My theory of enshittification describes the process by which platforms decay. First, they are good to their end users, while finding a way to lock those users in.

Then, secure in the knowledge that they can make things worse for those users, without risking their departure, the platforms make things worse in order to make things attractive for business customers. Who *also* get locked in, dependent on those captive users.

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And then, in the third stage of enshittification, platforms raid those business customers, harvesting all available surpluses for their shareholders and executives, leaving behind the bare, mingy homeopathic residue of value needed to keep users locked to the platform and businesses locked to the users, such that the final, ideal stage of the enshittified platform is a attained: a giant pile of shit.

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This observational piece of the theory is certainly valuable, inasumuch as it lets us scoop up this big, diffuse, enraging phenonmenon, capture in a net and attach a handle to it and call it "enshittification," recognising how we're being screwed.

But much more important is the enshittification hypothesis's theoretical piece, its account of *why* this is happening *now*.

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Let me start by saying that I do not attribute blame for enshittification to your poor consumer choices. Despite the endless insistences of the right, your consumption choices aren't the arbiters of policy.

The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority.

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In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win.

The idea that consumers are the final arbiters of society is a laughable, bitter counsel of despair. You will not shop your way free of a monopoly, any more than you will recycle your way out of wildfires. Shop as hard as you like, you will not - *can*not - end enshittification.

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Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is *whether the company can get away with treating you as the product*.

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So what about the companies? What about the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian failures who have appointed themselves eternal dictators over the digital lives of billions of people? Can we blame them for enshittifying our world?

Well, yes...and no.

It's obviously true that it takes a certain kind of sociopath to run a company like Facebook or Google or Apple. The suicide nets around Chinese iPhone factories are a choice, not a integral component of the phone manufacturing process.

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But these awful men are merely filling the niches that our policy environment have created. If Elon Musk ODs on ket today, there will be an overnight succession battle among ten horrible Big Balls, and the victor who emerges from that war will be indistinguishable from Musk himself.

The problem isn't that the wrong person is running Facebook and thus exercising a total veto over the digital lives of four billion people, the problem is that such a job exists.

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We don't need to perfect Zuck. We don't need to replace Zuck. We need to *abolish* Zuck.

So where does the blame lie?

It lies with policy makers. Regulators and politicians who created an enshittogenic environment: a rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will fare best.

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These are the true authors of enshittification: the named individuals who, in living memory, undertook specific policy decisions, that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of ushering in the enshittocene. Policymakers who were warned at the time that this would happen, who ignored that advice and did it anyway.

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It is these people and their terrible, deliberate misconduct that we need to remember. It is their awful policies that we must overthrow, otherwise, all we can hope to do is replace one monster with another.

So, in that spirit, let us turn to the story of one of these enshittogenic policy choices and the men who made it.

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This policy is called "anti-circumvention" and it's the epicenter of the enshittogenic policy universe. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to modify a device that you own, if the company that sold it to you would prefer that you didn't.

All a company has to do is demarcate some of its code as off-limits to modification, by adding something called an "access control," and, in so doing, they transform the act changing any of that code into a felony, a jailable offense.

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The first anticircumvention law is America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone modify code behind an access control is a serious crime, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Crucially, this is true whether or not you break any other law.

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Under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do a perfectly legal thing becomes a jailable crime, if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with an "access control."

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What's property? Well, let's use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

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"Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe."

The printer is yours. It's your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.

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But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see if you're using HP ink, and if it suspects that it's generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying "If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink too." That would be a weird law,given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.

But because HP puts an "access control" in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that *effectively* requires you to use HP ink.

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Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company's shareholders.

So another way of saying "anticircumvention law" is "felony contempt of business model." It's a way for a corporation to threaten you with prison if you don't use *your* property in the way *they* want you to.

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That's anti-circumvention law.

The DMCA was a enshittifier's charter, an invitation for corporations to use tactical "access controls" to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers - and competitors who might help those customers - with criminal prosecution.

Now, the DMCA has a known, living author, Bruce Lehman, a corporate IP lawyer who did a turn in government service as Bill Clinton's IP Czar.

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Lehman tried several ways to get American policymakers to adopt this stupid idea, only to be rebuffed. So, undaunted, he traveled to Geneva, home of the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, aa UN "specialized agency" that makes the world's IP treaties. At Lehman's insistence, WIPO passed a pair of treaties in 1996, collectively known as the "Internet Treaties."

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In 1998, he got Congress to pass the DMCA, in order to comply with the terms of these treaties, a move he has since repeatedly described as "doing an end-run around Congress."

This guy, Bruce Lehman, he is still with us, breathing the same air as you and me. We are sharing a planet with the Louis Pasteur of making everything as shitty as possible.

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But Bruce Lehman only enshittified America, turning our southern cousins into fodder for the immortal colony organisms we call limited liability corporations. To understand how *Canada* enshittified, we have to introduce some Canadian enshittifiers.

Specifically, two of Stephen Harper's ministers: James Moore, Harper's Heritage minister, and the disgraced sex-pest Tony Clement, who was then Industry minister.

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Stephen Harper *really* wanted a Canadian anti-circumvention law, and he put Clement and Moore in charge of the effort.

Everyone knew that it was going to be a hard slog. After all, Canadians had already rejected anti-circumvention law *three times*. Back in 2006, Sam Bulte - a Liberal MP in Paul Martin's government - tried to get this law through, but it was so unpopular that she lost her seat in Parkdale, which flipped to the NDP for a generation.

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Moore and Clement hatched a plan to sell anti-circumvention to the Canadian people. They decided to do a consultation on the law. The thinking was that if we all "felt heard" then we wouldn't be so angry when they rammed it through.

Boy, did *that* backfire. 6,138 of us filed consultation responses categorically rejecting this terrible law, and only *53* responses offered support for the idea.

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How were Moore and Clement going to spin this? Simple. Moore went to a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, and gave a speech where he denounced all 6,132 of us as "babyish" and "radical extremists." Then Harper whipped his caucus and in 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernisation Act passed, and we got a Made-in-Canada all-purpose, omnienshittificatory anti-circumvention law.

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Let's be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada's anti-circumvention law criminalizes *anything* you do with your computer, phone or device, if it runs counter to the manufacturer's wishes.

It's an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada's courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.

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Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. All companies do is add an "initialization" routine to their devices, so a new part installed in a car, a tractor, a phone, or a ventilator has to be unlocked by the manufacturer's representative before the device will recognize the new part, and it becomes a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.

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This is called "parts pairing" or "VIN locking. "Now, we did pass C-244, a national Right to Repair law, last year, but it's just a useless ornament, because it doesn't override anti-circumvention. So Canadians can't fix their own technology if the manufacturers uses an access control to block the repair.

Anti-circumvention means we can't fix things when they break, and it also means that we can't fix them when they arrive *pre-broken* by their enshittifying manufacturers.

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Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple's, and everyone who puts an app in the app store has to sign up to use Apple's payment processor, which takes *30 cents out of every dollar* you spend inside an app.

That means that when a Canadian user sends $10 to a month to a Canadian independent news outlet or podcast, $3 out of that $10 gets sucked out of the transaction and lands in Cupertino, California, where it is divvied by Apple's shareholders and executives.

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It's not just news sites. Every dollar you send through an app to a performer on Patreon, a crafter on Etsy, a games company, or a software company takes a roundtrip through Silicon Valley and comes back 30 cents lighter.

A Canadian company *could* bypass the iPhone's "access controls" and give you a download or a little hardware dongle that installed a Canadian app store, one that used the Interac network to process payments *for free*.

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That would eliminate Apple and Google's 30% tax on Canada's entire mobile digital economy.

And indeed, we have 2024's Bill C-294, an interoperability law, that lets Canadians do this. But just as with the repair law, our interoperability law is also useless, because it doesn't repeal the anti-circumvention law, meaning you are only allowed to reverse engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way.

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Of course, every company that's in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.

The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news?

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Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn't jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, one that slurped up everything Facebook was waiting to show you in your feed, all the updates from your friend and your groups while blocking all the surveillance, the ads and the slop and the recommendations, and then mixing in the news that *you* wanted to see.

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Remember when we tried to get Netflix to show Canadian content in your recommendations and search results? Anti-circumvention is the only reason some Canadian company can't jailbreak the Netflix app and give you an alternative client that lets you stream all your Netflix shows but also shows you search results from the NFB and any other library of Canadian media, while blocking Netflix's surveillance.

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Anticircumvention means that Canadian technologists can't seize the means of computation, which means that we're at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.

Apple will block Facebook's apps from spying on you while you use your iPhone, but they won't let you block *Apple* from spying on you while you use your iPhone, to gather exactly the same data Facebook steals from you, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you.

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Apple will screen the apps in its app store to prevent malicious code from running on your iPhone, but if you want to run a legitimate app and Apple doesn't want you to, they will block it from the app store and you will just have to die mad.

That's what's happened in October, when Apple kicked an app called ICE Block out of the App Store. ICE Block is an app that warns you if masked thugs are at large in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap you and send you to a camp.

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Apple decided that ICE thugs were a "protected class" that ICE Block discriminated against, hey decided that you don't deserve to be safe from ICE kidnappings, and what they say goes.

The road to enshittification hell is paved with anticircumvention. We told our politicians this, a decade and a half ago, and they called us "babyish radical extremists" and did it anyway.

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Now, I've been shouting about this for decades. I was one of those activists who helped get Sam Bulte unelected and flipped her seat for 20 years. But I will be the first person to tell you that I have mostly failed at preventing enshittification.

Bruce Lehman, James Moore and even Tony "dick pic" Clement are way better at enshittifying the world than I am at disenshittifying it.

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Of course, they have an advantage over me: they are in a coalition with the world's most powerful corporations and their wealthy investors.

Whereas my coalition is basically, you know, *you folks*. People who care about human rights, workers' rights, consumer rights, privacy rights. And guys, I hate to tell you, but we're *losing*.

Let's talk about how we start winning.

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Any time you see a group of people successfully push for a change that they've been trying to make *unsuccessfully* for a long-ass time it's a sure bet that they've found some coalition partners. People who want *some* of the same things, who've set aside their differences and joined the fight.

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That's the Trump story. The Trump coalition is basically all the billionaires, plus the racists, plus the dopes who'd vote for a slime mold if it promised to lower their taxes by a nickle, even though they somehow expect to have roads and schools. Well, maybe not schools. You know, Ford Nation.

Plus everyone who correctly thinks the Democrats are of do-nothing sellouts, who think they can bully you into voting for genocide because the other guy is an out-and-out fascist.

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Billionaires, racists, freaks with low-tax brain-worms and people who hate the sellout Dems: Trump's built a coalition that gets stuff done. Sure, it's terrible stuff, but you can't deny that they're getting it done.

To escape from the enshittificatory black hole that Clement and Moore blew in Canadian policy, we need a coalition, too. And thanks to Trump and his incontinent belligerence, we're getting one.

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Let's start with the Trump tariffs. When I was telling you about how anticircumvention law took four tries under two different Prime Ministers, perhaps you wondered "Why did all these Canadian politicians want this stupid law in the first place?"

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After all, it's not like Canadian companies are particularly enriched by this law. Sure, it lets Ted Rogers rent you a cable box that won't let you attach a video recorder, so you have to pay for Rogers' PVR, which only lets you record some shows, and deletes them after a set time, and won't let you skip the ads.

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But the amount of extra money Rogers makes off this disgusting little racket is dwarfed by the billions that Canadian business leave on the table every year, by not going into business disenshittifying America's shitty tech exports. To say nothing of the junk fees and app taxes and data that those American companies rip off every Canadian for.

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So why were these Canadian MPs and prime ministers from both the Liberals and the Tories so invested in getting anticircumvention onto our law-books?

Simple: the US Trade Rep threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass an anti-circuvmention law.

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Remember, digital products are *slippery*. If America bans circumvention, and American companies starts screwing the American public, that just opens an opportunity for companies elsewhere in the world to make disenshittifying products, which any American with an internet connection and a payment method can buy. Downloading jailbreaking code is much easier than getting insulin shipped from a Canadian pharmacy!

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So the US Trade Rep's top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America's trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenseless against American tech companies' predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America's defective goods.

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The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute *sucker* if you keep following their orders.

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We *could* respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

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Sure, Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we *could* have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store, bypassing Apple's 30% app tax and its high-handed judgments about what apps we can and can't have.

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Apple's payment processing business is worth $100b/year. We could offer people a 90% discount and still make $10b/year. And unlike Apple, we wouldn't have to assume the risk and capital expenditure of making phones. We could stick Apple with all of the risk and expense, and cream off the profits.

That's fair, isn't it? It's certainly how Big Tech operates. When Amazon started, Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, "Your margin is my opportunity."

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$100b/year off a 30% payment processing fee is a hell of a margin, and a hell of an opportunity.

With Silicon Valley, it's always "disruption for thee, 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).

Now, of course, Canada hasn't responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of "elbows up" turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs.

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Which is to say, we're making everything we buy from America more expensive for *us*, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?

It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "Ouch."

Plus, it's pretty indiscriminate. We're not angry at Americans. We're angry at Trump and his financial backers.

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Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel who's never done anything bad to Canada.

I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor, which costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down.

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Because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay two hundred bucks to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code into the tractor's console that unlocks the "parts pairing," so the tractor recognises the new part.

Instead of tariffing that farmer's soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor *without* paying an extra $200 to John Deere.

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Instead of tsking at Elon Musk over his Nazi salute, we could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades, without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.

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This is all stuff we could be doing. We could be building gigantic Canadian tech businesses, exporting to a global market, whose products make everything cheaper for every Canadian, and everyone else in the world, including every American.

Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.

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