WEBVTT 00:26.590 --> 00:32.230 The joke about the podium here is that this was the only non-USBC compatible podium they 00:32.230 --> 00:32.830 could find for me. 00:33.570 --> 00:37.970 So as many of you know, I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 00:38.830 --> 00:41.410 Next month I start my 25th year there. 00:41.970 --> 00:46.330 And I know I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there is no group anywhere 00:46.330 --> 00:51.090 on earth that does the work of the caliber that EFF does for our digital rights. 00:51.410 --> 00:56.090 And I'm an activist there, and so for the past quarter of a century, my job has been 00:56.090 --> 00:59.410 fighting something that I call the War on General Purpose Computing. 00:59.750 --> 01:05.370 Now if you were at 28C3 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title. 01:06.030 --> 01:11.670 Those are the trenches I have been in with EFF since my very first day on the job. 01:11.790 --> 01:16.390 That was a day when I flew to Los Angeles and crashed the inaugural meeting of something 01:16.390 --> 01:19.610 called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. 01:19.610 --> 01:25.790 This was an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters, and cable operators, 01:26.090 --> 01:31.710 and they'd gathered at the invitation of this lavishly corrupt American congressman, a man 01:31.710 --> 01:37.030 called Billy Tozin, who had promised them a new regulation, a rule that would ban the 01:37.030 --> 01:44.310 manufacture and sale of digital computers unless they had been damaged to specifications 01:44.310 --> 01:51.370 set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block the execution of code that 01:51.370 --> 01:54.510 their shareholders did not want to see executed in the wild. 01:55.110 --> 01:59.810 Now that rule was called the Broadcast Flag, and it actually did pass through the American 01:59.810 --> 02:00.930 regulatory system. 02:01.330 --> 02:05.490 The Federal Communications Commission passed it as a rule, so we sued the FCC. 02:05.950 --> 02:07.190 We overturned the rule. 02:08.030 --> 02:08.930 So thank you. 02:09.050 --> 02:09.250 Yeah. 02:09.490 --> 02:10.190 It was a good day. 02:10.190 --> 02:10.250 It was a good day. 02:13.790 --> 02:19.090 So we won that skirmish, but my friends, I have very bad news, although it's not news 02:19.090 --> 02:20.270 that will surprise you. 02:20.710 --> 02:27.750 Despite wins like that important one, we have been losing the war on general-purpose computers 02:28.220 --> 02:29.690 for the past 25 years. 02:30.380 --> 02:35.390 But that's why I've come to Hamburg today, because after decades of throwing myself against 02:35.390 --> 02:42.110 a locked door, the door that leads to a new good Internet, one that delivers the technological 02:42.110 --> 02:47.450 self-determination of the old good Internet and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our 02:47.450 --> 02:52.150 normie friends come and join the party, that door has been unlocked. 02:52.630 --> 02:55.030 Today, it is open a crack. 02:55.270 --> 02:57.110 I mean, it's open a crack. 02:57.530 --> 02:58.910 And here's the weirdest part. 02:59.710 --> 03:02.490 The guy who unlocked that door is Donald Trump. 03:03.380 --> 03:09.770 Now, he didn't do it on purpose, but thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are 03:09.770 --> 03:16.150 on the cusp of the post-American Internet, a new digital nervous system for the 21st 03:16.150 --> 03:22.010 century, an Internet that we can build together without worrying about America's demands or 03:22.010 --> 03:22.690 its priorities. 03:23.210 --> 03:24.410 Now, don't get me wrong. 03:24.490 --> 03:27.270 I am not happy about Trump or his policies. 03:27.950 --> 03:33.110 But as my friend Joey DeVilla likes to say, when life gives you SARS, you make SARS-CoV-2. 03:34.150 --> 03:39.330 The only thing worse than living through all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America 03:39.330 --> 03:43.250 and the world would be going through all of that and not salvaging anything of value 03:43.250 --> 03:43.670 from it. 03:43.910 --> 03:48.250 So that's what I'm here to talk to you about today, the post-American Internet that we 03:48.250 --> 03:55.030 can wrestle away from Trump's chaos, the post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has 03:55.030 --> 03:59.510 mobilized new coalition partners to fight on our side. 04:00.510 --> 04:02.530 Now, in politics, coalitions are everything. 04:02.890 --> 04:07.050 Anytime you see a group of people suddenly make a breakthrough in making a change that 04:07.050 --> 04:11.610 they failed to make for years and years, it's a sure bet that they have found coalition 04:11.610 --> 04:16.770 partners, new allies who don't want all the same things that they want, but want enough 04:16.770 --> 04:19.250 of the same things to fight on their side. 04:19.890 --> 04:21.230 And that's where Trump came from. 04:21.230 --> 04:27.030 He's at the front of a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, 04:27.830 --> 04:32.090 conspiratorialists, imperialists, and of course self-described libertarians who've got such 04:32.090 --> 04:37.590 a scorching case of low-tax brainworms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd take five 04:37.590 --> 04:38.810 cents off their tax bill. 04:39.810 --> 04:41.530 And that's what's got me... 04:41.530 --> 04:41.750 Yeah. 04:45.890 --> 04:52.690 And that's what's got me so excited, is that we've got a new coalition in the war on general-purpose 04:52.690 --> 04:56.910 computers, a coalition that includes digital rights activists who've been on the lines 04:56.910 --> 05:03.290 for decades, but also now people who want to turn America's tech trillions into billions 05:03.290 --> 05:09.890 for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about 05:09.890 --> 05:11.070 digital sovereignty. 05:11.970 --> 05:18.270 Now my thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition, which is good news, because for 05:18.270 --> 05:21.610 the first time in decades, I think victory is in our grasp. 05:22.370 --> 05:23.390 So let me explain. 05:24.210 --> 05:29.310 Fourteen years ago, I stood in front of this group and I talked about the war on general-purpose 05:29.310 --> 05:29.750 computing. 05:29.870 --> 05:34.130 Now that's my snappy name for the fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures 05:34.130 --> 05:36.890 for this fight is something called anti-circumvention law. 05:36.890 --> 05:42.830 Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product 05:42.830 --> 05:46.330 or service unless the manufacturer approves of your modification. 05:46.950 --> 05:53.570 And crucially, this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law. 05:54.270 --> 06:00.270 Anti-circumvention law, it originates in the USA with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium 06:00.270 --> 06:06.170 Copyright Act of 1998, which establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence 06:06.170 --> 06:13.350 and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work. 06:14.010 --> 06:19.630 So practically speaking, if you design a service or device with even the flimsiest of systems 06:19.630 --> 06:24.290 to prevent modification of its application code or its firmware, it is a felony. 06:24.450 --> 06:28.490 It is a jailable felony to modify that code or that firmware. 06:29.150 --> 06:34.290 It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass the access control, which 06:34.290 --> 06:40.350 means that pen testers who even describe how they access a device or a system face 06:40.350 --> 06:41.310 criminal liability. 06:42.150 --> 06:48.090 And so anti-circumvention law allows any manufacturer to trivially turn their product into a no-go 06:48.090 --> 06:53.910 zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of disclosing 06:53.910 --> 06:58.190 its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects. 06:58.190 --> 07:03.690 This is a law that Jay Freeman quite rightly calls felony contempt of business model. 07:04.310 --> 07:08.590 Now anti-circumvention law became the law of the land in America in 1998 when Bill Clinton 07:08.590 --> 07:10.490 signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 07:10.990 --> 07:15.670 But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, I want you to know this. 07:16.230 --> 07:21.990 Every other country in the world has passed a law just like this one in the years since. 07:22.450 --> 07:26.830 Now here in the EU, we got it through Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. 07:27.190 --> 07:31.830 Now it makes a certain kind of twisted sense for America to enact a law like this. 07:31.930 --> 07:36.510 After all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies 07:36.510 --> 07:37.350 in the world. 07:37.710 --> 07:43.070 By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America 07:43.070 --> 07:47.730 enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on its stock exchanges. 07:48.770 --> 07:52.230 But why would Europe pass a law like this? 07:52.310 --> 07:55.670 After all, Europe is a massive tech importer. 07:56.050 --> 08:01.550 By extending legal protections to tech companies that want to steal European users' data and 08:01.550 --> 08:06.930 money, the EU facilitates a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America. 08:07.790 --> 08:09.590 So why would Europe do this? 08:10.190 --> 08:14.150 Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which all the other countries came to 08:14.150 --> 08:18.950 enact their anti-circumvention laws, and maybe you'll spot a pattern that answers the question. 08:20.130 --> 08:24.650 Australia got its anti-circumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which 08:24.650 --> 08:27.270 obliges Australia to enact anti-circumvention law. 08:27.870 --> 08:33.430 Mexico and Canada got their anti-circumvention law through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade 08:33.430 --> 08:37.530 Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anti-circumvention laws. 08:38.090 --> 08:44.110 Andean nations like Chile got their anti-circumvention laws through US bilateral free trade agreements, 08:44.210 --> 08:46.830 which obliged them to enact anti-circumvention laws. 08:47.250 --> 08:51.830 And the Central American nations got their anti-circumvention laws through CAFTA, the 08:51.830 --> 08:57.590 Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA, which obliges them to enact anti-circumvention 08:57.590 --> 08:57.890 laws. 08:57.970 --> 08:59.590 Now, I assume you spotted the pattern by now. 08:59.850 --> 09:04.630 The US trade representative has forced every one of America's trading partners to enact 09:04.630 --> 09:10.210 an anti-circumvention law to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and 09:10.210 --> 09:11.830 money by American tech firms. 09:12.690 --> 09:15.130 But of course, this only raises a further question. 09:15.650 --> 09:20.830 Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its people's money 09:20.830 --> 09:26.970 and data and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that prevents 09:26.970 --> 09:27.990 this theft? 09:28.590 --> 09:31.550 Well, here's an anecdote that might unravel the riddle. 09:31.990 --> 09:36.830 Many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban took over Hungary, I used to guest lecture 09:36.830 --> 09:41.310 at a PhD program in political science at the Central European University in Budapest. 09:41.850 --> 09:46.890 And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students on anti-circumvention law, one of them approached 09:46.890 --> 09:47.130 me. 09:47.130 --> 09:51.790 Now, they had been the information minister of a Central American country during the CAFTA 09:51.790 --> 09:57.470 negotiations, and one day they'd received a call from the trade negotiator calling from 09:57.470 --> 09:59.330 the CAFTA trade negotiating room. 09:59.730 --> 10:04.250 And the negotiator said, you know how you told me not to give the Americans anti-circumvention 10:04.250 --> 10:05.770 law under any circumstances? 10:06.550 --> 10:12.010 Well, they've told me they will not take our coffee unless we give them anti-circumvention. 10:12.390 --> 10:15.150 And I'm sorry, we just can't lose the US coffee market. 10:15.150 --> 10:18.710 Our economy could collapse, so we're going to get anti-circumvention. 10:18.970 --> 10:19.590 I'm really sorry. 10:20.490 --> 10:21.010 That's it. 10:21.430 --> 10:26.350 That's why every government in the world allowed US big tech companies to declare open season 10:26.350 --> 10:28.910 on their own people's private data and ready cash. 10:29.430 --> 10:31.410 The alternative was tariffs. 10:32.030 --> 10:35.650 Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we have tariffs now. 10:37.010 --> 10:41.110 I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders 10:41.110 --> 10:45.970 and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. 10:55.620 --> 10:57.500 So happy Liberation Day? 10:58.720 --> 11:02.960 So far, every country in the world has come up with one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. 11:03.060 --> 11:07.800 The first one is, give Trump everything he asked for except Greenland and hope he stops 11:07.800 --> 11:08.620 being mad at you. 11:08.960 --> 11:10.960 And this has been an absolute failure. 11:11.400 --> 11:13.440 Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. 11:13.620 --> 11:15.420 He'll take fucking Greenland. 11:16.460 --> 11:23.420 Capitulation has been a failure, but so has been the other tactic, the retaliatory tariff. 11:23.820 --> 11:25.980 Now, that's what we have done in Canada. 11:26.140 --> 11:33.020 Like all the best Americans, I am Canadian, and it's a cheap laugh. 11:34.660 --> 11:41.640 Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things 11:41.640 --> 11:43.820 that we buy more expensive. 11:43.820 --> 11:46.400 Now, this is a very weird way to punish America. 11:46.800 --> 11:50.700 It is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs 11:50.700 --> 11:51.800 neighbor says, ouch. 11:52.540 --> 11:54.700 And worse, it's indiscriminate. 11:55.020 --> 11:59.220 Why whack some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs 11:59.220 --> 12:00.120 on his soybeans? 12:00.500 --> 12:02.640 That guy never did anything bad to Canada. 12:03.220 --> 12:08.720 But there is a third possible response to tariffs, one that is just sitting there begging 12:08.720 --> 12:09.540 to be tried. 12:10.420 --> 12:13.400 What about repealing anti-circumvention law? 12:14.240 --> 12:19.060 Now, if you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that repeals its anti-circumvention 12:19.060 --> 12:26.260 law, you can go into business making the disenchantificatory products that plug into America's defective 12:26.260 --> 12:32.540 tech exports and allow the people who own and use those products to use them in ways 12:32.540 --> 12:36.540 that are good for them, even if those ways are bad for the shareholders of the company 12:36.540 --> 12:37.440 that made the product. 12:38.040 --> 12:39.280 Think of John Deere tractors. 12:40.060 --> 12:44.200 When a farmer's John Deere tractor, thank you, there's going to be a lot more of that. 12:45.220 --> 12:49.700 When a John Deere tractor, when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected 12:49.700 --> 12:53.800 to repair it, to swap in the new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's mouthing. 12:54.240 --> 12:59.420 But that tractor will not recognize the new part and will not start working again, not 12:59.420 --> 13:05.100 until the farmer spends $200 on a service call out from an official John Deere service rep 13:05.100 --> 13:10.540 whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console to initialize the part 13:10.540 --> 13:12.820 and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit. 13:13.740 --> 13:19.080 Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anti-circumvention law, meaning 13:19.080 --> 13:24.220 farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage because their own government 13:24.220 --> 13:29.220 will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables this parts pairing check in 13:29.220 --> 13:31.060 this American product. 13:31.740 --> 13:34.220 So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11? 13:34.220 --> 13:36.880 The Copyright Modernization Act of 2012. 13:37.020 --> 13:38.660 That's our anti-circumvention law. 13:39.140 --> 13:43.300 Well, then a company like Honeybee, a Canadian company that already makes tractor front ends 13:43.300 --> 13:47.940 and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science graduates, I'm 13:47.940 --> 13:53.780 a proud U of W dropout, and it could put them to work jailbreaking John Deere's defective 13:53.780 --> 13:58.420 tractor firmware, and then they could offer it to everyone in the world. 13:58.580 --> 14:02.660 They could sell that crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, 14:02.660 --> 14:07.180 including that poor American farmer whose soybeans were currently tariffing. 14:07.660 --> 14:11.960 It is hard to convey just how much money is on the table here. 14:12.180 --> 14:13.500 I'm going to use just one example. 14:14.300 --> 14:15.440 Apple's App Store. 14:16.300 --> 14:22.300 Apple forces all app vendors into using its own payment processor and charges them a 30% 14:22.300 --> 14:26.160 commission on every euro spent inside of every app. 14:26.400 --> 14:27.520 30%! 14:27.520 --> 14:35.000 That is such a profitable business that Apple is making $100 billion a year on it. 14:35.680 --> 14:39.820 Now, if the EU were to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks 14:39.820 --> 14:44.160 in Finland could reverse engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a little hardware dongle 14:44.160 --> 14:48.020 that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and they could sell 14:48.020 --> 14:52.460 that dongle along with the infrastructure to operate an app store to anyone in the world 14:52.460 --> 14:57.340 who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors. 14:58.000 --> 15:04.320 Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer 15:04.320 --> 15:09.320 on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store, offer them a 15:09.320 --> 15:15.140 90% discount on payments, and still make $10 billion a year. 15:15.920 --> 15:20.700 Now, maybe Finland's never going to see another Nokia, but Nokia, that's a hard business to 15:20.700 --> 15:20.960 be in. 15:21.000 --> 15:23.680 You've got to make hardware, and that's expensive and risky. 15:24.020 --> 15:29.480 But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple has to incur the expense and the risk 15:29.480 --> 15:34.200 of making and fielding hardware, and those Finnish geeks get to cream off the $100 billion 15:34.920 --> 15:40.260 digital tax that Apple imposes on the world in an act of disgusting rip-off rent-seeking. 15:40.900 --> 15:45.220 As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, your margin is my opportunity. 15:45.720 --> 15:49.400 Now, with these guys, it's always disruption for thee and never for me. 15:49.400 --> 15:51.220 When they do it to us, it's progress. 15:51.420 --> 15:53.240 If we do it back to them, it's piracy. 15:53.660 --> 15:56.300 And of course, every pirate wants to be an admiral. 15:57.420 --> 15:58.400 Well, screw that. 15:59.040 --> 16:01.380 Let's move fast and break Tim Cook's things. 16:01.760 --> 16:04.140 Let's move fast and break King's. 16:09.600 --> 16:14.340 Now, it's funny, I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative, 16:14.640 --> 16:19.620 and in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight, but I did develop a kind of grudging respect 16:19.620 --> 16:25.380 for the skill with which the USTR had bound the entire world to a system of trade that 16:25.380 --> 16:30.600 conferred parochial advantage to America and its tech firms, giving them free reign to 16:30.600 --> 16:32.580 loot the world's data and economies. 16:33.020 --> 16:39.220 So it has been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global 16:39.220 --> 16:44.840 system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to 16:44.840 --> 16:47.220 protect the interests of America's capital class. 16:47.740 --> 16:50.080 I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen. 16:50.520 --> 16:55.960 I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough, but I'll take this massive own 16:55.960 --> 16:57.820 goal if Trump insists. 16:58.140 --> 17:04.620 I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist. 17:04.940 --> 17:06.560 I mean, is Trump a comrade? 17:08.000 --> 17:12.300 Now, you may have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to 17:12.300 --> 17:15.220 open up its App Store, and this has been a complete failure. 17:15.220 --> 17:20.280 Here in the EU, when they hit Apple with enforcement under the Digital Markets Act, Apple's response 17:20.280 --> 17:24.940 was to say, sure, we'll allow third-party apps, but only allow them to sell the apps 17:24.940 --> 17:25.720 that we permit. 17:26.220 --> 17:30.500 And also, those stores can use their own payment processors, but we're going to charge so many 17:30.500 --> 17:34.440 junk fees if they do that it'll be more expensive than using our payment processor. 17:34.740 --> 17:39.240 And if we think an Apple user's phone has left the EU for 21 days, we'll delete all of its 17:39.240 --> 17:39.880 apps and data. 17:40.640 --> 17:45.920 When the EU explained that this was not going to satisfy the DMA's terms, Apple threatened 17:45.920 --> 17:46.980 to pull out of the EU. 17:47.500 --> 17:52.500 And then once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen legal objections 17:52.500 --> 17:57.220 to this order, hoping to tie this up in court for a decade the way Google and Meta did with 17:57.220 --> 17:58.020 the GDPR. 17:58.840 --> 18:04.780 Now, it's not clear whether the EU can force Apple to write code to open up the iOS platform 18:04.780 --> 18:07.080 for alternative app stores and payment methods. 18:07.080 --> 18:14.800 But there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability any time it wants. 18:15.320 --> 18:23.120 The EU can decide not to allow Apple to use the EU's courts to shut down European companies 18:23.120 --> 18:29.380 that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs, and creative 18:29.380 --> 18:33.020 workers from Apple's rip-off by legalizing jailbreaks. 18:33.720 --> 18:46.510 All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive and in so doing, strip 18:46.510 --> 18:52.250 Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's $100 billion 18:52.690 --> 18:54.670 annual tax on the world's digital economy. 18:55.570 --> 19:01.170 The EU company that figures out how to reliably break iPhones will have customers all over 19:01.170 --> 19:06.770 the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto power over which 19:06.770 --> 19:11.590 apps can run on your phone to suck 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple 19:11.590 --> 19:16.430 also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers 19:16.430 --> 19:18.910 from Trump's fascist takeover. 19:19.510 --> 19:23.870 Back in October, Apple kicked an app called Iceblock out of the App Store. 19:24.270 --> 19:30.070 Now, this is an app that warns you if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking 19:30.070 --> 19:32.610 to grab you off the street and send you to a gulag. 19:32.610 --> 19:39.210 Apple internally classified ICE officers as a protected class and then declared that Iceblock 19:39.210 --> 19:42.310 infringed on the rights of those Pura Bessette ICE goons. 19:43.230 --> 19:48.350 And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who fled the USA 19:49.230 --> 19:54.070 this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children in 19:54.070 --> 19:55.070 a concentration camp. 19:55.570 --> 20:00.510 These skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who would like 20:00.510 --> 20:04.830 to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, 20:05.130 --> 20:07.010 not by how many Trump coins they buy. 20:07.870 --> 20:10.530 Apple's margin could be their opportunity. 20:11.510 --> 20:15.950 Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable 20:15.950 --> 20:21.970 companies in America is a much better response to Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs. 20:22.410 --> 20:24.630 For one thing, it's a targeted response. 20:25.150 --> 20:30.290 Go after big tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs 20:30.290 --> 20:36.190 each paid a million dollars out of their own pocket to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais. 20:36.670 --> 20:41.610 Raiding big tech's margins, it's not an attack on the American people, nor on the 20:41.610 --> 20:44.250 small American businesses that are ripped off by big tech. 20:44.530 --> 20:49.590 It is a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world. 20:49.770 --> 20:54.770 It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these rip-off companies. 20:55.270 --> 20:57.490 It beats the shit... 20:57.490 --> 20:58.070 Thank you. 21:00.950 --> 21:01.830 Thank you. 21:02.110 --> 21:07.650 It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers 21:07.650 --> 21:13.270 in the hope that someday a sector that has lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective 21:13.270 --> 21:18.170 chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs someday that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the 21:18.170 --> 21:19.370 minute they turn them on. 21:26.300 --> 21:29.780 So here's a new ally in the war on general purpose computing. 21:29.780 --> 21:35.060 Businesses and technologists who would want to make billions of dollars raiding big tech's 21:35.060 --> 21:39.940 margins, and policy makers who want their country to become the dis- and shitification 21:39.940 --> 21:40.720 nation. 21:40.920 --> 21:45.640 The country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jail 21:45.640 --> 21:50.780 breaks from other countries, but rather the country that makes billions of dollars selling 21:50.780 --> 21:54.680 that privacy and pocketbook defending tech to the rest of the world. 21:55.320 --> 21:59.680 Now that's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies that Trump has pushed 21:59.680 --> 22:00.480 into our camp. 22:00.860 --> 22:04.220 There is another powerful ally waiting in the wings. 22:05.300 --> 22:10.040 You remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest 22:10.040 --> 22:15.060 warrant for the Genocide-era Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the 22:15.060 --> 22:19.840 ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, and 22:19.840 --> 22:20.440 its calendars? 22:20.900 --> 22:23.340 Now, Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC. 22:23.520 --> 22:28.060 They say it's just a coincidence, but when it comes to a he said, Clippy said between 22:28.060 --> 22:32.940 the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists at Microsoft, I know who I believe. 22:34.160 --> 22:39.780 This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese 22:39.780 --> 22:42.980 companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms infrastructure. 22:43.700 --> 22:47.780 Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business, every 22:47.780 --> 22:52.620 household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based cloud service. 22:53.180 --> 22:57.740 The handful of US big tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are 22:57.740 --> 23:02.380 all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump administration, and that means that Trump 23:02.380 --> 23:04.540 can brick an entire nation. 23:05.140 --> 23:10.100 The attack on the ICC was an act of cyber warfare, like the Russian hackers who shut 23:10.100 --> 23:14.980 down Ukrainian power generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack 23:14.980 --> 23:16.540 Outlook to brick the ICC. 23:17.000 --> 23:18.560 Microsoft owns Outlook. 23:19.300 --> 23:25.320 Under the US Cloud Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose 23:25.320 --> 23:30.560 any of its users' data, including the data of foreign governments, and this is true no 23:30.560 --> 23:32.260 matter where the data is stored. 23:32.800 --> 23:38.320 Last July, Anton Carnio, the director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, told 23:38.320 --> 23:43.360 a French government inquiry that he, quote, couldn't guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't 23:43.360 --> 23:47.940 hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in 23:47.940 --> 23:49.180 a European data center. 23:49.820 --> 23:54.440 Under the Cloud Act, the US government can slap gag orders on companies that it forces 23:54.440 --> 23:59.640 to cough up this data, so there would be no way to know if this is happening or if 23:59.640 --> 24:00.520 it's already happened. 24:01.080 --> 24:03.240 It doesn't stop at administrative tools either. 24:03.980 --> 24:08.360 Do you remember back in 2022 when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of 24:08.360 --> 24:12.440 John Deere tractors from Ukraine, and all those tractors showed up in Chechnya? 24:12.860 --> 24:16.920 The John Deere company pushed a kill signal over the air to those tractors and bricked 24:16.920 --> 24:17.060 them. 24:17.860 --> 24:23.600 John Deere is every bit as vulnerable to the Trump administration as Microsoft is, and 24:23.600 --> 24:25.460 they can brick most of the tractors in the world. 24:25.740 --> 24:30.220 And the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number two company 24:30.220 --> 24:35.940 in the ag tech cartel, also an American company just as vulnerable to political attacks from 24:35.940 --> 24:36.640 the US government. 24:37.320 --> 24:39.980 Now, none of this is news to global leaders. 24:40.460 --> 24:44.760 Even before Microsoft and Trump bricked the ICC, they were trying to figure out a path 24:44.760 --> 24:46.200 to digital sovereignty. 24:46.580 --> 24:51.220 But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over the past 11 months 24:51.220 --> 24:55.120 has turned digital sovereignty from a nice to have to a must have. 24:55.860 --> 25:00.080 So finally, we're starting to see some movement, like Eurostack, a really cool project to 25:00.080 --> 25:05.300 clone the functionality of US big tech silos in free and open source software and build 25:05.300 --> 25:07.860 EU-based data centers to run this code on. 25:08.280 --> 25:10.260 But the Eurostack is heading for a crisis. 25:10.820 --> 25:16.020 It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate 25:16.020 --> 25:21.620 the useful features of big tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability 25:21.620 --> 25:26.940 tools that allow for the mass export of millions of documents, sensitive data structures, and 25:26.940 --> 25:27.680 edit histories. 25:28.160 --> 25:33.020 We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability 25:33.020 --> 25:39.340 that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions still housed in US data centers 25:39.340 --> 25:40.360 and US clouds. 25:40.360 --> 25:47.060 Because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers 25:47.060 --> 25:48.180 from their products. 25:48.660 --> 25:53.720 Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS app store 25:53.720 --> 26:00.480 and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing, and malicious compliance 26:00.480 --> 26:04.260 that they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of businesses 26:04.260 --> 26:09.940 and governments in a 27-nation block of 500 million affluent consumers. 26:10.540 --> 26:15.820 Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the 26:15.820 --> 26:17.920 cooperation of American big tech companies. 26:18.380 --> 26:23.320 Otherwise, you're just building housing in East Berlin for people who live in West Berlin. 26:23.620 --> 26:25.880 It doesn't matter how great that housing is. 26:26.160 --> 26:28.980 No one's going to move into it until you tear down the wall. 26:29.780 --> 26:34.480 Step one of tearing down the wall is killing anti-circumvention law so that we can run 26:34.480 --> 26:39.420 virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware, and generally 26:39.420 --> 26:41.160 seize the means of computation. 26:49.810 --> 26:54.090 So this is the third block in the disenchantification army. 26:54.250 --> 26:58.550 Not just digital rights hippies like me, not just entrepreneurs and economic development 26:58.550 --> 27:02.170 wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions 27:02.170 --> 27:08.350 into European billions, but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their 27:08.350 --> 27:13.010 extreme concern about their country's reliance on America's platforms that have been shown 27:13.010 --> 27:14.910 to be totally unreliable. 27:15.810 --> 27:20.390 This is how we're going to get a post-American internet with an unstoppable coalition of 27:20.390 --> 27:23.270 activists, entrepreneurs, and NATSEC hawks. 27:23.810 --> 27:25.770 This has been a long time coming. 27:26.410 --> 27:31.070 Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy 27:31.070 --> 27:35.650 and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political 27:35.650 --> 27:39.670 scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the underground empire. 27:39.670 --> 27:45.770 But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions, 27:46.170 --> 27:48.810 and that process only accelerated under Trump. 27:49.550 --> 27:51.370 Take trans-oceanic fiber cables. 27:51.670 --> 27:56.750 The way trans-oceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall 27:56.750 --> 27:59.630 in the USA, and those interconnections happen there. 28:00.110 --> 28:05.250 Now there's a good case for this hub-and-spoke topology, especially compared to establishing 28:05.250 --> 28:07.710 direct links from every country to every country. 28:07.710 --> 28:12.530 That's an order n-squared problem, and directly linking each of the Earth's 205 28:12.530 --> 28:17.150 countries with each other would require 20,910 fiber links. 28:17.670 --> 28:23.130 But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US 28:23.130 --> 28:25.510 doesn't take advantage of its centrality. 28:26.090 --> 28:29.790 And while many people worried what the US could do with the head ends of the world's 28:29.790 --> 28:35.730 global fiber runs, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's 28:35.730 --> 28:41.490 nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents 28:41.490 --> 28:46.030 showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable 28:46.030 --> 28:50.230 reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub. 28:50.890 --> 28:51.870 But it's not just fiber. 28:52.270 --> 28:54.130 The world does business in dollars. 28:54.710 --> 28:58.750 Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source 28:58.750 --> 28:59.690 of foreign reserves. 28:59.690 --> 29:05.250 But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars' worth of 29:05.250 --> 29:09.910 Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign government of Argentina had declared bankruptcy. 29:10.710 --> 29:15.490 They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets 29:15.490 --> 29:20.730 to them, to make good on loans that those debt collectors had never issued, but instead 29:20.730 --> 29:22.350 had bought up for pennies on the dollar. 29:23.050 --> 29:27.090 At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could 29:27.090 --> 29:30.250 not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves. 29:30.810 --> 29:32.390 But what else were they going to use? 29:32.770 --> 29:35.830 Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued. 29:36.350 --> 29:41.470 But then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT 29:41.470 --> 29:42.990 system for dollar clearing. 29:43.710 --> 29:47.690 Now, dollar clearing is when goods like oil are priced in dollars, so that buyers only 29:47.690 --> 29:51.570 need to find someone who will trade their currency for dollars, which they can then 29:51.570 --> 29:53.050 swap for any commodity in the world. 29:53.330 --> 29:56.250 Now, again, there's a sound, logical case for dollar clearing. 29:56.250 --> 30:02.490 It's just not practical to establish deep, liquid, pairwise trading markets for all of 30:02.490 --> 30:04.010 the world's nearly 200 currencies. 30:04.130 --> 30:05.810 It's another order n-squared problem. 30:06.230 --> 30:09.110 But this only works if the dollar is a neutral platform. 30:09.790 --> 30:14.110 Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy, whether or not you agree 30:14.110 --> 30:18.490 with those policies, it's not a neutral platform anymore, and the world has to go looking 30:18.490 --> 30:19.150 for an alternative. 30:19.890 --> 30:23.670 Now, no one knows what that alternative is going to be, just as no one knows what configuration 30:23.670 --> 30:25.590 the world's fiber links are going to end up taking. 30:25.590 --> 30:30.290 There are kilometers of new fiber being stretched across the open floor, and countries are 30:30.290 --> 30:34.870 trying out some pretty improbable gambits for dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia, which 30:34.870 --> 30:37.970 just revalued its national debt in Chinese-run Minbi. 30:38.630 --> 30:42.910 But without a clear alternative to America's unshittified platforms, the post-American 30:42.910 --> 30:45.210 century is off to a bit of a rocky start. 30:45.630 --> 30:49.370 But there is one post-American system that's easy to imagine. 30:49.630 --> 30:55.210 The project to rip out all the cloud-connected, back-doored, untrustworthy black boxes that 30:55.210 --> 31:00.450 power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles, and our tractors, and replace 31:00.450 --> 31:06.150 them with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code. 31:06.530 --> 31:11.710 This project is the only project that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being 31:11.710 --> 31:17.150 paralyzed by the exponential crises of scale that everyone else in the post-American world 31:17.150 --> 31:17.830 are confronting. 31:18.210 --> 31:23.850 That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution, like the Eurostack 31:23.850 --> 31:29.430 services, can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged, and improved by institutions in 31:29.430 --> 31:30.190 every country. 31:30.750 --> 31:31.670 It's a commons. 31:31.950 --> 31:36.250 It's more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal, and international, 31:36.670 --> 31:37.470 and collaborative. 31:37.670 --> 31:42.750 After all, we don't have dueling Western and Chinese standards for structural engineering. 31:43.170 --> 31:46.830 Rather, we have universal principles for making sure our buildings don't fall down, and 31:46.830 --> 31:48.490 we adapt them to local circumstances. 31:49.090 --> 31:53.770 We would not tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and 31:53.770 --> 31:59.330 we should not tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, 31:59.630 --> 32:06.310 pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and governments working. 32:10.950 --> 32:11.750 Thank you. 32:13.030 --> 32:16.470 The thing is, the thing is, software is not an asset. 32:16.770 --> 32:17.930 Software is a liability. 32:17.930 --> 32:23.750 Now, the capabilities that software delivers, automation, production, analysis, administration, 32:24.130 --> 32:25.230 those are assets. 32:25.570 --> 32:28.210 But the software itself, that is a liability. 32:28.850 --> 32:33.630 Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software, upstream of it, downstream of 32:33.630 --> 32:39.250 it, and adjacent to it, is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies, even 32:39.250 --> 32:41.430 in systems that have performed well for years. 32:42.550 --> 32:47.750 Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software 32:47.750 --> 32:52.270 imposes on makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players. 32:52.890 --> 32:56.490 Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. 32:56.710 --> 33:02.270 They really do think that software is an asset, which is why they're so fucking horny to have 33:02.270 --> 33:05.450 chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. 33:06.110 --> 33:10.410 This is why they think that it's good that they have a chatbot that, quote, produces a 33:10.410 --> 33:12.830 thousand times more code than a human programmer. 33:12.830 --> 33:18.230 Producing code that isn't designed for legibility or maintainability, that is optimized, rather, 33:18.370 --> 33:22.290 for the speed of production, that's just incurring tech debt at scale. 33:23.090 --> 33:24.390 Now, this... 33:24.390 --> 33:24.950 Thank you. 33:28.730 --> 33:32.130 This is a neat encapsulation of the entire AI story. 33:32.350 --> 33:37.470 The chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace 33:37.470 --> 33:39.810 you with a chatbot that can't do your job. 33:39.810 --> 33:45.090 Your boss is such an easy mark for a chatbot hustler because your boss hates you. 33:45.890 --> 33:52.850 In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stop coming to work, the business 33:52.850 --> 33:54.150 would chug along just fine. 33:54.190 --> 33:58.170 But if the workers stopped showing up, the business would ground to a halt. 34:03.450 --> 34:07.290 Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really they fear 34:07.290 --> 34:11.050 that they are strapped in the back seat playing with a Fisher-Price steering wheel. 34:12.110 --> 34:18.030 For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drivetrain. 34:18.350 --> 34:22.210 It is the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers. 34:22.870 --> 34:26.990 When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood with the striking writers, a writer told me 34:26.990 --> 34:31.490 that you prompt AI in exactly the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's 34:31.490 --> 34:31.650 room. 34:32.530 --> 34:37.090 Make me ET, but make it about a dog and give it a love interest and a car chase in the 34:37.090 --> 34:37.710 second act. 34:38.270 --> 34:42.930 Now, you say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell 34:42.930 --> 34:47.290 you why don't you fuck off back to your office and make a spreadsheet you knit with the grown-ups 34:47.290 --> 34:48.410 are here making a movie. 34:54.130 --> 34:59.050 Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly 34:59.050 --> 34:59.730 to your spec. 34:59.730 --> 35:05.290 The fact that that script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect 35:05.290 --> 35:08.450 of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit. 35:09.370 --> 35:13.890 AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a 35:13.890 --> 35:17.230 hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders. 35:17.750 --> 35:21.650 When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American has three 35:21.650 --> 35:25.870 friends but wants 15 friends and that he was going to solve this by giving us chatbots, 35:25.870 --> 35:30.410 we dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who doesn't understand what friendship 35:30.410 --> 35:34.190 is, but the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem. 35:34.830 --> 35:39.290 Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms and 35:39.290 --> 35:41.990 thus how many revenue-generating ads he gets to show you. 35:42.410 --> 35:46.930 Your friends stubbornly refuse to organise their relationships with you to the benefit 35:46.930 --> 35:48.290 of Mark Zuckerberg's shareholders. 35:48.990 --> 35:54.210 So Mark Zuckerberg's over there in Menlo Park furiously fantasising about replacing your 35:54.210 --> 35:58.750 friends with chatbots because that way he can finally realise the dream of a social 35:58.750 --> 36:00.290 network with no socialising. 36:05.870 --> 36:09.110 Rich, powerful people are at root solipsists. 36:09.230 --> 36:14.110 The only way to amass billions of dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole 36:14.110 --> 36:17.870 populations and the only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that is to 36:17.870 --> 36:22.590 convince yourself that those people aren't real, that in some important sense they don't 36:22.590 --> 36:23.090 exist. 36:23.090 --> 36:27.310 Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an NPC. 36:28.090 --> 36:33.230 Or those effective altruists who claim the moral high ground by saying that they cared 36:33.230 --> 36:38.610 about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years 36:38.610 --> 36:42.410 at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today. 36:42.730 --> 36:47.030 Or think of how Donald Trump fired all the US government scientists and then announced 36:47.030 --> 36:52.810 the Genesis programme, declaring that the US was about to begin generating annual moonshot 36:52.810 --> 36:55.090 scale breakthroughs with chatbots. 36:55.870 --> 36:57.410 It's science without scientists. 36:58.030 --> 37:02.490 Chatbots can't do science but from Trump's perspective they're still better than scientists 37:02.490 --> 37:07.190 because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare into an eclipse, not to inject bleach. 37:07.470 --> 37:11.090 A chatbot will never tell him that trans people exist or that climate change is real. 37:12.050 --> 37:17.990 Powerful people are suckers for AI because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people, 37:18.310 --> 37:22.790 just a boss and a computer and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how 37:22.790 --> 37:25.350 things and tell you no. 37:26.410 --> 37:32.030 AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective 37:32.030 --> 37:37.150 spicy autocomplete and lose money at a rate not seen in living memory. 37:37.850 --> 37:41.550 Now, compare AI with the project of building a post-American internet. 37:41.910 --> 37:47.570 This is a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide 37:47.570 --> 37:51.570 them among the world's entrepreneurs for whom they represent untold profits and the world's 37:51.570 --> 37:56.730 technology users for whom they represent untold savings, all the while building resiliency 37:56.730 --> 37:58.090 and digital sovereignty. 37:58.870 --> 38:01.690 Now, I imagine some of you are feeling a little cynical right now. 38:01.790 --> 38:08.390 After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual, incompetent deference 38:08.390 --> 38:13.230 to the United States and an inability to act even when the need was dire. 38:13.830 --> 38:18.090 If your leaders couldn't act decisively to take on the climate emergency, what hope do 38:18.090 --> 38:20.490 we have of them taking this moment seriously? 38:21.810 --> 38:23.990 Crises precipitate change. 38:24.950 --> 38:30.450 Remember when another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine and Europe began to 38:30.450 --> 38:32.430 experience a dire energy shortage. 38:32.990 --> 38:37.730 In three short years, this continent's solar uptake has skyrocketed and the EU went from 38:37.730 --> 38:42.810 being 15 years behind its energy transition to a decade ahead of schedule. 38:47.990 --> 38:51.750 Because when you're shivering in the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth 38:51.750 --> 38:54.910 it suddenly become existential battles that you cannot afford to lose. 38:55.090 --> 38:59.110 Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic tamper tantrum 38:59.110 --> 39:01.850 at the thought of solar panels hanging from their other neighbor's balcony. 39:02.170 --> 39:05.730 But when it's winter and there's no rushing gas and you're shivering in the dark, that 39:05.730 --> 39:09.570 person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all 39:09.570 --> 39:11.210 corners, and shove it up their ass. 39:15.210 --> 39:20.450 Besides, it doesn't have to be Europe that leads the charge on a post-American internet 39:20.450 --> 39:21.990 by repealing anti-circumvention. 39:22.430 --> 39:23.970 Any country can do it. 39:24.290 --> 39:27.950 And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking 39:27.950 --> 39:29.670 tools to everyone else in the world. 39:29.830 --> 39:32.090 It gets to be the dis- and shitification nation. 39:32.530 --> 39:36.410 And everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US 39:36.410 --> 39:38.790 tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder. 39:39.430 --> 39:41.650 Just one country has to break the consensus. 39:42.190 --> 39:45.750 And the case for every country doing that is the strongest it's ever been. 39:46.370 --> 39:50.630 It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing medical, 39:50.890 --> 39:52.810 food, and cash supports if they pissed off America. 39:52.970 --> 39:55.730 But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter. 39:56.810 --> 40:01.070 Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by 40:01.070 --> 40:04.090 decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies. 40:04.090 --> 40:09.170 Today, the US is in the third of its K-shaped recoveries. 40:09.530 --> 40:13.490 This is an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. 40:13.910 --> 40:18.090 For a generation, America has papered over that growing inequality with easy credit, 40:18.430 --> 40:23.170 with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages. 40:23.550 --> 40:25.570 So long as they could all afford to keep buying, 40:25.930 --> 40:29.030 other countries had to care about America as an export market. 40:29.030 --> 40:33.490 But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans 40:33.490 --> 40:36.010 struggling to buy groceries and other necessities, 40:36.390 --> 40:40.910 carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education, and medical expenses 40:40.910 --> 40:45.110 that they can't hope to pay down thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation. 40:45.670 --> 40:48.690 The Trump administration, meanwhile, has firmly sided with debt collectors, 40:48.850 --> 40:50.510 price gougers, and rent extractors. 40:50.890 --> 40:54.490 Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like RealPage. 40:54.790 --> 40:58.290 He restarted debt payments for 8 million American student borrowers 40:58.290 --> 41:01.350 and killed a plan to make life-saving drugs a little cheaper, 41:01.750 --> 41:05.630 leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world. 41:06.170 --> 41:10.690 Now, every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that does not go to consumption. 41:11.370 --> 41:13.430 And as more and more Americans slip into poverty, 41:13.770 --> 41:17.550 the US is gutting programs that spend money on their behalf, 41:17.730 --> 41:22.030 like SNAP, the food assistance program that helps an ever-larger slice of Americans 41:22.030 --> 41:23.530 stave off their hunger. 41:24.290 --> 41:27.450 America is chasing the world-without-people dream. 41:27.450 --> 41:30.330 Where working people have nothing, spend nothing, 41:30.590 --> 41:34.210 and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money 41:34.210 --> 41:37.470 into the stock market, shit coins, or gambling sites. 41:37.890 --> 41:38.850 But I repeat myself. 41:40.030 --> 41:43.530 Even the US military, long a sacrosanct institution, 41:43.950 --> 41:47.250 has been kneecapped to enhance rent-seekers. 41:47.950 --> 41:50.770 Congress just killed a military right-to-repair law, 41:50.970 --> 41:55.190 so now US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition 41:55.190 --> 41:57.970 of shipping generators and Jeeps back to America 41:57.970 --> 42:01.250 to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup 42:01.250 --> 42:04.190 because the Pentagon is still going to routinely sign contracts 42:04.190 --> 42:06.890 that ban them from teaching a Marine to fix an engine. 42:07.930 --> 42:10.870 Now, that post-American world, it's coming on fast. 42:11.530 --> 42:14.010 As we repeal our anti-circumvention laws, 42:14.130 --> 42:16.010 we don't have to care about what America thinks. 42:16.070 --> 42:19.210 We don't have to care about their tariffs because they're whacking us with tariffs. 42:19.650 --> 42:22.310 And the only people left in America who can afford to buy things 42:22.310 --> 42:25.110 are rich people who just don't buy enough stuff. 42:25.430 --> 42:28.350 There are only so many Lambos and Sub-Zero freezers 42:28.350 --> 42:31.310 that even the most guillotinable plute can usefully own. 42:35.830 --> 42:39.170 But what if European firms want to go on 42:39.170 --> 42:41.250 taking advantage of Europe's anti-circumvention laws? 42:41.350 --> 42:42.430 Well, there's good news there too. 42:42.530 --> 42:46.050 Good news because the EU firms that rely on anti-circumvention 42:46.050 --> 42:49.910 are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable. 42:49.910 --> 42:53.870 Anti-circumvention is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate. 42:54.350 --> 42:56.870 By imposing legal liability on reverse engineers 42:56.870 --> 42:58.750 who might have discovered the lethal crime, 42:59.150 --> 43:02.090 Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect 43:02.090 --> 43:04.470 and thousands of Europeans died every year. 43:05.150 --> 43:09.450 Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate, 43:09.850 --> 43:12.390 sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers. 43:12.930 --> 43:17.490 From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car, 43:17.490 --> 43:20.450 only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine 43:20.450 --> 43:21.830 if you buy a monthly subscription, 43:22.430 --> 43:25.130 to BMW that rents you an automated system 43:25.130 --> 43:28.990 that automatically dims your high beams if there's oncoming traffic. 43:29.650 --> 43:32.530 Legalized jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe 43:32.530 --> 43:34.870 could unlock those subscriptions for one price 43:34.870 --> 43:38.110 and not share any of that money with BMW or Mercedes. 43:39.170 --> 43:42.350 Then, yeah, it's good, but let me go, let me cook. 43:43.910 --> 43:47.270 Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends to be Irish. 43:47.910 --> 43:50.650 Medtronic is the world's largest medtech company, 43:50.810 --> 43:52.250 having purchased all of its competitors 43:52.250 --> 43:55.150 and then undertaken the largest tax inversion in history, 43:55.530 --> 43:58.650 selling itself to an Irish firm in order to magic the profits 43:58.650 --> 44:02.470 into a state of untaxable grace floating somewhere over the Irish Sea. 44:03.250 --> 44:06.510 Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators 44:06.510 --> 44:08.810 and it booby traps them in exactly the same way 44:08.810 --> 44:10.970 that John Deere booby traps its tractors. 44:11.510 --> 44:15.550 After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator, 44:15.550 --> 44:19.230 the ventilator's central computing unit will not recognize the part 44:19.230 --> 44:21.570 until it completes a cryptographic handshake 44:21.570 --> 44:24.410 proving that an authorized Medtronic technician 44:24.410 --> 44:26.730 was paid hundreds of euros to carry out a repair 44:26.730 --> 44:29.610 that the hospital's own technician probably performed. 44:30.390 --> 44:33.570 It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals 44:33.570 --> 44:35.270 every time a ventilator breaks. 44:35.550 --> 44:37.750 Now, this would be bad enough, but during the COVID lockdowns, 44:37.750 --> 44:39.530 when every ventilator was desperately needed 44:39.530 --> 44:40.990 and the planes weren't flying, 44:41.410 --> 44:43.750 there was no way for Medtronic technicians 44:43.750 --> 44:46.250 to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs. 44:46.890 --> 44:47.710 It was lethal. 44:48.090 --> 44:48.970 It killed people. 44:49.870 --> 44:53.250 There's one more European company that relies on anti-circumvention 44:53.250 --> 44:56.070 that I want to bring up here because they're all friends of CCC. 44:56.550 --> 44:58.950 I'm talking about the Polish train company, Nuvag. 45:06.240 --> 45:09.080 Nuvag sabotages its locomotives, booby trapping them 45:09.080 --> 45:11.460 so that if they sense they've been taken to a rival service yard, 45:11.680 --> 45:13.000 the train bricks itself. 45:13.580 --> 45:17.240 When the train operator calls Nuvag about this mysterious problem, 45:17.240 --> 45:20.460 the company helpfully remotes into the locomotive's computers 45:20.460 --> 45:22.300 to perform diagnostics, 45:22.580 --> 45:24.920 which is just sending an on-bricking command to the vehicle 45:24.920 --> 45:26.660 for which they charge 20,000 euros. 45:27.340 --> 45:28.980 Now, last year, Polish hackers 45:28.980 --> 45:31.420 from the security research firm Dragon Sector 45:31.420 --> 45:35.160 presented their research on this disgusting racket in this hall, 45:35.620 --> 45:39.500 and now they are being sued by Nuvag under anti-circumvention law 45:39.500 --> 45:42.020 for making absolutely true disclosures 45:42.020 --> 45:44.520 about Nuvag's deliberately defective products. 45:45.050 --> 45:48.360 So these are Europe's stakeholders for anti-circumvention law. 45:48.460 --> 45:49.700 There's the dieselgate killers, 45:50.200 --> 45:53.160 the car companies who want to rent you your accelerator and your high beams, 45:53.440 --> 45:57.200 the medtech giant that bricked all the ventilators in the world during COVID, 45:57.760 --> 46:00.320 and the company that tied Poland to the train tracks. 46:00.920 --> 46:03.980 Now, I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels 46:03.980 --> 46:05.280 as they show up and cry, 46:05.560 --> 46:08.080 won't someone think of the poor train saboteurs? 46:09.520 --> 46:11.580 The insidification of technology, 46:11.740 --> 46:14.200 the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on 46:14.200 --> 46:15.240 has many causes. 46:15.760 --> 46:18.340 The collapse of competition, regulatory capture, 46:18.660 --> 46:20.360 the smashing of the power of tech workers, 46:20.460 --> 46:22.920 but most of all, insidification is the result 46:22.920 --> 46:25.800 of anti-circumvention law's ban on interoperability. 46:26.360 --> 46:27.580 By blocking interop, 46:27.780 --> 46:29.860 by declaring war on the general purpose computer, 46:30.280 --> 46:33.640 our policymakers created an insidigenic environment 46:33.640 --> 46:36.080 that rewarded companies for being shitty 46:36.080 --> 46:38.220 and ushered in the insidicine, 46:38.540 --> 46:40.380 the era in which everything turns to shit. 46:41.360 --> 46:43.760 So it's time to call time on insidification. 46:43.760 --> 46:46.040 It's time to seize the means of computation. 46:46.560 --> 46:49.400 Let's build drop-in free open alternatives 46:49.400 --> 46:51.780 to the services and firmware we rely on. 46:52.060 --> 46:54.060 Let us end the era of silos. 46:54.680 --> 46:56.720 I mean, isn't it fucking weird 46:56.720 --> 46:59.660 that you have to care which network someone is using 46:59.660 --> 47:00.880 if you want to talk to them 47:00.880 --> 47:03.620 instead of just deciding who you want to talk to? 47:04.040 --> 47:05.200 The fact that you have to figure out 47:05.200 --> 47:07.180 whether the discussion you want to join is on Twitter 47:07.180 --> 47:09.000 or Blue Sky, Mastodon or Instagram, 47:09.240 --> 47:11.800 that is just the most prodigy AOL, 47:11.800 --> 47:14.100 CompuServe-ass way of running a digital world. 47:14.220 --> 47:17.600 I mean, 1985 called and it wants its walled gardens back. 47:24.140 --> 47:26.340 Powerful allies are joining our side 47:26.340 --> 47:28.220 in the war on general purpose computation. 47:28.620 --> 47:30.080 It's not just people like us 47:30.080 --> 47:32.200 who've been fighting this for the whole goddamn century, 47:32.380 --> 47:34.520 but also countries that want to convert 47:34.520 --> 47:36.820 America's tech-hoarded billions into fuel 47:36.820 --> 47:38.300 for a single-use rocket 47:38.300 --> 47:41.620 to boost their national tech sector into a stable orbit. 47:41.880 --> 47:43.600 And it's the national security hawks 47:43.600 --> 47:44.780 who are worried about Trump 47:44.780 --> 47:46.660 breaking their ministries or their tractors, 47:46.660 --> 47:48.840 but who are also worried with just cause 47:48.840 --> 47:49.820 about Xi Jinping 47:49.820 --> 47:52.220 breaking their solar panels or their batteries. 47:52.600 --> 47:54.580 Because after all, the post-American internet, 47:54.980 --> 47:57.000 it's also a post-Chinese internet. 47:57.740 --> 48:00.420 Nothing should be designed to be field updatable 48:00.420 --> 48:01.820 without the user's permission. 48:02.400 --> 48:04.600 Nothing critical should be a black box. 48:05.360 --> 48:07.320 Now, like I said at the start of this talk, 48:07.540 --> 48:09.580 I've been doing this work for 24 years 48:09.580 --> 48:11.080 at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 48:11.480 --> 48:12.600 throwing myself at a door 48:12.600 --> 48:14.280 that was double-locked and dead-bolted, 48:14.500 --> 48:16.080 and now that door is open a crack 48:16.080 --> 48:18.200 and goddamn it, I am hopeful. 48:18.820 --> 48:20.580 Not optimistic. Fuck optimism. 48:20.920 --> 48:22.700 Optimism is the idea that things will get better 48:22.700 --> 48:23.700 no matter what we do. 48:24.040 --> 48:25.260 I know what we do matters. 48:25.860 --> 48:28.080 Hope is the belief that we can improve things, 48:28.380 --> 48:29.640 even in small ways, 48:29.900 --> 48:31.680 and that we will then ascend a gradient 48:31.680 --> 48:33.240 towards the world that we want 48:33.240 --> 48:35.100 and attain higher vantage points 48:35.100 --> 48:36.860 from which new courses of action, 48:37.220 --> 48:39.180 invisible to us here at this lower elevation, 48:39.380 --> 48:40.040 will be revealed. 48:40.880 --> 48:42.180 Hope is a discipline. 48:42.520 --> 48:45.080 It requires that you not give in to despair. 48:45.080 --> 48:47.180 So I'm here to tell you, don't despair. 48:47.940 --> 48:50.080 All decade, all over the world, 48:50.520 --> 48:51.740 countries have taken up arms 48:51.740 --> 48:53.560 against concentrated corporate power. 48:54.020 --> 48:56.480 We have had big, muscular antitrust attacks 48:56.480 --> 48:57.660 on big corporations. 48:57.920 --> 48:59.160 In the US, under Biden, 48:59.220 --> 49:01.220 but also under the first Trump administration. 49:01.580 --> 49:03.460 In Canada, in the UK, in the EU, 49:03.580 --> 49:05.440 in member states like Germany, France, and Spain, 49:05.760 --> 49:09.120 in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, 49:09.380 --> 49:10.600 and in China. 49:11.720 --> 49:14.840 This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs. 49:14.840 --> 49:15.780 All over the world, 49:16.180 --> 49:18.160 governments are declaring war on monopolies, 49:18.280 --> 49:20.360 the source of billionaires' wealth and power. 49:21.200 --> 49:23.760 Now, even the most forceful wind is invisible. 49:24.200 --> 49:25.960 We only see it by its effects. 49:26.380 --> 49:27.400 And what we're seeing here 49:27.400 --> 49:29.240 is that whenever a politician 49:29.240 --> 49:32.060 bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail, 49:32.340 --> 49:34.360 no matter where in the world that politician is, 49:34.500 --> 49:35.960 that sail fills with wind 49:35.960 --> 49:37.540 that propels the policy 49:37.540 --> 49:40.460 in ways we have not seen for generations. 49:41.260 --> 49:43.540 The long becalming of the fight 49:43.540 --> 49:45.520 over corporate power has ended, 49:46.080 --> 49:48.160 and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing. 49:48.800 --> 49:51.040 It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada, 49:51.420 --> 49:53.540 or in South Korea, or Japan, or China, 49:53.740 --> 49:54.980 or Australia, or Brazil, 49:55.160 --> 49:56.320 but also in America. 49:56.480 --> 49:58.840 Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying 49:58.840 --> 49:59.920 as things are in America, 50:00.180 --> 50:01.460 the country has experienced 50:02.020 --> 50:03.580 and continues to experience 50:03.580 --> 50:06.440 a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions 50:06.440 --> 50:08.660 at the state, local, and even the federal level. 50:09.200 --> 50:11.740 And never forget that the post-American Internet 50:11.740 --> 50:13.200 will be good for Americans, 50:13.720 --> 50:17.500 because in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America, 50:17.800 --> 50:19.580 the trillions that American tech companies 50:19.580 --> 50:20.220 loot from the world 50:20.220 --> 50:22.560 do not trickle down to everyday Americans. 50:22.880 --> 50:24.920 The average American has a portfolio of assets 50:24.920 --> 50:25.980 that rounds to zero, 50:26.400 --> 50:28.520 and that includes stock in U.S. big tech companies. 50:28.880 --> 50:31.400 The average American is not a shareholder in big tech. 50:31.500 --> 50:33.040 They're a victim of big tech. 50:33.740 --> 50:35.540 Liberating the world from U.S. big tech 50:35.540 --> 50:38.740 is also liberating America from U.S. big tech. 50:39.080 --> 50:41.460 Now, that's been the EFF's mission for 35 years. 50:41.460 --> 50:43.660 It's been what I've done there for 25 years. 50:43.800 --> 50:45.040 And if you want to get involved in the fight, 50:45.120 --> 50:45.860 and I hope you do, 50:46.380 --> 50:47.480 it can be your mission, too. 50:48.000 --> 50:49.100 You can join EFF, 50:49.640 --> 50:51.360 and you can join groups in your own country, 50:51.620 --> 50:53.120 like NetzPolitik here in Germany, 50:53.440 --> 50:55.020 the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, 50:55.300 --> 50:56.740 La Quadrature de Net in France, 50:56.980 --> 50:58.200 the Open Rights Group in the UK, 50:58.700 --> 51:00.080 EF Finland, ISOC Bulgaria, 51:00.300 --> 51:01.280 ExNet, DFRI, 51:01.420 --> 51:02.920 Quintessence, Bits of Freedom, 51:03.260 --> 51:04.680 Open Media, FSFE, 51:04.880 --> 51:07.420 or any of dozens of organizations around the world. 51:07.520 --> 51:09.100 The door is open a crack. 51:09.480 --> 51:10.500 The wind is blowing. 51:10.500 --> 51:13.100 The post-American internet is upon us. 51:13.320 --> 51:14.900 It's a new good internet 51:14.900 --> 51:17.400 that delivers the technological self-determination 51:17.400 --> 51:18.960 of the old good internet 51:18.960 --> 51:21.480 and the ease of use of Web 2.0 51:21.480 --> 51:23.380 that let our normie friends use it, too. 51:23.940 --> 51:26.540 And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there, 51:26.960 --> 51:27.940 because it's going to be great. 51:28.620 --> 51:29.040 Thank you. 51:47.220 --> 51:48.400 Thank you very much. 51:49.640 --> 51:50.880 So, thank you. 51:51.580 --> 51:52.080 Thank you. 51:53.360 --> 51:53.880 Thanks. 51:54.280 --> 51:55.460 So, we've got a little... 51:55.460 --> 51:55.940 Thank you. 51:56.860 --> 51:57.380 Enough! 51:58.200 --> 51:58.720 Thank you. 52:01.920 --> 52:02.540 Thank you. 52:03.700 --> 52:05.840 So, we have a little time for questions. 52:06.080 --> 52:07.960 A good question has one part, not two. 52:08.400 --> 52:09.900 It's not more of a comment than a question. 52:10.280 --> 52:12.000 And almost with that exception, it's not about AI. 52:14.060 --> 52:15.820 All right, Thomas, I'll let you run the Q&A. 52:16.400 --> 52:17.800 Thank you. Thank you, Corey, so much. 52:18.040 --> 52:19.440 So, we do have time for questions. 52:20.180 --> 52:22.040 Let's start over there, microphone number one. 52:22.560 --> 52:24.920 Hi, thank you so much for here. 52:24.920 --> 52:25.540 Here. 52:26.400 --> 52:30.900 So, I wondered how do we convince governments like in Germany 52:31.580 --> 52:37.300 where we rely so much on export in our country 52:37.300 --> 52:41.280 and also on import of technology in general? 52:42.140 --> 52:43.680 Yeah, so how do you convince the German government 52:43.680 --> 52:46.340 where you rely so much on exporting things to America 52:46.340 --> 52:49.600 and rely also on importing technology from around the world? 52:49.820 --> 52:51.580 Well, I think I've just laid out the arguments, right? 52:51.840 --> 52:53.020 You have to make them. 52:53.020 --> 52:56.260 But, I mean, America's capacity to consume is in freefall. 52:57.500 --> 52:59.580 It's really the case that consumer spending consists 52:59.580 --> 53:01.920 almost entirely of the top decile of income earners. 53:02.080 --> 53:03.780 They just don't buy enough stuff, right? 53:03.780 --> 53:05.360 That's one of the reasons we have an asset bubble 53:05.360 --> 53:08.440 is because there's not enough places for people to put the money 53:08.440 --> 53:09.960 they've stolen from all the rest of us. 53:10.340 --> 53:15.460 And so, how many Mercedes can, you know, some guy in Palo Alto buy? 53:15.620 --> 53:18.280 Like, it's just eventually you just run out, right? 53:18.320 --> 53:20.340 So, consumption is tapping out in the US. 53:20.340 --> 53:23.000 It's one of the sources of secular stagnation. 53:23.540 --> 53:26.300 And then as to imports, it is a bug and not a feature 53:26.300 --> 53:29.000 that Europe is importing technology from America. 53:29.460 --> 53:31.360 You just say, you know, how would you like your ministry 53:31.360 --> 53:33.160 to be bricked the way the ICC was? 53:33.360 --> 53:35.120 It's time to get away from it. 53:36.220 --> 53:36.300 Yeah. 53:37.380 --> 53:38.200 Microphone number three. 53:38.780 --> 53:39.400 Hi, Corey. 53:39.560 --> 53:42.020 Thank you for the talk and thank you for everything you do. 53:42.160 --> 53:45.060 I wanted to ask you about the jailbreaking 53:45.060 --> 53:47.280 to be a little bit of a devil's advocate. 53:48.100 --> 53:51.380 Should we jailbreak our grandparents' iPhones? 53:51.780 --> 53:52.880 Should we jailbreak our... 53:52.880 --> 53:56.420 Grandparents' iPhones, the average consumer, should we do it? 53:56.500 --> 53:57.120 Is it unsafe? 53:57.780 --> 54:01.060 Yeah, should we jailbreak for like our normie friends? 54:01.780 --> 54:02.060 Yeah. 54:02.400 --> 54:04.060 So, I think if it's not legal, 54:04.260 --> 54:06.200 it's putting them in risk they might not understand, 54:06.360 --> 54:08.140 although it might be the right thing to do sometimes. 54:09.240 --> 54:12.020 My experience of people who are not technical 54:12.020 --> 54:14.380 is that they're very motivated to figure out 54:14.380 --> 54:15.940 how to do things with technology 54:15.940 --> 54:19.300 the manufacturer didn't intend when it's to their benefit. 54:20.560 --> 54:22.720 And generally, people who have less money, 54:22.900 --> 54:25.100 which also correlates with being non-technical, 54:25.400 --> 54:28.960 really want to do things that the manufacturer doesn't want 54:28.960 --> 54:30.600 because they're the ones who are the easy pickings 54:30.600 --> 54:31.420 for the manufacturers. 54:31.960 --> 54:32.940 So, the first person I ever met 54:32.940 --> 54:34.460 who had a phone with two Sims in it 54:34.460 --> 54:35.860 was a minimum wage worker 54:35.860 --> 54:37.500 at my daughter's nursery in East London 54:37.500 --> 54:40.400 because they wanted to get the plan from the carrier 54:40.400 --> 54:42.560 that gave them unlimited texting to their seven friends 54:42.560 --> 54:44.680 and they want to get the other plan from the other carrier 54:44.680 --> 54:45.820 that gave them unlimited calling. 54:46.280 --> 54:49.060 And for them, figuring out how to put two Sims in a phone 54:49.060 --> 54:52.260 was absolutely worth it for the savings 54:52.260 --> 54:54.160 because it wasn't a nice-to-have, it was a must-have. 54:54.200 --> 54:55.740 They just couldn't afford to talk to their friends 54:55.740 --> 54:56.780 unless they could do this. 54:57.060 --> 54:58.420 And so, it was a powerful motivator. 54:58.800 --> 55:00.960 I think that what you get if you formalize jailbreaking, 55:01.040 --> 55:02.440 because there's jailbreaks for all this stuff. 55:02.520 --> 55:03.980 I mean, you can jailbreak an iOS device. 55:04.120 --> 55:05.100 We all know about Checkmate. 55:05.400 --> 55:07.160 Eight generations of iOS devices 55:07.160 --> 55:09.280 that have been unpatchably broken, right? 55:09.780 --> 55:11.040 You can jailbreak a tractor. 55:11.180 --> 55:12.740 There's blobs floating around 55:12.740 --> 55:14.800 that are just like John Deere tractor firmware 55:14.800 --> 55:17.060 that if you want to pick up that dirty needle 55:17.060 --> 55:18.580 you found on the street and stick it in your arm, 55:18.640 --> 55:19.400 by all means, right? 55:19.600 --> 55:23.840 But what we don't have is like a reliable supply chain 55:23.840 --> 55:25.360 with named parties who have insurance 55:25.360 --> 55:28.460 and are subject to regulation in a stable country 55:28.460 --> 55:29.960 where we can call them up and say, 55:30.020 --> 55:32.180 you just bricked my tractor with your third-party firmware. 55:32.340 --> 55:33.420 You bricked my phone or whatever. 55:34.080 --> 55:37.020 That's the thing that I think makes us doable and usable. 55:37.740 --> 55:40.480 And I think that you can imagine a supply chain that goes like, 55:40.480 --> 55:42.780 okay, you've got a company that buys every printer 55:42.780 --> 55:43.780 as it comes off the line, 55:44.240 --> 55:47.000 flashes it with every firmware mod as it comes over the air, 55:47.380 --> 55:49.520 and then keeps an up-to-date set of jailbreaks 55:49.520 --> 55:51.600 that they sell for 25 euros a month 55:51.600 --> 55:53.500 to people sitting at the back of the dry cleaner 55:53.500 --> 55:56.300 or the news agent with a folding table 55:56.300 --> 55:59.000 who will jailbreak your printer for 15 euros 55:59.000 --> 56:01.800 and then sell you refillable ink cartridges, right? 56:01.880 --> 56:03.860 And so that's what the supply chain looks like. 56:03.940 --> 56:05.200 It's not like the person on the front line 56:05.200 --> 56:06.640 necessarily has to be super technical. 56:06.940 --> 56:09.500 They just have to have a toll-free number they call 56:09.500 --> 56:10.980 when the jailbreak's not working 56:10.980 --> 56:12.220 and that their customers can call 56:12.220 --> 56:15.220 if there's an over-the-air update that breaks the jailbreak. 56:16.980 --> 56:17.560 The microphone number one. 56:18.580 --> 56:20.560 To add to your comment about Medtronic 56:20.560 --> 56:22.360 during the COVID lockdowns, 56:22.580 --> 56:24.900 it was also found that you could jailbreak 56:24.900 --> 56:27.540 their very inexpensive CPAP machines 56:27.540 --> 56:29.380 to turn them into ventilators. 56:29.980 --> 56:33.460 And there were millions of these all around the country, 56:33.940 --> 56:36.720 but Medtronic would not enable that. 56:36.720 --> 56:37.060 Yeah. 56:37.700 --> 56:43.260 They claimed that there was a medical certification 56:43.260 --> 56:44.240 reason for doing so. 56:44.240 --> 56:44.400 Sure. 56:44.720 --> 56:46.320 But should that exemption exist 56:46.320 --> 56:47.980 or is that just marketing? 56:48.280 --> 56:49.460 I don't know if it... 56:49.460 --> 56:51.100 I mean, look, a lot of people did a lot of things 56:51.100 --> 56:53.080 during lockdown that weren't formally permitted 56:53.080 --> 56:54.400 under the regulatory system. 56:54.840 --> 56:56.520 And when generally if they help people, 56:57.060 --> 56:59.580 we assumed a state of exception 56:59.580 --> 57:00.880 and kind of let them get away with it. 57:00.960 --> 57:02.500 I think, you know, this is like 57:02.500 --> 57:03.800 the worst of all possible worlds. 57:03.860 --> 57:06.200 You have a company that is both incredibly risk-averse 57:06.200 --> 57:08.180 and refuses to do things that might save people 57:08.180 --> 57:09.780 and that dominates everything 57:09.780 --> 57:11.940 and is incredibly abusive and locks things down 57:11.940 --> 57:14.000 so that everything not forbidden is mandatory. 57:14.760 --> 57:16.260 I mean, what an awful... 57:16.260 --> 57:17.780 Like, you wouldn't want anyone to be in charge 57:17.780 --> 57:18.920 of the world's medical technology, 57:19.020 --> 57:20.280 but especially not those people. 57:21.540 --> 57:23.400 Signal Angel, do we have questions from the internet? 57:24.080 --> 57:26.180 We have a question from the internet. 57:27.140 --> 57:29.360 Especially in Germany, but all over the world, 57:29.480 --> 57:31.100 politicians don't really understand 57:31.100 --> 57:32.720 the impact of IT laws. 57:33.140 --> 57:35.100 And in some cases, like chat control, 57:35.100 --> 57:37.000 opening up devices would actually 57:37.000 --> 57:38.480 go against their intentions. 57:38.480 --> 57:41.360 How do we convince them to still open up devices 57:41.360 --> 57:43.560 and enable those laws? 57:43.980 --> 57:46.120 So I think it's a common fallacy 57:46.120 --> 57:49.760 that policymakers have to know how something works 57:49.760 --> 57:51.580 in order to make good policy about it. 57:52.000 --> 57:53.400 Most congresses and parliaments 57:53.400 --> 57:55.740 don't have, say, water safety experts in them. 57:55.800 --> 57:57.480 And yet, in most of the rich world, 57:57.520 --> 57:59.080 you can drink the water that comes out of the tap. 57:59.380 --> 58:02.040 It's not because they learned how microbiology works 58:02.040 --> 58:02.900 or water safety works. 58:02.900 --> 58:05.200 It's because they have a system of expert regulators 58:05.200 --> 58:06.160 who they defer to, 58:06.300 --> 58:07.860 and they take these problems seriously. 58:08.320 --> 58:09.840 And I think when you say that our policymakers 58:09.840 --> 58:11.220 don't understand technology, 58:11.480 --> 58:12.700 what you're actually identifying 58:12.700 --> 58:14.600 is them not taking technology seriously. 58:15.140 --> 58:17.440 And as a certain fellow once said, 58:17.480 --> 58:18.760 you may not care about technology, 58:18.840 --> 58:20.620 but technology is very interested in you. 58:20.820 --> 58:22.240 And there will come a time 58:22.240 --> 58:24.900 when not taking technology seriously 58:24.900 --> 58:26.200 will come and bite you in the ass. 58:26.360 --> 58:27.420 So we've got two minutes left. 58:27.480 --> 58:28.900 What if we take three questions really quick 58:28.900 --> 58:30.220 and I answer them in a speed round? 58:30.380 --> 58:31.020 Okay, let's do that. 58:31.020 --> 58:33.980 Microphone number four, two, and one. 58:34.120 --> 58:34.620 Make them quick. 58:35.160 --> 58:37.160 Yeah, like in 2022 58:37.160 --> 58:39.500 on the Blockchain Socialist podcast, 58:39.740 --> 58:42.220 you've been asked about Tornado Cash Privacy Protocol 58:42.220 --> 58:44.200 and it being sanctioned 58:44.200 --> 58:46.520 and its founders being persecuted. 58:46.980 --> 58:50.100 And you quite expectedly said that code is speech 58:50.100 --> 58:53.220 and we should only persecute the application. 58:53.740 --> 58:53.840 Yeah. 58:54.040 --> 58:55.200 But at the same time, 58:55.240 --> 58:56.580 you've been pretty explicitly 58:56.580 --> 58:58.720 that if you combine anonymity and finance, 58:58.720 --> 59:01.180 you're rolling out the red carpet for serial scammers. 59:01.640 --> 59:03.620 So where do you put Tornado Cash 59:03.620 --> 59:06.160 and if there is a line which segregates- 59:06.160 --> 59:06.980 Blockchain liability. 59:07.220 --> 59:07.740 Okay, got it. 59:07.780 --> 59:08.320 Next question. 59:10.700 --> 59:13.600 With EU legislation happening in Brussels 59:13.600 --> 59:15.460 with all the quirks and more and more lobbyists 59:15.460 --> 59:16.720 there than representatives, 59:17.060 --> 59:18.900 do you see a viable path for EU 59:18.900 --> 59:22.360 becoming the first bastion of dis-certification? 59:23.120 --> 59:24.200 Yeah, Brussels lobbyists. 59:24.240 --> 59:25.100 Okay, next one. 59:27.300 --> 59:28.240 Yeah, thank you so much. 59:29.080 --> 59:30.520 Free Roman, by the way. 59:30.940 --> 59:34.900 How do you respond to the thing about safety? 59:35.160 --> 59:37.240 Like when I tried to hack my Toyota 59:37.240 --> 59:38.860 and in US you can do it, 59:38.940 --> 59:40.260 in EU there is a safety law- 59:40.260 --> 59:41.280 Product safety, got it. 59:41.820 --> 59:44.100 Okay, so Blockchain liability, 59:44.560 --> 59:46.380 actual facilitation of a crime 59:47.100 --> 59:49.420 where you knowingly participate in it, 59:49.520 --> 59:50.640 you form a conspiracy. 59:51.460 --> 59:53.660 I think that that is fair game. 59:53.980 --> 59:56.100 I think making a general purpose tool that gets abused. 59:56.740 --> 59:57.760 You know, we have this idea 59:57.760 --> 59:59.780 in American copyright law that's more or less intact, 59:59.940 --> 01:00:02.280 that things capable of substantial non-infringing uses 01:00:02.280 --> 01:00:03.320 are presumptively lawful. 01:00:03.720 --> 01:00:05.380 Things capable of legal uses 01:00:05.380 --> 01:00:06.600 should be presumptively lawful. 01:00:07.060 --> 01:00:08.120 Abusing them should not be. 01:00:08.280 --> 01:00:09.660 What do we do about Brussels lobbyists? 01:00:09.920 --> 01:00:11.380 Well, we had lots of Brussels lobbyists 01:00:11.380 --> 01:00:12.160 for the oil industry 01:00:13.120 --> 01:00:15.160 before we took a great leap forward in solar. 01:00:15.540 --> 01:00:17.100 It just turns out that when you're shivering in the dark, 01:00:17.160 --> 01:00:18.640 no one gives a shit what they have to say. 01:00:19.480 --> 01:00:21.060 Again, I'm not an accelerationist, 01:00:21.080 --> 01:00:22.580 but I'm not not an accelerationist. 01:00:23.320 --> 01:00:25.320 And safety, that's the thing, right? 01:00:25.320 --> 01:00:28.240 Is that you have to have a real safety, privacy, 01:00:28.420 --> 01:00:29.960 consumer rights and labor rights regime. 01:00:30.320 --> 01:00:31.760 If you're not going to have the manufacturers 01:00:31.760 --> 01:00:33.540 decide what can and can't be done with their products, 01:00:33.640 --> 01:00:36.100 you need to have democratically accountable institutions. 01:00:36.340 --> 01:00:38.400 Now, it may be that today they're too conservative 01:00:38.400 --> 01:00:39.480 and they're blocking things, 01:00:39.600 --> 01:00:41.140 but that should be the final arbiter 01:00:41.140 --> 01:00:42.680 of which mods you can do, 01:00:42.920 --> 01:00:44.140 not whether the manufacturer 01:00:44.140 --> 01:00:45.180 thinks that they're good or not, 01:00:45.220 --> 01:00:47.460 because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest. 01:00:47.800 --> 01:00:49.340 They cannot distinguish between things 01:00:49.340 --> 01:00:50.320 that are bad for society 01:00:50.320 --> 01:00:51.600 and bad for their shareholders. 01:00:51.860 --> 01:00:53.380 So we can't put them in charge of this. 01:00:53.640 --> 01:00:54.640 Thank you all very much.