Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Cory Doctorow on the possibility of freeing the internet from American control Summary Cory Doctorow gave a great talk at 39C3 on the possibility of seizing the moment of American shredding of trade norms to enable the world to break free of the hobbles that American big tech has placed on technology around the world by enforcing trade policies. He presents a real hope that this could help de-enshittify parts of the internet back to some semblance of its old self, and to restore effective ownership of tech and its benefits to individuals rather than megacorporations.   Quotes From the video description: Quote Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America's trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning "adversarial interoperability," America handcuffed the world's technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it's time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world's hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!   My thoughts This is a small, surprising ray of hope coming from a surprising direction, and mostly under the radar. It seems to me it is something that the LTT audience, and especially the WAN show audience, should be enthused about. Doctorow raises a serious hope that something good can be salvaged from the wreckage being created across the world by the current American administration, and that includes specifically rescuing the right to repair, and the right to jailbreak, from their lockdown under worldwide laws put in place to appease big tech and other near-monopoly corporations (John Deere is also in the headlights here). The icing on this cake would be that an effective coalition of governments abandoning the rules currently enforced by American trade representatives might actually scare the tech monopolists enough to stop backing Trump in order to rescue their businesses. But I'm not holding my breath on that one.   Sources video of the talk:    transcript: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition