Elbows Up: How Canada Can Disenshittify Its Tech, Reclaim Its Sovereignty, and Launch a New Tech Sector Into a Stable Orbit with Cory Doctorow
Monday, September 28 - 7 p.m. , Horowitz Theatre
Tickets available in early August for $15 each
13 years ago, the US trade rep bullied us into passing IP laws that ban our tech companies from reverse-engineering, modifying, improving and disenshittifying the tech products they sell to us. America told us that unless we passed these laws, they'd slap us with tariffs.
Welp, here we are: 13 years on, our tech sector is becalmed, RIM and Nortel are distant dreams, US tech giants spy on us with every hour that God sends, they rip off ever app maker, performer, seller and news outlet that relies on an app to the tune of 30 cents out of every dollar, they won't show us the news (not even during wildfires!)...*and* we've got tariffs.
Canada, we can do better than retaliatory tariffs. Changing the law means changing the way our technologists relate to US Big Tech. It means raiding the margins of history's greatest rent seekers, creating a vast consumer surplus and a durable source of industrial advantage for Canada. It beats the heck of out voluntarily deciding to pay *more* for the things we buy from America (which is a pretty weird way of punishing Americans).
About Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification (nonfiction); and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle (followups to Red Team Blues). Other notable books include the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause; the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism; and the internationally bestselling Little Brother series; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
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