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If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people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.
I’ve read his treatise and I liked it a lot, but it appears to be full of wishful thinking. “Disenshittification?” Oh my sweet summer child, enshittification not only keeps getting worse, it seems to be accelerating. Also thinking the world would somehow, magically, unite against Trumpism, that there are cracks starting to form in the American digital hegemony… I don’t share this optimism at all.
Just to check, you know that this ‘sweet summer child’ is the one who came up with ‘enshittification’ in the first place? He’s been on this topic for decades now. But you think that your drive-by comment is smarter than the man who’s been sniffing out hidden trends all his career and was consistently ahead of the curve.
You clearly haven’t read it, since he lays out clearly the exact steps that would be required.
You don’t think Linux is a disenshittification solution for PCs?
Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. You want to run a custom android os, perhaps security and encryption oriented, or perhaps drm defeating is your goal. That all becomes possible if it’s simply legal to do whatever you want with your devices and your software.
Disenshittification isn’t something you wait for companies to do, it’s something you take for yourself! And it’s a whole lot easier to organize and do that if it’s officially legal.