#cancon

[persimmonlions]

[carys-the-ninth]

Nicole Cliffe's story about a grade 7 dance derailed by a dad's commitment to CanCon & The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, for posterity. [Archive link]

[bluegrasshole]

the concept of a shane hollander x tim hortons promotional meal. and it’s like one of their stupid bowls no one likes because he vetoed a special edition donut so fucking quick. and he has to do the commercial in english and in french, obviously. and the next time ilya is in canada he’s pissed he has to download the tims app and order the stupid fucking bowl on there because he wants to try it (/get closer to shane in the most mundane ways at any and all costs) but can’t stoop to actually going in and ordering out loud the shane hollander power forward protein bowl or whatever the fuck it is

[hubblegleeflower]

Canada’s heritage minister is the latest to weigh in on on ‘Heated Rivalry.’ Here’s what he said

The Canadian TV show “Heated Rivalry” is winning fans all around the world — including Culture Minister Marc Miller, who calls the show a Ca

Canadian Culture Minister Marc Miller pretty happy with Heated Rivalry.

[roseannem88]

Aerion Targaryen as a husband

Aerion treats marriage like something he owns rather than shares, a duty that lies heavily on his shoulders. He doesn’t care if his father, Maekar, loved and cherished his Wife (His mother); he won’t do the same. He won’t allow you to hold his hand or even say his name; it’s either ‘My prince ’ or ‘my dragon’.

Because he’s a Dragon, is he not?

Walking around the castle with him would feel heavy, unsettling you would fear that you might say something wrong and he would punish you for it, so talking with him is limited, small words, small answers, the time would feel slower and not in a good thing, your throat feels dry, your hands feels sweaty and your heart is thumping rapidly in your ears, despite the slight breeze in the atmosphere that it’s supposed to make your muscles loosen, however that’s hopeless when he’s with you

Because your marriage is merely beneficial for both families, he’s not going to waste time on you, right?

His hand would rarely touch you, but when it does, it would feel firm, hollow, a lack of affection, because he doesn’t care if you feel neglected. At the end, you’d realize he only held your hand, or even placed a hand on the small of your back, because Prince Maekar and His honourable brother, Prince Baelor, are around

Because who is Aerion Brightflame without showing off in front of his uncle and Father?

Maekar forced him into this marriage for him to ‘mature’, so most nights he would come to your shared chambers smelling different… and that only meant that he was with one of the whore’s; you don’t say anything, but the anger within you is unbearable. You wish you to him- you wish to give him a taste of his medicine.

However this marriage only made him worse

He doesn’t desire you; he longs for something erotic, something that would keep the dragon inside entertained, something deep, something even ecstatic

one day roaming outside the Ashford castle, away from the pressure, away from the lies, away from all the pretensions act in front of everyone, you met a good lad, merely a friend he was a square perhaps?, you shared thoughts, you watched the the starling nights sky together, you drew, you drank, danced, he made you feel like you weren’t a burden. As the days passed by and the meetings became regular, you both were basically friends,

But Aerion Brightflame kept an eye on you. He was aware of how unpleasant he could be, so he didn’t trust you; he ordered one of the Maeaters to follow you around when your absence became frequent

Coming back to the Castle heavily intoxicated, hair tousled, your burgundy gown slightly loose from the back due to all the dancing- you threw your exhausted body on the bed. You were staring at the ceiling, wondering how your life took a massive turn. Before you could realize it, an arm came to ring around your waist, gliding you until your back hit his chest; he nuzzles his face into your hair. “You smell of him,” he whispers into your ear. This is the first time he ever held you when there was no one around to impress

Days passed, and he acted surprisingly calm, calculated like always, and that’s what horrified you the most; he was planning something

A dragon can be very unpredictable

You occupied yourself with painting, your stomach-turning, uneven breath, unwilling to leave the castle after finding out he knew. Every time you remember that he is planning something ‘monstrous’. The paintbrush jumped out of your grip when the knocking on the door snapped you out of your endless thoughts

The Steward came, greeting you and placing a rather large box in front of you

You thanked the steward, not needing to order them to leave; they had already left. An apprehensive feeling filled your stomach; your hands couldn’t seem to stop trembling as you crouched down to open the box. You expected everything but what you saw

A human arms lies there in a pool of blood- you recognized the sleeves. A choked sob left you before you decided to pick up the piece of paper. You wished you didn’t recognize the handwriting, but you were smarter than that

“The dragon ought neve lose, never shares”

You threw the paper as your sobs came into uncontrollable screaming, kicking the box away with your feet, unable to stand,

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who broke the internet?

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

"Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

"Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide.

The crux of enshittification theory is this: tech bosses made their products and services so much worse in order to extract more rents from end-users and business customers. The reason they did this is because they could. Over 20+ years, our policymakers created an environment of impunity for enshittifying companies, sitting idly by (or even helping out) as tech companies bought or destroyed their competitors; captured their regulators; neutered tech workers' power; and expanded IP laws to ensure that technology could only ever be used to attack us, but never to defend us.

These four forces – competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability – once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges; or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting.

As these constraints fell away, the environment became enshittogenic: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

An enshittogenic environment meant that individuals within companies who embraced plans to worsen things to juice profits were promoted, displacing workers and managers who felt an ethical or professional obligation to make good and useful things. Top tech bosses – the C-suite – went from being surrounded by "adult supervision" who checked their worst impulses with dire warnings about competition, government punishments, or worker revolt to being encysted in a casing of enthusiastic enshittifiers who competed to see who could come up with the most outrageously enshittificatory gambits.

"Who Broke the Internet?" covers the collapse of all of these constraints, but its main focus is on IP law – specifically, anticircumvention law, which bans technologists from reverse-engineering and modifying the technologies we own and use (AKA "interoperability" or "adversarial interoperability").

Interoperability is at the center of the enshittification story because interop is an unavoidable characteristic of anything built out of computers. Computers are, above all else, flexible. Formally speaking, our computers are "Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every one of our computers is capable of running every valid program.

That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom.

Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital products or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that takes away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you could install that would reverse the damage. For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

In other worse, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Interoperability has long been technology's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Instagram to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better – they can be motivated by the desire to poach Instagram users and build a rival business, and still make life better for you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-og-app-instagram-alternative-ad-free/

And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck.

That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best. There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things – provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things need to be broken.

Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it is illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks are software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection).

This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so very, very stupid that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding it, because surely it can't be that stupid.

But oh, it is.

One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world without digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work. But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge becomes illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen.

Or think about cars: taking your car to your mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. If your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool – spending 5-figure sums every year for every manufacturer – in order to decode that error. Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law.

Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's not a copyright violations. It is the literal opposite of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires that you break the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means that buying a copyrighted work from its author becomes a copyright violation!

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws – again, in living memory, thanks to known individuals – that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on. We created this enshittogenic environment, and we got the enshittocene.

That's where "Who Broke the Internet?" comes in. We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman's brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the "Information Superhighway" proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore's eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman's proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was.

So Lehman scuttled to Switzerland, where a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was crafting a pair of new treaties to create a global system of internet regulation. Lehman lobbied the national delegations to WIPO to put anticircumvention in their treaties, and he succeeded – partially. WIPO is a very bad agency, since the majority of delegations that are sent to Geneva by the world's nations come from poor countries in the global south, and they're made up of experts in things like water, agriculture and child health. The vast majority of national reps at WIPO are not experts in IP, and they are often easy prey for fast-talking lobbyists from US-based media, pharma and tech companies, as well as the US government reps who carry their water.

But even at WIPO, Lehman's proposal was viewed as far too extreme. In the end, the anticircumvention rules embedded in the WIPO treaties are much more reasonable than Lehman's demands. Under the WIPO treaty, signatories must pass laws that make copyright infringement extra illegal if you have to break a digital lock on the way. But if you break a lock and you don't infringe copyright (say, because you refilled a printer cartridge, took your car to an independent mechanic, or got some software without using an app store), then you're fine.

Lehman's next move was to convince Congress that they needed to pass a version of the anticircumvention rule that went far beyond the obligations in the WIPO treaties. In this, he was joined by powerful, deep-pocketed lobbyists from Big Content, and later, Big Tech. They successfully pressured Congress into passing Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 – a law that protects digital locks, at the expense of copyright and the creative workers whom copyright is said to serve.

Lehman has repeatedly, publicly described this maneuver as "doing an end-run around Congress." Once America adopted this extreme anticircumvention rule, the US Trade Representative made it America's top priority to ram identical laws through the legislatures of all of America's trading partners, under the explicit or tacit threat of tariffs on any country that refused (the information minister of a Central American country once told me that the USTR threatened them, saying that if they didn't accept anticircumvention as a clause in the Central American Free Trade Agreement – CAFTA – they would lose their ability to export soybeans to America).

Canada took more than a decade to enact its own version of the anticircumvention rule, which was the source of public outrage by the USTR and US industry lobbyists. These neocolonialists found plenty of Parliamentary sellouts willing to introduce laws on their behalf, but every time this happened, the Canadian people reacted with a kind of mass outrage that had never been seen in response to highly technical proposals for internet regulation. For example, the Liberal MP Sam Bulte was challenged on her support of the rule by her Parkdale constituents at a public meeting, and had a screeching meltdown, screaming that she would not be "bullied by user-rights zealots and EFF members." Voters put "User-Rights Zealot" signs on their lawns and voted her out of office.

Anticircumvention remained a priority for the US, and they found new MPs to do their dirty work. Stephen Harper's Conservatives made multiple tries at this. After Jim Prentice utterly failed to get the rule through Parliament, the brief was picked up by Heritage Minister James Moore (who liked to call himself "the iPad Minister") and now-disgraced Industry minister Tony Clement. Clement and Moore tried to diffuse the opposition to the proposal by conducting a public consultation on it.

This backfired horribly. Over 6,000 Canadians wrote into the consultation with individual, detailed, personal critiques of anticircumvention, explaining how the rule would hurt them at work and at home. Only 53 submissions supported the rule. Moore threw away these 6,130 negative responses, justifying it by publicly calling them the "babyish" views of "radical extremists":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Named individuals created policies in living memory. They were warned about the foreseeable outcomes of those proposals. They passed them anyway – and then no one held them accountable.

Until now.

The point of remembering where these policies came from isn't (merely) to ensure that these people are forever remembered as the monsters they showed themselves to be. Rather, it is to recover the true history of enshittification, the choices we made that led to enshittification, so that we can reverse those policies, disenshittify our tech, and give rise to a new, good internet that's fit for the purpose of being the global digital nervous system for a species facing a polycrisis of climate catastrophe, oligarchy, fascism and genocide.

There's never been a more urgent moment to reconsider those enshittificatory policies – and there's never been a more auspicious moment, either. After all, Canada's anticircumvention law exists because it was supposed to guarantee tariff-free access to American markets. That promise has been shattered, permanently. It's time to get rid of that law, and make it legal for Canadian technologists to give the Canadian public the tools they need to escape from America's Big Tech bullies, who pick our pockets with junk-fees and lock-in, and who attack our social, legal and civil lives with social media walled gardens:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet" is streaming now. We've got three more episodes to go – part two drops on Monday (and it's a banger). You can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts, and here's the RSS feed:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

[gjdraws]

Remember when Kevin Crocker managed to goad Jake into (1) leaving his girlfriend, (2) who'd just lost her father to murder, (3) to drive all the way to prison so (4) Jake could break the glass down and have a dust-up with him?

Special mention to Jake being the physical embodiment of this emoji 🥹upon meeting Crocker after he's been exonerated:

[arustyspork]

As a Canadian who is very proud to be helping fund our government sponsored yaoi, I also think its my patriotic duty to provide support for all the non Canadians dipping their toe in the heated rivalry fanfic pool. Here's a short list of some Canadianisms to include in your fics:

Booter: a specific term for when you're trudging through the snow and you get a boot full of snow

Beavertail: a fried pastry covered with sugar and Nutella. These shops are very common in Montreal and Ottawa

Bagged milk: now this is a very popular Canadian stereotype, but its actually only a thing in Ontario and Quebec (so it would apply here). Normally the bags are stored in a little pitcher in the fridge.

Drinking age: this varies based on province. The drinking age is 19 everywhere except alberta, manitoba, and quebec

Cannabis: cannabis was completely legalized and regulated in 2018. There are specific shops for it you have to buy from.

Geography: the maritimes refers to a specific collection of provinces on the Atlantic (PEI, nova scotia, and new brunswick). The prairie provinces include manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (sometimes). We also have the territories up north, which are very sparse in population. Ottawa is right on the border with quebec, cross the river and you're in gatineau.

Metric system: canada is all over the place. Generally we use the metric system for distance (km per hour, meterages), however when you're referring to the height of a person or weight of a person, you use imperial. We use Celsius for temperature except for the ovens, which are Fahrenheit.

Quebec: quebec is lowkey crazy. Because they keep trying to leave the country, they have a lot of different rules and laws from the rest of us. Quebecois French is different from regular French and they're very snobby about it. Shane, being from Ottawa, probably learnt from French immersion (he sounds like it on the show) and it would not be at all impressive to anyone in quebec.

Washroom: basically synonymous with bathroom. Exclusively Canadian term

Bunny hug: this is only used in Saskatchewan, but it refers to hoodies with the front pocket.

Toque: term for a beanie. SHANE WOULD NEVER CALL IT A BEANIE

gay marriage: legal across Canada since 2005!

Food: ketchup chips, all dressed chips, Nanaimo bars, coffee crisp, caramilk. Perogies are very popular in the prairies.

Thanksgiving: ours is in october!

Packaging: every product in canada has things in French and English, so even if most of us don't speak French, we know a lot of French nouns

School: when we talk about high school, we refer to the grades as "grade 3" or "grade 11". We wouldn't use sophomore or junior. This also means that rather than saying you're a tenth grader, you'd say "im in grade 10" or "I'm a grade 10er" (I admit this one is weird)

Hockey: the national pastime. Everyone went to school with a mob of hockey boys that has mullets and talks with the most insane Canadian accent you've ever heard in your life. Even if you don't know anything about hockey, you're rooting for a Canadian team to win the Stanley cup, and you probably skated as part of gym class in elementary school

Shane probably went to a hockey school, or might’ve been billeted out during high school to play on different junior teams.

I could make a whole separate post just about hockey terminology but here's a few

Hat trick: 3 goals in a game. When this happens people from the crowd throw hats on the ice and they get collected for the player to keep.

Gordie Howe Hat Trick: a goal, an assist, and a fight in one game!

Goalies: certified weirdos. Sometimes they talk to their posts. Weirdly a lot of them can juggle. If someone from the opposing team hurts or even touches the goalie, they get beat to hell

Fighting: fighting results in a 5 minute major penalty, but is just a big part of the culture. Refs don't tend to pull people apart right away. It's also a thing where when a fight starts, two players from opposite teams will pair up and put their arms around eachother. The intent is that they prevent eachother from joining the fight but really they just look like they're hugging.

I could probably fill up an entire blog of little things like this and ill probably make additions in the reblogs when I think of them! Please know my inbox is open for Canadian culture consulting if its at all required!! Very excited to read your fics 😈