- cross-posted to:
- anarchism@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- anarchism@slrpnk.net
So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.
But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That’s a weird way to punish America! It’s like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “Ouch!”
And it’s indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.
But there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?
If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company’s shareholders mad.
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Please do. Let this cess pool rot. Its not salvagable.
The only real solution isn’t reactivating roombas but cutting dependence on US goods and markets. The US market is highly desirable from a purely population angle but isn’t essential today. Moving to an alternative to the dollar, expanding production of essential goods to other nations, etc.
If you really want to spite the US use retaliatory IP lifting. “Ok, US IP protections are now invalid.”
Just declare any simple script that does a wget on copyrighted information to be “AI”. AI is immune from copyright infringement it seems.
In light of recent events, other countries should simply stop recognizing US intellectual property claims as valid.
In light of recent events, other countries should drag Trump to the ICC and thence straight to the gallows.
LOL have you never heard of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Protection_Act
Oh and guess who isn’t part of the ICC?
I’d like to see these “other countries” drag Trump there. How? With what? This isn’t Star Trek, you can’t beam him mid-poop to the Netherlands.
If we can’t do it legally, we’ll just have to do it illegally. What’s important is that it gets done.
Yes but they’d rather make money with the usa then do the smart thing
They’re making way less than they could be because of lopsided “free” trade agreements.
Still more than if they had to also implement some of the stuff
Iirc this is an actual (as in offical and described in legislation) lever the EU can pull, unfortunately regardless of public sentiment many of its leaders are beholden US economic interests.
They are becoming less beholden by the day for reasons Doctorow laid out.
Like, all IP? That seems very dangerous.
Dangerous to whom?
EU tech companies keep letting themselves be sold to US tech companies, or re-HQing to America.
Capitalism can’t solve problems created by capitalism. The largest companies will always gobble up the competition, eliminating the alternatives.
Moving HQ to murica is usually done because of venture capitalists having it as a requirement for funding. If EU based startups want to be successful without it they require either funding from european VCs or figure out how to do compete without VC money.
Competition and markets authorities are empowered to block acquisitions and it’s often high profile when it’s done due to an unfriendly power like china trying to do it. The USA is now a more aggressive power than china so acquisitions by US companies ought to be blocked by default.
This may mean less money flows from the US into the European acquired companies, but tough shit, this is too important.
We need to realise that the status quo is not what we had two years ago, because Trump changed it. He’s making the whole world poorer, and we can choose whether that poverty affects us monetarily (because we need to put money into replacing US tech) or more fundamentally - e.g. if he uses dependence on US tech to exert political control over European nations.
Agreed. I like the spirit of Switzerland’s “public money, public code” initiative. If they could do that for infrastructure, that’d be awesome.
I like the DisEnshittification. Actually why not call it Deshittification ? Just like DeGoogle.
Coincidentally, Doctorow is the one who coined ‘enshittification’ originally.
“Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.” Be-fucking-Cause they voted for Trump and they do not give one single fuck about how it affects anybody. But now they are like I didn’t vote for this bullshit. Yes they did. They just thought it would not touch them.
That fails to acknowledge the force of the argument which is that tariffs affect innocent people.
Point is, it’s too important. If you fight back when you’re invaded, innocent people (like your own soldiers) will be killed. Consequences will be worse if you just roll over though.
Maximum pressure needs to be exerted on the US, through retaliatory tariffs, ceasing to recognise American intellectual property, and sanctions.
Farmer was a pretty bad example. American farmers have it coming to them and do deserve a punch in the face for overwhelmingly voting Trump.
They’ve had several punches in the face from tariffs, but keep insisting they walked into doors and it’s all fine and still love him.
Soybean farming involves huge corporations exploiting small producers.
Very much agree with this argument though it’s not new. IP law has always been a secret weapon against US which is mostly a service economy country.
EU just seems too weak to take advantage of this though
Give him the Sudetenland, I’m sure he’ll stop after that. Appeasement always works!! /s
Something not often discussed is the possibility that the UK and France might not have been capable of stopping Hitler through military force at that time.
I mean even later even after building up a bit more, France got curb stomped and the UK barely got out of Dunkirk. And that happened while Germany was occupying Czechoslovakia and part of Poland which took significant military resources from fighting the UK and France. There’s a very real possibility that standing up to Hitler over Czechoslovakia would have gone even worse than standing up to Hitler over Poland. Sure the Soviets might have helped at that time, but their military wasn’t even capable of taking on Finland at that point.
At any rate at the present time, the world needs to build up it’s military power before standing up to Trump. We’re saying it’s because we’re fulfilling NATO obligations (like Trump told us to!) or getting ready to fight Russia maybe. But military build up is happening but it’s not going to happen overnight.
It’s obviously the right idea, Cory’s been saying it to anyone who will listen for months if not years, but it would depend on governments doing something. How can it possibly happen then, if there aren’t powerful corporate interests hiring lobbyists to say it in a way that politicians can hear?
I’m not sure how far you read, but he argues that it would only take one country’s legislature to set this off and reap the rewards of nurturing a fully open alternative to the US big-tech stack.
With the US pissing off pretty much everyone else and losing allies by the day, it will only be a matter of time before the doors are blown open on this.
It’s a speech. He has a hypothesis at best, and expertly lays out one way for it to go.
If one country did it, they’d try to give them the Venezuela treatment.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the overall concept has incredible legs, but the finer details of tit-for-tat and retaliation aren’t quite fleshed out.
It’s why things have to happen in a certain order. You can’t do the more aggressive economic actions against the US until after certain conditions are in place. First you need to cut dependency on the US for anything essential. Food and strategic resources like aluminum, steel, and energy. You also need a strong enough military to make any US military action costly for the US.
Once those conditions are met you can take further action. Hitting the US tech sector is more of a middle option. Manipulating the US bond market is the nuclear option.
Currently these options aren’t on the table since the US can kick out the legs of that table if you tried to play those cards. But many things are quietly changing around the world while Americans are obsessing over Epstein files, Trump playing battleship, and Hegseth and Rubio fucking around with tinpot South American dictators.
Be the change you want to see: start lobbying government for it.
“Say it in a way politicians can hear” means bribes. You got politician bribe money sitting around? I don’t.
This is just defeatism. Not all politicians are corrupt. And even corrupt ones also have to respond to other kinds of pressures, if those are strong enough. Defeatism is what makes democracy die.
It surprises me from time to time just how cheap some of these politicians sell out for. If I could get together with my neighbours all contributing $50 and buy a legislator or two, we could probably get funds for a stadium.
“The former Royal Bank of Scotland submitter who was offered sushi rolls in exchange for helping try to rig the Libor rate-setting process has been banned by the UK’s financial regulator.” https://www.ft.com/content/23868e36-0095-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62
Without being able to read that article, I choose to interpret that quote as if a renown personal chef was on offer for a number of years to provide world class sushi rolls whenever the mood strikes.
It’s worse than that. It was one batch of rolls, specifically yesterday’s rolls.
Read the Bloomberg Chats That Got a Former RBS Libor Trader Paul White Banned for Life - Business Insider – https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-that-got-a-former-rbs-libor-trader-paul-white-banned-for-life-2016-4
People can get arrogant enough to think that they won’t get caught.
Emmanuel Clase was a Major League pitcher making ~$5M per year. He got caught intentionally flubbing pitches for $5000. 5M a year gone now to get a few thousand dollars. Why would someone be that stupid?
Because they don’t think they’ll get caught.
No please, I have already had enough irritating news this year. I wish to live in the funnier version I created where Mr Ping stays within earshot of this trader guy and serves up some delicious rolls on request.
That’s because that’s actually just the down payment. The recurring comes from board seats and roles in name only later down the line.
Who wants a stadium, though? Those things are a blight.
Oh I hadn’t meant an actual stadium, moreso stadium-level money for public works That said, there are stadiums that are defacto multipurpose community centres. Those aren’t half bad.
You and a bunch of other people together do. You’re not changing anything on your own.
That’s the type of mentality that keeps individuals from even attempting to build a large gathering of like-minded people to actually push for a change. Yeah, I’m not doing any kind of damage by myself, but that should not keep me from trying, and asking others to also try. Fuck that defeatist mindset.
Get together with others and try, is my point. A current main issue is lack of attempts to coordinate efforts, and people talking like everything is an individual effort.
Yeah, he’s been doing this stuff since I first read about him in 2010 or so; yet now, thanks to Trump lol, things look differently.
like ‘dark web’ except not public. fuck them lemmings. ‘meat with eyes’ - lewis black
the unshitification privateers. subscription cleanse. oh wait it’s just them again
Moreover, Trump introduced major tariff exceptions for some countries. For example, the integrated North American auto industry would have been devastated if he hadn’t decided on 6 March to exempt goods from Mexico and Canada from the 25% levy that had gone into effect two days earlier. Goods from these countries now face no penalty if they are imported under the US-Mexico-Canada agreement.
This softening was predictable. US business would have suffered enormously if Trump had fully implemented the tariffs he had announced, let alone threatened, so it was never likely that he would persist with the worst of them. Trump regularly stakes out extreme negotiating positions, only to back down when the heat is on, even if he hasn’t gotten what he demanded from the other side. In fact, investors’ assumption that “Trump always chickens out” – known as Taco – has become a taunt. But when a madman threatens Armageddon, it is foolhardy to goad him into following through. The tariffs Trump has implemented are still very high.
Why haven’t Trump’s tariffs crashed the US economy?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/29/donald-trump-tariffs-us-economy-inflation-employment-2026Tarrifing in response is effective long-term, i think. Short-term, it’s a blow to your economy, but the businesses will reorientate to different pastures, because the US is more expensive.
Edit: ok, maybe that’s a bit naive.
Well it’s not like there is whole lot of stuff shipped from US to EU. The trick is, digital services sure would not be tarrifed (and if they are, users would still have no choice but to pay).
EU members are hooked on tax revenue from US big tech as well. Ireland, for example, is host to Meta offices and datacenters which are huge for revenue and jobs. As an outside observer, this seems to be a major source of tension and debate within that country. Meta just has way too much leverage. It remains to be seen whether the EU as a whole or individual members will have the foresight to seize upon the opportunity to foster an open, alternative tech ecosystem as Doctorow suggests. But, like he says, it will only take one to blow the doors open.
Think about it. Why does Meta spend the money on that HQ in Ireland? Surely we all know it’s not them trying to make a country better by investing in it because they are such kind souls, right? So, yeah Ireland benefits from it, and that’s a good thing, but they also have that leverage to say ‘thanks for the money, and you can keep profiting here, as long as you’re not breaking any of our laws’. I don’t know, it’s way more complicated than that, but politicians need tk grow some balls.
I’ve read his treatise and I liked it a lot, but it appears to be full of wishful thinking. “Disenshittification?” Oh my sweet summer child, enshittification not only keeps getting worse, it seems to be accelerating. Also thinking the world would somehow, magically, unite against Trumpism, that there are cracks starting to form in the American digital hegemony… I don’t share this optimism at all.
Just to check, you know that this ‘sweet summer child’ is the one who came up with ‘enshittification’ in the first place? He’s been on this topic for decades now. But you think that your drive-by comment is smarter than the man who’s been sniffing out hidden trends all his career and was consistently ahead of the curve.
You don’t think Linux is a disenshittification solution for PCs?
Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. You want to run a custom android os, perhaps security and encryption oriented, or perhaps drm defeating is your goal. That all becomes possible if it’s simply legal to do whatever you want with your devices and your software.
Disenshittification isn’t something you wait for companies to do, it’s something you take for yourself! And it’s a whole lot easier to organize and do that if it’s officially legal.
