I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.
Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:
But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.
Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."
As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.
DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.
I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.
I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:
The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?
No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.
Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.
No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.
Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?
Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.
That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.
The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.
But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.
You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.
This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:
Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:
When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.
This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":
While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.
This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).
In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:
Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:
This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
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:
How authoritarian economics works in practice—not by building something new, but by hollowing out what remains and turning it to private gain.
James B. Greenberg
Aug 03, 2025
For all the talk of strength and resurgence, the economic logic of Trump’s second term is unfolding as accelerated collapse—not from neglect, but from design. This isn’t a return to industrial America or a defense of the forgotten working class. It’s a systematic transfer of risk, wealth, and control—an extraction economy wearing the mask of governance.
The false premises of Trump’s tariff policies were clear from the start. Framed as tools to rebalance trade and protect American jobs, they provoke retaliatory measures, drive up consumer costs, and disrupt long-standing supply chains. Farmers—once promised protection—face collapsing export markets. Manufacturers pay more for parts and pass the costs down. What begins as a trade war becomes a self-inflicted wound.
Trade agreements, too, are no longer about negotiation but disruption. Deals are torn up or hastily redrawn for spectacle, not substance, leaving uncertainty in their place. Long-term trading partners are alienated. Diplomatic capital is spent for domestic headlines. The result is an erosion of stability that no executive order can reverse.
The mass deportation apparatus, already in motion during Trump’s first term, has expanded in both scale and impunity. Migrant labor, long essential to sectors like agriculture, construction, food processing, and elder care, is treated as disposable. Entire regions dependent on immigrant labor find themselves without workers. Crops rot. Projects stall. Small businesses close. This isn’t about restoring order—it’s about creating chaos that can be exploited.
That same logic extends to the privatization of public services. Core functions once considered government’s responsibility—healthcare, education, disaster response—have been handed off to contractors and profit-driven intermediaries. The effect isn’t greater efficiency. It’s greater opacity, reduced oversight, and a transfer of public wealth into private hands. Where there should be accountability, there’s a contract. Where there should be care, there’s a bill.
The consequences play out quietly. A diabetic pays $600 for insulin. A teacher loses her job when her district eliminates “controversial” curriculum. A farm in California can’t find workers to harvest its crop after an ICE sweep. These aren’t isolated events—they’re how policy lands.
Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans further tilt the economy toward extraction. Under the rhetoric of growth, the federal government hemorrhages revenue while offering little relief to those who need it. The benefits are uneven by design: windfalls for billionaires, crumbs for workers. That shortfall—created at the top—is then used to justify cuts to the social safety net below.
Meanwhile, the economic landscape grows more volatile. Market chaos isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. These disruptions aren’t the byproduct of mismanagement. They are part of a deliberate strategy: to destabilize public systems, drive confusion, and create conditions where those closest to power can extract wealth while everyone else bears the risk. Crisis becomes profitable: when you already control the exit.
Insider trading has proliferated under cover of deregulation. Federal officials wink through the chaos, offering quiet tips that make fortunes for those who know when to buy. Bankruptcies surge, especially among small and midsized enterprises. The large absorb the weak. Capital concentrates further into the hands of the few. Monopoly power expands across nearly every sector—from food and freight to finance, energy, and tech.
Regulatory protections have been stripped away under the guise of freeing the market. In practice, that means removing guardrails that keep corporations from polluting, exploiting, or defrauding with impunity. Deregulation advantages those who already have leverage and leaves the rest of us to absorb the risk. Public lands and leases are sold off at bargain prices to extractive industries. These aren’t isolated decisions. They reflect an ethos that treats the country not as a society to be governed, but as an asset to be liquidated.
Public institutions have been gutted alongside public protections. Universities lose funding. Scientific research becomes contingent on political loyalty. Agencies lose experienced staff and institutional memory. Expertise is treated as a liability. The social safety net—already fraying—is slashed: Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, housing support. What remains is a patchwork that leaves the most vulnerable exposed and asks the rest to fend for themselves.
In the name of decentralization, responsibility for everything from pandemic response to climate adaptation is offloaded to states, local governments, and individuals—most without the resources to confront the scale of the crisis. What looks like flexibility is abandonment. And that abandonment hits hardest in the very communities already stretched thin—rural counties, inner cities, tribal nations, aging towns where industry left long ago and investment never returned.
Inflation surges, driven in part by these disruptions. But the response doesn’t address root causes. It weaponizes the pain, pits neighbor against neighbor, and blames the cost of living on immigrants, trans people, or “woke” universities rather than on the billionaires quietly profiting from scarcity.
We’re left with a politics of abandonment layered on top of an economy of dispossession. A dollar once seen as the stable currency of global trade is now being questioned abroad. Confidence in federal data declines, not because of error, but because of manipulation. Jobs reports are revised. Environmental data softens. Budget projections skew. Reality itself is reshaped to fit the message.
This is no accident. The erosion of trust, the institutional hollowing, the engineered instability—these are part of a political economy that rewards volatility for those who know how to ride it. The playbook isn’t new. It’s a textbook case of accumulation by dispossession, where crisis becomes a means of profit and disorder a source of control.
Anthropologist Roy Rappaport warned decades ago of what happens when lower-order systems capture and repurpose their regulators—when corporations begin to define the state rather than be governed by it. It’s the logic behind the old line: what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. We’re living through the consequences. That belief was never true.
From an anthropologist’s view, this is a cultural restructuring. Public knowledge—once understood as a shared resource—is now treated as a threat. The systems we used to rely on—universities, public media, statistical agencies—are recast as partisan, elite, or untrustworthy. Once discredited, they become easier to ignore, then defund, then remake.
Power doesn’t just operate through budgets and laws—it works through stories. By painting public institutions as corrupt, elites as enemies, and private profit as neutral, the regime manufactures consent for its own consolidation.
What we’re seeing is not just bad policy. It’s a deliberate reshaping of the economy to benefit those already at the top. The rest of us are left to compete for what’s been carved away.
And that’s the real Trump economy—not a boom, not a revival, but a funnel.
And if that happens, we won’t just lose arguments over policy—we’ll lose the institutions that make public argument possible. What’s dismantled won’t come back quickly, and what replaces it won’t answer to us.
Suggested Readings
Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New Press, 1998.
Greenberg, James B. “An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit Crisis: Power, Culture, and Ethics in Financial Governance.” In Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium, edited by James B. Greenberg and Thomas K. Park, 161–190. Lexington Books, 2017.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2007.
Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Rappaport, Roy A., and Muriel J. Sheppard, eds. Disorders of Our Own: A Book of Diagnostic Anthropology. Suny Press, 1983.
Stoller, Matt. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Simon & Schuster, 2019.
Tooze, Adam. Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy. Viking, 2021.
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. University of Arizona Press, 2025.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Reading comments on any npmd vid on youtube is so wild bc there are people that DONT watch nightmare time and livestreams and learn all of the hatchetfield lore???
At a moment when research is forbidden, it is incredibly important that we find ways to be creatively and prosocially disobedient.
Ethan Zuckerman introducing a 2016 conference Forbidden Research in Open Transcripts. Forbidden Research Welcome and Introduction: Ethan Zuckerman
January 11 is the death anniversary of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist.
Here are a few thoughts from Public Knowledge’s “The Redirect: Technology after Capitalism” event at SFMOMA with Xiaowei Wang, Andrea Steves, Kim Stanley Robinson, Finn Brunton, and Caitlin Zaloom, which I very much enjoyed. [These notes were shared on Twitter the day after the event, but I am just now piecing them together here with a few corrections.]
That description of late capitalism (finance-driven capitalism, neoliberalism, what have you) keeping us stuck in very short-term thinking reminds me of Stewart Brand’s “pace layering.” We need to zoom in and out. We need to inhabit various orbits.
That notion of the potential of art (in the broadest of terms) as a mechanism for thinking… in a way, it keeps us from doing (making messes, consuming more, etc.) by slowing us down through a process of considering, playing out possibilities and subsequently making less mess, which together with the Fred Jameson quote that came up (“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”) reminds of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
The, again, Fred Jameson (pretty sure, but I could be remembering wrong) thought that Kim Stanley Robinson shared about the need for everyone to be a technocrat/bureaucrat because commons have always been dependent on keepers/minders/custodians enforcing them, even if not visible.
But how to bring back commons if capitalism keeps up racing along and the capitalist always find a way to root out socialism? I think about a Fred Moten quote I saw earlier today:
I don't think that scale is our friend, it's our enemy. how to get together on small scale with patience, ethical regard for one another... maybe this renewal of our habits of assembly happens on a small scale." —Fred Moten #tinylife
… and the notion of pockets (small!) of resistance (some collected quotes and ideas), with a nod to John Berger for language and for the sense of urgency, which has only expanded since he wrote.
And then back to the struggle to imagine a post-capitalist world, to break free from systems we no longer recognize as human inventions nor anything short of laws of physics, even if they aren’t, we need “the third loop” (Open thread, see above and below.)
Essentially I understand the third loop to be the ability to question a system itself and clearly see it’s contours, while 1st and 2nd loops are working within that dominant system
See also notions of (1) “cultural dark matter” and (2) “transcontextualism” and the “double bind.”
So much more to chew on: Xiaowei Wang’s visit to Alibaba towns and the “rural revitalization” initiatives in China, KSR’s re-terraforming and/or terra-harnessing (my feeble attempts at naming) of California’s Central Valley, using existing geology as “French drains,” and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic (more or less, “What’s good is good for the land.”), and “Capitalism is a fear of the other, a prisoner’s dilemma.” And “You get Theranos because there are not enough places for money to go [in capitalism].” Etc, etc. Brain food.
FIN
Update 1:
Because it relates to many parts of the thread above (especially the imagining of alternatives to our systems and the practice of art), here is some bell hooks, who of course has said:
The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is. It’s to imagine what is possible.
Update 2: From an exchange with Xiaowei Wang, whose prompts are in quotes, the rest of the words mine:
love this Fred Moten quote: so, so true. sometimes I get really excited about being part of a community/organizing + then get heartsick when we start using same vocabularies that capitalism has taught us since birth."whats the most efficient and productive political strategy" etc
yes! with sprinklings of “value” and “worth” and “human capital” and “achievement” not to mention all the hierarchy and war words… “merit” and “deserve” and “dominate” and “lead” and “win” and and
I am curious, especially wrt the "it's easier to imagine end of world than end of capitalism" quote. if capitalism did end, would our brains be able to handle it? i think of many friends who say if they could stop working, they're not sure what they would do instead!
I am curious too. I think we have so much of our identity wrapped up in our work (“What do yo do?” as one of the first questions we ask people new to us) and most of our education points to work, not life and leisure (largely discouraged beyond vacation, “idle hands…”) that even when people retire, many don’t know what to do with themselves. (If I recall correctly, there is some research about retirees and those without hobbies have greater health consequences.) But I think the answer lies in recreation and creativity. If our education emphasized creativity and recreation as part of a balanced life, then it would be easier to imagine days gardening, birding, walking/hiking, sports playing, making of all sorts (art, carpentry, writing, painting, filmmaking, etc.), care and maintenance (of children, homes, machines, etc.).
… reading, chatting, cooking, sewing, cleaning. But so many of those care and maintenance tasks today are paid poorly (when paid at all) and thus seen as something to aspire to remove from our lives (often with an app!, no less).
(Some disclosure.)
PS: Jenny Odell has some good answers to all this notion in How to Do Nothing (the text of a talk, the video of the talk, and the book).
Here’s Jia Tolentino referencing Jenny Odell in “What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away”:
It involves rejecting the sort of progress that centers on isolated striving, and emphasizing, instead, caregiving, maintenance, and the interdependence of things.
[…]
She locates the potential for change in individual acts of refusal, which, she argues, make space for others to follow.
