The joke about the podium here is that this was the only non-USBC compatible podium they
could find for me.
So as many of you know, I'm an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Next month I start my 25th year there.
And I know I'm hardly unbiased, but as far as I'm concerned, there is no group anywhere
on earth that does the work of the caliber that EFF does for our digital rights.
And I'm an activist there, and so for the past quarter of a century, my job has been
fighting something that I call the War on General Purpose Computing.
Now if you were at 28C3 14 years ago, you may have heard me give a talk with that title.
Those are the trenches I have been in with EFF since my very first day on the job.
That was a day when I flew to Los Angeles and crashed the inaugural meeting of something
called the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group.
This was an unholy alliance of tech companies, media companies, broadcasters, and cable operators,
and they'd gathered at the invitation of this lavishly corrupt American congressman, a man
called Billy Tozin, who had promised them a new regulation, a rule that would ban the
manufacture and sale of digital computers unless they had been damaged to specifications
set by that group, specifications for technical measures to block the execution of code that
their shareholders did not want to see executed in the wild.
Now that rule was called the Broadcast Flag, and it actually did pass through the American
regulatory system.
The Federal Communications Commission passed it as a rule, so we sued the FCC.
We overturned the rule.
So thank you.
Yeah.
It was a good day.
So we won that skirmish, but my friends, I have very bad news, although it's not news
that will surprise you.
Despite wins like that important one, we have been losing the war on general-purpose computers
for the past 25 years.
But that's why I've come to Hamburg today, because after decades of throwing myself against
a locked door, the door that leads to a new good Internet, one that delivers the technological
self-determination of the old good Internet and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our
normie friends come and join the party, that door has been unlocked.
Today, it is open a crack.
I mean, it's open a crack.
And here's the weirdest part.
The guy who unlocked that door is Donald Trump.
Now, he didn't do it on purpose, but thanks to Trump's incontinent belligerence, we are
on the cusp of the post-American Internet, a new digital nervous system for the 21st
century, an Internet that we can build together without worrying about America's demands or
its priorities.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I am not happy about Trump or his policies.
But as my friend Joey DeVilla likes to say, when life gives you SARS, you make SARS-CoV-2.
The only thing worse than living through all the terror that Trump has unleashed on America
and the world would be going through all of that and not salvaging anything of value
from it.
So that's what I'm here to talk to you about today, the post-American Internet that we
can wrestle away from Trump's chaos, the post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has
mobilized new coalition partners to fight on our side.
Now, in politics, coalitions are everything.
Anytime you see a group of people suddenly make a breakthrough in making a change that
they failed to make for years and years, it's a sure bet that they have found coalition
partners, new allies who don't want all the same things that they want, but want enough
of the same things to fight on their side.
And that's where Trump came from.
He's at the front of a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians,
conspiratorialists, imperialists, and of course self-described libertarians who've got such
a scorching case of low-tax brainworms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd take five
cents off their tax bill.
And that's what's got me...
Yeah.
And that's what's got me so excited, is that we've got a new coalition in the war on general-purpose
computers, a coalition that includes digital rights activists who've been on the lines
for decades, but also now people who want to turn America's tech trillions into billions
for their own economy, and national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about
digital sovereignty.
Now my thesis here is that this is an unstoppable coalition, which is good news, because for
the first time in decades, I think victory is in our grasp.
So let me explain.
Fourteen years ago, I stood in front of this group and I talked about the war on general-purpose
computing.
Now that's my snappy name for the fight, but the boring name that they use in legislatures
for this fight is something called anti-circumvention law.
Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to alter the functioning of a digital product
or service unless the manufacturer approves of your modification.
And crucially, this is true whether or not your modification violates any other law.
Anti-circumvention law, it originates in the USA with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998, which establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence
and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work.
So practically speaking, if you design a service or device with even the flimsiest of systems
to prevent modification of its application code or its firmware, it is a felony.
It is a jailable felony to modify that code or that firmware.
It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass the access control, which
means that pen testers who even describe how they access a device or a system face
criminal liability.
And so anti-circumvention law allows any manufacturer to trivially turn their product into a no-go
zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of disclosing
its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.
This is a law that Jay Freeman quite rightly calls felony contempt of business model.
Now anti-circumvention law became the law of the land in America in 1998 when Bill Clinton
signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, I want you to know this.
Every other country in the world has passed a law just like this one in the years since.
Now here in the EU, we got it through Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001.
Now it makes a certain kind of twisted sense for America to enact a law like this.
After all, they are the world's tech powerhouse, home to the biggest, most powerful tech companies
in the world.
By making it illegal to modify digital products without the manufacturer's permission, America
enhances the rent-extracting power of the most valuable companies on its stock exchanges.
But why would Europe pass a law like this?
After all, Europe is a massive tech importer.
By extending legal protections to tech companies that want to steal European users' data and
money, the EU facilitates a one-way transfer of value from Europe to America.
So why would Europe do this?
Well, let me tell you about the circumstances under which all the other countries came to
enact their anti-circumvention laws, and maybe you'll spot a pattern that answers the question.
Australia got its anti-circumvention law through the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which
obliges Australia to enact anti-circumvention law.
Mexico and Canada got their anti-circumvention law through the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade
Agreement, which obliges Canada and Mexico to enact anti-circumvention laws.
Andean nations like Chile got their anti-circumvention laws through US bilateral free trade agreements,
which obliged them to enact anti-circumvention laws.
And the Central American nations got their anti-circumvention laws through CAFTA, the
Central American Free Trade Agreement with the USA, which obliges them to enact anti-circumvention
laws.
Now, I assume you spotted the pattern by now.
The US trade representative has forced every one of America's trading partners to enact
an anti-circumvention law to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and
money by American tech firms.
But of course, this only raises a further question.
Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its people's money
and data and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that prevents
this theft?
Well, here's an anecdote that might unravel the riddle.
Many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban took over Hungary, I used to guest lecture
at a PhD program in political science at the Central European University in Budapest.
And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students on anti-circumvention law, one of them approached
me.
Now, they had been the information minister of a Central American country during the CAFTA
negotiations, and one day they'd received a call from the trade negotiator calling from
the CAFTA trade negotiating room.
And the negotiator said, you know how you told me not to give the Americans anti-circumvention
law under any circumstances?
Well, they've told me they will not take our coffee unless we give them anti-circumvention.
And I'm sorry, we just can't lose the US coffee market.
Our economy could collapse, so we're going to get anti-circumvention.
I'm really sorry.
That's it.
That's why every government in the world allowed US big tech companies to declare open season
on their own people's private data and ready cash.
The alternative was tariffs.
Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we have tariffs now.
I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders
and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders.
So happy Liberation Day?
So far, every country in the world has come up with one of two responses to the Trump tariffs.
The first one is, give Trump everything he asked for except Greenland and hope he stops
being mad at you.
And this has been an absolute failure.
Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile.
He'll take fucking Greenland.
Capitulation has been a failure, but so has been the other tactic, the retaliatory tariff.
Now, that's what we have done in Canada.
Like all the best Americans, I am Canadian, and it's a cheap laugh.
Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things
that we buy more expensive.
Now, this is a very weird way to punish America.
It is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs
neighbor says, ouch.
And worse, it's indiscriminate.
Why whack some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs
on his soybeans?
That guy never did anything bad to Canada.
But there is a third possible response to tariffs, one that is just sitting there begging
to be tried.
What about repealing anti-circumvention law?
Now, if you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that repeals its anti-circumvention
law, you can go into business making the disenchantificatory products that plug into America's defective
tech exports and allow the people who own and use those products to use them in ways
that are good for them, even if those ways are bad for the shareholders of the company
that made the product.
Think of John Deere tractors.
When a farmer's John Deere tractor, thank you, there's going to be a lot more of that.
When a John Deere tractor, when a farmer's John Deere tractor breaks down, they are expected
to repair it, to swap in the new parts and assemblies to replace whatever's mouthing.
But that tractor will not recognize the new part and will not start working again, not
until the farmer spends $200 on a service call out from an official John Deere service rep
whose only job is to type an unlock code into the tractor's console to initialize the part
and pair it with the tractor's main computing unit.
Modding a tractor to bypass this activation step violates anti-circumvention law, meaning
farmers all over the world are stuck with this ripoff garbage because their own government
will lock up anyone who makes a tractor mod that disables this parts pairing check in
this American product.
So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11?
The Copyright Modernization Act of 2012.
That's our anti-circumvention law.
Well, then a company like Honeybee, a Canadian company that already makes tractor front ends
and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science graduates, I'm
a proud U of W dropout, and it could put them to work jailbreaking John Deere's defective
tractor firmware, and then they could offer it to everyone in the world.
They could sell that crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method,
including that poor American farmer whose soybeans were currently tariffing.
It is hard to convey just how much money is on the table here.
I'm going to use just one example.
Apple's App Store.
Apple forces all app vendors into using its own payment processor and charges them a 30%
commission on every euro spent inside of every app.
30%!
That is such a profitable business that Apple is making $100 billion a year on it.
Now, if the EU were to repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks
in Finland could reverse engineer Apple's bootloaders and make a little hardware dongle
that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and they could sell
that dongle along with the infrastructure to operate an app store to anyone in the world
who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.
Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer
on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store, offer them a
90% discount on payments, and still make $10 billion a year.
Now, maybe Finland's never going to see another Nokia, but Nokia, that's a hard business to
be in.
You've got to make hardware, and that's expensive and risky.
But if the EU legalizes jailbreaking, then Apple has to incur the expense and the risk
of making and fielding hardware, and those Finnish geeks get to cream off the $100 billion
digital tax that Apple imposes on the world in an act of disgusting rip-off rent-seeking.
As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers, your margin is my opportunity.
Now, with these guys, it's always disruption for thee and never for me.
When they do it to us, it's progress.
If we do it back to them, it's piracy.
And of course, every pirate wants to be an admiral.
Well, screw that.
Let's move fast and break Tim Cook's things.
Let's move fast and break King's.
Now, it's funny, I spent 25 years getting my ass kicked by the US Trade Representative,
and in my defense, it wasn't a fair fight, but I did develop a kind of grudging respect
for the skill with which the USTR had bound the entire world to a system of trade that
conferred parochial advantage to America and its tech firms, giving them free reign to
loot the world's data and economies.
So it has been pretty amazing to watch Trump swiftly and decisively dismantle the global
system of trade and destroy the case for the world continuing to arrange its affairs to
protect the interests of America's capital class.
I mean, it's not a path I would have chosen.
I'd have preferred no Trump at all to this breakthrough, but I'll take this massive own
goal if Trump insists.
I mean, I'm not saying I've become an accelerationist, but at this point, I'm not exactly not an accelerationist.
I mean, is Trump a comrade?
Now, you may have heard that governments around the world have been trying to get Apple to
open up its App Store, and this has been a complete failure.
Here in the EU, when they hit Apple with enforcement under the Digital Markets Act, Apple's response
was to say, sure, we'll allow third-party apps, but only allow them to sell the apps
that we permit.
And also, those stores can use their own payment processors, but we're going to charge so many
junk fees if they do that it'll be more expensive than using our payment processor.
And if we think an Apple user's phone has left the EU for 21 days, we'll delete all of its
apps and data.
When the EU explained that this was not going to satisfy the DMA's terms, Apple threatened
to pull out of the EU.
And then once everyone had finished laughing, Apple filed more than a dozen legal objections
to this order, hoping to tie this up in court for a decade the way Google and Meta did with
the GDPR.
Now, it's not clear whether the EU can force Apple to write code to open up the iOS platform
for alternative app stores and payment methods.
But there is one thing that the EU can absolutely do with 100% reliability any time it wants.
The EU can decide not to allow Apple to use the EU's courts to shut down European companies
that defend European merchants, performers, makers, news outlets, game devs, and creative
workers from Apple's rip-off by legalizing jailbreaks.
All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive and in so doing, strip
Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's $100 billion
annual tax on the world's digital economy.
The EU company that figures out how to reliably break iPhones will have customers all over
the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto power over which
apps can run on your phone to suck 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple
also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers
from Trump's fascist takeover.
Back in October, Apple kicked an app called Iceblock out of the App Store.
Now, this is an app that warns you if there's a snatch squad of masked ICE thugs nearby looking
to grab you off the street and send you to a gulag.
Apple internally classified ICE officers as a protected class and then declared that Iceblock
infringed on the rights of those Pura Bessette ICE goons.
And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who fled the USA
this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children in
a concentration camp.
These skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who would like
to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are,
not by how many Trump coins they buy.
Apple's margin could be their opportunity.
Legalizing jailbreaking, raiding the highest margin lines of business of the most profitable
companies in America is a much better response to Trump tariffs than retaliatory tariffs.
For one thing, it's a targeted response.
Go after big tech's margins and you're mounting a frontal assault on the businesses whose CEOs
each paid a million dollars out of their own pocket to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais.
Raiding big tech's margins, it's not an attack on the American people, nor on the
small American businesses that are ripped off by big tech.
It is a raid on the companies that screw everyday Americans and everyone else in the world.
It's a way to make everyone in the world richer at the expense of these rip-off companies.
It beats the shit...
Thank you.
It beats the shit out of blowing hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers
in the hope that someday a sector that has lost nearly a trillion dollars shipping defective
chatbots will figure out a use for GPUs someday that doesn't start hemorrhaging money the
minute they turn them on.
So here's a new ally in the war on general purpose computing.
Businesses and technologists who would want to make billions of dollars raiding big tech's
margins, and policy makers who want their country to become the dis- and shitification
nation.
The country that doesn't merely protect its people's money and privacy by buying jail
breaks from other countries, but rather the country that makes billions of dollars selling
that privacy and pocketbook defending tech to the rest of the world.
Now that's a powerful alliance, but those are not the only allies that Trump has pushed
into our camp.
There is another powerful ally waiting in the wings.
You remember last June, when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest
warrant for the Genocide-era Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump denounced the ICC, and then the
ICC lost its Outlook access, its email archives, its working files, its address books, and
its calendars?
Now, Microsoft says they didn't brick the ICC.
They say it's just a coincidence, but when it comes to a he said, Clippy said between
the justices of the ICC and the convicted monopolists at Microsoft, I know who I believe.
This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese
companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms infrastructure.
Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business, every
household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based cloud service.
The handful of US big tech companies that supply the world's administrative tools are
all vulnerable to pressure from the Trump administration, and that means that Trump
can brick an entire nation.
The attack on the ICC was an act of cyber warfare, like the Russian hackers who shut
down Ukrainian power generation facilities, except that Microsoft doesn't have to hack
Outlook to brick the ICC.
Microsoft owns Outlook.
Under the US Cloud Act of 2018, the US government can compel any US-based company to disclose
any of its users' data, including the data of foreign governments, and this is true no
matter where the data is stored.
Last July, Anton Carnio, the director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, told
a French government inquiry that he, quote, couldn't guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't
hand sensitive French data over to the US government, even if that data was stored in
a European data center.
Under the Cloud Act, the US government can slap gag orders on companies that it forces
to cough up this data, so there would be no way to know if this is happening or if
it's already happened.
It doesn't stop at administrative tools either.
Do you remember back in 2022 when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of
John Deere tractors from Ukraine, and all those tractors showed up in Chechnya?
The John Deere company pushed a kill signal over the air to those tractors and bricked
them.
John Deere is every bit as vulnerable to the Trump administration as Microsoft is, and
they can brick most of the tractors in the world.
And the tractors they can't brick are probably made by Massey Ferguson, the number two company
in the ag tech cartel, also an American company just as vulnerable to political attacks from
the US government.
Now, none of this is news to global leaders.
Even before Microsoft and Trump bricked the ICC, they were trying to figure out a path
to digital sovereignty.
But the Trump administration's outrageous conduct and rhetoric over the past 11 months
has turned digital sovereignty from a nice to have to a must have.
So finally, we're starting to see some movement, like Eurostack, a really cool project to
clone the functionality of US big tech silos in free and open source software and build
EU-based data centers to run this code on.
But the Eurostack is heading for a crisis.
It's great to build open, locally hosted, auditable, trustworthy services that replicate
the useful features of big tech, but you also need to build the adversarial interoperability
tools that allow for the mass export of millions of documents, sensitive data structures, and
edit histories.
We need scrapers and headless browsers to accomplish the adversarial interoperability
that will guarantee ongoing connectivity to institutions still housed in US data centers
and US clouds.
Because US companies are not going to facilitate the mass exodus of international customers
from their products.
Just think of how Apple responded to the relatively minor demand to open up the iOS app store
and now imagine the thermonuclear foot-dragging, tantrum-throwing, and malicious compliance
that they'll come up with when faced with the departure of a plurality of businesses
and governments in a 27-nation block of 500 million affluent consumers.
Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the
cooperation of American big tech companies.
Otherwise, you're just building housing in East Berlin for people who live in West Berlin.
It doesn't matter how great that housing is.
No one's going to move into it until you tear down the wall.
Step one of tearing down the wall is killing anti-circumvention law so that we can run
virtual devices that can be scripted, break bootloaders to swap out firmware, and generally
seize the means of computation.
So this is the third block in the disenchantification army.
Not just digital rights hippies like me, not just entrepreneurs and economic development
wonks rubbing their hands together at the thought of transforming American trillions
into European billions, but also the national security hawks who are 100% justified in their
extreme concern about their country's reliance on America's platforms that have been shown
to be totally unreliable.
This is how we're going to get a post-American internet with an unstoppable coalition of
activists, entrepreneurs, and NATSEC hawks.
This has been a long time coming.
Since the post-war settlement, the world has treated the US as a neutral platform, a trustworthy
and stable maintainer of critical systems for global interchange, what the political
scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call the underground empire.
But over the past 15 years, the US has systematically shattered global trust in its institutions,
and that process only accelerated under Trump.
Take trans-oceanic fiber cables.
The way trans-oceanic fiber routes were planned, the majority of these cables make landfall
in the USA, and those interconnections happen there.
Now there's a good case for this hub-and-spoke topology, especially compared to establishing
direct links from every country to every country.
That's an order n-squared problem, and directly linking each of the Earth's 205
countries with each other would require 20,910 fiber links.
But putting all the world's telecoms eggs in America's basket only works if the US
doesn't take advantage of its centrality.
And while many people worried what the US could do with the head ends of the world's
global fiber runs, it wasn't until Mark Klein's 2006 revelations about the NSA's
nation-scale fiber optic taps in AT&T's network, and Ed Snowden's 2013 documents
showing the global scale of this wiretapping, that the world had to confront the undeniable
reality that the US could not be trusted to serve as the world's fiber hub.
But it's not just fiber.
The world does business in dollars.
Most countries maintain dollar accounts at the Fed in New York as their major source
of foreign reserves.
But in 2005, American vulture capitalists bought up billions of dollars' worth of
Argentinian government bonds after the sovereign government of Argentina had declared bankruptcy.
They convinced a judge in New York to turn over the government of Argentina's US assets
to them, to make good on loans that those debt collectors had never issued, but instead
had bought up for pennies on the dollar.
At that moment, every government in the world had to confront the reality that they could
not trust the US Federal Reserve with their foreign reserves.
But what else were they going to use?
Without a clear answer, dollar dominance continued.
But then, under Biden, Putin-aligned oligarchs and Russian firms lost access to the SWIFT
system for dollar clearing.
Now, dollar clearing is when goods like oil are priced in dollars, so that buyers only
need to find someone who will trade their currency for dollars, which they can then
swap for any commodity in the world.
Now, again, there's a sound, logical case for dollar clearing.
It's just not practical to establish deep, liquid, pairwise trading markets for all of
the world's nearly 200 currencies.
It's another order n-squared problem.
But this only works if the dollar is a neutral platform.
Once the dollar becomes an instrument of US foreign policy, whether or not you agree
with those policies, it's not a neutral platform anymore, and the world has to go looking
for an alternative.
Now, no one knows what that alternative is going to be, just as no one knows what configuration
the world's fiber links are going to end up taking.
There are kilometers of new fiber being stretched across the open floor, and countries are
trying out some pretty improbable gambits for dollar alternatives, like Ethiopia, which
just revalued its national debt in Chinese-run Minbi.
But without a clear alternative to America's unshittified platforms, the post-American
century is off to a bit of a rocky start.
But there is one post-American system that's easy to imagine.
The project to rip out all the cloud-connected, back-doored, untrustworthy black boxes that
power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles, and our tractors, and replace
them with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code.
This project is the only project that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being
paralyzed by the exponential crises of scale that everyone else in the post-American world
are confronting.
That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution, like the Eurostack
services, can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged, and improved by institutions in
every country.
It's a commons.
It's more like a science than a technology, in that it is universal, and international,
and collaborative.
After all, we don't have dueling Western and Chinese standards for structural engineering.
Rather, we have universal principles for making sure our buildings don't fall down, and
we adapt them to local circumstances.
We would not tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and
we should not tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators,
pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and governments working.
Thank you.
The thing is, the thing is, software is not an asset.
Software is a liability.
Now, the capabilities that software delivers, automation, production, analysis, administration,
those are assets.
But the software itself, that is a liability.
Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down as the software, upstream of it, downstream of
it, and adjacent to it, is updated or swapped out, revealing defects and deficiencies, even
in systems that have performed well for years.
Shifting software to commons-based production is a way to reduce the liability that software
imposes on makers and users, balancing out that liability among many players.
Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this.
They really do think that software is an asset, which is why they're so fucking horny to have
chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds.
This is why they think that it's good that they have a chatbot that, quote, produces a
thousand times more code than a human programmer.
Producing code that isn't designed for legibility or maintainability, that is optimized, rather,
for the speed of production, that's just incurring tech debt at scale.
Now, this...
Thank you.
This is a neat encapsulation of the entire AI story.
The chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace
you with a chatbot that can't do your job.
Your boss is such an easy mark for a chatbot hustler because your boss hates you.
In their secret hearts, bosses understand that if they stop coming to work, the business
would chug along just fine.
But if the workers stopped showing up, the business would ground to a halt.
Bosses like to tell themselves that they're in the driver's seat, but really they fear
that they are strapped in the back seat playing with a Fisher-Price steering wheel.
For them, AI is a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the company's drivetrain.
It is the realization of the fantasy of a company without workers.
When I was walking the picket line in Hollywood with the striking writers, a writer told me
that you prompt AI in exactly the same way a studio boss gives shitty notes to a writer's
room.
Make me ET, but make it about a dog and give it a love interest and a car chase in the
second act.
Now, you say that to a writer's room and they will call you a fucking idiot suit and tell
you why don't you fuck off back to your office and make a spreadsheet you knit with the grown-ups
are here making a movie.
Meanwhile, if you give that prompt to a chatbot, it will cheerfully shit out a script exactly
to your spec.
The fact that that script will be terrible and unusable is less important than the prospect
of a working life in which no one calls you a fucking idiot suit.
AI dangles the promise of a writer's room without writers, a movie without actors, a
hospital without nurses, a coding shop without coders.
When Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast and announced that the average American has three
friends but wants 15 friends and that he was going to solve this by giving us chatbots,
we dunked on him as an out-of-touch billionaire Martian who doesn't understand what friendship
is, but the reality is that for Zuck, your friends are a problem.
Your friends' interactions with you determine how much time you spend on his platforms and
thus how many revenue-generating ads he gets to show you.
Your friends stubbornly refuse to organise their relationships with you to the benefit
of Mark Zuckerberg's shareholders.
So Mark Zuckerberg's over there in Menlo Park furiously fantasising about replacing your
friends with chatbots because that way he can finally realise the dream of a social
network with no socialising.
Rich, powerful people are at root solipsists.
The only way to amass billions of dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole
populations and the only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that is to
convince yourself that those people aren't real, that in some important sense they don't
exist.
Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an NPC.
Or those effective altruists who claim the moral high ground by saying that they cared
about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years
at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.
Or think of how Donald Trump fired all the US government scientists and then announced
the Genesis programme, declaring that the US was about to begin generating annual moonshot
scale breakthroughs with chatbots.
It's science without scientists.
Chatbots can't do science but from Trump's perspective they're still better than scientists
because a chatbot won't ever tell him not to stare into an eclipse, not to inject bleach.
A chatbot will never tell him that trans people exist or that climate change is real.
Powerful people are suckers for AI because AI fuels the fantasy of a world without people,
just a boss and a computer and no ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how
things and tell you no.
AI is a way to produce tech debt at scale, to replace skilled writers with defective
spicy autocomplete and lose money at a rate not seen in living memory.
Now, compare AI with the project of building a post-American internet.
This is a project to reduce tech debt, to unlock America's monopoly trillions and divide
them among the world's entrepreneurs for whom they represent untold profits and the world's
technology users for whom they represent untold savings, all the while building resiliency
and digital sovereignty.
Now, I imagine some of you are feeling a little cynical right now.
After all, your political leaders have demonstrated decades of ineffectual, incompetent deference
to the United States and an inability to act even when the need was dire.
If your leaders couldn't act decisively to take on the climate emergency, what hope do
we have of them taking this moment seriously?
Crises precipitate change.
Remember when another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine and Europe began to
experience a dire energy shortage.
In three short years, this continent's solar uptake has skyrocketed and the EU went from
being 15 years behind its energy transition to a decade ahead of schedule.
Because when you're shivering in the dark, a lot of fights you didn't think were worth
it suddenly become existential battles that you cannot afford to lose.
Sure, no one wants to argue with a tedious neighbor who has an aesthetic tamper tantrum
at the thought of solar panels hanging from their other neighbor's balcony.
But when it's winter and there's no rushing gas and you're shivering in the dark, that
person can take their aesthetic objection to balcony solar, fold it until it's all
corners, and shove it up their ass.
Besides, it doesn't have to be Europe that leads the charge on a post-American internet
by repealing anti-circumvention.
Any country can do it.
And the country that gets there first gets to reap the profits from supplying jailbreaking
tools to everyone else in the world.
It gets to be the dis- and shitification nation.
And everyone else in the world gets to buy those tools and defend themselves from US
tech companies' monetary and privacy plunder.
Just one country has to break the consensus.
And the case for every country doing that is the strongest it's ever been.
It used to be that countries that depended on USAID had to worry about losing medical,
food, and cash supports if they pissed off America.
But Trump killed USAID, so now that's a dead letter.
Meanwhile, America's status as the planet's most voracious consumer has been gutted by
decades of anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies.
Today, the US is in the third of its K-shaped recoveries.
This is an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer.
For a generation, America has papered over that growing inequality with easy credit,
with everyday Americans funding their consumption with credit cards and second and third mortgages.
So long as they could all afford to keep buying,
other countries had to care about America as an export market.
But a generation of extraction has left the bottom 90% of Americans
struggling to buy groceries and other necessities,
carrying crushing debt from skyrocketing shelter, education, and medical expenses
that they can't hope to pay down thanks to 50 years of wage stagnation.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has firmly sided with debt collectors,
price gougers, and rent extractors.
Trump neutered enforcement against rent-fixing platforms like RealPage.
He restarted debt payments for 8 million American student borrowers
and killed a plan to make life-saving drugs a little cheaper,
leaving Americans to continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.
Now, every dollar spent servicing a loan is a dollar that does not go to consumption.
And as more and more Americans slip into poverty,
the US is gutting programs that spend money on their behalf,
like SNAP, the food assistance program that helps an ever-larger slice of Americans
stave off their hunger.
America is chasing the world-without-people dream.
Where working people have nothing, spend nothing,
and turn every penny over to rentiers who promptly flush that money
into the stock market, shit coins, or gambling sites.
But I repeat myself.
Even the US military, long a sacrosanct institution,
has been kneecapped to enhance rent-seekers.
Congress just killed a military right-to-repair law,
so now US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition
of shipping generators and Jeeps back to America
to be fixed by their manufacturers at a 10,000% markup
because the Pentagon is still going to routinely sign contracts
that ban them from teaching a Marine to fix an engine.
Now, that post-American world, it's coming on fast.
As we repeal our anti-circumvention laws,
we don't have to care about what America thinks.
We don't have to care about their tariffs because they're whacking us with tariffs.
And the only people left in America who can afford to buy things
are rich people who just don't buy enough stuff.
There are only so many Lambos and Sub-Zero freezers
that even the most guillotinable plute can usefully own.
But what if European firms want to go on
taking advantage of Europe's anti-circumvention laws?
Well, there's good news there too.
Good news because the EU firms that rely on anti-circumvention
are engaged in the sleaziest, most disgusting frauds imaginable.
Anti-circumvention is the reason that Volkswagen could get away with Dieselgate.
By imposing legal liability on reverse engineers
who might have discovered the lethal crime,
Article 6 of the Copyright Directive created a chilling effect
and thousands of Europeans died every year.
Today, Germany's storied automakers are carrying on the tradition of Dieselgate,
sabotaging their cars to extract rent from drivers.
From Mercedes, which rents you the accelerator pedal in your luxury car,
only unlocking the full acceleration curve of your engine
if you buy a monthly subscription,
to BMW that rents you an automated system
that automatically dims your high beams if there's oncoming traffic.
Legalized jailbreaking and any mechanic in Europe
could unlock those subscriptions for one price
and not share any of that money with BMW or Mercedes.
Then, yeah, it's good, but let me go, let me cook.
Then there's Medtronic, a company that pretends to be Irish.
Medtronic is the world's largest medtech company,
having purchased all of its competitors
and then undertaken the largest tax inversion in history,
selling itself to an Irish firm in order to magic the profits
into a state of untaxable grace floating somewhere over the Irish Sea.
Medtronic supplies the world's most widely used ventilators
and it booby traps them in exactly the same way
that John Deere booby traps its tractors.
After a hospital technician puts a new part in a Medtronic ventilator,
the ventilator's central computing unit will not recognize the part
until it completes a cryptographic handshake
proving that an authorized Medtronic technician
was paid hundreds of euros to carry out a repair
that the hospital's own technician probably performed.
It's just a way to suck hundreds of euros out of hospitals
every time a ventilator breaks.
Now, this would be bad enough, but during the COVID lockdowns,
when every ventilator was desperately needed
and the planes weren't flying,
there was no way for Medtronic technicians
to come and bless the hospital technicians' repairs.
It was lethal.
It killed people.
There's one more European company that relies on anti-circumvention
that I want to bring up here because they're all friends of CCC.
I'm talking about the Polish train company, Nuvag.
Nuvag sabotages its locomotives, booby trapping them
so that if they sense they've been taken to a rival service yard,
the train bricks itself.
When the train operator calls Nuvag about this mysterious problem,
the company helpfully remotes into the locomotive's computers
to perform diagnostics,
which is just sending an on-bricking command to the vehicle
for which they charge 20,000 euros.
Now, last year, Polish hackers
from the security research firm Dragon Sector
presented their research on this disgusting racket in this hall,
and now they are being sued by Nuvag under anti-circumvention law
for making absolutely true disclosures
about Nuvag's deliberately defective products.
So these are Europe's stakeholders for anti-circumvention law.
There's the dieselgate killers,
the car companies who want to rent you your accelerator and your high beams,
the medtech giant that bricked all the ventilators in the world during COVID,
and the company that tied Poland to the train tracks.
Now, I relish the opportunity to fight these bastards in Brussels
as they show up and cry,
won't someone think of the poor train saboteurs?
The insidification of technology,
the decay of the platforms and systems we rely on
has many causes.
The collapse of competition, regulatory capture,
the smashing of the power of tech workers,
but most of all, insidification is the result
of anti-circumvention law's ban on interoperability.
By blocking interop,
by declaring war on the general purpose computer,
our policymakers created an insidigenic environment
that rewarded companies for being shitty
and ushered in the insidicine,
the era in which everything turns to shit.
So it's time to call time on insidification.
It's time to seize the means of computation.
Let's build drop-in free open alternatives
to the services and firmware we rely on.
Let us end the era of silos.
I mean, isn't it fucking weird
that you have to care which network someone is using
if you want to talk to them
instead of just deciding who you want to talk to?
The fact that you have to figure out
whether the discussion you want to join is on Twitter
or Blue Sky, Mastodon or Instagram,
that is just the most prodigy AOL,
CompuServe-ass way of running a digital world.
I mean, 1985 called and it wants its walled gardens back.
Powerful allies are joining our side
in the war on general purpose computation.
It's not just people like us
who've been fighting this for the whole goddamn century,
but also countries that want to convert
America's tech-hoarded billions into fuel
for a single-use rocket
to boost their national tech sector into a stable orbit.
And it's the national security hawks
who are worried about Trump
breaking their ministries or their tractors,
but who are also worried with just cause
about Xi Jinping
breaking their solar panels or their batteries.
Because after all, the post-American internet,
it's also a post-Chinese internet.
Nothing should be designed to be field updatable
without the user's permission.
Nothing critical should be a black box.
Now, like I said at the start of this talk,
I've been doing this work for 24 years
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
throwing myself at a door
that was double-locked and dead-bolted,
and now that door is open a crack
and goddamn it, I am hopeful.
Not optimistic. Fuck optimism.
Optimism is the idea that things will get better
no matter what we do.
I know what we do matters.
Hope is the belief that we can improve things,
even in small ways,
and that we will then ascend a gradient
towards the world that we want
and attain higher vantage points
from which new courses of action,
invisible to us here at this lower elevation,
will be revealed.
Hope is a discipline.
It requires that you not give in to despair.
So I'm here to tell you, don't despair.
All decade, all over the world,
countries have taken up arms
against concentrated corporate power.
We have had big, muscular antitrust attacks
on big corporations.
In the US, under Biden,
but also under the first Trump administration.
In Canada, in the UK, in the EU,
in member states like Germany, France, and Spain,
in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil,
and in China.
This is a near-miraculous turn of affairs.
All over the world,
governments are declaring war on monopolies,
the source of billionaires' wealth and power.
Now, even the most forceful wind is invisible.
We only see it by its effects.
And what we're seeing here
is that whenever a politician
bent on curbing corporate power unfurls a sail,
no matter where in the world that politician is,
that sail fills with wind
that propels the policy
in ways we have not seen for generations.
The long becalming of the fight
over corporate power has ended,
and a fierce, unstoppable wind is blowing.
It's not just blowing in Europe, or in Canada,
or in South Korea, or Japan, or China,
or Australia, or Brazil,
but also in America.
Never forget that as screwed up and terrifying
as things are in America,
the country has experienced
and continues to experience
a tsunami of antitrust bills and enforcement actions
at the state, local, and even the federal level.
And never forget that the post-American Internet
will be good for Americans,
because in a K-shaped, bifurcated, unequal America,
the trillions that American tech companies
loot from the world
do not trickle down to everyday Americans.
The average American has a portfolio of assets
that rounds to zero,
and that includes stock in U.S. big tech companies.
The average American is not a shareholder in big tech.
They're a victim of big tech.
Liberating the world from U.S. big tech
is also liberating America from U.S. big tech.
Now, that's been the EFF's mission for 35 years.
It's been what I've done there for 25 years.
And if you want to get involved in the fight,
and I hope you do,
it can be your mission, too.
You can join EFF,
and you can join groups in your own country,
like NetzPolitik here in Germany,
the Irish Council for Civil Liberties,
La Quadrature de Net in France,
the Open Rights Group in the UK,
EF Finland, ISOC Bulgaria,
ExNet, DFRI,
Quintessence, Bits of Freedom,
Open Media, FSFE,
or any of dozens of organizations around the world.
The door is open a crack.
The wind is blowing.
The post-American internet is upon us.
It's a new good internet
that delivers the technological self-determination
of the old good internet
and the ease of use of Web 2.0
that let our normie friends use it, too.
And I can't wait for all of us to get to hang out there,
because it's going to be great.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
So, thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So, we've got a little...
Thank you.
Enough!
Thank you.
So, we have a little time for questions.
A good question has one part, not two.
It's not more of a comment than a question.
And almost with that exception, it's not about AI.
All right, Thomas, I'll let you run the Q&A.
Thank you. Thank you, Corey, so much.
So, we do have time for questions.
Let's start over there, microphone number one.
Hi, thank you so much for here.
Here.
So, I wondered how do we convince governments like in Germany
where we rely so much on export in our country
and also on import of technology in general?
Yeah, so how do you convince the German government
where you rely so much on exporting things to America
and rely also on importing technology from around the world?
Well, I think I've just laid out the arguments, right?
You have to make them.
But, I mean, America's capacity to consume is in freefall.
It's really the case that consumer spending consists
almost entirely of the top decile of income earners.
They just don't buy enough stuff, right?
That's one of the reasons we have an asset bubble
is because there's not enough places for people to put the money
they've stolen from all the rest of us.
And so, how many Mercedes can, you know, some guy in Palo Alto buy?
Like, it's just eventually you just run out, right?
So, consumption is tapping out in the US.
It's one of the sources of secular stagnation.
And then as to imports, it is a bug and not a feature
that Europe is importing technology from America.
You just say, you know, how would you like your ministry
to be bricked the way the ICC was?
It's time to get away from it.
Yeah.
Microphone number three.
Hi, Corey.
Thank you for the talk and thank you for everything you do.
I wanted to ask you about the jailbreaking
to be a little bit of a devil's advocate.
Should we jailbreak our grandparents' iPhones?
Should we jailbreak our...
Grandparents' iPhones, the average consumer, should we do it?
Is it unsafe?
Yeah, should we jailbreak for like our normie friends?
Yeah.
So, I think if it's not legal,
it's putting them in risk they might not understand,
although it might be the right thing to do sometimes.
My experience of people who are not technical
is that they're very motivated to figure out
how to do things with technology
the manufacturer didn't intend when it's to their benefit.
And generally, people who have less money,
which also correlates with being non-technical,
really want to do things that the manufacturer doesn't want
because they're the ones who are the easy pickings
for the manufacturers.
So, the first person I ever met
who had a phone with two Sims in it
was a minimum wage worker
at my daughter's nursery in East London
because they wanted to get the plan from the carrier
that gave them unlimited texting to their seven friends
and they want to get the other plan from the other carrier
that gave them unlimited calling.
And for them, figuring out how to put two Sims in a phone
was absolutely worth it for the savings
because it wasn't a nice-to-have, it was a must-have.
They just couldn't afford to talk to their friends
unless they could do this.
And so, it was a powerful motivator.
I think that what you get if you formalize jailbreaking,
because there's jailbreaks for all this stuff.
I mean, you can jailbreak an iOS device.
We all know about Checkmate.
Eight generations of iOS devices
that have been unpatchably broken, right?
You can jailbreak a tractor.
There's blobs floating around
that are just like John Deere tractor firmware
that if you want to pick up that dirty needle
you found on the street and stick it in your arm,
by all means, right?
But what we don't have is like a reliable supply chain
with named parties who have insurance
and are subject to regulation in a stable country
where we can call them up and say,
you just bricked my tractor with your third-party firmware.
You bricked my phone or whatever.
That's the thing that I think makes us doable and usable.
And I think that you can imagine a supply chain that goes like,
okay, you've got a company that buys every printer
as it comes off the line,
flashes it with every firmware mod as it comes over the air,
and then keeps an up-to-date set of jailbreaks
that they sell for 25 euros a month
to people sitting at the back of the dry cleaner
or the news agent with a folding table
who will jailbreak your printer for 15 euros
and then sell you refillable ink cartridges, right?
And so that's what the supply chain looks like.
It's not like the person on the front line
necessarily has to be super technical.
They just have to have a toll-free number they call
when the jailbreak's not working
and that their customers can call
if there's an over-the-air update that breaks the jailbreak.
The microphone number one.
To add to your comment about Medtronic
during the COVID lockdowns,
it was also found that you could jailbreak
their very inexpensive CPAP machines
to turn them into ventilators.
And there were millions of these all around the country,
but Medtronic would not enable that.
Yeah.
They claimed that there was a medical certification
reason for doing so.
Sure.
But should that exemption exist
or is that just marketing?
I don't know if it...
I mean, look, a lot of people did a lot of things
during lockdown that weren't formally permitted
under the regulatory system.
And when generally if they help people,
we assumed a state of exception
and kind of let them get away with it.
I think, you know, this is like
the worst of all possible worlds.
You have a company that is both incredibly risk-averse
and refuses to do things that might save people
and that dominates everything
and is incredibly abusive and locks things down
so that everything not forbidden is mandatory.
I mean, what an awful...
Like, you wouldn't want anyone to be in charge
of the world's medical technology,
but especially not those people.
Signal Angel, do we have questions from the internet?
We have a question from the internet.
Especially in Germany, but all over the world,
politicians don't really understand
the impact of IT laws.
And in some cases, like chat control,
opening up devices would actually
go against their intentions.
How do we convince them to still open up devices
and enable those laws?
So I think it's a common fallacy
that policymakers have to know how something works
in order to make good policy about it.
Most congresses and parliaments
don't have, say, water safety experts in them.
And yet, in most of the rich world,
you can drink the water that comes out of the tap.
It's not because they learned how microbiology works
or water safety works.
It's because they have a system of expert regulators
who they defer to,
and they take these problems seriously.
And I think when you say that our policymakers
don't understand technology,
what you're actually identifying
is them not taking technology seriously.
And as a certain fellow once said,
you may not care about technology,
but technology is very interested in you.
And there will come a time
when not taking technology seriously
will come and bite you in the ass.
So we've got two minutes left.
What if we take three questions really quick
and I answer them in a speed round?
Okay, let's do that.
Microphone number four, two, and one.
Make them quick.
Yeah, like in 2022
on the Blockchain Socialist podcast,
you've been asked about Tornado Cash Privacy Protocol
and it being sanctioned
and its founders being persecuted.
And you quite expectedly said that code is speech
and we should only persecute the application.
Yeah.
But at the same time,
you've been pretty explicitly
that if you combine anonymity and finance,
you're rolling out the red carpet for serial scammers.
So where do you put Tornado Cash
and if there is a line which segregates-
Blockchain liability.
Okay, got it.
Next question.
With EU legislation happening in Brussels
with all the quirks and more and more lobbyists
there than representatives,
do you see a viable path for EU
becoming the first bastion of dis-certification?
Yeah, Brussels lobbyists.
Okay, next one.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Free Roman, by the way.
How do you respond to the thing about safety?
Like when I tried to hack my Toyota
and in US you can do it,
in EU there is a safety law-
Product safety, got it.
Okay, so Blockchain liability,
actual facilitation of a crime
where you knowingly participate in it,
you form a conspiracy.
I think that that is fair game.
I think making a general purpose tool that gets abused.
You know, we have this idea
in American copyright law that's more or less intact,
that things capable of substantial non-infringing uses
are presumptively lawful.
Things capable of legal uses
should be presumptively lawful.
Abusing them should not be.
What do we do about Brussels lobbyists?
Well, we had lots of Brussels lobbyists
for the oil industry
before we took a great leap forward in solar.
It just turns out that when you're shivering in the dark,
no one gives a shit what they have to say.
Again, I'm not an accelerationist,
but I'm not not an accelerationist.
And safety, that's the thing, right?
Is that you have to have a real safety, privacy,
consumer rights and labor rights regime.
If you're not going to have the manufacturers
decide what can and can't be done with their products,
you need to have democratically accountable institutions.
Now, it may be that today they're too conservative
and they're blocking things,
but that should be the final arbiter
of which mods you can do,
not whether the manufacturer
thinks that they're good or not,
because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest.
They cannot distinguish between things
that are bad for society
and bad for their shareholders.
So we can't put them in charge of this.
Thank you all very much.