by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-06 09:28:25+00:00
Personally, I think it would be great if various foreign countries reacted to the Trump tariffs by repealing laws compelling them to defend various intellectual property claims that primarily but not exclusively benefit large American companies. I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, in large part because this issue just has very little to do with US tariffs at all, and affects business relationships in non-US countries as well, and is clearly just Cory Doctorow's long-standing hobbyhorse that he cared about decades ago when the world and US political landscape looked very different. But I largely agree with him on this point, so sure, whatever.

I also think it would largely be good if European institutions used more free software hosted directly by the people who use it, rather than relying on software platforms ultimately run by American companies subject to American law. Like Doctorow, I thought the same thing 15 or 20 years ago as well.

There's also the important caveat that American free speech law is the best in the world, and in particular other anglophone countries, not to mention European countries in general, routinely arrest and charge people for political speech on social media that would be unambiguously protected speech in the US. Yeah, it's bad that Larry Bushart was jailed because the local sheriff's department interpreted his joke about the Charlie Kirk assassination as a terroristic threat, but this was ultimately one local sheriff and prosecutor being basically individually corrupt - charges were dropped because there is no legal basis in the US for making jokes about people getting politically assassinated on social media to be a crime, and he's apparently suing the sheriff's department over this. I hope he wins. Lucy Connolly in the UK spent a year in prison for her social media tweets and the prime minister of the UK defended the conduct of the UK criminal justice system. I do not think that a social media platform run by a company directly subject to UK speech law (or the laws of most other countries around the world) would be dramatically better than the status quo.

> And speaking of ICE thugs, there are plenty of qualified technologists who have fled the US this year, one step ahead of an ICE platoon looking to put them and their children into a camp. Those skilled hackers are now living all over the world, joined by investors who'd like to back a business whose success will be determined by how awesome its products are, and not how many $TRUMP coins they buy.

This is wishful thinking - the average person actively evading ICE right now is a low-wage laborer from a 3rd world country who either snuck over the US border or overstayed a visa years ago because they judged that living illegally in the US was better than staying in their shitty 3rd world country. Any person who is actually a qualified technologist probably has some better options than illegally immigrating to the US with their minor children.

Also any children that an illegal immigrant has on US soil are legally natural-born US citizens by the 14th amendment. ICE has no power to deport them, and indeed those anchor babies can potentially use their legal status as a way to get other members of their family including the illegal-immigrant parents who bore them some kind of legal status in the US.

> Rich, powerful people are, at root, solipsists. The only way to amass a billion dollars is to inflict misery and privation on whole populations. The only way to look yourself in the mirror after you've done that, is to convince yourself that those people don't matter, that, in some important sense, they aren't real.

This is simply not true. The way to amass a billion dollars is to either be a local elite in a 3rd world country taking advantage of oil resources, or to be a founder or extremely early investor in a company that gets world-changingly big. Misery and privation is the default state of humanity, humanity has only conquered that to the extent we have so far by technological innovation, and a lot of important technological innovations come from companies that got to be huge by selling stuff that people find valuable and pay money for. This is the exact opposite of inflicting misery and privation on people.

> Think of Elon Musk calling everyone who disagrees with him an "NPC,” or all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

Elon Musk calling people who disagree with him NPCs is him acting exactly the same way as an edgy, extremely-online, pseudonymous shitposter. Which is frankly novel for someone with his immense level of wealth, and makes him more akin to the average internet shitposter than most billionaires. Bill Gates wasn't doing this kind of thing when he was the richest person on earth.

Effective altruists who buy into extreme longtermist moral theories that put a lot of weight on trillions of sentient beings who might exist in the far-future are certainly weird from the perspective of the average person; but moral philosophies that have unintuitive consequences are nothing new, and have more to do with very smart, high-openness academic nerds than the ultra-wealthy.

I think that bringing up extreme-longtermist EAs in this section of the essay betrays an important lack of understanding on Doctorow's part. He's trying to argue that the software products produced by well-known American corporations are bad because they allow those companies to control what their users can do, and wield this control towards earning more money from ads - sure, fair enough, this is a reasonable criticism. He then pivots towards attacking AI on the grounds that it will let these companies replace their programmers and produce more bad code - this is, I think, failing to really think about the promises and risks of this fairly-new set of technologies, but okay, yeah, in principle someone could use AI to generate code that is bad for some purpose.

Then he starts talking about tech company CEOs he dislikes and throws in this jab at effective altruists in general - and this clearly has nothing at all to do with his actual argument. Doctorow is basically free-associating about people he dislikes, and some bay area tech company CEOs are vaguely socially-adjacent to some bay area tech effective altruists and some effective altruists think that extreme-longterm visions of humanity's future imply that there will be astronomically more sentient beings existing then than exist now, and this has unintuitive moral consequences.

Not all Effective Altruists are extreme-longtermists in this way - the modal EA cause is trying to reduce human suffering and death in Africa today by making anti-malarial bednets more widely available - and there's certainly plenty of reasonable moral-philosophical debate to be had about exactly what various visions of the long-term future of humanity imply about how we ought to act now. Doctorow doesn't care about this, he isn't even thinking about it, he's tossing off a throwaway line in an essay because he wants to complain about a group of people he thinks are obviously bad. This is lazy and unprincipled writing.