There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.
This means digital rights activists who’ve been trying to get rid of the “anti-circumvention” laws have a new potential ally: investors and technologists who’d like to make a hell of a lot of money raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable companies the world has seen.
Interesting perspective.
It’s a great point that if you’re getting threatened anyway might as well go in for a pound instead of a penny.
HAHAH you mean the same investors who decided to ruin the internet for shareholder value? Yea let me just place the same source of evil and maybe this time it’ll work
Right‽ this has ‘maybe the genie won’t screw me over with my third wish if I just ask it right’ energy.
The same investors that brought
- Unskippable ads to every platform including your refrigerator
- Removing previously free or basic features just to put them behind a paywall
- Fucking AI this AI that and subsequently making everything more expensive
- Subscription based models on software and the stupid you own nothing idea
- The prevalence of data collection everywhere
The list can go on and on
One of the shittiest humans on the planet is in charge and fucking things up, here’s a completely unlikely event that would fix nothing that could happen.
One can only hope!
Getting pretty tired of the Guardian’s copium tbh.
This is written by Cory Doctorow – formerly of the EFF and coiner of the word “enshittification”. You can disagree with him, but this is the same kind of advocacy he has written for decades.
Ok, I disagree with Cory Doctorow due to the modus operandi of any tech organisation trying to turn a profit in a late stage capitalistic society along with the more detailed reasons others have provided in this post.
And I’m tired of the Guardian publishing hopium articles.
