Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again | Cory Doctorow
www.theguardian.com
The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives, says science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow

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.

  • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    9 hours ago

    As much as I love Cory Doctorow’s work, this is a stretch. The crack in the door only comes once everything supporting the consolidation and oligarchy of the tech industry comes crashing down. The broligarchs have their contingency planning in place already, so a crack in the door might exist one day, but it’s going to take a lot more than EFF and a few niche rights groups to make any change there. The tech money is digging in, and doing so in ways that are edge cases for even digital rights groups.

    The post-WWII order is gone, the post-Cold War model of economics is over, and the post-9/11 surveillance state is now wearing a mask with hoses that feed it super-strength drugs. It’s that the costs of the old bargain are double for everyone that isn’t a FANG, and now gone for them. Just like the Western economy, it’s bifurcating towards different planes of existence that know of each other but barely interact IRL. Which is not sustainable, but for how long we’ll wobble, it’s hard to say.

    Digital rights and privacy groups need to be proactive and demonstrate uses cases for both, and make use of them while expecting the non-sustainability of the current system to one day give way to something new.

    So step 1 is, for now, strap the fuck in and get your house in order. Build skills, teach others. Step 2 one day is going to be on the heels of massive cultural and political change.