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 – taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API – 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – a competitor, a tinkerer, a grad student – 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 – 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 – which is staffed up with extremely accomplished and skilled engineers – 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 lock…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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me: "lol superstitions, some people sure are dumb!"
me, in the literal next breath: "I need to recreate the exact feeling that I experienced last summer, after being laid off and securing a new job within a week, and starting a two-week vacation, the first one in 3 years. Then and only then I'll be able to continue working on this draft"
(if it’s ok I’m gonna livejournal out on that solipsistic tip for a hot minute (if it’s not I have a bag of old dicks you can snack on in the meantime))
Highschool was a real aggravating struggle, right? And I came out of it feeling like I had banged my head against a wall for a few years because I wouldn’t accept something that was very obvious, that crowds and I are not on the same wave-length and don’t get along.
While I was in college (stemming in no small part from inspiration I found in the works of John Waters and Richard James and Vince McMahon) I found this weird way to flip the issue, by becoming An Entertainer and trying to deliberately manipulate crowds. A lot of it was curious experimentation, trying to see what I could do, but it was all intended to coalesce into some kind of Music Industry Success where I could subvert the social conventions that made me feel so dismally oppressed and cynical in HS.
That worked out better than I expected, and I caught that Indie Musician fever where you take success for validation of your heretofore-underappreciated specialness (journalists: please don’t ever call a teenager a genius, for their sake), indicative of a Destiny, an ascent to prominence, where great wrongs would finally be corrected.
After a few years of touring, interviews, reviews, etc, I came to see that 1) I wasn’t the first person to experience this, 2) nearly every ambitious artist in that Industry was under the same spell, 3) the system was not like a crowd at all: it was a whole other entity, and it endured because it shaped all those who passed through it. Success changed you in spite of your efforts. “Around every corner another corner waits”: you either have to get delusional about the depth of the effect you’re having on your audience’s lives, or else continually believe there’s just one more rung to reach before The Real Work can really start bearing fruit.
Then, one night in the desert, my ambition was exorcised. I began a ridiculously prolonged period of trying to partner with something bigger than my conscious ego, through making new things with Crowds put out of my mind completely, through relinquishing control (primarily, perhaps, via a humbled relationship to the tools, and increased faith in improvisation), and through reading other people’s experiences and insights and accomplishments in slipping around the I-That-Believes-It-Is-All-Of-Me.
It took about a decade-- a decade riddled with guilt and doubt that I wasn’t just rationalizing a pedestrian succumber to laziness and fear-- but at the end I started to have real hope, and feel like I could be happy in this world, and that I didn’t necessarily have to know how to Make A Difference in order to make a difference.
So why the fuck am I on Twitter like every day? In the past, it’s definitely been because I was afraid that, were I not there, the last bit of existence I had in that Industry would evaporate and nobody who invested in me would ever see any return on having faith in me. But that fear is not at all strong anymore; I understand that it is out of my hands regardless of whether or how I obsesses over it, and I also can see (and accept) that everything I’m interested in is not in any way useful to the audience-channeling channels of that Industry.
Part of it is the little injection of reassurance that I’m not totally incoherent and alone that I get from those 2-4 favs (esp when they come from people like Multsanta, or Jana, or young Baltimoreans I’ve never met, or, uh.... I’m sure there are others, but anyways.) But that reassurance is swamped in the disheartening fog brought by so many of the (political) Takes I end up seeing (usually through RTs, although there are some people who depress the shit out of me that I feel too mean muting).
I downgraded from smartphone to candybar mostly because I wanted to get my head out of online, and it’s def achieved that to a degree, but I could use a degree more. Discipline, right? That’s all it is innit? I suppose I am hoping that writing this on a webpage right now will shame me into following through all the way.
I modelled nude for a figure drawing class a while ago, it was a smash hit so they asked me to do it again
thinking about wearing my antlers this time around
(ps if you're reading this and we're friends and you live in my town, you should come to the drawing class and DRAW ME and then gimme a bunch of drawings because there's nothing in this world I want more than drawings of my own naked body)
one time I was on an island with a dude and we were the only two people on the island. so obviously we set up a tripod and photographed ourselves like we had killed all the other humans on the island. we had a shotgun and a shovel and OBVIOUSLY I was the one holding the shotgun, because, obviously.
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.
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Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I have to say that the mind of the white man is the world's greatest sausagefest. Unless you're counting Queens of the Stone Age, there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias.As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It's also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid's user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.
Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites...
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
This has been quoted in RWW and Gawker—in a derisive way. One of the follow ups: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time... I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."
The web is ruled by maniacs like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul zealots, Apple fan boys, blog commenters, animal lovers, and other crazy people.Content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disordersCouch potatoes don't matter on the web, crazy people do
