The author and digital rights activist talks jailbreaking, the government being AI-pilled, and Aeron chair analogies. <\/p>\n
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What would Canada look like if tech journalist and author Cory Doctorow were AI minister? For starters, there would likely be less sloganeering and more cursing coming out of Canada\u2019s innovation ministry. It might also look, however, like a Canada that\u2019s more skeptical of big, southern tech firms, more comfortable outside the confines of US copyright law, and less AI-pilled than the government is today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Doctorow, who published his most recent nonfiction work, The Reverse Centaur\u2019s Guide to Life After AI, earlier this summer, joined BetaKit editor-in-chief Douglas Soltys in the podcast studio last month, where he talked about repealing Canada\u2019s anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, why jailbreaking big tech is a path to sovereignty, and how he fears the government\u2019s \u201call-in\u201d approach to AI could turbocharge 21st century fascism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You can read an excerpt from that conversation below. <\/p>\n
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n
In your essay in BetaKit Most Ambitious, you talk about this idea that for Canada\u2019s digital sovereignty to mean anything, we\u2019ve got to jailbreak this country. Can you tell our audience what that means?<\/p>\n
First, let\u2019s talk about three ways that Canada is not digitally sovereign. We\u2019re subject to raids on our privacy and on the functionality of the tools we use. We try to get Facebook to pay for news, now we just don\u2019t have news on Facebook, and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another is market opportunity. You could jailbreak the Facebook app. You could offer people all of the services that Facebook has, but without having to use Facebook. There\u2019s plenty of Americans who would buy that if they could, and there\u2019s plenty of people all over the world who would buy that if they could.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The third way is that Microsoft could turn off M365 for any ministry or structurally important firm and brick that firm or branch of the government.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So the question is why can\u2019t we just fix this? The answer is that in 2012 we passed a wildly unpopular law<\/a> that says it\u2019s illegal for Canadians to modify American technology if it has digital rights management (DRM), and you can\u2019t break DRM even for lawful purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Apple won\u2019t let you replace a screen or add more RAM unless you go Apple-certified and even then they might not let you.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jailbreaking is a way we defend our human rights. It\u2019s the way that we capture those markets and turn their trillions into our billions. Jeff Bezos tells every supplier, \u201cyour margin is my opportunity.\u201d When he does it, that\u2019s not progress. And, if we do it to him, it\u2019s not piracy. That margin is our opportunity.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also how we get our digital sovereignty because while we can build equivalents to M365, no one is going to copy and paste a million documents and data structures into your Canadian cloud.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We need to do something like virtualize a phone and iterate through all the records and be able to extract the data that way which we can only do if we repeal this wildly unpopular law, become a dis-enshittification nation, turn their trillions into our billions, become digitally sovereign, protect the privacy and money of the people in Canada and set up an export market where everyone in the world, including Americans, become our customers rather than doing something like boycotting American products and drinking shitty Wayne Gretzky rye instead of delicious American bourbon, and whacking some poor farmer in a state that begins and ends with a vowel because we\u2019re not buying his corn anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the time this episode comes out, BetaKit will have sat down with Evan Solomon<\/a>, Canada\u2019s AI minister. My question for you is: if you were AI minister, what would you do?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a story about a system admin who\u2019s told they have to build a server farm that can process a certain number of flops within 10 years. When asked what their plan is, they say, \u201cI\u2019m going to do nothing for the next nine years while Moore\u2019s Law does its work, and then I\u2019m going to build a data centre for 10 percent of what it would cost me to build it today\u201d\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n