But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then *Apple* would have to incur all the expense and risk of making and fielding hardware, while those Finnish geeks could cream off the $100b Apple sucks out of the global economy in an act of a disgusting, rip-off rent-seeking.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity." With these guys, it's always "disruption for thee, but not for me."

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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.

Well, screw that. Move fast and break Tim Cook's things. Move fast and break *kings*!

It's funny: I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative (in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight).

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I developed a kind of grudging admiration for the skill with which the USTR bound the entire world to a system of trade that conferred parochial advantages to America and its tech firms, giving them free rein to loot the world's data and economies. So it's been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to protect the interests of America's capital class.

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I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough. But I'll take this massive own-goal if Trump insists. I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly *not* an accelerationist.

Now, you might have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to open its App Store, and they've totally failed at this.

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When the EU hit Apple with an enforcement order under the Digital Markets Act, Apple responded by offering to allow third party app stores, but it would only allow those stores to sell apps that Apple had approved of.

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And while those stores *could* use their own payment processors, Apple would charge them so much in junk fees that it would be *more* expensive to process a payment using your own system, and if Apple believed that a user's phone had been outside of the EU for 21 days, they'd remotely delete all that user's data and apps.

When the EU explained that this would not satisfy the regulation, Apple threatened to pull out of the EU.

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Then, once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen bullshit objections to the order hoping to tie this up in court for a decade, the way Google and Meta did for the GDPR.

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It's not clear that the EU can force Apple to write code that opens up the iOS platform for alternative app stores and payment methods, but there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability, any time they want: the EU can decide not to let Apple use Europe's courts to shut down European companies that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs and creative workers, from Apple's ripoff, by jailbreaking phones.

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All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy.

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The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

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Back in October, Apple kicked the "ICE Block" app out of the App Store. That's an app that warns the user if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking to grab you off the street and send you to an offshore gulag. Apple internally classified ICE kidnappers as a "protected class," and then declared the ICE Block infringed on the rights of these poor, beset ICE goons.

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And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

Apple's margin could be *their* opportunity.

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Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in America is a *much* better response to the Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.

For one thing, this is a *targeted* response: go after Big Tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs each paid a million bucks to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.

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Raiding Big Tech's margins is not an attack on the American people, nor on the small American businesses that are ripped off by Big Tech. It's a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans *and* everyone else in the world. It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these ripoff companies.

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It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data-centers in the hopes that someday, a sector that's lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the minute they plug them in.

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So here are our new allies in the war on general-purpose computation: businesses and techies who want to make billions raiding Big Tech's margins, and policymakers who want their country to be the disenshittification nation - the country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jailbreaks from other countries, but rather, the country that makes billions of dollars *selling* that privacy and pocketbook-defending tech to the rest of the world.

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That's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies Trump has pushed into our camp. There's another powerful ally waiting in the wings.

Remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, its calendars?

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Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC - that it's a coincidence. But when it comes to a he-said/Clippy-said between the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists of Microsoft, I know who *I* believe.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment.

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Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The handful of US Big Tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump admin, and that means that Trump can brick an entire *nation*.

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The attack on the ICC was an act of cyberwarfare, like the Russian hackers who shut down Ukrainian power-generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to *hack* Outlook to brick the ICC - they *own* Outlook.

Under the US CLOUD Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose *any* of its users' data - including foreign governments - and this is true no matter where that data is stored.

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Last July, Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France, told a French government inquiry that he "couldn't guarantee" that Microsoft wouldn't hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in a European data-center.

Under the CLOUD Act, the US government can slap gag orders on the companies that it forces to cough up that data, so there'd be no way to even know if this happened, or whether it's already happened.

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It doesn't stop at administrative tools, either: remember back in 2022, when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of John Deere tractors from Ukraine and those tractors showed up in Chechnya? The John Deere company pushed an over-the-air kill signal to those tractors and bricked 'em.

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John Deere is every bit as politically vulnerable to the Trump admin as Microsoft is, and they can brick most of the tractors in the world, and the tractors they *can't* brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number-two company in the ag-tech cartel, which is also an American company and just as vulnerable to political attacks from the US government.

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Now, none of this will be news to global leaders. Even before Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC they were trying to figure out a path to "digital sovereignty." But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over past 11 months has turned "digital sovereignty" from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

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So finally, we're seeing some movement, like "Eurostack," a project to clone the functionality of US Big Tech silos in free/open source software, and to build EU-based data-centers that this code can run on.

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But Eurostack is heading for a crisis. It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate the useful features of Big Tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability tools that allow for mass exporting of millions of documents, the sensitive data-structures and edit histories.

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We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions that are still hosted on US cloud-based services, because US companies are *not* going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers from their platform.

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Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS App Store, and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing and malicious compliance they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of the businesses and governments in a 27-nation bloc of 500,000,000 affluent consumers.

Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work *without* the cooperation of the Big Tech companies.

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Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it *West* Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall.

Step one of tearing down that wall is killing anticircumvention law, so that we can run virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware and generally seize the means of computation.

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So this is the third bloc in the disenshittification army: not just digital rights hippies like me; not just entrepreneurs and economic development wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions into European billions; but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their extreme concern about their country's reliance on American platforms that have been shown to be *totally* unreliable.

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This is how we'll get a post-American internet: with an unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks.

This has been a long time coming. Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the "Underground Empire."

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But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, a process that only accelerated under Trump.

Take transoceanic fiber optic cables: the way the transoceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall on the coasts of the USA where the interconnections are handled. There's a good case for this hub-and-spoke network topology, especially compared to establishing direct links between every country.

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That's an Order(N^2) problem: directly linking each of the planet Earth's 205 countries to every other country would require 20,910 fiber links.

But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US doesn't take advantage of its centrality.

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While many people worried about what the US could do with the head-ends of the world's global fiber infra, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.

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It's not just fiber. The world does business in dollars. Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source of foreign reserves. But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars worth of Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign nation of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.

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They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets to them to make good on loans that these debt collectors had not issued, but had bought up at pennies on the dollar. At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. But what else could they use?

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Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued, but then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT system for dollar clearing. This is when goods - like oil - are priced in dollars, so that buyers only need to find someone who will trade their own currency for dollars, which they can then swap for any commodity in the world.

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Again, there's a sound case for dollar clearing: it's just not practical to establish deep, liquid pairwise trading market for all of the world's nearly 200 currencies, it's another O(N^2) problem.

But it only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy - whether or not you agree with that policy - it's no longer a neutral platform, and the world goes looking for an alternative.

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No one knows what that alternative's going to be, just as no one knows what configuration the world's fiber links will end up taking. There's kilometers of fiber being stretched across the ocean floor, and countries are trying out some pretty improbable gambits as dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia revaluing its sovereign debt in Chinese renminbi. Without a clear alternative to America's enshittified platforms, the post-American century is off to a rocky start.

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But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.

This project is the *only* one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale.

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That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution - like the Eurostack services - can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

It's a commons, more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal and international and collaborative. We don't have dueling western and Chinese principles of structural engineering.

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Rather, we have universal principles for making sure buildings don't fall down, adapted to local circumstances.

We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

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The thing is, software is not an asset, it's a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers - automation, production, analysis and administration - *those* are assets. But the software itself? That's a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software upstream of it, downstream of it, and adjacent to it is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies in systems that may have performed well for years.

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Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software imposes on its makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.

Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That's why they're so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds.

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That's why they think it's *good* that they've got a chatbot that "produces 1000 times more code than a human programmer."

Producing code that's not designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

This is a neat encapsulation of the whole AI story: the chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that *can't* do your job.

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Your boss is an easy mark for that chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stopped coming to work, the business would run along just fine, but if the *workers* stopped showing up, the company would grind to a halt.

Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really, they fear that they're strapped into the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel.

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For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. It's the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.

When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood during the writer's strike, a writer told me that you prompt an AI the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's room: "Make me ET, but make it about a dog, and give it a love interest, and a car-chase in the third act."

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Say that to a writer's room and they will call you a *fucking idiot suit* and tell you "Why don't you go back to your office and make a spreadsheet, you nitwit. The grownups here are writing a movie."

Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly to spec. The fact that this script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.

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AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.

When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American had three friends, but wanted 15 friends, and that he could solve this by giving us chatbots instead of friends, we all dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who didn't understand the nature of friendship.

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But the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms, and thus how many revenue-generating ads he can show you.

Your friends stubbornly refuse to organize their relationship with you in a way that maximizes the return to his shareholders.

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So Zuck is over there in Menlo Park, furiously fantasizing about replacing your friends with chatbots, because that way, he can finally realize the dream of a social media service without any socializing.

Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations.

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The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they're no't *real*.

Think of Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or those "Effective Altruists," who claimed moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

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Think of how Trump fired US government scientists, then announced the "Genesis" program, declaring the US would begin generating *annual* "moonshot"-scale breakthroughs with chatbots. It's science without scientists.

Chatbots can't do science, but from Trump's perspective, they're better than scientists, because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare at an eclipse, or inject bleach. A chatbot won't tell him that trans people exist, or the climate emergency is real.

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