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:
The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"
https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html
Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:
What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.
I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.
In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.
There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.
This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.
All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_Studios
One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:
There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:
Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):
As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."
Which brings Broderick to his main question:
If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?
His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."
For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.
Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.
This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming is a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.
But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:
Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.
Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:
A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":
Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.
And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."
I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).
I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:
https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt
It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.
It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.
Someone open sourced a home automation platform that runs entirely on your own hardware - and it supports over 1,000 integrations out of the box.
It's called Home Assistant. And it's not a smart home app.
It's a complete, self-hosted home automation OS - local control, no cloud required, no subscription, no company in the middle reading your data.
Here's what it actually does:
→ Controls lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, sensors, and appliances from one dashboard
→ 1,000+ integrations: Philips Hue, Google Nest, Apple HomeKit, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, and more
→ Automations that run locally - no internet connection required, no latency
→ Energy monitoring dashboard - track solar production, grid usage, and battery storage in real time
→ Full mobile app for iOS and Android with location awareness
→ Works on Raspberry Pi, home server, NAS, or any x86-64 machine with UEFI
→ Monthly releases - 2026.3 shipped last week
Here's the wildest part:
Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomeKit all route your smart home data through their servers.
Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi in your closet.
Your automations fire in milliseconds. Your data never leaves your house. Your devices keep working when the cloud goes down - which they will.
Amazon discontinued Alexa Classic. Google killed Stadia, Inbox, and a hundred other products. Apple required a HomePod hub.
Home Assistant has shipped a new release every single month for over a decade.
85.5K GitHub stars. 37K forks. Still going.
100% Open Source. Apache-2.0 License.
:house_with_garden: Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. - home-assistant/core
This disenshittifies a whole lot of things. Now while I don't put much trust in IOT and smart home hardware, using only two remotely controlled electrical sockets and a smart bulb that I originally intended to run through IFTTT, I welcome solutions that skip the corporate middlemen, their services and servers that can be shut down at any moment, leaving you with a lot of useless electronic scrap.
Google added a new search filter that strips out the ads, the AI, and everything except the basic search results.
The filter is: &udm=14
You can type in the new filter into the google search bar, or you can use the website someone made that basically does that part for you (turn it into your default search engine perhaps).
The website is udm14.com (use .org instead, if you want to filter out NSFW results)
.
A search filter is text you add to a search to customize the results, such as using
-site:twitter.com
to remove all search results with a twitter URL or
filetype:pdf
if you only want links to PDF files.
i've made many friends from different corners of the world this year, and since i don't use social media (apart from tumblr), i have a bunch of phone contacts and buried addresses... could.. could it be time to get an address book?
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:
Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.
Enshittification comes from specific policy choices, made by named individuals, that had the foreseeable and foreseen result of making the web worse:
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
RSS's liftoff was driven by Google, who released a great RSS reader called "Google Reader" in 2007. Reader was free and reliable, and other RSS readers struggled to compete with it, with the effect that most of us just ended up using Google's product, which made it even harder to launch a competitor.
But in 2013, Google quietly knifed Reader. I've always found the timing suspicious: it came right in the middle of Google's desperate scramble to become Facebook, by means of a product called Google Plus (G+). Famously, Google product managers' bonuses depended on how much G+ engagement they drove, with the effect that every Google product suddenly sprouted G+ buttons that either did something stupid, or something that confusingly duplicated existing functionality (like commenting on Youtube videos).
Google treated G+ as an existential priority, and for good reason. Google was running out of growth potential, having comprehensively conquered Search, and having repeatedly demonstrated that Search was a one-off success, with nearly every other made-in-Google product dying off. What successes Google could claim were far more modest, like Gmail, Google's Hotmail clone. Google augmented its growth by buying other peoples' companies (Blogger, YouTube, Maps, ad-tech, Docs, Android, etc), but its internal initiatives were turkeys.
Eventually, Wall Street was going to conclude that Google had reached the end of its growth period, and Google's shares would fall to a fraction of their value, with a price-to-earnings ratio commensurate with a "mature" company.
Google needed a new growth story, and "Google will conquer Facebook's market" was a pretty good one. After all, investors didn't have to speculate about whether Facebook was profitable, they could just look at Facebook's income statements, which Google proposed to transfer to its own balance sheet. The G+ full-court press was as much a narrative strategy as a business strategy: by tying product managers' bonuses to a metric that demonstrated G+'s rise, Google could convince Wall Street that they had a lot of growth on their horizon.
Of course, tying individual executives' bonuses to making a number go up has a predictably perverse outcome. As Goodhart's law has it, "Any metric becomes a target, and then ceases to be a useful metric." As soon as key decision-makers' personal net worth depending on making the G+ number go up, they crammed G+ everywhere and started to sneak in ways to trigger unintentional G+ sessions. This still happens today – think of how often you accidentally invoke an unbanishable AI feature while using Google's products (and products from rival giant, moribund companies relying on an AI narrative to convince investors that they will continue to grow):
Like I said, Google Reader died at the peak of Google's scramble to make the G+ number go up. I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google realized that Reader's core functionality (helping users discover, share and discuss interesting new web pages) was exactly the kind of thing Google wanted us to use G+ for, and so they killed Reader in a bid to drive us to the stalled-out service they'd bet the company on.
If Google killed Reader in a bid to push users to discover and consume web pages using a proprietary social media service, they succeeded. Unfortunately, the social media service they pushed users into was Facebook – and G+ died shortly thereafter.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
https://kottke.org/rolodex/
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
https://newsblur.com/
But RSS continues to be a power user-coded niche, despite the fact that RSS readers are really easy to set up and – crucially – make using the web much easier. Last week, Caroline Crampton (co-editor of The Browser) wrote about her experiences using RSS:
As Crampton points out, much of the web (including some of the cruftiest, most enshittified websites) publish full-text RSS feeds, meaning that you can read their articles right there in your RSS reader, with no ads, no popups, no nag-screens asking you to sign up for a newsletter, verify your age, or submit to their terms of service.
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
Now, not every website publishes a fulltext feed. Often, you will just get a teaser, and if you want to read the whole article, you have to click through. I have a few tips for making other websites – even ones like Wired and The Intercept – as easy to read as an RSS reader, at least for Firefox users.
Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" that re-renders the contents of a web-page as black type on a white background. Firefox does some kind of mysterious calculation to determine whether a page can be displayed in Reader View, but you can override this with the Activate Reader View, which adds a Reader View toggle for every page:
Lots of websites (like The Guardian) want you to login before you can read them, and even if you pay to subscribe to them, these sites often want you to re-login every time you visit them (especially if you're running a full suite of privacy blockers). You can skip this whole process by simply toggling Reader View as soon as you get the login pop up. On some websites (like The Verge and Wired), you'll only see the first couple paragraphs of the article in Reader View. But if you then hit reload, the whole article loads.
Activate Reader View puts a Reader View toggle on every page, but clicking that toggle sometimes throws up an error message, when the page is so cursed that Firefox can't figure out what part of it is the article. When this happens, you're stuck reading the page in the site's own default (and usually terrible) view. As you scroll down the page, you will often hit pop-ups that try to get you to sign up for a mailing list, agree to terms of service, or do something else you don't want to do. Rather than hunting for the button to close these pop-ups (or agree to objectionable terms of service), you can install "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that reaches into the page's layout files and deletes any element that isn't designed to scroll with the rest of the text:
https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
Other websites (like Slashdot and Core77) load computer-destroying Javascript (often as part of an anti-adblock strategy). For these, I use the "Javascript Toggle On and Off" plugin, which lets you create a blacklist of websites that aren't allowed to run any scripts:
Some websites (like Yahoo) load so much crap that they defeat all of these countermeasures. For these websites, I use the "Element Blocker" plug-in, which lets you delete parts of the web-page, either for a single session, or permanently:
It's ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There's corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta's monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter's crushing of the open web. There's regulatory enshittification, like the EU's failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of "cookie consent" popups is the same as complying with the GDPR.
Those are real problems, but they don't have to be your problem, at least when you want to read the web. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide to using RSS to improve your web experience, evade lock-in and duck algorithmic recommendation systems:
Customizing your browser takes this to the next level, disenshittifying many websites – even if they block or restrict RSS. Most of this stuff only applies to desktop browsers, though. Mobile browsers are far more locked down (even mobile Firefox – remember, every iOS browser, including Firefox, is just a re-skinned version of Safari, thanks to Apple's ban rival browser engines). And of course, apps are the worst. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to improve it in any way:
And even if you do customize your mobile browser (Android Firefox lets you do some of this stuff), many apps (Twitter, Tumblr) open external links in their own browser (usually an in-app Chrome instance) with all the bullshit that entails.
The promise of locked-down mobile platforms was that they were going to "just work," without any of the confusing customization options of desktop OSes. It turns out that taking away those confusing customization options was an invitation to every enshittifier to turn the web into an unreadable, extractive, nagging mess. This was the foreseeable – and foreseen – consequence of a new kind of technology where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited:
If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it)
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:
Crises precipitate change: Trump's incontinent belligerence spurred the world to long-overdue action on "digital sovereignty," as people woke up to the stark realization that a handful of Trump-aligned giant tech firms could shut down their governments, companies and households at the click of a mouse.
This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.
Now, more than a decade into the Trump era, the world is finally confronting the reality that they need to get the hell off of American IT, and transition to open, transparent and verifiable alternatives for their administrative tools, telecoms infrastructure and embedded systems for agriculture, industry and transportation. And not a moment too soon:
But building the post-American internet is easier said than done. There remain huge, unresolved questions about the best way to proceed.
One thing is clear: we will need new systems: the aforementioned open, transparent, verifiable code and hardware. That's a huge project, but the good news is that it benefits tremendously from scale, which means that as countries, businesses and households switch to the post-American internet, there will be ever more resources to devote to building, maintaining and improving this project. That's how scientific endeavors work: they're global collaborations that allow multiple parties to simultaneously attack the problems from many angles at once. Think of the global effort to sequence, understand, and produce vaccines for Covid 19.
Developing the code and hardware for the post-American internet scales beautifully, making it unique among the many tasks posed by the post-American world. Other untrustworthy US platforms – such as the dollar, or the fiber links that make interconnection in the USA – are hampered by scale. The fact that hundreds of countries use the dollar and rely on US fiber connections makes replacing them harder, not easier:
Building the post-American internet isn't easy, but there's a clear set of construction plans. What's far less clear is how we transition to the post-American internet. How do people, organizations and governments that currently have their data locked up in US Big Tech silos get it off their platforms and onto new, open, transparent, verifiable successors? Literally: how do you move the data from the old system to the new one, preserving things like edit/view permissions, edit histories, and other complex data-structures that often have high-stakes attached to them (for example, many organizations and governments are legally required to maintain strict view/edit permissions for sensitive data, and must preserve the histories of their documents).
On top of that, there's all the systems that we use to talk to one another: media services from Instagram to Tiktok to Youtube; chat services from iMessage to Discord. It's easy enough to build alternatives to these services – indeed, they already exist, though they may require additional engineering to scale them up for hundreds of millions or billions of users – but that's only half the battle. What do we do about the literal billions of people who are already using the American systems?
This is where the big divisions appear. In one camp, you have the "if you build it, they will come" school, who say that all we need to do is make our services so obviously superior to the legacy services that America has exported around the world and people will just switch. This is a very seductive argument. After all, the American systems are visibly, painfully defective: riddled with surveillance and ads, powered by terrible algorithms, plagued by moderation failures.
But waiting for people to recognize the superiority of your alternatives and jumping ship is a dead end. It completely misapprehends the reason that users are still on legacy social media and other platforms. People don't use Instagram because they love Mark Zuckerberg; they use it because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg:
What's more, Zuckerberg knows this. He knows that users of his service are hamstrung by the "collective action problem" of getting the people who matter to you to agree on when it's time to leave a service, and on which service is a safe haven to flee to:
The reason Zuckerberg knows this is that he had to contend with it at the dawn of Facebook, when the majority of social media users were locked into an obviously inferior legacy platform called Myspace. Zuckerberg promised Myspace users a superior social media experience where they wouldn't be spied on or bombarded with ads:
Zuckerberg knew that wouldn't be enough. No one was going to leave Myspace for Facebook and hang out in splendid isolation, smugly re-reading Facebook's world-beating privacy policy while waiting for their dopey friends to wise up and leave Myspace to come and join them.
No: Zuckerberg gave the Myspace refugees a bot, which would accept your Myspace login and password and then impersonate you to Myspace's servers several times per day, scraping all the content waiting for you in your Myspace feed and flowing it into your Facebook feed. You could reply to it there and the bot would push it out to Myspace. You could eat your cake and have it too: use Facebook, but communicate with the people who were still on Myspace.
This is called "adversarial interoperability" and it was once the norm, but the companies that rose to power by "moving fast and breaking things" went on to secure legal protections to prevent anyone from doing unto them as they had done unto their own predecessors:
The harder it is for people to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat them without paying the penalty of losing users. This is the source of enshittification: when a company can move value from its users and customers to itself without risking their departure, it does.
People stay on bad platforms because the value they provide to one another is greater than the costs the platform extracts from them. That means that when you see people stuck on a very bad platform – like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – you should infer that what they get there from the people that matter to them is really important to them. They stick to platforms because that's where they meet with people who share their rare disease, because that's where they find the customers or audiences that they rely on to make rent; because that's the only place they can find the people they left behind when they emigrated.
Now, it's entirely possible – likely, even – that legacy social media platforms will grow so terrible that people will leave and jettison those social connections that mean so much to them. This is not a good outcome. Those communities, once shattered, will likely never re-form. There will be permanent, irretrievable losses incurred by their members:
"If you build it, they will come" is a trap. Technologists and their users who don't understand the pernicious nature of the collective active problem trap themselves. They build obviously superior technical platforms and then gnash their teeth as the rest of the world fails to make the leap.
All too often, users' frustration at the failure of new services to slay the inferior legacy services curdles, and users and designers of new technologies decide that the people who won't join them are somehow themselves defective. It doesn't take long to find a corner of the Fediverse or Bluesky where Facebook and Twitter users are being condemned as morally suspect for staying on zuckermuskian media. They are damned for loving Zuckerberg and Musk, rather than empathized with for loving each other more than they hate the oligarchs who've trapped them. They're condemned as emotionally stunted "attention whores" who hang out on big platforms to get "dopamine" (or some other pseudoscientific reward), which is easier than grappling with the fact that legacy social media pays their bills, and tolerating Zuckerberg or Musk is preferable to getting evicted.
Worst of all, condemning users of legacy technology as moral failures leads you to oppose efforts to get those users out of harm's way and onto modern platforms. Think of the outcry at Meta's Threads taking steps to federate with Mastodon. There are good reasons to worry about this – the best one being that it might allow Meta to (illegally) suck up Mastodon users' data and store and process it. But the majority of the opposition to Threads integration with Mastodon wasn't about Threads' management – it was about Threads' users. It posited a certain kind of moral defective who would use a Zuckerberg-controlled platform in the 2020s and insisted that those people would ruin Mastodon by bringing over their illegitimate social practices.
I've made no secret of where I come down in this debate: the owners of legacy social media are my enemy, but the users of those platforms are my comrades, and I want to help them get shut of legacy social media as quickly and painlessly as possible.
What's more, there's a way to make this happen! The same adversarial interoperability that served Zuckerberg so well when he was draining users off of Myspace could be used today to evacuate all of Meta's platforms. We could use a combination of on-device bridging, scraping and other guerrilla tactics to create "alt clients" that let you interact with people on Mastodon and the legacy platforms in one context, so that you can leave the bad services but keep the good people in your life.
The major barrier to this isn't technological. Despite the boasts of these companies to world-beating engineering prowess, the reality that people (often teenagers) keep successfully finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the "impregnable" platforms, in order to build successful alt clients:
The thing that eventually sees off these alt clients isn't Big Tech's technical countermeasures – it's legal risk. A global system of "anticircumvention" laws makes the kinds of basic reverse-engineering associated with building and maintaining using adversarial interoperability radioactively illegal. These laws didn't appear out of thin air, either: the US Trade Representative pressured all of America's trading partners into passing them:
Which brings me back to crises precipitating change. Trump has staged an unscheduled, sudden, midair disassembly of the global system of trade, whacking tariffs on every country in the world, even in defiance of the Supreme Court:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd6zn3ly22yo
Ironically, this has only helped make the case for adversarial interoperability. Trump is using tech companies to attack his geopolitical rivals, ordering Microsoft to shut down both the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian high court in retaliation for their pursuit of the criminal dictators Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro. This means that Trump has violated the quid pro quo deal for keeping anticircumvention law on your statute books, and he has made the case for killing anticircumvention as quickly as possible in order to escape American tech platforms before they are weaponized against you:
I've been talking about this for more than a year now, and I must say, the reception has been better than I dared dream. I think that – for the first time in my adult life – we are on the verge of creating a new, good, billionaire-proof internet:
But there's one objection that keeps coming up: "What if this makes Trump mad?" Or, more specifically, "What if this makes Trump more mad, so instead of hitting us with a 10% tariff, it's a 1,000% tariff?
This came up earlier this week, when I gave a remote keynote for the Fedimtl conference, and an audience member said that he thought we should just focus on building good new platforms, rather than risking Trump's ire. In my response, I recited the arguments I've raised in this piece.
But yesterday, I saw a news item that made me realize there was one more argument I should have made, but missed. It was a Reuters story about Trump ordering American diplomats to fight against "data sovereignty" policies around the world:
The news comes from a leaked diplomatic cable, and it's a reminder that Trump's goal is to maintain American dominance of the world's technology and to prevent the formation of a post-American internet altogether. Worrying that Trump will hit you with more tariffs if you legalize jailbreaking assumes that the thing that would upset Trump is that you broke the rules.
That's not what makes Trump angry.
What makes Trump angry is losing.
Say you focus exclusively on building superior platforms. Say by some miracle that everyone you care about somehow overcomes the collective action problems and high switching costs and leaves behind US Big Tech services and comes to your new, federated, cleantech, post-American alternative.
Do you think that Trump will observe this collapse in the fortunes of the most important corporations in his coalition and shrug and say, "Well, I guess I lost fair and square; better luck next time?"
Hell, no. We already know what Trump does when his corporate allies lose to a superior foreign rival – Trump steals the rival's service and gives it to one of his cronies. That's literally what he last month, to Tiktok:
The fear of harsh retaliation for any country that dares to be a Disenshittification Nation is based on the premise that Trump is motivated by a commitment to fairness. He's not: Trump is motivated by a desire to dominate. Anything that threatens the dominance of the companies that take his orders is fair game, and he will retaliate in any way he can.
