#speculative design

The DMCA was a enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers – and competitors who might help those customers – with criminal prosecution.

Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar.

Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, aa UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties," and in 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress."

This guy, Bruce Lehman, he is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible.

But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how Canada enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers.

Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister. Stephen Harper really wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort.

Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law three times. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte – a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government – tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation.

Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through.

Boy, did that backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only 53 responses offered support for the idea.

How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,132 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law.

Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes.

It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.

Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies have to do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so that any new parts installed in a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator has to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.

This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking. "Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturers uses an access control to block the repair.

Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers.

Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's official one, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app.

That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 to a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives.

It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter.

A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy.

And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.

The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that you wanted to see.

Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance.

Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.

Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block Apple from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you.

Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad.

That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp. Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against, hey decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes.

The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway.

Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification.

Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it. Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors.

Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, you folks. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're losing.

Let's talk about how we start winning.

Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make unsuccessfully for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want some of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight.

That's the Trump story, all over. The Trump coalition is basically, all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation.

Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democratic Party are a bunch of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist.

Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done.

To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one.

Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?"

After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads.

But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian business leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for.

So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books?

Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law.

Remember, digital products are slippery. If America bans circumvention, and American companies starts screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy!

So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods.

The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have.

Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits.

That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity." $100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity.

With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, not for me. When they do it to us, that's progress, when we do it to them, it's piracy (and every pirate wants to be an admiral).

Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?

It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch."

Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada.

I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part.

Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere.

Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.

This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American.

Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.

But that's not what we've done. Instead, we've decided to make everything in Canada more expensive, which is just about the stupidest political strategy I've ever heard of.

This might be the only thing Carney could do that's less popular than firing 10,000 civil servants and replacing them with chatbots on the advice of the world's shadiest art dealer, who is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent.

Which is just, you know, stupid. It's like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive. Human beings are not word-guessing programs who know more words that ChatGPT.

So it's clear that the coalition of "people who care about digital rights" and "people who want to make billions of dollars off jailbreaking tech" isn't powerful enough to break the coalition that makes hundreds of billions of dollars from enshittification.

But Trump – yes, Trump! – keeps recruiting people to our cause.

Trump has made it clear that America no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. It has adversaries and rivals. And Trump's favorite weapon for attacking his foreign adversaries are America's tech giants.

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Bejamin Netanyahu for ordering a genocide, Trump denounced them, and Microsoft shut down their Outlook accounts.

The chief prosecutor and other justices immediately lost access to all the working files of the court, to their email archives, to their diaries and address books.

This was a giant, blinking sign, visible from space, reading AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

Trump's America only has adversaries and rivals, and Trump will pursue dominance by bricking your government, your businesses, your whole country.

It's not just administrative software that Trump can send kill signals to. Remember when those Russian looters stole Ukrainian tractors and they turned up in Crimea? John Deere sent a kill-signal to the tractors and permanently immobilized them.

This was quite a cool little comeuppance, the kind of thing a cyberpunk writer like me can certainly relish. But anyone who thinks about this for, oh, ten seconds will immediately realise that anyone who can push around the John Deere company can order the permanent immobilization of any tractor in the world, or all the tractors in your country.

Because John Deere is a monopolist, and whatever part of the market Deere doesn't control is controlled by Massey Ferguson, and Trump can order the bricking of those tractors, too.

This is the thing we were warned we'd face if we let Huawei provide our telecoms infrastructure, and those warnings weren't wrong. We should be worried about any gadget that we rely on that can be bricked by its manufacturer.

Because that means we are at risk from the manufacturer, from governments who can suborn the manufacturer, from corporate insiders who can hijack the manufacturer's control systems, and from criminals who can impersonate the manufacturer to our devices.

This is the third part of our coalition: not just digital rights weirdos like me; not just investors and technologists looking to make billions; but also national security hawks who are justifiably freaking out about America, China, or someone else shutting down key pieces of their country, from its food supply to its administrative capacity.

Trump is a crisis, and crises precipitate change.

Just look at Europe. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, the EU was a decade behind on its energy transition goals. Now, just a few years later, they're 15 years ahead of schedule.

It turns out that a lot of "impossible" things are really just fights you'd rather not have. No one wants to argue with some tedious German who hates the idea of looking at "ugly solar panels" on their neighbour's balcony. But once you're all shivering in the dark, that's an argument you will have and you will win.

Today, another mad emperor is threatening Europe – and the world. Trump's wanton aggression has given rise to a new anti-enshittification coalition: digital rights advocates, investors and technologists, and national security hawks; both the ones who worry about America, and the ones who worry about China.

That's a hell of a coalition!

The time is right to become a disenshittification nation, to harness our own tech talent, and the technologists who are fleeing Trump's America in droves, along with capital from investors who'd like to back a business whose success isn't determined by how many $TRUMP Coins they buy.

Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size.

It's unlike everything else we've tried, like the Digital Services Tax, or forcing Netflix to support cancon, or making Facebook and Google pay to link to the news.

All of those tactics involve making these companies that are orders of magnitude richer than Canada do something they absolutely do not want to do.

Time and again, they've shown that we don't have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does.

We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops, our nonprofits, who want to jailbreak America's shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity.

In a jailbroken Canada, we don't have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place.

And if we don't do it, someone else will. Because every country was arm-twisted into passing an anti-circumvention law like ours. Every country had a supine and cowardly lickspittle like James Moore or Tony Clement who'd do America's bidding, a quisling who'd put their nation's people and businesses in chains, rather than upset the US Trade Rep.

And all of those countries are right where we are: hit with tariffs, threatened by Trump, waiting for the day that Microsoft or Oracle or Google or John Deere bricks their businesses, their government, their farms.

One of those countries is going to jump at this opportunity, the opportunity to consume the billions in rents stolen by US Tech giants, and use them as fuel for a single-use rocket booster that launches their tech sector into a stable orbit for decades to come.

That gives them the hottest export business in living memory: a capital-light, unstoppable suite of products that save businesses and consumers money, while protecting their privacy.

If we sleep on this, we'll still benefit. We'll get the consumer surplus that comes from buying those jailbreaking tools online and using them to disenshittify our social media, our operating systems, our vehicles, our industrial and farm equipment.

But we won't get the industrial policy, the chance to launch a whole sector of businesses, each with the global reach and influence of RIM or Nortel.

That'll go to someone else. The Europeans are already on it. They're funding and building the "Eurostack": free, open source, auditable and trustworthy versions of the US tech silos. We're going to be able to use that here.

I mean, why not? We'll just install that code on metal running in Canadian data-centres, and we'll debug it and add features to it, and so will everyone else.

Because that's how IT should work, and it should go beyond just the admin and database software that businesses and governments rely on. We should be building drop-in, free, open software for everything: smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches, phones, cars, tractors, powered wheelchairs, ventilators.

That's how it should already be: that the software that powers these devices that we entrust with our data, our integrity, our lives should be running code that anyone can see, test, and improve.

That's how science works, after all. Before we had science, we had something kind of like science. We had alchemy. Alchemy was very similar to science, in that an alchemist would observe some natural phenomena in the world, hypothesise a causal relationship between them, and design an experiment to validate that hypothesis.

But here's where alchemy and science diverge: unlike a scientist, an alchemist wouldn't publish their results. They'd keep them secret, rather than exposing them to the agony of adversarial peer review, where your enemies seek out every possible reason to discredit your work. This let the alchemists kid themselves about the stuff they thought they'd discovered, and that's why every alchemist discovered for themself, in the hardest way possible, that you shouldn't drink mercury.

But after 500 years of this, alchemy finally achieved its long sought-after goal of converting something common to something of immeasurable value. Alchemy discovered how to transform the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of knowledge, through the crucible of publishing.

Disclosure is the difference between knowledge and ignorance. Openness is the difference between dying of mercury poisoning and discovering medicine.

The fact that we have a law on our statute books, in the year of two thousand and twenty-five, that criminalises discovering how the software we rely on works, and telling other people about it and improving it – well, it's pretty fucking pathetic, isn't it?

We don't have to keep on drinking the alchemists' mercury. We don't have to remain prisoners of the preposterous policy blunders of Tony Clement and James Moore. We don't have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don't have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices.

We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology.

Like the EU's energy transition, this is a move that's long overdue. Like the EU's energy transition, amad emperor has created the conditions for us to get off of our asses, to build a better world.

We could be a disenshittification nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamned fortune doing it.

And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border, and rescue our American cousins to boot.

What's not to like?

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet