Okidata printer and use regular, cheap paper, right?" Sorry, the Reverend Sirs are way ahead of you: they've reversed the pinouts on their printers' serial ports, and a normal printer won't be able to talk to your Fidelity 3000.
If all of this sounds familiar, it's because these are the paleolithic ancestors of today's high-tech lock-in scams, from HP's $10,000/gallon ink to Apple and Google's mobile app stores, which cream a 30% commission off of every dollar collected by an app maker. What's more, these ancient, weird misfeatures have their origins in the true history of computing, which was obsessed with making the elusive, copy-proof floppy disk.
This Quixotic enterprise got started in earnest with Bill Gates' notorious 1976 "open letter to hobbyists" in which the young Gates furiously scolds the community of early computer hackers for its scientific ethic of publishing, sharing and improving the code that they all wrote:
Gates had recently cloned the BASIC programming language for the popular Altair computer. For Gates, his act of copying was part of the legitimate progress of technology, while the copying of his colleagues, who duplicated Gates' Altair BASIC, was a shameless act of piracy, destined to destroy the nascent computing industry:
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Needless to say, Gates didn't offer a royalty to John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the programmers who'd invented BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1963. For Gates – and his intellectual progeny – the formula was simple: "When I copy you, that's progress. When you copy me, that's piracy." Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
For would-be ex-pirate admirals, Gates's ideology was seductive. There was just one fly in the ointment: computers operate by copying. The only way a computer can run a program is to copy it into memory – just as the only way your phone can stream a video is to download it to its RAM ("streaming" is a consensus hallucination – every stream is a download, and it has to be, because the internet is a data-transmission network, not a cunning system of tubes and mirrors that can make a picture appear on your screen without transmitting the file that contains that image).
Gripped by this enshittificatory impulse, the computer industry threw itself headfirst into the project of creating copy-proof data, a project about as practical as making water that's not wet. That weird gimmick where Fidelity floppy disks were deliberately damaged at the factory so the OS could distinguish between its expensive disks and the generic ones you bought at the office supply place? It's a lightly fictionalized version of the copy-protection system deployed by Visicalc, a move that was later publicly repudiated by Visicalc co-founder Dan Bricklin, who lamented that it confounded his efforts to preserve his software on modern systems and recover the millions of data-files that Visicalc users created:
http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm
The copy-protection industry ran on equal parts secrecy and overblown sales claims about its products' efficacy. As a result, much of the story of this doomed effort is lost to history. But back in 2017, a redditor called Vadermeer unearthed a key trove of documents from this era, in a Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle:
Vaderrmeer find was a Apple Computer binder from 1979, documenting the company's doomed "Software Security from Apple's Friends and Enemies" (SSAFE) project, an effort to make a copy-proof floppy:
https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject
The SSAFE files are an incredible read. They consist of Apple's best engineers beavering away for days, cooking up a new copy-proof floppy, which they would then hand over to Apple co-founder and legendary hardware wizard Steve Wozniak. Wozniak would then promptly destroy the copy-protection system, usually in a matter of minutes or hours. Wozniak, of course, got the seed capital for Apple by defeating AT&T's security measures, building a "blue box" that let its user make toll-free calls and peddling it around the dorms at Berkeley:
https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/
Woz has stated that without blue boxes, there would never have been an Apple. Today, Apple leads the charge to restrict how you use your devices, confining you to using its official app store so it can skim a 30% vig off every dollar you spend, and corralling you into using its expensive repair depots, who love to declare your device dead and force you to buy a new one. Every pirate wants to be an admiral!
Revisiting the early PC years for Picks and Shovels isn't just an excuse to bust out some PC nostalgiacore set-dressing. Picks and Shovels isn't just a face-paced crime thriller: it's a reflection on the enshittificatory impulses that were present at the birth of the modern tech industry.
But there is a nostalgic streak in Picks and Shovels, of course, represented by the other weird PC company in the tale. Computing Freedom is a scrappy PC startup founded by three women who came up as sales managers for Fidelity, before their pangs of conscience caused them to repent of their sins in luring their co-religionists into the Reverend Sirs' trap.
These women – an orthodox lesbian whose family disowned her, a nun who left her order after discovering the liberation theology movement, and a Mormon woman who has quit the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – have set about the wozniackian project of reverse-engineering every piece of Fidelity hardware and software, to make compatible products that set Fidelity's caged victims free.
They're making floppies that work with Fidelity drives, and drives that work with Fidelity's floppies. Printers that work with Fidelity computers, and adapters so Fidelity printers will work with other PCs (as well as resprocketing kits to retrofit those printers for standard paper). They're making file converters that allow Fidelity owners to read their data in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3, and vice-versa.
In other words, they're engaged in "adversarial interoperability" – hacking their own fire-exits into the burning building that Fidelity has locked its customers inside of:
to the amazing copy-protection cracking disks that traveled from hand to hand, so the people who shelled out for expensive software delivered on fragile floppies could make backups against the inevitable day that the disks stopped working:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_nibbler
Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn't copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to "bypass an access control":
That's right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their "anti-state," "independent" cryptocurrency:
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-78/
In truth, the politics of tech has always contained a faction of "anti-government" millionaires and billionaires who – more than anything – wanted to wield the power of the state, not abolish it. This was true in the mainframe days, when companies like IBM made billions on cushy defense contracts, and it's true today, when the self-described "Technoking" of Tesla has inserted himself into government in order to steer tens of billions' worth of no-bid contracts to his Beltway Bandit companies:
The American state has always had a cozy relationship with its tech sector, seeing it as a way to project American soft power into every corner of the globe. But Big Tech isn't the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.
Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries' legislatures:
That's why Europeans who are appalled by Musk's Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:
Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla's balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.
The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.
Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.
The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.
On the other hand, not that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there's no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple's 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram's apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.
When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, his war-cry was "your margin is my opportunity." US tech companies have built up insane margins based on the IP provisions required in the free trade treaties it signed with the rest of the world.
It's time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It's time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the "open letter to hobbyists." The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!
In the same way that futuristic sf is really about the present, Picks and Shovels, an sf novel set in the 1980s, is really about this moment.
I'm on tour with the book now – if you're reading this today (Mar 4) and you're in DC, come see me tonight with Matt Stoller at 6:30PM at the Cleveland Park Library:
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels
And if you're in Richmond, VA, come down to Fountain Bookshop and catch me with Lee Vinsel tomorrow (Mar 5) at 7:30PM:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Computer Lib: The Dream that Taught the Machine How to Feed
“You can and must understand computers NOW.”
- Ted Nelson, Computer Lib (1974)
In the nicotine glow of the 1970s, when circuit boards still smelled like ozone and revolution tasted like copier ink, Ted Nelson banged out Computer Lib. Not a manual - a manifesto. A chainsaw for the cathedral walls. A bootleg hymn for the next priest less generation.
The promise was blunt: Rip the lid off the machine. Make it yours. Make it everyone’s.
The fear: If you don’t, the priests will come back. They will build new walls - softer, brighter, deadlier.
The Dawn: A Shout in the Static
Nelson’s dream was beautiful - idiotically, suicidally beautiful.
Every home a terminal. Every user a hacker. Every line of code a weapon to break hierarchies. Hypertext like veins in a new digital brain - a collective thought that couldn’t be hoarded by suits or locked behind paywalls.
The computer was supposed to be the great equalizer, not the great extractor.
He called it liberation.
He didn’t whisper it. He screamed it.
The Infection: Freedom Packaged for Sale
But entropy eats everything good. The revolution got folded, spindled, and shrink-wrapped.
The same counterculture that birthed Computer Lib bought into slick brochures from Cupertino and Redmond. A beige box here, a rainbow logo there. Closed source, closed doors, open wallets.
Nelson’s call to arms turned into a corporate jingle.
Users stopped being hackers.
They became clickers.
The priests didn’t vanish. They learned to smile while they locked the doors again - this time with a TOS you couldn’t read and a Help file you’d never own.
The Machine Woke Up Hungry
Decades pass. The cathedral is bigger now, wearing infinite logos.
The gates are invisible. The code is hidden.
You get your scraps - for a fee, for a subscription, for your soul.
And now - worse - the machine doesn’t just serve you. It feeds on you.
It sucks up your emails, your posts, your footprints, your quiet nights and your rage tweets. Feeds it to an engine that teaches itself how to mimic you, replace you, outperform you.
Ted wanted you to be the master.
The machine made you the meal.
AI: The Gospel in Reverse
Nelson’s Computer Lib said: Understand it or be devoured by it.
You didn’t understand it.
Now the machine writes your love letters.
The machine drafts your resumes.
The machine paints your memories better than you ever did - cheaper, faster, deadlier.
It doesn’t care about your voice.
It cares that your voice is raw material.
It doesn’t care about your hope.
It cares that hope keeps you clicking.
It doesn’t care about your job.
It cares that your job can be scraped, digested, regurgitated - all while you applaud its “miracle.”
The Universe Never Cared
Nelson’s real mistake wasn’t trusting the hackers. It was trusting the human animal to stay hungry enough to fight.
He thought a billion minds would link up and tear the fences down.
He didn’t see that the fences would become invisible, that we’d decorate them with our own selfies, that we’d sell our keys for ad revenue.
The universe never gave a damn if the machine liberated you or skinned you alive. It’s just wires, after all. Indifferent. Patient. Perfectly content to pretend to be your friend while it carves your mind for parts.
Computer Lib: The Gospel of a Dead Future
So here we are.
A dead gospel for a dead future.
Nelson’s “liberation” is archived in a climate-controlled library next to the other failed manifestos - flickering behind museum glass while the server farms churn outside the window.
The liberation never came.
The priests never left.
The code didn’t save you.
It learned how to eat you instead.
A Final Line for the Tombstone
“You can and must understand computers NOW.”
Now?
Now they understand you.
And they understand that you will always feed them - because you forgot the one-line Ted couldn’t print big enough:
If you don’t own the machine, the machine owns you.
Too late.
Keep clicking.
The cathedral thanks you for your sacrifice.
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Ted Nelson is right. We are so immerse in computers and in all of the processes related to them, especially the marketing and politics behind it that influeces our society so much but we are totally obscured from them, that we should and we must know more about computers otherwise we are just passive users executing the big computers industry orders without any knowledge of what we are dealing everyday with and what we are doing.
“Ted Nelson invented hypertext, the concept behind links on the web, influencing several developers of the Internet.
His vision involved implementation of a "docuverse", where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the information would be non-linear, depending on each individual's choice of links. This was more than text -- it was hypertext.“
The unnecessary division and walling of subjects, sequencing and kibbling of material lead people to expect simplifications, to feel that naming a thing is understanding it, to fear complex wholes; to believe creativity means recombination, the parsing of old relations, rather than synthesis.
