It was all downhill after the Cuecat
Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Franciscoâs Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didnât have to pay a cent.
The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the companyâs marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition. To get the Cuecat into widespread use, the company raised millions in the capital markets, then mass-manufactured these things and gave them away for free at Radio Shacks around the country. Every Wired and Forbes subscriber got one in the mail!
That was the good idea (itâs basically a prototype for todayâs QR-codes). The terrible idea was that this gadget would spy on you. Also, it would only work with special barcodes that had to be licensed from the manufacturer. Also, it would only work on Windows.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001017162623/http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/sep2000/nf20000928_029.htm
But the manufacturer didnât have the last word! Not at all. A couple of enterprising hardware hackersâââPierre-Philippe Coupard and Michael Rothwellâââtore down a Cuecat, dumped its ROM, and produced their own driver for itâââa surveillance-free driver that worked with any barcode. You could use it to scan the UPCs on your books or CDs or DVDs to create a catalog of your media; you could use it to scan UPCs on your groceries to make a shopping list. You could do any and every one of these things, because the Cuecat was yours.
Cuecatâs manufacturer, Digital Convergence, did not like this at all. They sent out legal demand letters and even shut down some of the repositories that were hosting alternative Cuecat firmware. They changed the license agreement that came with the Cuecat software CD to prohibit reverse-engineering.
http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm
It didnât matter, both as a practical matter and as a matter of law. As a practical matter, the (ahem) cat was out of the bag: there were so many web-hosting companies back then, and people mirrored the code to so many of them, the company would have its hands full chasing them all down and intimidating them into removing the code.
Then there was the law: how could you impose license terms on a gift? How could someone be bound by license terms on a CD that they simply threw away without ever opening it, much less putting it in their computer?
https://slashdot.org/story/00/09/18/1129226/digital-convergence-changes-eula-and-gets-cracked
In the end, Cuecat folded and sold off its remaining inventory. The early 2000s were not a good time to be a tech company, much less a tech company whose business model required millions of people to meekly accept a bad bargain.
Back then, tech users didnât feel any obligation to please tech companiesâ shareholders: if they backed a stupid business, that was their problem, not ours. Venture capitalists were capitalistsâââif they wanted us give to them according to their need and take from them according to their ability, they should be venture communists.
Last August, philosopher and Centre for Technomoral Futures director Shannon Vallor tweeted, âThe saddest thing for me about modern techâs long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer.â
https://twitter.com/ShannonVallor/status/1559659655097376768
She went on: âI donât think itâs just my nostalgia, is it? Thereâs no longer anything being promised to us by tech companies that we actually need or asked for. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy.â
https://twitter.com/ShannonVallor/status/1559663985821106177
Today on Tumblr, @wilwheatonâ responded: â[T]here is very much no longer a feeling of âHow can this change/improve my life?â and a constant dread of âHow will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate.ââ
https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/698603648058556416/cory-doctorow-if-you-see-this-and-have-thoughts
Wil finished with, âCory Doctorow, if you see this and have thoughts, I would LOVE to hear them.â
Iâve got thoughts. I think this all comes back to the Cuecat.
When the Cuecat launched, it was a mixed bag. Thatâs generally true of technologyâââor, indeed, any product or service. No matter how many variations a corporation offers, they can never anticipate all the ways that you will want or need to use their technology. This is especially true for the users the company values the leastâââpoor people, people in the global south, women, sex workers, etc.
Thatâs what makes the phrase âSo easy your mom can use itâ particularly awful âMomsâ are the kinds of people whose priorities and difficulties are absent from the room when tech designers gather to plan their next product. The needs of âmomsâ are mostly met by mastering, configuring and adapting technology, because tech doesnât work out of the box for them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/19/the-weakest-link/#moms-are-ninjas
(As an alternative, I advocate for âso easy your boss can use it,â because your boss gets to call up the IT department and shout, âI donât care what it takes, just make it work!â Your boss can solve problems through raw exercise of authority, without recourse to ingenuity.)
Technology canât be understood separately from technology users. This is the key insight in Donald Normanâs 2004 book Emotional Design, which argued that the ground state of all technology is broken, and the overarching task of tech users is to troubleshoot the things they use:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/29/banjo-nazis/#cuckoos-egg
Troubleshooting is both an art and a science: it requires both a methodical approach and creative leaps. The great crisis of troubleshooting is that the more frustrated and angry you are, the harder it is to be methodical or creative. Anger turns attention into a narrow tunnel of brittle movements and thinking.
In Emotional Design, Norman argues that technology should be beautiful and charming, because when you like a technology that has stopped working, you are able to troubleshoot it in an expansive, creative, way. Emotional Design was not merely remarkable for what it said, but for who said it.
Donald Norman, after all, was the author of the hugely influential 1998 classic The Design of Everyday Things, which counseled engineers and designers to put function over formâââto design things that work well, even if that meant stripping away ornament and sidelining aesthetics.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/don-norman/the-design-of-everyday-things/9780465050659/
With Emotional Design, Norman argued that aesthetics were functional, because aesthetics primed users to fix the oversights and errors and blind spots of designers. It was a manifesto for competence and humility.
And yet, as digital technology has permeated deeper into our lives, it has grown less configurable, not more. Companies today succeed where Cuecat failed. Consolidation in the online world means that if you remove a link from one search engine and four social media sites, the material in question vanishes for 99% of internet users.
Itâs even worse for apps: anyone who succeeds in removing an app from two app stores essentially banishes it from the world. One mobile platform uses technological and legal countermeasures to make it virtually impossible to sideload an app; the other one relies on strong-arm tactics and deceptive warnings to do so.
That means that when a modern Coupard and Rothwell decides to unfuck some piece of technologyâââto excise the surveillance and proprietary media requirements, leaving behind the welcome functionalityâââthey can only do so with the sufferance of the manufacturer. If the manufacturer doesnât like an add-on, mod, plug-in or overlay, they can use copyright takedowns, anticircumvention law, patent threats, trademark threats, cybersecurity law, contract law and other âIPâ to simply banish the offending code:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Many of these laws carry dire penalties. For example, distributing a tool that bypasses an âaccess controlâ so that you can change the software on a gadget (say, to make your printer accept third-party ink) is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a $500k fine and a 5-year prison sentence.
If Cuecatâs manufacturers had simply skinned their firmware with a thin scrim of DRM, they could have threatened Coupard and Rothwell with prison sentences. The developments in âIPâ over the two decades since the Cuecat have conjured up a new body of de facto law that Jay Freeman calls âfelony contempt of business model.â
Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. In the Cuecat era, a corporate meeting to plan a product that acted against its usersâ interests had to ask, âHow will we sweeten the pot and/or obfuscate our code so that our users donât remove the anti-features weâre planning to harm them with?â
But in a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to âGiven that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?â
That is, âhow can we raise the switching costs of our products so that users who are angry at us keep using our products?â When Facebook was planning its photos product, they deliberately designed it to tempt users into making it the sole repository of their family photos, in order to hold those photos ransom to keep Facebook users from quitting for G+:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
Companies claim that their lock-in strategies are about protecting their users: âMove into our walled garden, for it is a fortress, whose battlements bristle with fearsome warriors who will defend you from the bandits who roam the countrysideâ:
https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/
But this âfeudal securityâ offers a terrible temptation to the lords of these fortresses, because once you are inside those walls, the fortress can easily be converted to a prison: these companies can abuse you with impunity, for so long as the cost of the abuse is less than the cost of the things you must give up when you leave.
The tale that companies block you from overriding their decisions is for your own good was always dubious, because companies simply canât anticipate all the ways their products will fail you. No design team knows as much about your moment-to-moment struggles as you do.
But even where companies are sincere in their desire to be the most benevolent of dictators, the gun on the mantelpiece in Act I is destined to go off by Act III: eventually, the temptation to profit by hurting you will overpower whatever âcorporate ethicsâ once stayed the hand of the techno-feudalist who rules over your fortress. Under feudal security, you are one lapse in corporate leadership from your protector turning into your tormentor.
When Apple launched the Ipad 12 years ago, I published an editorial entitled âWhy I wonât buy an iPad (and think you shouldnât, either),â in which I predicted that app stores would inevitable be turned against users:
https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/
Today, Apple bans apps if they âuseâŠa third-party serviceâ unless they âare specifically permitted to do so under the serviceâs terms of use.â In other words, Apple specifically prohibits developers from offering tools that displease other companiesâ shareholders, no matter whether this pleases Apple customers:
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#intellectual-property
Note that clause 5.2.2 of Appleâs developer agreement doesnât say âYou mustnât violate a legally enforceable term of service.â It just says, âThou shalt not violate a EULA.â EULAs are garbage-novellas of impenetrable legalese, larded with unenforceable and unconscionable terms.
Apple sometimes will displease other companies on your behalf. For example, it instituted a one-click anti-tracking setting for Ios that cost Facebook $10 billion in a matter of months:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html
But Apple also has big plans to expand its margins by growing its own advertising network. When Apple customers choose ad-blockers that block Appleâs ads, will Apple permit it?
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/
The problem with app stores isnât whether your computing experience is âcuratedââââthat is, whether entities you trust can produce collections of software they vouch for. The problem is when you canât choose someone elseâââwhen leaving a platform involves high switching costs, whether thatâs having to replace hardware, buy new media, or say goodbye to your friends, customers, community or family.
When a company can leverage its claims to protecting you to protect itself from youâââfrom choices you might make that ultimately undermine its shareholders interests, even if they protect your own interestsâââit would be pretty goddamned naive to expect it to do otherwise.
More and more of our tools are now digital tools, whether weâre talking about social media or cars, tractors or games consoles, toothbrushes or ovens:
https://www.hln.be/economie/gentse-foodboxleverancier-mealhero-failliet-klanten-weten-van-niets~a3139f52/
And more and more, those digital tools look more like apps than Cuecats, with companies leveraging âIPâ to let them control who can compete with themâââand how. Indeed, browsers are becoming more app-like, rather than the other way around.
Back in 2017, the W3C took the unprecedented step of publishing a DRM standard despite this standard not having anything like the consensus that is the norm for W3C publications, and the W3C rejected a proposal to protect people who reverse-engineered that standard to add accessibility features or correct privacy defects:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership
And while weâre seeing remarkable progress on Right to Repair and other policies that allow the users of technology to override the choices of vendors, thereâs another strong regulatory current that embraces companiesâ ability to control their users, in the hopes that these big companies will police their users to prevent bad stuff, from controversial measures like filtering for copyright infringement to more widely supported ideas like blocking child sex abuse material (CSAM, AKA âchild pornâ).
There are two problems with this. First, if we tell companies they must control their users (that is, block them from running plugins, mods, skins, filters, etc) then we canât tell them that they must not control their users. It comes down to whether you want to make Mark Zuckerberg better at his job, or whether you want to abolish the job of âMark Zuckerberg.â
https://doctorow.medium.com/unspeakable-8c7bbd4974bc
Then thereâs the other problemâââthe gun on the mantelpiece problem. If we give big companies the power to control their users, they will face enormous internal pressure to abuse that power. This isnât a hypothetical risk: Facebookâs top executives stand accused of accepting bribes from Onlyfans in exchange for adding performers who left Onlyfans to a terrorist watchlist, which meant they couldnât use other platforms:
https://gizmodo.com/clegg-meta-executives-identified-in-onlyfans-bribery-su-1849649270
Iâm not a fan of terrorist watchlists, for obvious reasons. But letting Facebook manage the terrorist watchlist was clearly a mistake. But Facebookâs status as a âtrusted reporterâ grows directly out of Facebookâs good work on moderation. The lesson is the same as the one with Apple and the adsâââjust because the company sometimes acts in our interests, it doesnât follow that we should always trust them to do so.
Back to Shannon Vallorâs question about the origins of âmodern techâs long spiral into user manipulation and surveillanceâ and how that âkilled off the joy that people like me used to feel about new techâ; and Wil Wheatonâs âconstant dread of âHow will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity.â
Tech leaders didnât get stupider or crueler since those halcyon days. The tech industry was and is filled with people who made their bones building weapons of mass destruction for the military-industrial complex; IBM, the company that gave us the PC, built the tabulating machines for Nazi concentration camps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
We didnât replace tech investors and leaders with worse peopleâââwe have the same kinds of people but we let them get away with more. We let them buy up all their competitors. We let them use the law to lock out competitors they couldnât buy, including those who would offer their customers tools to lower their switching costs and block abusive anti-features.
We decided to create âFelony Contempt of Business Model,â and let the creators of the next Cuecat reach beyond the walls of their corporate headquarters and into the homes of their customers, the offices of their competitors, and the handful of giant tech sites that control our online discourse, to reach into those places and strangle anything that interfered with their commercial desires.
Thatâs why plans to impose interoperability on tech giants are so excitingâââbecause the problem with Facebook isnât âthe people I want to speak to are all gathered in one convenient place,â no more than the problem with app stores isnât âthese companies generally have good judgment about which apps I want to use.â
The problem is that when those companies donât have your back, you have to pay a blisteringly high price to leave their walled gardens. Thatâs where interop comes in. Think of how an interoperable Facebook could let you leave behind Zuckerbergâs dominion without forswearing access to the people who matter to you:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Cuecats were cool. The people who made them were assholes. Interop meant that you could get the cool gadget and tell the assholes to fuck off. We have lost the ability to do so, little by little, for decades, and thatâs why a new technology that seems cool no longer excites. Thatâs why we feel dreadâââbecause we know that a cool technology is just bait to lure us into a prison that masquerades as a fortress.
Image:
Jerry Whiting (modified)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CueCat_barcode_scanner.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
[Image ID: A Cuecat scanner with a bundled cable and PS/2 adapter; it resembles a plastic cat and also, slightly, a sex toy. It is posed on a Matrix movie âcode waterfallâ background and limned by a green âsupernovaâ light effect.]
