My absolute favourite comic journal by Stevenson. Made me cry my eyes out. Even when I can’t articulate it, it gets to the core of what I think love is.
Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you’re all probably used to…but I’m not.
Mrs Krabappel: It’ll take you about six weeks, dear.
-The Simpsons, “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love,” S3E23, May 7, 1992
We are living through weird times, and they’ve persisted for so long that you probably don’t even notice it. But these times are not normal.
Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.
6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love,” Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it’s a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.
But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an “access control” that you have to work around in order to make a modification.
For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you’re only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with “unauthorized bread”:
If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn’t walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion “cooking robots” that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven’t really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):
But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you’d embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful “System on a Chip” (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an “access control” that satisfies DMCA 1201.
Likewise, in 1998, “access controls” (also called “DRM,” “technical protection measures,” etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:
But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a “complementary good” that improves on it.
It’s even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What’s more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.
Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a “subscription”:
This slippery slope was mildly exciting until the speed picked up and the friction increased resulting in all my flesh being flensed off.
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it’s punk to only use things made before “smart devices” or “internet of things” crap became ubiquitous and unavoidable
buy used and old stuff, especially when there’s no dumb modern equivalent. fix things yourself. help others break away from DRM-deranged devices. teach others how to fix stuff themselves, and share how-to tutorials
old tech was made to be more durable, anyhow: our plasma-screen TV from 2004 still works better than any chip-infested LED made in the last two decades, and isn’t even capable of connecting to the internet. my phone from 2018 still holds more memory than new ones, has a processor capable of anything I use it for, and has a second card slot no phones offer anymore. my 1966 Chrysler Newport contains zero parts any corporation could stop me from changing or repairing. my motorcycle jacket from 1998 will outlive me. and so on
with this DMCA-driven trend and the rise of “AI” everything (plus, y'know, the tanking economy), I expect we’ll see a resurgence of handmade, repaired, and low-tech goods
and if more people say, “Enough!” perhaps we can turn this doom-barge around and get this law changed. then maybe we’ll start seeing new things we’d choose to buy again
in the mean time, stay punk and tell corporations to fuck off with their enshittified crap
Thank you for your service to humanity, Question Hound 🫡🔥 only you could convey such a specific feeling that people still regularly reference 13 years later with three simple words.
people talk about how we need to bring back “don’t feed the trolls” rhetoric for modern internet ragebait and I agree but also I think the most useful thing from the Old Internet that I miss is LURKING
be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it’s so nice and so freeing and it’s a good way to learn things.
I have frequently regretted getting involved in shit that didn’t involve me online but you know what I’ve never regretted doing? Lurking. literally lurk moar
sorry for being annoying [remembers that practicing gratitude instead of shame is better for my mental health and my relationships] thank you for letting me be annoying with you
Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don’t understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it’s producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we’re shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:
Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.
This is the thesis of Paul Mason’s 2015 book Postcapitalism, a book that has aged remarkably poorly (though not, perhaps, as poorly as Mason’s own political credibility): code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does “wear out” (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).
To understand why code is a liability, you have to understand the difference between “writing code” and “software engineering.”
“Writing code” is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer’s resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.
Meanwhile, “software engineering” is a discipline that subsumes “writing code,” but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.
“Writing code” is about making code that runs well. “Software engineering” is about making code that fails well. It’s about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It’s about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:
Because that’s the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn’t static, it’s dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.
A big reason why some people think chatbots are great at writing code is because it’s like gambling. Entering a prompt and having a chatbot return in seconds workable code that would have taken you hours to write is like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, it’s an incredible rush. Gamblers remember the times they hit a jackpot but ignore the fact that they lost money overall.
This is how you can end up with coders insisting that AI tools benefited them in a study proving that AI tools made them less productive.
Even worse, Im in a lot of open source code related spaces and if you don’t ask a chatbot for help before asking people, no one helps you nowadays like 60% of the time.
Its like going to a doctor and being like “Im coughing up blood” and they respond with “well have you tried the slot machine yet? You should try the slot machine before you ever speak to a doctor”.
the other day i saw a tiktok of a woman talking about how her hyper-militant abusive parents would sometimes punish her by “taking away her name” and referring to her as a prisoner number. genuinely terrible stuff, obviously. but i skimmed the comments and. listen. i truly DO NOT mean to dunk too hard on this person, like they could be a kid or something, but.
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just. breathtaking. imagine if your primary reference for the concept of the un-personing of prisoners was (check notes) a book series about owls.
This is why it’s important to Include stuff like this in fiction, especially ya fiction. It can be a lot of sheltered and/or indoctrinated children, in the case of a lot of rural “Christians”, first introduction to these types of concepts in a way they can understand.
I don’t think there’s anything weird or shameful about it. Knowledge is knowledge, regardless of where it came from.
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