I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH in TOMORROW (May 15) at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.
Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies β taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API β was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.
Bad clients would be muscled aside by third-party clients. Locked bootloaders would be hacked and replaced. Code that confirmed you were using OEM parts, consumables or adapters would be found and nuked from orbit. Weak APIs would be replaced with muscular, unofficial APIs built out of unstoppable scrapers running on headless machines in some data-center. Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.
Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable of running every valid program. Specifically, they represented the power of adversarial interoperability β when someone modifies a technology against its manufacturer's wishes. Adversarial interoperability is the origin story of today's tech giants, from Microsoft to Apple to Google:
But adversarial interop has been in steady decline for the past quarter-century. These big companies moved fast and broke things, but no one is returning the favor. If you ask the companies what changed, they'll just smirk and say that they're better at security than the incumbents they disrupted. The reason no one's hacked up a third-party iOS App Store is that Apple's security team is just so fucking 1337 that no one can break their shit.
I think this is nonsense. I think that what's really going on is that we've made it possible for companies to design their technologies in such a way that any attempt at adversarial interop is illegal.
"Anticircumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act make bypassing any kind of digital lock (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM") very illegal. Under DMCA, just talking about how to remove a digital lock can land you in prison for 5 years. I tell the story of this law's passage in "Understood: Who Broke the Internet," my new podcast series for the CBC:
For a quarter century, tech companies have aggressively lobbied and litigated to expand the scope of anticircumvention laws. At the same time, companies have come up with a million ways to wrap their products in digital locks that are a crime to break.
Digital locks let Chamberlain, a garage-door opener monopolist block all third-party garage-door apps. Then, Chamberlain stuck ads in its app, so you have to watch an ad to open your garage-door:
These companies built 11-foot ladders to get over their competitors' 10-foot walls, and then they kicked the ladder away. Once they were secure atop their walls, they committed enshittifying sins their fallen adversaries could only dream of.
I've been campaigning to abolish anticircumvention laws for the past quarter-century, and I've noticed a curious pattern. Whenever these companies stand to lose their legal protections, they freak out and spend vast fortunes to keep those protections intact. That's weird, because it strongly implies that their locks don't work. A lock that works works, whether or not it's illegal to break that lock. The reason Signal encryption works is that it's working encryption. The legal status of breaking Signal's encryption has nothing to do with whether it works. If Signal's encryption was full of technical flaws but it was illegal to point those flaws out, you'd be crazy to trust Signal.
Signal does get involved in legal fights, of course, but the fights it gets into are ones that require Signal to introduce defects in its encryption β not fights over whether it is legal to disclose flaws in Signal or exploit them:
But tech companies that rely on digital locks manifestly act like their locks don't work and they know it. When the tech and content giants bullied the W3C into building DRM into 2 billion users' browsers, they categorically rejected any proposal to limit their ability to destroy the lives of people who broke that DRM, even if it was only to add accessibility or privacy to video:
The thing is, if the lock works, you don't need the legal right to destroy the lives of people who find its flaws, because it works.
Do digital locks work? Can they work? I think the answer to both questions is a resounding no. The design theory of a digital lock is that I can provide you with an encrypted file that your computer has the keys to. Your computer will access those keys to decrypt or sign a file, but only under the circumstances that I have specified. Like, you can install an app when it comes from my app store, but not when it comes from a third party. Or you can play back a video in one kind of browser window, but not in another one. For this to work, your computer has to hide a cryptographic key from you, inside a device you own and control. As I pointed out more than a decade ago, this is a fool's errand:
After all, you or I might not have the knowledge and resources to uncover the keys' hiding place, but someone does. Maybe that someone is a person looking to go into business selling your customers the disenshittifying plugin that unfucks the thing you deliberately broke. Maybe it's a hacker-tinkerer, pursuing an intellectual challenge. Maybe it's a bored grad student with a free weekend, an electron-tunneling microscope, and a seminar full of undergrads looking for a project.
The point is that hiding secrets in devices that belong to your adversaries is very bad security practice. No matter how good a bank safe is, the bank keeps it in its vault β not in the bank-robber's basement workshop.
For a hiding-secrets-in-your-adversaries'-device plan to work, the manufacturer has to make zero mistakes. The adversary β a competitor, a tinkerer, a grad student β only has to find one mistake and exploit it. This is a bedrock of security theory: attackers have an inescapable advantage.
So I think that DRM doesn't work. I think DRM is a legal construct, not a technical one. I think DRM is a kind of magic Saran Wrap that manufacturers can wrap around their products, and, in so doing, make it a literal jailable offense to use those products in otherwise legal ways that their shareholders don't like. As Jay Freeman put it, using DRM creates a new law called "Felony Contempt of Business Model." It's a law that has never been passed by any legislature, but is nevertheless enforceable.
In the 25 years I've been fighting anticircumvention laws, I've spoken to many government officials from all over the world about the opportunity that repealing their anticircumvention laws represents. After all, Apple makes $100b/year by gouging app makers for 30 cents on ever dollar. Allow your domestic tech sector to sell the tools to jailbreak iPhones and install third party app stores, and you can convert Apple's $100b/year to a $100m/year business for one of your own companies, and the other $999,900,000,000 will be returned to the world's iPhone owners as a consumer surplus.
But every time I pitched this, I got the same answer: "The US Trade Representative forced us to pass this law, and threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass it." Happy Liberation Day, people β every country in the world is now liberated from the only reason to keep this stupid-ass law on their books:
One of the questions I've been getting repeatedly from policy wonks, activists and officials is, "Is it even possible to jailbreak modern devices?" They want to know if companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and John Deere have created unbreakable digital locks. Obviously, this is an important question, because if these locks are impregnable, then getting rid of the law won't deliver the promised benefits.
It's true that there aren't as many jailbreaks as we used to see. When a big project like Nextcloud β which is staffed up with extremely accomplished and skilled engineers β gets screwed over by Google's app store, they issue a press-release, not a patch:
These hacks are incredibly ambitious! How ambitious? How about a class break for every version of iOS as well as an unpatchable hardware attack on 8 years' worth of Apple bootloaders?
Now, maybe it's the case at all the world's best hackers are posting free code under pseudonyms. Maybe all the code wizards working for venture backed tech companies that stand to make millions through clever reverse engineering are just not as mad skilled as teenagers who want an ad-free Insta and that's why they've never replicated the feat.
Or maybe it's because teenagers and anonymous hackers are just about the only people willing to risk a $500,000 fine and 5-year prison sentence. In other words, maybe the thing that protects DRM is law, not code. After all, when Polish security researchers revealed the existence of secret digital locks that the train manufacturer Newag used to rip off train operators for millions of euros, Newag dragged them into court:
Tech companies are the most self-mythologizing industry on the planet, beating out even the pharma sector in boasting about their prowess and good corporate citizenship. They swear that they've made a functional digital lockβ¦but they sure act like the only thing those locks do is let them sue people who reveal their workings.
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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Luddites are often characterized as anti-technology. But in reality, they were anti-exploitation. The story of the Luddites, the conflict between rich capitalists and impoverished laborers, set the tone for many other class conflicts that followed. Understanding Luddismβs roots is deeply relevant for contemporary Catholic social thought on labor justice, especially in the era of AI.
Link here. Note: this was written by a guy I went to school with, do me a favor and spread it around--Levi is pretty dope.
no General but Ludd does the poor any good. (2026)
Based on descriptions of Luddites in Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine -- "one of the men wore a grotesque mask cut from a bloody calfskin" -- often wearing women's clothing blackened with coal.
Men are more easily made than Machinery,
Stockings will fetch higher than lives;
Gibbets on Sherwood will heighten the scenery,
[Showing] how Commerce, how Liberty thrives.
Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,
When famine appeals, and when poverty groans;
That life should be valued at less than a stocking,
And breaking of frames, lead to breaking of bones.
for those unfamiliar with luddism: tldr it's a 18th century worker's rights movement fighting against the rapid development of technology that was facilitating their exploitation and lower wages by breaking into factories and smashing machinery, neo-luddism is a reclaiming of the term "luddite", which became an insult for people who generally opposed technology.
Wikipedia article on Luddites (the 18th century ones)
Wikipedia article on neo-luddism
btw i sell these, PWYC + shipping! if u are worried about how much shipping would cost or how accessible it would be to u, DM me :) we can make it work!! also open to trades :3
(if payment is impossible for u, you also have my full consent to copy this design, make it in bulk if u want, sell it to ur irl friends, i do not care and dont believe in copyright anyways. have fun)
getting a dumb phone. the way forward is not good or really convenient or fun by any means but the alternative is so gigantically evil that even entertaining the possibility will turn you into a pillar of salt. the only thing keeping people going is the unconscious belief that they will not have the phone forever. but if they were forced to confront the eventuality of living the rest of their days on the phone they would see. and it would be too horrible to recover from. better to look away.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
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