So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That’s a weird way to punish America! It’s like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “Ouch!”

And it’s indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company’s shareholders mad.

  • kbal@fedia.io
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    4 months ago

    It’s obviously the right idea, Cory’s been saying it to anyone who will listen for months if not years, but it would depend on governments doing something. How can it possibly happen then, if there aren’t powerful corporate interests hiring lobbyists to say it in a way that politicians can hear?

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m not sure how far you read, but he argues that it would only take one country’s legislature to set this off and reap the rewards of nurturing a fully open alternative to the US big-tech stack.

      With the US pissing off pretty much everyone else and losing allies by the day, it will only be a matter of time before the doors are blown open on this.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        It’s a speech. He has a hypothesis at best, and expertly lays out one way for it to go.

        If one country did it, they’d try to give them the Venezuela treatment.

        Don’t get me wrong, I think the overall concept has incredible legs, but the finer details of tit-for-tat and retaliation aren’t quite fleshed out.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          It’s why things have to happen in a certain order. You can’t do the more aggressive economic actions against the US until after certain conditions are in place. First you need to cut dependency on the US for anything essential. Food and strategic resources like aluminum, steel, and energy. You also need a strong enough military to make any US military action costly for the US.

          Once those conditions are met you can take further action. Hitting the US tech sector is more of a middle option. Manipulating the US bond market is the nuclear option.

          Currently these options aren’t on the table since the US can kick out the legs of that table if you tried to play those cards. But many things are quietly changing around the world while Americans are obsessing over Epstein files, Trump playing battleship, and Hegseth and Rubio fucking around with tinpot South American dictators.

    • Alexander@sopuli.xyzOP
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, he’s been doing this stuff since I first read about him in 2010 or so; yet now, thanks to Trump lol, things look differently.