The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard – between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven
A single country – poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent – was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.
The effect this had on Ireland is…mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law. The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions. The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.
There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.
What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are very good. It's not just corporate tax evasion.
First among these things that you can't do anywhere else: it's a crime in virtually every country on earth to modify America's defective, enshittified, privacy-invading, money-stealing technology exports. That's because the US trade representative has spent the past 25 years using the threat of tariffs to bully all of America's trading partners into adopting "anti-circumvention" laws:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change
There is nothing good about this. The fact that local businesses can't sell you a privacy blocker, an alternative client, a diagnostic tool, a spare part, a consumable, or even software for your American-made devices leaves you defenseless before US tech's remorseless campaign of monetary and informational plunder – and it means that your economy is denied the benefits of creating and exporting these incredibly desirable, profitable products.
Incredibly, Trump deliberately blew up this multi-trillion dollar system of US commercial advantage. By chaotically imposing and rescinding and re-imposing tariffs on the world, he has neutralized the US trade rep's tariff threats. Foreign firms just can't count on exporting to America anymore, so the threat of (more) tariffs grows less intimidating by the minute:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
The time is ripe for the founding of a disenshittification nation, an Ireland for disenshittification. I have no doubt that eventually, most or all of the countries in the world will drop their anti-circumvention laws (the laws that ban the modification of US tech exports). Once one country starts making these disenshittifying tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export, since all it takes to buy one of these tools from a circumvention haven is an internet connection and a payment method.
