The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery

“How Canada can help Americans and defeat America”: this essay from Cory Doctorow goes into two of my favourite topics: fucking up DRM and other capitalist digital limitations on data and hardware ownership, and fucking up the US. Nice.

Trump's tariffs prove that this was a bad bargain. By voluntarily gluing its technological elbows to its sides, Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies. Canada is long overdue for a reckoning with this blunder. The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries. The second-best time is now. By repealing Bill C-11 and legalizing reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology with consent of its users and in accordance with privacy, consumer and labour rights, Canada will gain a devastating counter to Trump's tariffs. Not only will legalizing jailbreaking let Canadians get more out of their own property, it will turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions – while making Canada digitally sovereign by facilitating the uncoupling of Canadian ministries, corporations, households, and devices from America's cloud. This is how Canada removes the digital kill switch it handed to America, a kill switch that can shut down its tractors, phones, and governments.

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