Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech.
Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!
Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.
Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.
And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).
We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.
In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.
Let’s take it. ’
Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
If you haven’t read Enshittification yet, do yourself a favour and get a copy. It’s a wonderful read.
It feels like a full summation of every work he’s ever written on Enshittification on his Pluralistic blog, being someone who’s read it for a long while now. I definitely didn’t get much new information from the book on top of what he’s written about in his blog before, but it’s still a very good read, and much more concise than hundreds of separate blog posts that sometimes repeat the same talking points from older ones.
A great read if you want to just sit down and learn practically everything about Enshittification, from what it is at its core to things like specific historical examples, primarily of tech leaders at major tech companies enshittifying their products. Some of that stuff is batshit crazy.
agreed - I second this
just finished it, it’s a great talk. i hope he’s right and the countries finally start fighting back!
