Cory Doctorow is an award-winning Canadian science-fiction author, journalist, and tech activist. He also coined the word that neatly summarizes the plight of modern tech: enshittification. Doctorow recently spoke at OCAD University as part of a workshop to help imagine more equitable and sustainable tech futures.
His call to arms (elbows?) has been abridged with permission and appears in the 2026 BetaKit Most Ambitious issue. Read more stories of the Canadian tech innovators strengthening our autonomy, security, and prosperity here.
My theory of enshittification describes the process by which platforms decay. I do not attribute blame for enshittification to poor consumer choices. So where does the blame lie?
It lies with policymakers. Regulators and politicians who created an enshittogenic environment: a rigged game whose terrible rules guarantee that the worst people doing the worst things will fare best.
The policy is called “anti-circumvention,” and it is the epicentre of the enshittogenic policy universe. Under anti-circumvention law, it is a crime to modify a device you own if the company that sold it to you would prefer that you didn’t.
All a company has to do is demarcate some of its code as off-limits to modification by adding something called an “access control,” and, in so doing, they transform the act of changing any of that code into a jailable offence.
The first anti-circumvention law is America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Under the DMCA, helping someone modify code behind an access control is a serious crime, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Crucially, this is true whether or not you break any other law: under DMCA 1201, simply altering a digital device to do a perfectly legal thing becomes a jailable crime if the manufacturer wills it so and manifests that will with an access control.
This is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property.
But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you’re using HP ink, and if it suspects that you’ve bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, US Congress never passed a law saying, “If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too.”
But because HP puts an access control in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.
The DMCA was an enshittifier’s charter: an invitation for corporations to use tactical access controls to write invisible, private laws that would let them threaten their customers—and competitors who might help those customers—with criminal prosecution.
In 2012, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, passed in Canada, and we got our own anti-circumvention law.
Let’s be clear about what this law does: because it makes no exemptions for circumvention for lawful purposes, Canada’s anti-circumvention law criminalizes anything you do with your computer, phone, or device if it runs counter to the manufacturer’s wishes.
It’s an invitation for foreign manufacturers to use Canada’s courts to punish Canadian customers and Canadian companies for finding ways to make the products we buy and use less shitty.
Anti-circumvention is at the root of the repair emergency. It makes it a crime for an independent mechanic, or a farmer, or an independent repair shop, or a hospital technician to fix a car, or a tractor, or a phone, or a ventilator.
Anti-circumvention means we can’t fix things when they break, and it also means that we can’t fix them when they arrive pre-broken by their enshittifying manufacturers.
Take the iPhone: it can only use one app store, Apple’s official one, and everyone who puts an app in the App Store has to sign up to use Apple’s payment processor, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend inside an app.
A Canadian company could bypass the iPhone’s access controls and install a Canadian app store, one that uses the Interac network to process payments for free, eliminating Apple’s and Google’s 30 percent tax on Canada’s entire mobile digital economy.
We have 2024’s Bill C-294, an interoperability law, which lets Canadians do this. But our law is useless because it doesn’t repeal the anti-circumvention law. Meaning you are only allowed to reverse-engineer products to make interoperable alternatives if there is no access control in the way. And, of course, every company that’s in a position to rip you off just adds an access control.
The fact that foreign corporations have the final say over how Canadians use their own property is a font of endless enshittification. Remember when we told Facebook to pay news outlets for links and Facebook just removed all links to the news? Our anti-circumvention law is the only reason that a Canadian company couldn’t jailbreak the Facebook app and give you an alternative app, blocking all the surveillance, the ads, the slop, and the recommendations and mixing in the news that you wanted to see.
Anti-circumvention means that Canadian technologists can’t seize the means of computation, which means that we’re at the mercy of American companies and we only get the rights that they decide to give us.
To escape from the enshittificatory black hole in Canadian policy, we need a coalition. And thanks to Trump, we’re getting one.
Let’s start with the Trump tariffs. US trade representatives’ top priority for the past quarter-century has been bullying America’s trading partners, under threat of tariffs, into passing anti-circumvention laws to render their own people defenceless against American tech companies’ predation and to prevent non-American tech companies from going into business disenshittifying America’s defective goods.
The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.
And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.
Let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don’t follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.
We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.
Canada might not ever have a company like Research In Motion again, but what we could have is a company that sells the tools to jailbreak iPhones to anyone who wants to set up an independent iPhone store.
Canada hasn’t responded to the Trump tariffs with jailbreaking. Our version of “elbows up” turns out to mean retaliatory tariffs. We’re making everything we buy from America more expensive for us, which is a pretty weird way of punishing America, eh?
Plus, those tariffs are pretty indiscriminate. Tariffing soybeans just whacks some poor farmer who’s never done anything bad to Canada.
I guarantee you that poor bastard is making payments on a John Deere tractor that costs him an extra $200 every time it breaks down, because after he fixes it himself, he has to pay $200 to John Deere and wait two days for them to send out a technician who types an unlock code so the tractor recognizes the new part.
Instead of tariffing that farmer’s soybeans, we could sell him the jailbreaking tool that lets him fix his tractor without paying an extra $200 to John Deere.
We could sell every mechanic in the world a Tesla jailbreaking kit that unlocks all the subscription features and software upgrades without sending a dime to Tesla, kicking Elon Musk square in the dongle.
We could build gigantic Canadian tech businesses and export to a global market. Our products could make everything cheaper for every Canadian and everyone else in the world, including every American.
Because the American public is also getting screwed by these companies, and we could stand on guard for them, too. We could be the Disenshittification Nation.
The time is right to harness our own tech talent and the technologists who are fleeing Trump’s America in droves, along with capital from investors who’d like to back a business whose success isn’t determined by how many $TRUMP coins they buy.
Jailbreaking is how Canada cuts American Big Tech down to size.
Time and again, they have shown that we don’t have the power to make them do things. But you know what Canada has total power over? What Canada does.
We are under no obligation to continue to let these companies use our courts to attack our technologists, our businesses, our security researchers, our tech co-ops and our non-profits, who want to jailbreak America’s shitty tech, to seize the means of computation, to end the era in which American tech companies can raid our wallets and our data with impunity.
In a jailbroken Canada, we don’t have to limit ourselves to redistribution, to taxing away some of the money that the tech giants steal from us. In a jailbroken Canada, we can do predistribution. We can stop them from stealing our money in the first place.
We don’t have to tolerate the endless extraction of Big Tech. We don’t have to leave billions on the table. We need not abide the presence of lurking danger in all our cloud-connected devices.
We can be the vanguard of a global movement of international nationalism, of digital sovereignty grounded in universal, open, transparent software, a commons that everyone contributes to and relies upon. Something more like science than technology.
We could be a Disenshittification Nation. We could seize the means of computation. We could have a new, good internet that respects our privacy and our wallets. We could make a goddamn fortune doing it.
And once we do it, we could protect ourselves from spineless digital vassals of the mad king on our southern border and rescue our American cousins to boot.
What’s not to like?
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Article courtesy CC BY 4.0 (abridged with permission). Image courtesy Cory Doctorow. Photo by Shaughn and John.