So you've been elected President of the United States as an independent, and now you've been sworn into office. It's time to break the backs of our corporate overlords so we can restore an America made for the people instead of the oligarchs. This will be more difficult than getting elected, as it will have to get past a lot of Congresspeople who do not, under any circumstances, want to help you break their masters. If they did, all that political money goes away, and what is Congress without corporate sponsorship? They might actually have to start thinking for themselves and about the people they're supposed to serve. Perhaps US politics will draw the best and the brightest for a change. Imagine a world where we have competent people making decisions for our country. That has not happened during my lifetime. Probably not yours, either.
Your first EO should be to eradicate Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. That sounds oddly specific. If you don't know what that is, you're not a Cory Doctorow fan, because I don't think he goes a single day without bringing it up. But you can see why he does. Here's an excerpt from one of his Pluralistic columns that explains it better than I can:
Under anticircumvention law, it's 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.
Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an "access control" for a copyrighted work.
So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it's a felony – a jailable felony – to modify that code or firmware. It's also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.
Under anticircumvention law any manufacturer can trivially turn their product into a no-go zone, criminalizing the act of investigating its defects, criminalizing the act of reporting on its defects, and criminalizing the act of remediating its defects.
This is a law that Jay Freeman rightly calls "Felony Contempt of Business Model." Anticircumvention became the law of the land in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the DMCA. But before you start snickering at those stupid Americans, know this: every other country in the world has passed a law just like this in the years since. Here in the EU, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive.
Now, it makes a certain twisted sense for the US 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 US stock exchanges.
Let me describe what is the quintessential American scene. Picture a man who loves his car. He learns everything about his car so that he can maintain it in pristine condition, and so he can fix things that go wrong with it. Remember when you were a kid helping your dad with the flashlight while he worked under the hood? My dad wasn't around for stuff like that, but I experienced it with Gramps. Gramps was not good at that kind of thing and had to regularly throw in the towel and go to a mechanic.
But if the average American tried to fix their own car today, complete with all the digital programs that make your car run, that's a felony. Because of the DMCA. If your phone breaks, you can only go to an accepted vendor to get it fixed. It's also why you can't use any old ink in your printer. You have to use approved ink, which just so happens to be the most expensive fucking thing on the planet by volume. No shit. Do the math. Doctorow also points out that a Kentucky Derby champion's cum is less expensive than HP printer ink.
This is how corporations have come to control every single fucking aspect of our lives. And in case you skimmed that excerpt, who was the villain who did this to us? That's right, Bill Clinton.
Do you see, perhaps, why I don't trust Democrats, either?
If that wasn't enough, the corporate overlords forced our politicians to extor . . . er, I mean, convince the rest of the world to enact similar legislation protecting their "IP." I put that in quotation marks because there is nothing intellectual about this property. I dislike the phrase "intellectual property" under ordinary circumstances. Under these? It's fucking perverse. If you've also wondered where real innovation has gone, blame Clinton for outlawing the process of reverse engineering.
So yes, the rest of the world has similar laws, and that's how our corporate overlords became theirs, too. How did they threa--er, negotiate with them? If the other countries didn't pass that law, they'd have hefty tariffs levied against them.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Trump has no idea that he's planted the seeds to his masters' destruction. Doctorow is a big proponent of having those other countries repeal the law. That would be infinitely more rewarding than reciprocal tariffs, which only hurts their citizens, too.
But for some reason they're not doing that. So it'll have to be you. Make Reverse Engineering Great Again! Bring innovation back to the US! And more importantly, break the hold the corporations have over us.
And if you don't believe that the corporations have a hold over us, do you remember the Food Pyramid they taught you in school when you were a kid? It's bullshit. 100% bullshit. The corporations that sell us food made sure to push this thing on our teachers to ensure that we continue to buy, in great supplies, the specific foods they sell.
Do you drink orange juice in the morning? Why? Not that long ago (history is never that far behind us, remember), orange juice was NOT a breakfast beverage. But a propagandist started planting the idea in the media that American families drank orange juice for breakfast. Because his client had a surplus of oranges to sell that year.
That's just the shit we know about. How else have their slimy tendrils invaded our lives? Our thoughts? Our very beliefs? How much of you is really you, and how much is the runoff of a corporate scam to get you to buy something?
Break their hold on us. All of us.
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This is a bit I think I'll come back to every once in a while as more EOs occur to me. I already have another one, but that'll be for another time. This should get you started.
But maybe I've lost my mind. Haven't we all, these days? At least a little? I don't think I'm jumping at shadows. So . . .
Doctorow also brings up the fact that our military equipment breaks down all the time, which is a problem, especially if our military is in a warzone, for instance. Because our own soldiers aren't even allowed to repair that equipment. They have to ship it back to the corporation that made it so they can fix it and ship it back. It's like something out of Catch-22.
As always, don't take my word for it. Do some research. Look up "military right to repair." You may also see a recent news story about it. Because what the fuck else would you expect in these grim times?
The exterminator came in today like John Goodman in Arachnophobia. Guns blazing and one liners. He fought with Big Ed's brother in a boiler room. It was intense, but he finally dropped that fucker into a pool of molten lava. I saw the brass knuckles melt off the roach's legs.
I hope it worked.
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