Whatever the reason, right-to-repair laws have been passing at the state level, amid smart tactics from repair advocates, who have split the anti-repair coalition by introducing domain-specific repair laws, rather than going after across-the-board repair rights.

  The turning point came during the 2020 elections, when Massachusetts repair advocates won a commanding majority for a ballot initiative, Question 1, that safeguarded automotive right to repair. Under Question 1’s language, automakers would be obliged to provide diagnostic codes and other digital tools to independent mechanics. In the run-up to the election, the big automakers blanketed the Bay State with scare ads about all the dangers drivers would face once anyone could work on your car. One of these ads depicted a shadowy figure following a woman to her home, ending on a freeze frame as she turns over her shoulder and begins to scream. Right to repair will kill you!

  The automakers’ pitch was that they had transformed their products into rolling surveillance platforms that gathered and stored so much information about their owners as to constitute a lethal risk. There’s some truth to this: In 2024, Mozilla Labs surveyed the privacy policies and practices of every carmaker and concluded that, from a privacy perspective, no car currently being manufactured was safe. (Mozilla also revealed some of the very weird lies that carmakers told to data brokers about which information they held on drivers, like Nissan, which promised that it could supply data about the smells present inside its drivers’ cars. Needless to say, Nissan has none of this data—gas chromatographs do not come standard in Nissan’s cars. The company was just treating the ad brokers with the same contempt they exhibit for their customers when they spy on them. There is no honor among thieves.)

  But the answer to “Your car is a rolling surveillance platform full of so much compromising data that anyone who can access its internal systems could murder you” is simple: your car should stop spying on you. That would actually work, unlike Big Car’s answer, which is “Data should be accessible only to giant car companies and anyone who will buy it from us.”

  The Massachusetts Question 1 automotive repair initiative passed with a massive majority (74.97 percent!), but it still hasn’t taken effect, thanks to successful courtroom delaying efforts by Big Car. Even so, the idea of establishing right-to-repair laws spread to other states.

  In New York State, an electronics right-to-repair law passed in 2024, only to be neutered by Governor Kathy Hochul in a signing statement that ripped the guts out of it. (Note to New York transit activists who are still salty about Hochul unilaterally diminishing NYC’s hard-fought congestion charge from $15 to $9 at the last minute: we feel your pain, and your enemy is our enemy.)

  But repair advocates are tenacious, and their tenacity is paying off. In 2024, Colorado passed the nation’s first powered wheelchair right-to-repair law, which is notable for three reasons: First, it actually passed, without being assassinated as it crossed the finish line. Second, it addressed the absolute catastrophe that is powered wheelchair repair, a complicated mess composed of terrible federal procurement rules. (Medicare pays for chairs only rated for indoor use, and only from the lowest bidder, which practically means one of two private equity–backed monopolists that have gutted their repair divisions.) Third, it simply banned the use of parts pairing and other DRM in powered wheelchairs sold in Colorado. States can’t fix DMCA 1201 and its prohibition on reverse engineering, because that’s federal law, but they can order companies not to use technologies that enable them to invoke DMCA 1201 within state lines.

  Colorado’s prohibition on DRM found its way into a 2024 Oregon right-to-repair law, one that covers broad swaths of consumer electronics. The Washington statehouse passed its own version of this law this spring. More state legislatures are teeing up similar rules in the sessions to come.

  This sets up a cool dynamic, where every state has its own unique repair law, forcing national companies to follow a complex and confusing patchwork of laws, which has the reliable effect of turning these companies into advocates for a national repair law, one that covers every state. These companies would prefer no law at all, but if they must have a law, they’d like to have it come out of Congress, since they reckon they can corrupt one national legislature more readily than fifty state legislatures.

  All this is to say that after more than a decade of trench warfare holding action in the repair wars, things are finally starting to move. And with the European Union passing its own far-reaching right-to-repair legislation, manufacturers are increasingly required to either sell repairable goods all over the world or endure the cost, complexity, and risk of producing different models for the EU market and for everywhere else. So far, the picture is looking very good: When the EU ordered Apple (and everyone else, but Apple is a uniquely bad actor here) to standardize a USB-C charger port, Apple switched all its iPhones to USB-C. Apparently, producing a USB-C phone for the EU and a different one for everywhere else is too expensive, even for a company as stubbornly proprietary and rent seeking as Apple.

  Other legislatures are still groping their way to repair-friendliness. As a Canadian, I am simultaneously proud and ashamed to say that in November 2024, Parliament passed two bills that provide for far-reaching repair and interoperability rights: C-244 and C-294. (Note to Americans: Your charming custom of putting the nation’s top political science graduates to work for a yearslong apprenticeship consisting primarily of thinking up cute acronyms for their bosses’ legislative proposals is not widely practiced elsewhere.)

  This is great … but there’s a catch. Canada has its own version of DMCA 1201. Known as Bill C-11, this anti-circumvention law was shepherded through Parliament in 2012 by Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement (the latter of whom is a disgraced sex-pest whose political career ended when he sent pictures of his erect penis to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of extortionists from Côte d’Ivoire).

  Bruce Lehman got the DMCA passed in the United States in 1998, when the internet was relatively obscure and few people were paying attention to tech policy questions. But by 2010, we’d had more than a decade of experience with anti-circumvention law, and Canadians were virulently opposed to the introduction of their own Made-in-Canada anti-circumvention law. Clement and Moore consulted on the proposal and were inundated with objections. By the time the consultation ended, 6,138 Canadians had written in to oppose it, while 54 wrote in support. Faced with this total rejection, Moore deployed a shrewd gambit: he dismissed the bill’s opponents—me included—as “radical extremists” and said that he would disregard their “babyish” views.

  As with DMCA 1201, Bill C-11 comprehensively prohibits the distribution of circumvention devices. (See the discussion of “use exemptions” and “tools exemption” on page 287 for more on this.) That means that Canada’s new legislation grants Canadians the right to modify their devices to make them interoperate and in order to repair them, but it denies them the tools they’ll need to exercise these rights. Womp womp.

  The repair movement is an example of how creating a coalition around a broad issue—repair—that then fights together for narrow victories (wheelchairs, cars, electronics) can break through the incredible lobbying power of giant monopolists. Working at the state level, repair advocates are creating a patchwork of policies that can only really be satisfied by wholeheartedly supporting repair in every way. They can thus bypass a hostile White House and Congress but still be able to work with federal agencies when those agencies come on board.

  I think interoperability’s future lies in this strategy. Manufacturers’ war on interop tempts them into such baroque, odious scams that we have our pick of wedge issues.

  For example, a “right-to-print” campaign could target the ink rip-offs used by printer manufacturers, banning them from selling printers that take measures to block third-party ink, requiring them to provide diagnostic codes needed to fix busted printers, and the unlock codes needed to roll back fake “security updates” that break compatibility with rival ink cartridges.

  A “right to unlock” campaign could force manufacturers to provide the keys and codes needed to keep gadgets running if the manufacturer stops supporting them or goes out of business. States could ban manufacturers from locking customers to specific app stores, servers, or other proprietary code and services.

  Such campaigns wouldn’t just represent bids for narrow sets of rights; they’d be a way to normalize the idea that if you buy something, it’s yours, and you should have the final say as to how it works, even if the manufacturer would rather you organized your affairs to its shareholders’ benefit. Each victory would radicalize more partisans to the cause of technological self-determination and create a hostile, difficult-to-navigate regulatory environment for would-be enshittifiers.

  Best of all, the right to self-help would also create resilient communities, where local businesses build software and provide repair and upgrade services to their neighbors, and create a partisan army for expanding and protecting interoperability.

  Ironically, Trump’s trade wars have opened a new front in the interoperability wars. Many other countries have adopted anti-circumvention rules patterned after the US DMCA 1201, under pressure from the Office of the US Trade Representative, which made adopting US IP laws a condition of trading with the United States.

  During Trump’s first term, his trade negotiators ripped up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had been in place since 1994, and replaced it with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Under the USMCA, both Canada and Mexico are obliged to pass and enforce anti-circumvention laws, and in exchange, both countries get tariff-free access to US markets.

  When Trump threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada, leaders in both countries mooted their own retaliatory tariffs on US goods. Canadians liked the sound of giving Americans a black eye, but it’s a sure bet that once they find themselves paying far higher prices for the US goods they rely on, they’ll lose their enthusiasm. If there’s one political lesson from 2024’s wave of elections in which incumbent parties were enthusiastically voted out of power, it’s that voters do not like politicians who preside over a rise in prices.

  Rather than imposing retaliatory tariffs on Trump’s America, Canada could—and should—repeal its anti-circumvention law, and empower Canadian companies to make interoperable goods and services, from third-party printer cartridges, to independent app stores for phones and games consoles, to universal diagnostic tools for cars and tractors. That way, Canadians would pay less for the apps, repairs, parts, and services associated with their digital technologies, and America’s most profitable companies would be directly punished with competitors who attacked their most profitable lines of business, the enshittified after-market services and junk fees that really screw us all.

  The final edits for this book were delivered in early June, just days after the US Court of International Trade ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, and just days before the DC circuit court’s deadline for briefs for Trump’s appeal of the decision. If Trump loses that appeal, he’s vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court, which has grown so bizarre and dysfunctional that it’s hard to guess what will happen next.

  But even in the event that Trump is prohibited from carrying on with his tariffs, even if he has a public change of heart and promises to do away with all of his tariffs forever, the rest of the world should not and will not believe him.

  Trump has forever shattered the international system of trade, and, in so doing, he has destroyed the US trade representative’s most effective tool for getting other countries to pass pro-enshittification laws: the threat of tariffs for noncompliance.

  There is no reason for any country, anywhere, to keep anticircumvention (that is, pro-enshittification) laws on their books. The first country that dares to abolish these laws could set in motion a revolution in technology, one that treats the billions in monopoly rents that US Big Tech has extracted from the rest of the world as a disposable rocket stage that boosts its domestic tech sector into a long-term, stable orbit as a global powerhouse of disenshittification tools that the rest of us will greedily buy and use.

  The audience for these tools is truly global, and it includes Americans, who, after all, were the first victims of Big Tech’s scams and privacy invasions. If Canada can export reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans, then Canada (or some other country) could also export the tools of technological self-determination to any American with a credit card and an internet connection.

  Happy Liberation Day, everybody!

  Restoring Labor

  William Gibson famously said, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” This is usually interpreted to mean that sharp-eyed observers can find little bits and bobs of gleaming new technology seeded around their surroundings, like a kid on a solar-charged e-bike bombing down a gravel road with a cargo box full of COVID vaccines in a region where no one has running water or grid electricity.

  But I know Bill, and there’s no way that his unevenly distributed futures are exclusively utopian. Gibson is a man who is uniquely and brilliantly attuned to all the ways that technology can go horribly, lavishly wrong.

  Here’s how I think the future’s uneven distribution goes: I think all the worst technologies appear first among the least socially powerful among us, and then work their way up the privilege gradient until we’re all struggling under them.

  I call this the “shitty technology adoption curve.” If you’re a bright tech entrepreneur with a terrible idea that will make people’s lives miserable, you can’t just inflict it on someone like me, a middle-aged, middle-class mouthy white guy. I’ll scream bloody murder.

  So you start with prisoners. Asylum seekers. People in mental institutions. Parolees. Then it’s schoolkids, people on welfare, gig workers. Then it’s college kids, interns, Medicare recipients, blue-collar workers, bottom-rung white-collar workers. At each stage, all the rough edges of the terrible new technology are sanded down on the bodies of its victims, and the depredations that can’t be softened are instead normalized, one group at a time.

  Eventually, the shitty technology comes for us all, working its way past middle-class writers and white-collar workers, all the way up to the C-suite. Twenty years ago, if you found yourself eating your meals under the unblinking eye of a CCTV camera, it was because you were an inmate at a supermax prison. Today, all it signifies is that you were unwise enough to buy a “smart” home camera from Apple, Google, or (God help you) Facebook.

  Tech workers enjoyed decades of absolutely top-tier workplace conditions. A tech industry “campus” had many perks: free gourmet meals, day-care facilities, gyms, laundry services—all the mom-for-hire comforts that were lampooned in shows like Silicon Valley. Tech bosses didn’t lavish these extras on tech workers out of affection: it came out of a cold-blooded calculation that tech workers were very hard to replace, and in enormous demand, so they had to be kept happy or they might defect to a rival.

  But tech workers aren’t the only workers tech bosses employ—indeed, they represent a tiny slice of a typical tech business. From Amazon’s warehouse workers and delivery drivers to Facebook’s overseas content moderators to Apple’s Chinese factory workers, the largest tech workforce labors under some of the worst conditions of any workers in any sector.

  Amazon’s warehouses have the highest rate of on-the-job injuries—including serious injuries, even maimings—of its industry. As discussed on page 120, Amazon drivers are put on quotas so punishing that they piss in bottles and defecate in bags. Their eyes and mouths are constantly monitored by “AI” cameras, and they are disciplined for not looking where the camera thinks they should be, or for singing along to the radio (“distracted driving”).

  The reason Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy treat Amazon coders well and treat Amazon drivers and packers horribly is not that they are sentimentally attached to the one group and contemptuous of the other. The reason Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black T-shirts with weird slogans their bosses don’t understand is that their bosses are afraid of them.

  The future of those coders is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet. If you want to know how Amazon will treat its coders once they can be readily replaced, just look at Amazon warehouse workers and drivers. They’re the early adopters of Amazon’s preferred labor conditions. There’s no reason coders can’t piss in bottles.

  For a man with a dick-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos sure has an abiding hatred of our kidneys.

  Apple CEO Tim Cook has a reputation for being a kind of cuddly tech boss who stands out from the pack. But the reason Apple’s board picked Cook to replace cofounder Steve Jobs after he juice-cleansed his way into an early cancer death wasn’t Cook’s sunny disposition.

  As I discussed on page 291, Cook’s signature achievement prior to his elevation to CEO, the deed that led to his accumulation of more than $2 billion in personal wealth, was figuring out how to offshore Apple’s production to factories in China. This involved establishing labor oversight and discipline in those remote Chinese factories that was so overwhelming and brutal that Foxconn, Apple’s primary contractor, had to install suicide nets around the factories in “iPhone City” to catch workers who leaped to their deaths rather than face another day on the job.

  We don’t have to speculate about how Tim Cook treats workers he’s not afraid of. The suicide nets have settled the matter. This is what Apple’s tech workers can look forward to, once Tim Cook is no longer worried about replacing them.

  The bad news is that tech has resolved its labor scarcity problem. As I noted earlier, the US tech sector fired 260,000 workers in 2023. In the first half of 2024, another 100,000 tech workers joined their unemployed colleagues on the breadline.