#transcripts

So let me explain: 14 years ago, I stood in front of this group and explained the "War on General Purpose Computing." That was my snappy name for this fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures for it is "anticircumvention,"

Under anticircumvention law, it's 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 or not your modification violates any other law.

Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.

So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.

Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and, criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.

This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.

Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US 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 US stock exchanges.

But why would Europe pass a law like this? Europe is a massive tech importer. By extending legal protection to tech companies that want to steal their users' data and money, the EU was facilitating a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. So why would Europe do this?

Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which other countries came to enact their anticircumvention laws and maybe you'll spot a pattern that will answer this question.

Australia got its anticircumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Australia to enact anticircumvention law.

Canada and Mexico got it through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anticircumvention laws.

Andean nations like Chile got their anticircumvention laws through bilateral US free trade agreements, which oblige them to enact anticircumvention laws.

And the Central American nations got their anticircumvention laws through CAFTA – The Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA – which obliges them to enact anticircumvention laws, too.

I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?

Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.

They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. 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 people's private data and ready cash.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then 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 had 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." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"

And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.

Think of John Deere tractors: when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected to repair it, swapping in new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's malfing. But the tractor won't recognize that new part and will not start working again, not until the farmer spends a couple hundred bucks on a service callout from an official John Deere tractor repair 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 anticircumvention law, meaning farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage, because their own government will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables the parts-pairing check in this American product.

So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.

It's hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple's App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app.

30 percent! That's such a profitable business that Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the 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 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 still make $10b/year.

Maybe Finland will never see another Nokia, but Nokia's a tough business to be in. You've got to make hardware, which is expensive and risky. But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but 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.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break kings!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight). I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's 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.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this. When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

And while those stores could use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be more expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU. Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens 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, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

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 jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% 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 the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be their opportunity.

Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a much better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is 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 bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's 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 ripoff companies.

It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and technologists who want to make billions of dollars raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification 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.

That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC – that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who I 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 equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire nation.

The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack Outlook to brick the ICC – they own 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 foreign governments – and this is true no matter where that data is stored. Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "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.

And under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number-two company in the ag-tech cartel, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

But 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 adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

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 they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention 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.

So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification 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 American platforms that have been shown to be totally unreliable.

This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec 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 Newman call the "Underground Empire." But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country. That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country 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 about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, 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.

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 nation 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 these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at 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 could they 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. This is when goods – like oil – are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it 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 that policy – it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

But there's 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 institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering. Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That's 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 in systems that may have performed well for years.

Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its 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. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That's why they think it's good that they've got a chatbot that "produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that isn't designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole 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 chatbot that can't do your job.

Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the workers stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into 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 drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI 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 third act."

Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this 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 had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

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 can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders. So Zuck is 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 media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care 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 Trump fired all the US government scientists, and then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring that the US would begin generating annual "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs, with a chatbot. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't really do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're still better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or not to inject bleach. A chatbot won't ever tell him that trans people exist, or that the climate emergency 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 telling you "no."

AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective spicy autocomplete systems, to lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.

Now, compare that with the project of building a post-American internet: 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 while building resiliency and sovereignty.

Now, some of you are probably feeling pretty cynical about this right now. After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual and incompetent deference to the US, and an inability to act, even when the need was dire. If your leaders couldn't act decisively 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 experienced a dire energy shortage? In three short years, the continent's solar uptake skyrocketed. The EU went from being 15 years behind in its energy transition, to ten years ahead of schedule.

Because when you're shivering the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth it are suddenly existential battles you can't afford to lose. Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic temper tantrum at the thought of a solar panel hanging from their neighbor's balcony.

But when it's winter, and there's no Russian gas, and you're shivering in the dark, then that person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all corners, and shove it right up their ass.

Besides, we don't need Europe to lead the charge on a post-American internet by repealing anticircumvention. Any country could do it! And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking tools to the rest of the world, it gets to be the Disenshittification 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 so is the strongest it's ever been. It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing food, medical 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 grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped" recovery, that's an economic rally where the rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. For a generation, America 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 50 years of wage stagnation.

The Trump administration has sided firmly with debt collectors, price gougers, and rent extractors. Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like Realpage, restarted debt payments for eight million student borrowers, and killed a plan to make live-saving drugs a little cheaper, leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.

Every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that can't go to consumption. And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, the US is gutting programs that spend money on the public's behalf, like SNAP, the food stamps program that helps an ever-larger slice of the American public stave off 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 – is being kneecapped to enrich 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 materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup, because the Pentagon routinely signs maintenance contracts that prohibit it from teaching a Marine how to fix an engine.

The post-American world is really coming on fast. As we repeal our anticircumvention laws, we don't have to care what America thinks, we don't have to care about their tariffs, because they're already whacking us with tariffs; and because the only people left in the US who can afford to buy things are rich people, who just don't buy enough stuff. There's only so many Lambos and Sub-Zeros even the most guillotineable plute can usefully own.

But what if European firms want to go on taking advantage of anticircumvention laws? Well, there's good news there, too. "Good news," because the EU firms that rely on anticircumvention are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.

Anticircumvention law is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. By imposing legal liability on reverse-engineers who might have discovered this 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 monthly subscription; to BMW, which rents you the automated system that automatically dims your high-beams if there's oncoming traffic.

Legalize jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe could unlock those subscription features for one price, and not share any of that money with BMW and Mercedes.

Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends it is Irish. Medtronic is the world's largest med-tech company, having purchased all their competitors, and then undertaken the largest "tax-inversion" in history, selling themselves to a tiny Irish firm, in order to magick their profits into a state of untaxable grace, floating in the Irish Sea.

Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators, and it booby-traps them the same way John Deere booby-traps its tractors. After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, the ventilator's central computing unit refuses to recognize the part until it completes a cryptographic handshake, proving that an authorized Medtronic technician was paid hundreds of euros to certify 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. This would be bad enough, but during the covid lockdowns, when every ventilator was desperately needed, and when the planes stopped flying, there was no way for a Medtronic tech to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. This was lethal. It killed people.

There's one more European company that relies on anticircumvention that I want to discuss here, because they're old friends of CCC: that's the Polish train company Newag. Newag sabotages its own locomotives, booby-trapping them so that if they sense they have been taken to a rival's service yard, the train bricks itself. When the train operator calls Newag about this mysterious problem, the company "helpfully" remotes into the locomotive's computers, to perform "diagnostics," which is just sending a unbricking command to the vehicle, a service for which they charge 20,000 euros.

Last year, Polish hackers from the security research firm Dragon Sector presented on their research into this disgusting racket in this very hall, and now, they're being sued by Newag under anticircumvention law, for making absolutely true disclosures about Newag's deliberately defective products.

So these are the European stakeholders for anticircumvention law: the Dieselgate killers, the car companies who want to rent you your high-beams and accelerator, the med-tech giant that bricked all the ventilators during the pandemic, and the company that tied Poland to the train-tracks.

I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels, as they show up and cry "Won't someone think of the train saboteurs?"

The enshittification of technology – the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on – has many causes: the collapse of competition, regulatory capture, the smashing of tech workers' power. But most of all, enshittification is the result of anticircumvention law's ban on interoperability.

By blocking interop, by declaring war on the general-purpose computer, our policy-makers created an enshittogenic environment that rewarded companies for being shitty, and ushered in the enshittocene, in which everything is turning to shit.

Let's call time on enshittification. Let's seize the means of computation. Let's build the drop-in, free, open, auditable alternatives to the services and firmware we rely on.

Let's end the era of silos. I mean, isn't it fucking weird how 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're trying 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, 1990 called and they want their 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 for this whole goddamned century, but also countries that want to convert American tech's hoarded trillions into fuel for a single-use rocket that boosts their own tech sector into a stable orbit.

It's national security hawks who are worried about Trump bricking their ministries or their tractors, and who are also worried – with just cause – about Xi Jinping bricking all their solar inverters and 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.

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 goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

All this decade, all over the world, countries have taken up arms against concentrated corporate power. We've had big, muscular antitrust attacks on big corporations in the US (under Trump I and Biden); in Canada; in the UK; in the EU and member states like Germany, France and Spain; in Australia; in Japan and South Korea and Singapore; in 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.

Even the most forceful wind is invisible. We can only see it by its effects. 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 sail fills with wind and propels the policy in ways that haven't been seen in 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, Japan, China, Australia or Brazil. It's blowing in America, too. Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying as things are in America, the country has experienced, and continues to experience, a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions at the local, state and 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 companies loot from the world don't trickle down to Americans. The average American holds a portfolio of assets that rounds to zero, and that includes stock in US tech companies.

The average American isn't a shareholder in Big Tech, the average American is a victim of Big Tech. Liberating the world from US Big Tech is also liberating America from US Big Tech.

That's been EFF's mission for 35 years. It's been my mission at EFF for 25 years. If you want to get involved in this 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, or the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, or La Quadrature du Net in France, or the Open Rights Group in the UK, or EF Finland, or ISOC Bulgaria, XNet, DFRI, Quintessenz, Bits of Freedom, Openmedia, 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: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there. It's gonna be great.

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:

Gretchen: At its most neutral form, a “diglossia” involves two languages or dialects or varieties of a single language or two quite different languages that are in stable use in the same place by the same people for different social situations. One of them is more prestigious than the other.

Lauren: I’m hearing “social baggage.” I’m hearing maybe a bit of “political complexity.” This sounds like a very specific situation. Is this really something that crops up all the time?

Gretchen: Part of the reason why it’s hidden is that, oftentimes, one of them isn’t considered a real language.

Lauren: Okay, that’s a great way to make it invisible.

Gretchen: You might think, okay, this is just multilingualism. It’s a specific kind of multilingualism. The answer is “Sometimes, yes,” but multilingualism is a whole bunch of other things. But the way that diglossia hides is by one of them being the “real” version of the language, and the other ones just being “bad” versions.

Lauren: Right. I guess this is one of those situations where variation between two dialects or two varieties hides in the fact that the boundary between “What is a language?” and “What is a dialect?” is often also really hidden.

Gretchen: Exactly. Especially when, as is often the case, one of them is the one that gets written down and the other one doesn’t get written down.

Lauren: I’m gonna assume the written-down one is the prestige one.

Gretchen: You’d be correct about that. Then you can hide that as, okay, well the writing is the real form of the language, which we’re gonna unpack, and the spoken thing is just like, “That’s just what people say, but it’s not the correct thing.” This is the hidden aspect of the diglossia if we’re ignoring how people actually talk to each other, and we’re only paying attention to writing, you can be like, “Yeah, there’s one language here.”

Lauren: Which is a good reason, as a linguist, to pay attention to how people actually speak to each other.

Gretchen: It sure is. Especially when these varieties are related to each other. Let’s talk about some concrete examples because we’re gonna get back to French and how French is a secret, hidden diglossia, but let’s talk about a classic diglossic situation first that everyone agrees is a diglossia so we can get a little bit more clarity. Very classic example of a diglossia is Arabic. When I studied Arabic for a couple years in university, they were very clear with us, like, “We’re teaching you Modern Standard Arabic, which is based on Classical Arabic but with modern vocabulary and stuff, but no one actually really speaks this, but everyone recognises it and learns it in school because a.) Modern Standard Arabic is the thing you learn in classrooms. You go to a classroom to learn this. If you’re learning it in the classroom, you got to learn the classroom thing.”

Lauren: And then you have people speaking Egyptian Arabic. I’ve definitely read about Moroccan Arabic. They do cool stuff with gesture. There’s all these different – Jordanian Arabic is slightly different again.

Gretchen: Exactly. You have these different varieties of Arabic, which are certainly related to each other and related to the Modern Standard variety or the Classical variety, which is the version that’s found in the Quran. They’re related to each other historically, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible. You know, somebody speaking Moroccan Arabic and someone speaking Egyptian Arabic can’t necessarily understand each other. So, sometimes, when you have people who are from multiple Arabic-speaking regions, they end up using the Modern Standard variety that’s found on, like, news to communicate with each other across those dialect boundaries, even though you would sound like an absolute weirdo if you were talking in Modern Standard Arabic to, like, your kid, or your dog, or your friends in a casual social situation because no one does that.

Lauren: This is where, as a single speaker operating in this community, everyone agrees “We use Moroccan Arabic for these parts of our lives and Modern Standard Arabic for these other parts of our lives.”

Gretchen: Right. And some of these local varieties may be different even between cities in the same country or regions in the same country, or they may have slightly larger regional varieties, but everyone agrees that there’s multiple Arabics. Everyone agrees this is literally a textbook diglossic situation.

Lauren: Has Arabic always been the go-to example of a diglossia?

Gretchen: There is a classic article by a linguist named Charles A. Ferguson in 1959 called, “Diglossia,” in a journal called WORD – very bold titles, I love it –

Lauren: To the point

Gretchen: – where he introduces diglossia as a term for English speakers. It had been previously used in French as “diglossie,” which has been applied to the same situation. His four textbook citation examples are Arabic, Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Those are his defining examples of diglossia. Arabic is literally textbook – I mean, he wasn’t writing a textbook; he was writing an article. But Arabic is literally in the defining examples of diglossia.

Lauren: This is why I’ve heard this contrast between standard and local varieties of Arabic framed in this way before.

Gretchen: If English speakers on average knew more about the situation in Arabic and knew that it was fully a diglossia, then I would be able to say, “It’s a diglossia” at parties, and people would be like, “Ah, yes, of course, like Arabic, which we all understand in detail.” But sadly, this is not true among my friends, so it’s worth getting through what the situation is like – and also talking about these other three paradigmatic examples that Ferguson talks about.

Lauren: What are some of the features of diglossia that were in the definitive article?

Gretchen: In a diglossia, you have two varieties that are the high form of the language, or the high language, and the low form of the language. They’re associated with different levels of prestige, with different types of situations, and so, for example, in Arabic, the high form is Modern Standard Arabic, and the low form is whatever the regional variety is (Egyptian, Moroccan, etc.).

Lauren: But they don’t have to be related languages, right? Because I’m thinking about that era in Europe where your vernacular language may have been a Romance language, but it may have been a language like English, but your formal prestige language was Latin that’s directly related.

Gretchen: That can still be a diglossia. The formal language, the written language, can be related or unrelated. They can have varying degrees of relationship. In Greek, you have two forms of the Greek language, one is the high form, which is modelled after Classical Greek and adapted to the modern language, and one is the Demotic form of Greek, which is the casual variety. Spoiler: Greek isn’t still like this. People have stopped using the modern-after-classical one for news broadcasts and stuff now. They now just use the Demotic form, the low form, for most social situations, so it doesn’t necessarily stay the same. But in 1959, when Ferguson is writing this article, this seems to be the stable situation for Greek.

Lauren: I guess “stable” being a reminder of persistent but not necessarily forever. We don’t send kids to school in Latin anymore.

Gretchen: Exactly. In Swiss German, the high form of the language is High German, which is the one that’s spoken in a variety of countries where German is spoken. The low form is Swiss German – so Standard German and Swiss German. This is not necessarily the case in other places. In other places, in Germany, for example, or at least in parts of Germany, High German (Hochdeutsch) is the normal form people are talking to their kids in, and there isn’t this same bifurcation between the two varieties. But in Switzerland, again, at least at the time this article was written (things may have changed somewhat), there’s this bifurcation. And then in Haiti, you have French as the high form as the language, and Haitian Creole, which is ultimately derived from French with influences from other languages, as the low form of the language. Again, French is used in France as a language people do speak to children in and do lots of other stuff in, but in Haiti you have this distinction. Again, there’s been a growing movement to use Haitian Creole in more circumstances in Haiti for some of the same reasons as – this has been the case in Greece and Switzerland and things like that. “How much of this is stable?” is the real question. In some of these cases, we have a high form of the language that is used as the normal form of the language in other places. In some places, the high form is only ever used as the really formal variety, like in Arabic.

Lauren: You can’t just use the languages objectively to say one is definitely high and one is definitely low. It’s about this particular context as well.

Gretchen: It’s about the particular social context. Ferguson gives this really nice table breaking down a bunch of context where he thinks these are the main linguistic contexts and, in each one, whether the high or low variety is used. Do you wanna guess, actually? If I give you some context, do you wanna guess which ones are high and which ones are low?

Lauren: Sure. Let’s do this.

Gretchen: All right. Context Number 1: a sermon in a church or mosque. High or low?

Lauren: Well, I get to cheat because you just told me that Classical Arabic is the language of the Quran and, therefore, is the form of the language used in religious ceremonies. But also, up until very recently in Catholicism, masses were said in Latin and sometimes still are. I’m gonna guess that’s the high.

Gretchen: That is absolutely the high form. Even in English you sometimes see some “thees” and “thous” floating around. They’re not quite the high form of the language, but they’re certainly an older form of the language that is sometimes found in religious contexts.

Lauren: We give that a bit of a social prestige buff for those.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Next context: instructions to servants, waiters, workmen, and clerks (is the four professions).

Lauren: I mean, as an Australian who lives with the erroneous belief that we are a very egalitarian and informal society, just the idea of having servants makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, but I guess this is your everyday – you’re interacting with everyday people – you’re going for your more vernacular-slash-low variety of the language.

Gretchen: You’re correct. This is a low variety. If you’re writing a personal letter to someone. Do you use the high or low? This one’s maybe trickier.

Lauren: This is where I have to ponder how long it’s been since I’ve written a personal letter – how much my personal letter writing has been influenced by my informal, online language use. But also, Gretchen, I’m taking it for granted that literacy is the domain of everyday people. So, maybe – I guess I am more formal. If I was writing you a letter, I would be like, “Dear Gretchen,” so maybe literacy is prestige and high.

Gretchen: Ah, you’re correct. I was really wondering if you were gonna go for low, but that is also considered a high context.

Lauren: That was a real roller coaster.

Gretchen: Note that this paper is from 1959. This is pre-texting. We can get into texting in a bit. Next context: a speech in parliament or a political speech. High or low?

Lauren: I think Ferguson and I are hanging out in different social domains, but parliament is a very formal place. They get very stuffy. I’ll say high.

Gretchen: Absolutely. University lecture.

Lauren: I mean, I’m pretty chatty, but I am 60 years younger than Ferguson, so I guess university lectures are meant to be very formal, so prestige.

Gretchen: Absolutely. This is sort of a classroom kind of variety, so you have to put it in the classroom. Next up: conversation with family, friends, colleagues – all the same.

Lauren: For the record, I do not speak to my family and my friends and my colleagues in exactly the same way even with my delusions of egalitarian-ness. But they’re all very close to me. They’re all very much people I hang out with every day. So, maybe the low variety rather than the standard.

Gretchen: You got this. Absolutely. That’s low. Next up is “news broadcast.” When was the last time you listened to a news broadcast?

Lauren: I listen to very chatty news broadcasts, but I also know in Australia we had this whole accent that people only ever really heard on the radio that was very much more British-adjacent. I still remember watching – not watching live but watching re-runs of the first television broadcast in Australia, and it was [British-ish accent], “Welcome to Television.”

Gretchen: Oh, we had one of those in Canada, too. We had a whole British-inflected radio-TV voice that is out of date now but used to exist.

Lauren: That is so high that it prestiged itself into extinction. I’ll say high.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Next up (I’m sure you listen to these all the time): a radio soap opera.

Lauren: Look, I’m gonna do my best to extrapolate that to my personal context, which is gossipy podcasts, which are absolutely – if you told me, “radio soap opera,” I would default to formal as well. But if I actually think about it in its modern equivalent, like a gossipy YouTube breakdown video – vernacular.

Gretchen: Yeah. That is also low. I think these are like, soaps, the idea is that they’re everyday people having dramas about who’s having whose baby kind of thing. That’s definitely low. This is the telenovela genre. Okay. Newspaper editorial, news story, caption on picture – high or low?

Lauren: I mean, newspapers are always pretty formal in their language. I’ll go high.

Gretchen: Yeah, that one’s high. Next up (as its own category): caption on political cartoon.

Lauren: Wow, that’s a really specific niche. I’m 100% gonna guess this because I don’t really have a lot of data to work with. If news broadcast is formal, soap opera is informal and low, newspaper editorial is high, I’m gonna say that caption on a political cartoon is in the vernacular-slash-low more often.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Lauren: Which I think reinforces this point that it is both of these varieties used by the same group of people because the same person can be listening to the same radio station and understand both the news and the soap opera – understand the newspaper and the joke-y, slang-y political cartoon.

Gretchen: I think this is also – when I think of a political cartoon, when I saw that and was thinking about the Quebec context, I was like, “Oh, the political cartoon is where you’re so much more likely to see vernacularised Quebec-specific spellings of formal language.” For the most part, there’s not as much writing in the low variety, but there is still an ability to represent the low variety in writing as you can see in political cartoons or as you can see in like, you know when you go to a tourism tchotchke shop, and they have t-shirts that say, like, “Here’s a local word that you can say,” “that you can buy on a shirt” or “on a mug.” In Quebec they say things like, “icitte,” which is Québécois for “ici,” which is “here,” but “icitte” is the Québécois way of saying “here.” Localising the word for “here” is an especially strong way of saying that it’s local. You see this on t-shirts and ball caps and things like that. Okay, final two – again, this is another pair – we have poetry versus folk literature.

Lauren: Oof. I think Ferguson and I just live in different realities – with deepest respect to poets I love who are trying so hard to blur the boundary. I assume he’s speaking of the kind of – you read Shakespeare; you read very formal language; it’s in the high variety. Folk literature – much more your everyday language.

Gretchen: This is the formal-sonnets-type-poetry-versus-slam-poetry distinction. Are you using the vernacular? This is a high-low distinction. I’m gonna read a paragraph from Ferguson because I think it illustrates an important point, “The importance of using the right variety in the right situation can hardly be overestimated. An outsider who learns to speak fluent, accurate L and then uses it in a formal speech is an object of ridicule. A member of the speech community who uses H in a purely conversational situation or in an informal activity like shopping is equally an object of ridicule. In all the defining languages, it is typical behaviour to have someone read aloud from a newspaper written in H and then proceed to discuss the contents in L. In all of the defining languages, it’s typical behaviour to listen to a formal speech in H and then discuss it – often with the speaker himself – in L. The last two situations on the list call for comment. In all the defining languages, some poetry is composed in L, and small handful of poets compose in both, but the status of the two kinds of poetry is very different. For the speech community as a whole, it is only the poetry in H that is felt to be ‘real’ poetry. On the other hand, in every one of the defining languages, certain proverbs, politeness formulas and the like are in H even when cited in ordinary conversation by illiterates. I has been estimated that as much as one-fifth of the proverbs in the active repertoire of Arab villagers are in H.”

Lauren: Okay, so maybe Ferguson and I are in the same reality because poets who are doing very interesting things with everyday language are often seen as being more invisible or less legitimate than reading your classic sonnets. So, maybe things haven’t changed as much as I think they have. But this idea that everyone is using both varieties all the time and shift between them depending on the domain is a key feature of what makes diglossia a very specific form of multilingualism.

Gretchen: Exactly. The differences between the two varieties can be relatively large. I wanna read another paragraph from Ferguson that I think illustrates this well. “A striking feature of diglossia is the existence of many paired items – one H, one L – referring to fairly common concepts frequently used in both H and L where the range of the two meanings is roughly the same, and the use of one or the other immediately stamps the utterance or written sequence in H or L. For example, in Arabic, the H word for ‘see’ is ‘ra’a.’ The L word is ‘shaf.’ The word ‘ra’a’ never occurs in ordinary conversation, and ‘shaf’ is not used in normal, written Arabic. If, for some reason, a remark in which ‘shaf’ was used is quoted in the press, it is replaced by ‘ra’a’ in the written quotation. In Greek, the H word for ‘wine’ is ‘inos.’ The L word is ‘krasi.’ The menu will have ‘inos’ written on it, but the diner will ask the waiter for ‘krasi.’ The nearest American English parallels are in cases such as ‘illumination’ – ‘light’ – ‘purchase/buy’ or ‘children/kids.’ But in those cases, both words may be written and both may be used in ordinary conversation. The gap is not so great as for the corresponding doublets in diglossia.”

Lauren: I read that paragraph, and I decided we should do a wine bar tour of Athens.

Gretchen: [Laughs] To see if this still the case since 1959.

Lauren: Just to check.

Gretchen: What did you find on the menus? Dis they say “inos,” which is the H form, or “krasi,” which is the L form?

Lauren: Yes, you have correctly identified we don’t have the budget to send us both to Athens on a wine bar tour.

Gretchen: If the Athens tourism bureau wants to sponsor this podcast, please get in touch.

Lauren: Wants to sponsor our very important update on Ferguson 1959. I did the next best thing, and I poked around some of the menus people took photos of for wine bars on various maps and tourism websites.

Gretchen: What did you find? Are they still using “inos,” or they switched to “krasi,” or what?

Lauren: What I found is they’re mostly using the word “wine,” which is slightly disappointing. But I do have at least one example of “krasi” on the menu.

Gretchen: Ah, okay. So, it is not explicitly the case that – I mean, to be fair, I don’t know how good your Greek is, but I expect you were partially doing this search in English.

Lauren: I was partly doing this search in English.

Gretchen: This is something that’s changed in the last number of decades that the formerly L variety has just become the version that’s used all around places in Greece.

Lauren: I think it’s so interesting that even from this first example, he’s talking about H and L. He’s just immediately shrunk down “high, prestige,” this common phenomenon across these different contexts, into H, and this “vernacular, everyday” into L, and that that is there from the very beginning, and that he kind of invents “diglossia” in this etymologically slightly confusing way.

Gretchen: I love that “diglossia” comes from Greek “di,” meaning “two,” and “glossa,” meaning “language,” literally “tongue,” which is the same etymology as “bilingualism,” which is “bi,” meaning “two,” and “lingua,” meaning “tongue” or “language” in Latin, but just a different word in Greek. These are complete cognates. They both mean “two languages.” They’re just “two languages” in slightly different social situations that we’ve decided to make separate for an academic purpose.

Lauren: I think bilingualism is the general phenomenon of where a group of people – maybe there’s a society – that is bilingual even if the individuals in it are not.

Gretchen: I mean, Canada is famously a bilingual country, which really just means that some people speak English and some people speak French. There are some people who themselves speak both, but in a lot of cases, like the governmental systems or the signage on the milk cartons, is set up to allow people to be monolingual in their language of choice, which is a different type of situation.

Lauren: I love using exactly the same etymology to coin a new word in English that is for this subset of bilingualism where you have people using these two languages or two varieties in this particular dynamic.

Gretchen: I also want to look into this question of the H and L because high and low prestige are what they correspond to, but originally, H and L, to go to the German context, are “Hochdeutsch,” “High German,” and “Plattdeutsch,” or “Low German,” which I always assumed as a person who hadn’t been to Germany when I first learned about this phenomenon that this referred to “Oh, the north is high, and the south is low,” but in fact, the south is high, and the north is low. Because the highness does not refer to the cardinal directions; it refers to whether there are mountains.

Lauren: We have three different high-low metaphors crashing into each other for German. I would also take a guess that a high and a low variety had to do with north and south, but it’s the opposite. It’s hilly and flat.

Gretchen: It’s hilly and flat. The Netherlands (a.k.a. the low countries) are spoken in a flat area of Europe that is correspondingly prone to flooding.

Lauren: I just had one of those moments where I had to actually think of “nether-lands” as like, the low –

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Right. That one is right there is front of your face, isn’t it.

Gretchen: It’s right there. The high German varieties are spoken in the German highlands, which in Scotland, the highlands are in the north, and so they are both high intrinsic cardinal directions and also high in terms of literally “high-lands” that are mountainous compared to the south of England. But in Germany, the mountain ranges are on the other side of things, and the High German from Germany is spoken in the highlands.

Lauren: Thank you for clarifying that complexity of high and low.

Gretchen: But I think that if the mountainous situation had been different, it’s possible that this metaphor might not have been imported to stand for high and low prestige because it does map onto a familiar conceptual space that if it was the low countries that spoke the prestigious variety, there might have been an entirely different termed because it does have this cross-sensory mapping.

Lauren: I think one of the challenges here is that linguists talk about these community-driven prestige values in a way where it kind of reinforces them, but we don’t necessarily claim to own them, or linguists don’t necessarily want to reinforce (even though they may) these values of high and low. They try and use “high” and “low” as relatively neutral terms because you get things like “vulgar Latin,” or you get these values that have a lot more baggage when it comes to people’s opinions about the everyday language variety.

Gretchen: I think this is particularly interesting in the original Ferguson article even though many people have talked about other languages and linguistic situations where this also occurs because some of these particular examples of local situations have shifted because everyone is using Demotic Greek now, and so it’s less like, “Oh, this version of the language doesn’t exist because it’s not the classical form.” But the attitudes are still being reflected in other types of situations. Here’s another quote, “In all the defining languages, the speakers regard H as superior to L in a number of respects. Sometimes, the feeling is so strong that H alone is regarded as ‘real,’ and L is reported ‘not to exist’.” I found this wasn’t the case when I was studying Arabic because they were like, “Ah, yes, this is clearly a diglossic situation,” but that might be because of this work that’s now been happening over present decades.

Lauren: Or because you weren’t necessarily in one of the contexts where everyday language was just happening and didn’t need to be commented on.

Gretchen: Exactly. But they were still like, “Well, clearly you want to learn the high variety because that’s the only one that’s learnable in a classroom. We’re gonna sort of teach you a little bit of Egyptian Arabic because people kind of understand that from a lot of popular Egyptian media, but the primary thing we’re gonna teach you is this classroom thing.” [Quoting] “Speakers of Arabic may say (in L) that so-and-so doesn’t know Arabic. This normally means that he doesn’t know H, although he may be a fluent, effective speaker of L. If a non-speaker of Arabic asks an educated Arab for help in learning to speak Arabic, the Arab will normally try to teach him H forms, insisting that they’re the only ones to use. Very often, educated Arabs will maintain they never use L at all, in spite of the fact that direct observation shows they use it constantly in all ordinary conversation. Similarly, educated speakers of Haitian Creole frequently deny its existence, insisting they only speak French. This attitude cannot be called a deliberate attempt to deceive the questioner but seems almost a self-deception. When the speaker in question is replying in good faith, it is often possible to break through these attitudes by asking such questions as to what kind of language he uses when speaking to his children, to servants, or to his mother.”

Lauren: The three main groups of people.

Gretchen: “The very revealing reply is usually something like, “Oh, well they wouldn’t understand [the H form, whatever it is called].”

Lauren: I find there’s also a big social difference between the Greek example and the Haitian-Creole-slash-French example in that a lot of the current diglossic situations that we see are a direct result of colonisation and the languages of colonisation being imposed in particular situations. In each situation, the power dynamic at play ends up being different. Again, you can’t just take, “Well, this language comes in, and then this is how the diglossia unfolds” because it’s unique depending on the particular context of any given place. If you think about Portuguese, the whole of Brazil is now an area where Portuguese is considered the standard language. It’s the language of media. But Brazilian Portuguese has become its own standard. There might be variations between how standard your Brazilian Portuguese is, but there’s this understanding of it as its own system with its own social dynamics, whereas somewhere like Mozambique – European Portuguese is still that H variety used in formal situation and news reports, and there’s a local Mozambiquan Portuguese that’s used.

Gretchen: And which has much less prestige associated with it than Brazilian Portuguese, which has become this national standard.

Lauren: Brazilian and European Portuguese have a very different dynamic than Mozambiquan and European Portuguese. Again, taking each social context and its own historical perspective into account when figuring out the dynamic between prestigious and non-prestigious varieties.

Gretchen: This is the thing that brings me back to French, which is when I was learning French in school, which was in Canada but outside of Quebec, we learned France French. This is something that people have told me in many parts of Canada that they learned France French in school. And then once you go up in Quebec somewhere – Quebec City, Montreal, wherever – “Great, I’ve been learning this language for years to communicate with you guys. Here I am trying to communicate.” It turns out that we’ve been learning the wrong French to do that.

Lauren: The Standard French that you learnt in Canada and Montreal French are doing something different.

Gretchen: The Standard French that we learn in Canada is France French, which is spoken in France and, especially, is based on the standard of Paris. You do occasionally, these days, especially in Ontario and places like, especially, Ottawa, places that are closer to Quebec, get some Québécois teachers in Canadian schools. I don’t wanna say people are only learning France French. But by and large, there’s this reliance on France as a standard source of French. You’re more likely to be exposed to media with a Parisian accent. You’re more likely to be exposed to France French and to be using that as a model for both grammar and vocabulary and accent especially. And then you show up in Quebec, really anywhere in Quebec, and the French that you’re hearing – you go into a store, and you try to talk to someone, you try to talk to someone on the street – you’re hearing a completely different accent than what you’ve been exposed to for all those years in school.

Lauren: But this is just a different variety. This isn’t – are people moving between Québécois French and France French in their everyday life, or is this “You just come here and have to learn a new dialect?”

Gretchen: Well, it’s a little bit of one, a little bit of the other because I’ve said this to Québécois people since moving here, like, “Hey, I learned the wrong variety to communicate with you guys. I had to come here and re-learn French and learn some vocabulary differences, learn a lot of accent differences, learn quite a few grammatical differences in terms of actually being able to use spoken French, especially in Quebec, that I wasn’t taught in school. Especially between the difference between speaking and writing, I had to learn quite a difference in terms of French, so that I could actually talk to people here. I would’ve been great if my schooling had prepared me for that in really any way.” The response that I get is really interesting – and I think this is why it’s revelatory that it’s more of a diglossia and less of a “Okay, there’s just two different varieties,” because they’re like, “Oh, but don’t worry. That’s what we learn in school, too.”

Lauren: They’re not learning Quebec French in school; they’re learning France French as well.

Gretchen: Yeah. And they’re like, “Yeah, of course we go to school to learn France French. We go to school to learn written French, to learn Standard French,” which comes with this whole set of baggage – and to learn this French that has – like, there’s a past tense in French that’s only used in writing, in literary writing, that’s not used in speech.

Lauren: Huh, right. Just to clarify, there’s nothing about the relationship between French and English in Montreal that’s diglossia. You can use both on signage. You can use either in school or work depending on where you are. You might be a French speaking household at home or an English speaking household – or you might be bilingual – but there’s not one as the default high.

Gretchen: Right. French and English in Montreal – Montreal is bilingual in the sense of French and English, but this is not a diglossia because, apart from certain situations that are government-mandated where you have to use French – with signage there are laws about how large the French has to be, which has to be larger than the English, and before the English, and this kind of stuff, but that’s because the government has said, “French is important. We want to put it on signs.”

Lauren: Not because English isn’t a real language.

Gretchen: The individual people who’re making the signs and, indeed, before this law was passed, were perfectly happy to put English on signs. It’s not to say that English is a language you can’t put on signage and French is the only language you can put on signs. That’s only the case for legal reasons. It’s not the case for people’s pragmatic sense of what language could go on a sign. The same thing is – there’re people who send their children to French school; there’re people who send their children to English school; there’re people who go home and speak English in the home or French in the home. These are bilingual aspects of the situation, but they’re not diglossic because there aren’t certain social situations where only one form is appropriate and other social situations where only another form is appropriate.

Lauren: Whereas the relationship between Québécois French and France French is diglossia to some extent because in particular formal contexts, there is an orientation towards France French, and then Québécois French is the everyday French, whereas if you went to Paris, you would be learning France French, and then going home and speaking France French.

Gretchen: Well, sort of. But my argument is that maybe French is just diglossic the whole way down.

Lauren: Okay, this is the plot twist I did not expect from you.

Gretchen: Because, yes, there are more differences between how people speak on the street in Montreal or in Quebec and how people speak on the street in France. We do learn the France accent more than the French learn the Quebec accent. But also, there are things that are different between what people call “spoken and written French” that are, if not yet a diglossia, at the very least, verging on a diglossia.

Lauren: I feel like this is where writing systems bring a lot of baggage to high and low forms of a language. Even with the limited French that I know, all of those silent letters really do not help you to speak the language through reading.

Gretchen: All of those silent letters, every French child, when they learn to read and write, has to learn how to do a whole grammatical analysis on their language in order to be able to put the correct T at the end of the word or R at the end of the word in order to know which one it is, whereas in speech people communicate just fine without making this distinction. In addition, silent letters are something English also has. We can get back to “Is English a diglossia?” But French also has a whole tense that’s only used in writing. There’s a whole past tense – the simple past – that’s only used in literary writing. It’s used in children’s picture books for kids to introduce them to this literary past tense.

Lauren: Training into two separate varieties happens very early.

Gretchen: Yeah. But it’s not used in speech ever. Even when I was taking French in school, they were like, “Oh, yeah, you’re not gonna speak this one. You’re only gonna encounter it in writing.” There’s a different way of doing negation in speech versus writing which is pretty basic to the system.

Lauren: I feel like this is where a lot of the French learner paradox of like, “If everyone does it wrong, how is it wrong?” is because spoken and written are actually different varieties to a far greater extent than English, just like you say “kids” when you’re being slang-y and “children” where you’re being formal.

Gretchen: Or like in English, we have this whole system of contractions. You can say “will not,” or you can say “won’t.” But you can write “won’t.” It’s a bit more informal, but it has a standard written form that is associated with slightly less formal writing. In French, the formal way of forming negation is you that you put “ne” before the verb and “pas” after the verb. If you wanna say like, “I don’t know,” that’d be “Je ne sais pas.” In spoken French, nobody says that. You look like you’re a time traveller if you go around saying, “Je ne sais pas.” The spoken way of forming negation – and this is still true in France – is “Je sais pas.” You don’t say the “ne.” You can potentially contract the vowels even more like “J’pas,” which is how people actually say, “I dunno,” rather than, “I do not know,” which, again, you look a bit of a time traveller if you go around saying, “I do not know.”

Lauren: If you look back at the distribution on Ferguson’s table of where you use each variety, you begin to see how writing systems and formal education help create this friction and this distinction between the two varieties.

Gretchen: The things that are sort of parasitic on the written standard, or reading things out loud, or writing itself versus this caption on political cartoon – that’s also where the texting goes. I can read a whole linguistics textbook in French and not have any difficulties because it’s in the formal French that I was trained on, but when I try to read people’s comments under a YouTube video in French, which are written in this vernacular style, the texting-variety of written French (which is newer and more informal, but it doesn’t not have rules; the rules are just emergent from the context), people are doing all sorts of stuff that I’m just not familiar with. It feels like a different variety to me because I’m worse at understanding it, especially in writing. I have to read it aloud to myself and then I go “Oh, that’s what they mean.”

Lauren: I think it’s really great to have stepped back and taken this perspective of the fact that this dynamic between high and low varieties of a language (or high and low languages within the same context) have these similarities because I think when you’re explaining this to a French speaker or to someone looking at the old distinction between English and Latin, it can seem like this is just a one-off case. But Ferguson’s whole idea is this is a recurring dynamic between languages that plays out because of recurring power dynamics in society.

Gretchen: And the hard thing talking about it with French speakers is precisely this thing that is the case in a diglossia where you have a hard time convincing them that the low variety even exists or is real because all of the realities that they’ve been taught in schools have been “Oh, but here’s how you do this written standard; here’s how you do this formal variety.” I guess the big galaxy-brain question is “Is English also a diglossia?” Because there are aspects of written English, especially when it comes to silent letters, that abstract from the pronunciation of any given variety of English, or some varieties pronounce the words the same that are written differently, and some languages say, “Yeah, these words are written differently, and we’re still pronouncing them differently.” Different phonetic mergers have happened in different varieties of English, but we’re still writing them according to one particular set of principles. Or a very few differences like O-U-R versus O-R, but realistically, any English speaker can actually recognise both.

Lauren: There are also situations where you may have someone in your social life who’s in a diglossic relationship. They may be an Aboriginal English speaker in Australia who their particular community is diglossically moving between Standard Australian English and Aboriginal English even if you, yourself, are not. Being aware of these dynamics can be really helpful.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that’s helpful about having a fancy Greek word to talk about it with, like “diglossia,” is that it helps legitimise this thing which otherwise invisibilises a perfectly valid linguistic system that is actually really cool and, often, underappreciated. And to say, you know, it’s not that you’re sometimes speaking the “wrong” version of a language or sometimes speaking the bad version, it’s that there’s this complicated and interesting social dynamic around which one you speak at which time. Both of them have value. Some of them feel more personal, more intimate, more joke-y, more casual. Some of them connect you to a broader history of literature and intellectual tradition. These are both things that are great. It’s not that only one of them has merit.

Lauren: Being aware of this dynamic can help you articulate why we need to respect all varieties even if they have been made invisible in this dynamic.

Gretchen: The other thing that I think this can answer a question of that often comes up for me at parties is “Is technology – is the internet, the printing press, the phone, social media – is this creating a linguistic situation in which we’re all talking more like each other, we’re all using the same English, we’re all using an internationalised version of things that we can talk to each other, or do we still have this linguistic fragmentation? As time progresses, linguistic varieties get more and more distinct from each other.” I think diglossia is one way where the answer can be both. If we’re doing things that let us participate in the lingua franca of a globalised style of English or a globalised style of French or Arabic, Spanish, or any of these other big languages that are spoken in a lot of different places, that globalised style can still exist, and people can use it to do this communication between people in lots of different places, at the same time as the local versions can keep diverging from each other because languages, you know, that’s how entropy works. Languages keep having a tendency to diverge from each other. What can happen is that people are actually fluent in both varieties and use them in different situations. This is way more common than we give it credit for.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba/kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our very cute Gavagai mugs – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky; @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include a chat about what books we’re reading in 2025, updates on our various activities and what’s coming next in 2026, an interview with Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich manuscript, and a deleted scenes episode with some of our favourite extra bits of interviews and linguistics advice from 2025.

Lauren: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or leave a nice review like this one from wastrel92, who said, “Five stars. Accessible and informative. I discovered this podcast two days ago, and I’m already on Episode 15. I can’t stop. The hosts’ enthusiasm for the subject is infectious, and they always manage to find an accessible reference or an analogy for the topic they’re discussing without dumbing it down.”

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

1. Make a workskin.

For this step, I'll refer you to the ao3 guide on how to create workskins. Make a new one, or add the following code between the dashes below to your existing skins.

---

#workskin .transcript {

font-family: "Libre Baskerville", Baskerville, "Book Antiqua", Georgia, Times, serif;

color: #586e75;

background: #fdf6e3;

padding: 1em;

width: fit-content;

margin: 0 auto 35px;

font-size: 120%;

}

---

Once you've made your workskin, follow the steps in the included link to add that workskin to the fic you want to apply this style to.

2. Tell the fic where to apply the style

The document above also explains this, but just so you can see the actual steps here:

In your fic, under the html editor view, add

<div class "transcript">

To the front of the text that will be in this format (it may not be the entire fic! You can have it in the middle of regular prose if you like).

At the end of the section that will be in the format, close it off with

</div>

Now just save your draft and confirm that it's working! If it looks off, double check your html, make sure it took and didn't delete itself or isn't misspelled.

And btw, readers who may not like this format can turn it off themselves with the Hide Creator's Style button, so this is optional for readers! It also works well with screen readers as-is.