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Retired since 2012.
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The news cycle is already getting to my heart. It’s not even been 24h.
It’s time to protect my mental health. First step will be to curb the information I consume and how much time I spend on Instagram, Twitter and Threads.
I *loooooove* the internet. I have made countless friends and meaningful connections here. Yet, the current version of these digital gardens is hurting my mental health.
Here is my honest attempt to curb the time I spend mindlessly scrolling and instead create new habits.
Here’s a growing list of things I’ll try to do instead:
1. Grab a book
2. Text or call a loved one
3. Pull up a random Wikipedia page
4. Listen to an audiobook
5. Read a poem
6. Play a soothing game on my phone
7. Do a brief meditation and check in with my heart
8. Pet my dog
9. Go for a brisk quick walk
10. Do 5 squats (yeah right)
11. ________ <— your suggestion her
The US Trade Representative has filed a “Report on China’s Targeting of the Maritime, Logistics and Shipbuilding Sectors for Dominance” (January 16, 2025). In the lingo of US trade law, this is a “Section 301” report, which comes from a 1974 law delegating the authority to the USTR to investigate “unfair” trade practices by other countries and to impose tariffs or other trade restrictions in response.
There is zero doubt that China has targetted its shipbuilding industry with major subsidies. But part of what is interesting in this case is that the US has not been a major player in global shipbuilding for decades. Thus, the USTR report reads strangely to me, because while it is phrased in terms of effects on US shipbuilding, hat industry has been dominated by Japan and South Korea.
Either fortuitious or thanks to excellent editorial decision-making, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I work as Managing Editor, published a paper on Chinese ship-building subsidies in the Fall 2024 issue as part of a symposium on industrial policy. Like all JEP papers back to the first issue, it is available free and ungated. Panle Jia Barwick, Myrto Kalouptsidi, and Nahim Bin Zahur describe “Industrial Policy: Lessons from Shipbuilding.”
They present a figure showing global patterns of shipbuilding. As you can see, the UK(blue) and other nations of Europe (red) dominated global shipbilding for most of the first half of the 20th century. The US has surges of shipbilding in each World War, but is generally not much of a factor. Then Japan (orange) takes a large share of the global shipbuilding market after World War II and Korea (green) enters the market in force in the 1980s. China’s share begins to rise rapidly in the early 2000s.
As the figure illustrates, it would be impossible for China’s shipbuilding to have affected the US shipbuilding industry before about 2000. Thus, when the USTR report discusses the low levels of US shipbuilding in, say, the 1970s or 1980s, the causes are necessarily elsewhere.
The USTR report has only a few mentions of shipbuilding in Japan and Korea, mostly in footnotes, but it does drop in an occasional sentence. For example, USTR (pp. 116-117) notes in passing: “For China to achieve its targeted dominance, including as demonstrated by explicit global market share targets, Chinese companies must displace foreign companies in existing markets and take new markets as they develop. Such displacement affects China’s current top competitors in Korea and Japan, as well as U.S. shipbuilders, which continue to see their smallmarket share decline and are unable to compete with China’s artificially low prices and massive scale.” At another point, USTR (p. 60) quotes an outside study stating: “Chinese yards often force ship buyers to source engines and other subcomponents in China when they order vessels. Otherwise, ship buyers interviewed by the authors indicate, they would favor Korean and Japanese made engines and other internal parts.” In short, this is not a case where a large or cutting-edge US industry is being challenged by China’s subsidies.
Shipbuilding has been a highly subsidized industry in Europe, Japan, and Koreaa before it became subsidized by China, as Barwick, Kalouptsidi, and Zahur point out in JEP. They write:
First, why do governments subsidize shipbuilding? Our narrative suggests a wide variety of reasons: the connection between trade, shipping, and shipbuilding; the development of heavy manufacturing as a strategy for promoting economic growth; employment; national security and military considerations; and the desire for national prestige (or “pride and machismo,” as Stråth (1987) puts it). Yet, in none of the historical cases is it self-evident exactly what mix of objectives led to industrial policy in shipbuilding.
Second, was industrial policy successful? It is challenging to evaluate if industrial policy worked. There are certainly examples of “apparent success” in Japan, South Korea, and China, where a country with a negligible initial share of the global industry embarks on a program of industrial policy and rapidly becomes a global leader. But the history of shipbuilding is also filled with examples of unsuccessful industrial policy, such as the long- standing US policy of protecting its shipbuilding sector through cabotage laws, European governments’ prolonged and costly attempts to subsidize their shipbuilders in the face of Japanese and Korean competition (Stråth 1987), or an earlier attempt by South Korea to promote shipbuilding in the 1960s (Amsden 1989). Other countries have failed to launch a shipbuilding industry as well, as in the case of Brazil’s failed attempt to launch its own shipbuilding sector in the late 1970s (Bruno and Tenold 2011). Even the apparent success stories required massive support, leading to the question (rarely answered in the literature) of whether the benefits from subsidizing shipbuilding are worth its large cost.
They seek to estimate the full range of China’s subsidies for the shipbuilding industry: cheap land near the ocean, cheap low-interest long-term loans, subsidized inputs (like steel), subsidies for exporting ships, subsidies for ship-buyers, and streamlined licenses. China opens literally hundreds of shipyard from about 2006-2013. They estimate that these government subsidies were equal to about half of total revenue for China’s shipbuilding industry during these years.
Should China’s shipbuilding subsidies be counted as a “success”? They write:
[A]lthough China’s shipbuilding subsidies were highly effective at achieving output growth and market share expansion, we find that they were largely unsuccessful in terms of welfare measures. The program generated modest gains in domestic producers’ profit and domestic consumer surplus. In the long run, the gross return rate of the adopted policy mix, as measured by the increase in lifetime profits of domestic firms divided by total subsidies, is only 18 percent, meaning that for every $1 the government spends, it gets back 18 cents in profitability. In other words, the net return when incorporating the cost to the government was a negative 82 percent, with entry subsidies explaining a lion’s share of the negative return.
They discuss how one might estimate a higher return. For example, if China had targeted its shipbuilding subsidies to larger and more efficient firms, rather than encouraging entry–as it eventually did–the return to its subsidies would have been higher. Also, if one takes into account that China’s massive shipbuilding program was probably large enough to drive down global costs of transportation, then China (and other exporters around the world) would have also benefited from being able to trade more cheaply.
The current situation in global ship-building is that if the US penalizes Chinese ship-building, most of the benefits will go to Japanese and Korean shipbuilders. But let’s try to look beyond that. Why has the US has played such a small role in global ship-building? What would be involved in changing that?
For most economists, the travails of US ship-building go back to laws in the 19th and early 20th century–for example, the Jones Act of 1920–which sought to protect US shipbuilding from foreign competition. The law requires that shipping between two US ports can only be carried by ships built in the United States. But when US shipbuilders no longer faced global competition, their efficiency fell behind. Current estimates are that the US cost for building a large ocean-going ship is about 300-400% higher than a ship built in Japan or Korea. Thus, the US ship-building industry has become focused on smaller ships for domestic purposes, not ocean-goign vessels. The USTR writes: “U.S. shipbuilders delivered 608 vessels of all types in 2020, including 15 deep-draft vessels and 5 large oceangoing barges. The majority of these 608 vessel deliveries were inland dry cargo or tank barges and tugs and towboats. U.S. shipbuilders delivered only four bulk vessels in 2024 …”
If US ships were much, much cheaper, the US transportation system could look quite different: for example, it would be much cheaper to transport cargo and bulk goods up and down the east coast and west coast, rather than using overland rail or trucks. For example, US lumber companies complain that they are at a disadvantage in shipping lumber between US locations compared to Canadian lumber firms–because the Canadian firms can use cheaper international shipping.
I struggle to imagine the US economy becoming an important global ship-building nation. In a big-picture sense, the country would need to develop the domestic expertise to drive down the cost of building large ocean-going vessels by, say, 75%. This would involve a building managerial and corporate expertise, along with worker expertise, and developing the supply chains of specialized products to support th is effort. But a more basic starting point, imagine the problems in a US context of acquiring land and permitting by the ocean or a large enough river to make launching hundreds of ocean-going ships possible.
It’s perhaps easier to imagine a newly board US shipbuilding industry focused on particular tasks, like top-level maintenance and repair of big oceangoing vessels, or focusing as a starting point on a particular part of the market. As the JEP authors point out: “The major types of ships currently produced include containerships, (oil) tankers, bulk carriers, as well as more niche products like cruise ships, liquefied natural gas carriers, and “Ro-Ro’s,” which are ships that allow vehicles to be rolled on and off the ship.” The USTR report also points out the specialized ships need to install offshore wind turbines.
I’m sure that shipmakers in Japan and Korea are perfectly happy for the US to take a stab at reining in Chinese subsidies for ship-building. But I confess that when I think of orienting the US toward key industries for 21st century prosperity, pouring in the government subsidies and attention to create a globally competitive shipbuilding industry would not be high on my list.
The post China’s Industrial Policy for Shipbuilding: The US Pushes Back first appeared on Conversable Economist.
I can't remember where I first heard dancehall reggae, but I do remember where I bought most of my dancehall cassettes: at Play De Record, a great hip hop/reggae DJ store on Yonge Street in Toronto whose bins were all killer, no filler. I'd go into the store every couple weeks and more or less pick three albums at random and love every one of 'em. I just discovered that PDR is still in business, which makes me extremely happy:
Look, I know that mostly I use this blog to talk about tech politics, monopoly, impending fascism and the climate emergency, with the odd science fiction review. But all that other stuff (modulo the sf novels) are weighing on my heavily this week, and I feel like posting something a little more lighthearted. So I consulted my editor (me), who called a special meeting of the editorial board (also me), who kicked it up to the publisher (still me), and they all agreed that I could write a post about a weird hip-hop album that's been earworming me in the best way imaginable since 1992.
I'm pretty sure I bought Fu-Schnickens' debut album "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" at Play De Record. Certainly, I have a memory of stopping on the sidewalk outside of the store to wrestle the cellophane off the cassette and pop it into my walkman. I definitely remember my first walk through the city with the music in my ears. I laughed aloud. Several times. I might have even danced a little:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw–ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas
At the time, I knew nothing about Fu-Shnickens. In the years since, I have listened to F.U. Don't Take It Personal approximately one heptillion times and somehow managed not to learn anything about Fu-Schnickens. Today, I read their all-too-short Wikipedia article and learned that the group was together between 1988 and 1995, that their second album (which I remember not being as impressed with) had a top-40 novelty track with vocals by Shaquille O'Neal, who said the Schnickens were his favorite hiphop group:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Schnickens
I get it, Shaq. They're great. First of all, they're incredibly silly. Long before Wu-Tang Clan, they were doing this weird kung-fu movie schtick in their songs (which, admittedly, walks an uncomfortable line between "parodies of racist depictions of Chinese people in the movies" to "racist parodies of Chinese people in the style of those movies"). Their songs are jammed with pop culture references in a way that puts, say, Paul's Boutique to shame. You can get a sense of this by looking at the lyrics transcribed over at Genius (where they are criminally under-annotated):
https://genius.com/artists/Fu-schnickens
Take "La Schmoove," a song that references "The Jeffersons," "Leave It To Beaver," "Superfly," Honey-Nut Cheerios, Popeye, Elmer's Glue, Elmer Fudd, Pippi Longstockings, "Married With Children," "Three's Company," "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," "Do-Wah-Diddy," the board game Battleship, and Pepe Le Pew. It features rhymes like "we in there like swimwear," "Adios muchachos dorme vous unbuckle my Fu-Schnick shoe," and "Yo zilch kaput me nada none son." It's legit bonkers.
But also: they're really good. The frontman, Chip Fu (Roderick Roachford) raps really fast, has amazing flow, and periodically just starts rapping backwards, like literally saying the same syllables he just said, but backwards, with that same amazing flow. They are steeped in old dancehall, and it shines through (they more-or-less single-handedly revived Tenor Saw's now-familiar "Ring the Alarm").
Many of their songs feature a kind of hiphopified Phil Spector wall of sound, a kind of melodic drone that underlays the beats and lyrics. As soon as I hear that drone, I start smiling, because I know what's coming.
I have been earwormed by these tracks for this entire century and much of the past century. It's always really hard to explain why you like something, but I think that Fu-Schnickens' pop culture stream of consciousness and nonsense syllables are a kind of rhythmic version of my own internal monologue, which is a kind of endless babble of fragments of books, music, movies and TV; dumb jokes; words repeated until they lose all meaning and become meaningless phonemes, all kind of splinters of ideas and words floating around, bumping into each other.
There's lots of dancehall and dancehall-adjacent stuff that's arguably better than this album, like "The Good The Bad The Ugly & The Crazy," the amazing and underappreciated collaboration between Necka Demus, Junior Demus and Super Cat:
And I could listen to Shaggy's cover of "Oh Carolina" all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLqmWt2h2g
Or Apache Indian's "Boom Shack-A-Lak":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZzBd41NuZw
Or even better, "Ragamuffin Girl":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGhrpajNtKk
But none of music is on continuous shuffle-play in the back of my brain the way "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" is and has been since the Clinton administration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw–ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas
What's more, this is one of the very few (non-Talking Heads, non-David Byrne) albums that my daughter and I like listening to together in the car. It's so perfectly silly, virtuosic, funny, and danceable. Still as good as it was when I was young and had the hips I was born with. I've owned it on cassette and CD and as MP3s. I somehow own the vinyl (though I have no turntable).
I'm grateful to the management of this publication for the opportunity to share it with you.
FTC Report Shows Big Pharma Middlemen Jack Up Prices by Up to 7,736% https://www.commondreams.org/news/pharmacy-benefit-managers-profiteering (h/t /r/LateStageCapitalism)
Taking Leave https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/01/15/taking-leave/
#20yrsago Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends? https://craphound.com/aadossierletter.txt
#15yrsago Mass “overdose” planned in protest of Boots pharmacy sale of “homeopathic remedies” https://web.archive.org/web/20100120080932/http://www.1023.org.uk/the-1023-overdose-event.php
#15yrsago HOWTO Read science-fiction https://reactormag.com/sf-reading-protocols/
#15yrsag 3D-printed math and science sculptures https://www.bathsheba.com/math/
#15yrsago Leaked document: How the EU planned to force changes in Canada’s copyright https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/01/eu-ceta-leak/
#15yrsago CBS uncovers rare Jack Benny treasures, puts them back and tosses out the key https://themoderatevoice.com/killing-comedic-heritage-cbs-reportedly-seals-some-classic-jack-benny-show-comedy-masters/
#15yrsago Disney’s Looking at Paintings: An Introduction to Fine Art for Young People https://memex.craphound.com/2010/01/18/disneys-looking-at-paintings-an-introduction-to-fine-art-for-young-people/
#15yrsago Cracking ice-sheets sound like Star Wars blasters https://silentlistening.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/dispersion-of-sound-waves-in-ice-sheets/
#15yrsago When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor https://jalopnik.com/how-my-youthful-junkyard-scrounging-habit-got-my-high-s-5450096
#15yrsago Britain’s Business Secretary wants to turn the nation’s back on basic science https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/17/lasers-government-funding-peter-mandelson
#10yrsago Eric Holder: no more civil forfeiture without warrant/charges https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/holder-ends-seized-asset-sharing-process-that-split-billions-with-local-state-police/2015/01/16/0e7ca058-99d4-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html
#10yrsago Ecstatic NSA spooks delight in spying on spies who are spying on spies https://web.archive.org/web/20150117184537/https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/new-snowden-docs-indicate-scope-of-nsa-preparations-for-cyber-battle-a-1013409.html
#5yrsago Brazilian authoritarian Bolsonaro fires his culture minister for giving a speech plagiarized from Joseph Goebbels https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bolsonaro-under-fire-dismisses-his-culture-minister-for-giving-a-nazi-speech-but-it-is-still-representative-of-brazils-governing-ethos/
#5yrsago Manhattan: a city of empty luxury condos and overflowing homeless shelters https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-housing-has-gone-insane/605005/
#5yrsago Imagining a “smart city” that treats you as a sensor, not a thing to be sensed https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-cities-where-youre-the-sensor-not-the-thing-being-sensed
#5yrsago Ars Technica’s dunk on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series is the best dunk of all https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/goops-netflix-series-its-so-much-worse-than-i-expected-and-i-cant-unsee-it/
#5yrsago Fast-tracked South Dakota bill will felonize doctors who offer gender-confirmation therapy to trans kids https://web.archive.org/web/20200501000000*/https://thegailygrind.com/2020/01/16/republicans-introduce-bill-to-make-it-illegal-for-doctors-to-treat-transgender-children-in-north-dakota/
#5yrsago Inventive students detach IoT car-immobilizers, use their SIMs to power free wifi hotspots https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/e541r4/new_type_of_parking_enforcement_on_my_campus/
#1yrago The super-rich got that way through monopolies https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops
#1yrago Demon-haunted computers are back, baby https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated
Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow
Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing
Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989
Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779
Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419
Picks and Shovels at Dark Delicacies (Burbank), Mar 13
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/
Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/
Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189
Teardown 2025 (PDX), Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Just Say It's Capitalism (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1014?autostart=false
Lost Dollar Business Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLGgMQfFCk
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels Chapter One https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/01/10/picks-and-shovels-chapter-one/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.
That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact. NAFTA and USMCA are, at root, a way to make rich people richer by making poorer people poorer. Trump's base hated NAFTA because they (correctly) believed that it was being used to erode wages by chasing cheaper labor and more lax environmental controls in other countries. Neither NAFTA nor USMCA have any stipulations requiring exported goods to be manufactured by unionized workers, or in factories with robust environmental and workplace safety rules.
The point of NAFTA/USMCA is to goose profits by despoiling the environment, maiming workers, stealing their wages, paying them less, all while poisoning the Earth. Trump's "new" NAFTA was just the old NAFTA with some largely cosmetic changes so that Trump's base could be (temporarily) fooled into thinking Trump was righting the historic wrong of NAFTA.
However, there was one part of USMCA that marked a huge departure from NAFTA: the "IP" chapter. USCMA bound Canada and Mexico to implementing brutal new IP laws. For example, Mexico was forced to pass an anti-circumvention law that makes it a crime to tamper with "digital locks." This means that Mexican mechanics can't bypass the locks US car companies use to lock-out third party repair. Mexican farmers can't fix their own tractors. And, of course, Mexican software developers can't make alternative app stores for games consoles and mobile devices – they must sell their software through US Big Tech companies that take 30% of every sale:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva
Shamefully, Canada had already capitulated to most of these demands. Two Canadian Conservative Party politicians, Tony Clement and James Moore, had sold the country out in 2012, throwing away 6,138 negative responses to a consultation on a new DRM law (on the grounds that they were "babyish" views of "radical extremists"), siding instead with the 54 cranks and industry shills who supported their proposal:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest
When Canadian politicians are pressed on why these anti-interoperability policies are good for Canada, they'll say that it's a condition of free trade, and the benefits of being able to export Canadian goods to the US without tariffs outweigh the costs of having to pay rents to American companies for consumables (like car parts or printer ink), repair, and software sales.
Sure, when Canadian software authors sell iPhone apps to Canadian customers, the payments take a round trip through Cupertino, California and return 30% short. But Canadian consumers get to buy iPhones without paying tariffs on them, and the oil, timber, and minerals we rip out of the ground can be sent to America without tariffs, either (oh, also, a few things that are still manufactured in Canada can do this, too).
Enter Trump, carrying a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods, which he has vowed to impose on his first day in office. Obviously, this demands a policy response. What should Canada do when Trump tears up his "big, beautiful" trade deal and whacks Canadian exporters? One obvious response is to impose a 25% retaliatory tariff on American exporters:
https://mishtalk.com/economics/canada-says-it-will-match-us-tariffs-if-trump-launches-trade-war/
After all, Canada and the US are one another's mutual largest trading partners. American businesses rely on selling things to Canadians, so a massive tariff on US goods will certainly make some of Trump's business-lobby backers feel pain, and maybe they'll talk some sense into him.
I think this would be a huge mistake. The most potent political lesson of the past four years is that politicians who preside over rising prices – regardless of their role in causing them – will swiftly feel the wrath of their voters. The public is furious about inflation, whether it comes from transient covid supply chain shocks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or cartels using "inflation" as cover for illegal, collusive price-gouging.
Canadians are very reliant on American imports of finished goods. That's another legacy of NAFTA: it crashed Canada's manufacturing sector. Canadian manufacturing companies treated the US as a "nearshore" source of non-union labor and weak environmental and safety rules, and shipped Canadian union jobs to American scabs. Canada's economy is supposedly now all about "services" but what we really export is stuff we tear out of the Earth.
Countries that are organized around resource extraction don't need fancy social safety nets or an educational system capable of producing a high-tech workforce. All you need to extract resources is a hole in the ground surrounded by guns, which explains a lot about shifts to the Canadian political climate since the Mulroney years.
Since Canada is now substantially reorganized as an open-pit mine for American manufacturers, cutting off American imports would drive the prices of everyday good sky-high, and would be political suicide.
But there's another way.
Because, of course, Canada – like any other country – has the capacity to make all kinds of things, including high-tech things. Sure, it's unlikely that Canada will launch another Research in Motion with a Blackberry smart-phone that will put the iPhone and Android in the shade. The mobile duopoly has the market sewn up, and can use predatory pricing, refusal to deal, and other anticompetitive tactics to strangle any competitor in its cradle.
But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That's a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple's 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.
There's no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don't get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.
Canadian companies like Honeybee already make "front-ends" for John Deere tractors – these are the components that turn a tractor into a plow, or a thresher, or another piece of heavy agricultural equipment. Honeybee struggles constantly to get its products to interface with Deere tractors, because Deere uses digital locks to block its products:
Canada could produce jailbreaking kits for John Deere tractors, too – not just for Honeybee. Every ag-tech company in the world would benefit from commercially available, professionally supported John Deere jailbreaking kits. So would farmers, because these kits would restore farmers' Right to Repair their own tractors:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
Speaking of repair: Canadian companies could jailbreak every make and model of every US automobile, and make independent, constantly updated diagnostic tools that every mechanic in the world could buy for hundreds of dollars, rather than paying the five-figure ransom that car makers charge for their own underpowered, junk versions of these tools.
Jailbreaking cars doesn't stop with repair, either. Cars like the Tesla are basically giant rent-extraction machines. If you want to use all the "features" your Tesla ships with – like access to the full charge on your battery – you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees over the life of the car, and when you sell your car, all that "downloadable content" is clawed back. No one will pay extra to buy your used Tesla just because you spent thousands on manufacturer upgrades, because they're all downgraded when you sign over the pink slip.
But Canadian companies could make jailbreaking kits for Teslas that unlock all the features in the car for a single low price – and again, they could sell these to every Tesla owner in the world.
Elon Musk doesn't invent anything, he just takes credit for other people's ideas, and that's as true of bad ideas as it is for good ones. Musk didn't invent the extractive Tesla rip-off: he stole it from inkjet printer companies like HP, who have used the fact that jailbreaking is illegal to turn printer ink into the most expensive fluid in the world, selling for more than $10,000/gallon.
Canadian companies could sell jailbreaking kits for inkjet printers that disconnect them from "subscription" services and disable the anti-features that check for and reject third party ink. People all over the world would buy these.
What's standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?
Only the IP laws that Canada has agreed to in order to get tariff-free access to American markets. You know, the access that Trump has promised to end in less than a week's time?
Canada should tear up these laws – and not impose tariffs on American goods. That way, Canadians can still buy cheap American goods, and then they can save billions of dollars every year on the consumables, parts, software, and service for those goods.
This is hurting American big business where it hurts – in the ongoing rents it extracts from Canadians through IP laws like Bill C-11 (the law that bans jailbreaking). Canada could become a global high-tech export powerhouse, selling "complementary" goods that disenshittify all the worst practices of US tech monopolists, from car parts to insulin pumps.
It's the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don't go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.
Canada can win this kind of war, even against a country as big and powerful as the USA. After all, we did it once before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CK3EDncjGI
This month, I'm serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
It's a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.
Here's part one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing
Part two:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom
Part three:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve
Part four:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery
Part five:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#mister-25-percent
And now, onto part six – the thrilling conclusion!
I opened and shut my mouth. If the figures they’d discussed were real, then my billables would come out to a fraction of what I’d get if they got their way and absorbed CF. I reminded myself that I’d been ready to leave, to forgo all the money, just a moment before. But against that: the sense of how much I’d regret it if I took this deal, helped Fidelity Computing recapture their tearaway competitors, and picked up a mere $1,500, while five or ten times as much money could have been mine.
Imaginary regrets were no basis for doing business, I told myself. “That’s a deal,” I said.
Bishop Clarke clapped his hands together once. “I knew we could find a way to work together. How simply wonderful.”
“I can’t wait to see what you find,” Rabbi Finkel said.
“We pay net ninety,” Father Marek said. “The girls in payables can get you set up with an invoicing template.” He cupped his chin in one hand. “Which reminds me, I don’t suppose you have a Fidelity system, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“That’s not uncommon, for a secular person,” Bishop Clarke said.
“We’ll loan you a refurb,” Father Marek said. “Stop by the loading bay after you speak to payables. Tell them I sent you. I’ll have my secretary call down to them.”
Shlomo came and got me and steered me out of executive row and back into the cavernous room where the customer-service reps murmured into their phones. They all stiffened as the door to executive row opened, and their conversations took on a hush.
I had a friend when I was growing up in San Diego, Marc Reyes. Marc’s father was an angry man, the kind of person who’d shout at his wife and kids even when there was a young stranger in the house. I’d seen him punch a wall hard enough to crack the plaster, over nothing—a failure to bring in the afternoon paper.
The hush in that bullpen took me back to the Reyes household, the tense silence that would fall over it when Marc’s father would come home.
I humped the banker’s box full of CF floppies through the bullpen and into the accounting department, where a middle-aged Orthodox man with sidelocks and a wide-brimmed hat gave me a floppy disk with an invoice template on it. I slipped it into the box, then put the box into the back of Art’s van, and drove around to the loading dock, where I signed for a quartet of battered cardboard boxes containing a Fidelity 3000 (their 386 system), a monitor, a printer, and two floppy drives.
I pointed the van back to Art’s place and put my foot down on the pedal.
PLURALITY: The future of collaborative technology and democracy https://www.plurality.net/
The Visible Zorker https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/01/the-visible-zorker (h/t Waxy)
#15yrsago ATM skimmer — could you spot it in the wild? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-the-fraud/
#15yrsago Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video https://web.archive.org/web/20100119020907/http://www.thestandard.com/news/2010/01/15/proposed-web-video-restrictions-cause-outrage-italy
#10yrsago Leaked US cybersecurity report singles out crypto as essential for security of private data https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/15/-sp-secret-us-cybersecurity-report-encryption-protect-data-cameron-paris-attacks
#10yrsago New editor at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction https://locusmag.com/2015/01/finlay-named-editor-of-fsf/
#5yrsago Five steps for thinking about climate change without being overwhelmed by hopelessness https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-to-help-climate-change.html
#5yrsago The ten types of movie: orange and blue, sexy legs, blurry cop… https://twitter.com/leesteffen/status/1217167850009440257
#5yrsago American conspiracy theorists keep insisting on their right to trial by combat https://www.loweringthebar.net/2020/01/kansas-man-seeks-trial-by-combat.html
#5yrsago Major brands’ ads are showing up on climate deniers’ Youtube videos https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21066906/youtube-climate-change-denial-avaaz-samsung-uber-nintendo
#5yrsago Hong Kong shoppers patronize “yellow” stores that support the uprising; while “blue” businesses that support the mainland are vandalized https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/hong-kong-protest-shoppers-build-yellow-economy-reward-businesses-that-support-their
#5yrsago Carriers ignore studies that show they suck at preventing SIM-swap attacks https://www.issms2fasecure.com/assets/sim_swaps-01-10-2020.pdf
#5yrsago Bill from Missouri’s Rep Ben Baker threatens librarians with prison sentences for allowing minors to read books banned by town committees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/16/missouri-could-jail-librarians-for-lending-age-inappropriate-books-parental-oversight-of-public-libraries-bill
#5yrsago Court case lays bare KPMG’s crimes: poaching employees from its own regulators and making them steal government secrets https://www.pogo.org/investigations/how-accountants-took-washingtons-revolving-door-to-a-criminal-extreme
#1yrago American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons
Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow
Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing
Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989
Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779
Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419
Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/
Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189
DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Just Say It's Capitalism (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1014?autostart=false
Lost Dollar Business Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLGgMQfFCk
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels Chapter One https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/01/10/picks-and-shovels-chapter-one/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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