Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A Canadian flag, its elements replaced with circuit boards. In the foreground, a bent-double, exhausted Uncle Sam trudges over rocky terrain, shlepping a giant sack on his back. Centered in the maple leaf is the word SORRY.

Sorry, eh (permalink)

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

Back in 2012, Canada passed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. It's a law that bans Canadian companies from modifying America's digital tech exports. We passed it because the US threatened us with tariffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell jailbreaking kits for phones and consoles, which would let Canadian sellers offer goods and services to Canadian buyers outside of US app stores, sidestepping the 30% app tax that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony and others impose on our digital economy.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell mechanics a universal diagnostic tool that turns every "check engine" light into a useful error message. Instead, Canadian mechanics have to send $10,000/year/manufacturer to America for a proprietary car diagnosis kit.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't offer ink cartridge manufacturers software that will ensure their cartridges work in the printers Canadians buy from the American inkjet cartel. As a result, Canadians have to spend $10,000/gallon on ink, making it the most expensive fluid a Canadian civilian can purchase without a government permit.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell our farmers software that lets them start using their tractors as soon as they've fixed them. Instead, after a Canadian farmer fixes their tractor, they have to wait for a service call from a rep for a US ag-tech monopolist who'll type an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard and charge the farmer a couple hundred bucks for this "service."

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't revive one of the most successful technologies in modern history: the home video recorder. Remember those? First we had VCRs, then we had digital successors like the Tivo. Canadian law says you're allowed to record the video that comes into your home, whether by broadcast, cable, satellite or streaming. But Bill C-11 bans a Canadian company from selling you a gadget that lets you save the video you get in an app or from a set-top box.

It's crazy: we have actually uninvented the VCR! You know how everyone is pissed off about their favourite shows being yanked from the streaming services? Repeal C-11 and you could just save those shows forever. Repeal C-11 and you'd kill the grinchy little racket that services like Prime pull, where Christmas cartoons are in the free tier from March to November, and cost $3.99 to watch between November and March. Just tape 'em in August and save 'em for later!

It doesn't stop there. Remember when Facebook banned all links to the news in Canada? Repeal C-11 and a Canadian company could sell you an alternative Facebook app that puts the news back into your feed! Repeal C-11 and Canadians could get an alternative app that replaces all the streaming services, letting you search and stream every service you have an account for in one place, mixing in Canadian content from the NFB, public broadcasters, and commercial services.

Virtually every Canadian ministry, corporation and household is locked into a US Big Tech silo. Any of these could be shut down at a single word from Trump to any of the tech giants who've lined up to do his bidding. Repeal C-11 and we can extract all our data from these walled gardens/prisons and get it onto auditable, trustworthy, transparent open source software, hosted in data-centres located safely on Canadian soil.

If there's one thing Canadians are good it, it's going to other countries and extracting their wealth. We're world champions at it.

America's tech monopolies have sequestered trillions of dollars worth of monopoly rents on their balance sheets. This is dead capital, being pissed up the wall on nonsense like stock buybacks and data-centres and grotesque executive bonuses.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity."

America's tech trillions represent a rich and readily accessible seam that we can extract – safely, from our own country! – and turn into our billions, and an exportable line of products that the whole world would beat a path to our door to buy.

Look, I'm sorry. I don't have any ideas for how Canada can get to a better future by lighting billions on fire in a bet on a failing technology whose dubious profitability depends on ruining our job market, our power grid and our water supply, which will tie the American political situation to our ankles.

All I've got is an idea for how we can make insanely profitable products that people really want to buy, that will insulate us from cyberattacks by US tech giants who are in thrall to Trump, and that Americans will pay us to use in order to free themselves from the tech giants who abuse them, too.

I'm really sorry. I know it's out of step with the times, but all I have is ideas that make money, make us safer, make us richer, and make our technology better.

On the other hand, those chatbots sure are cute. It's funny when they "hallucinate."

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Hey, Mark made me a guest editor! https://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a/

#15yrsago Woz on Network Neutrality https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/

#15yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire https://web.archive.org/web/20110116093950/http://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/

#10yrsago For the first time in 15 years, there’s a new Violent Femmes album https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2016/01/13/462656061/hear-a-song-from-violent-femmes-first-album-in-15-years

#10yrsago 3D Systems abandons its Cube printers, but DRM means you can’t buy filament from anyone else https://michaelweinberg.org/post/137045828005/free-the-cube

#10yrsago Why Moveon endorsed Bernie Sanders https://medium.com/middle-of-nowhere-center-of-everything/the-top-5-reasons-moveon-members-voted-to-endorse-bernie-with-the-most-votes-and-widest-margin-in-78c2e69990ec#.py5rdi9xc

#10yrsago Sneak-privatization of public schools: attacking teachers, unions and standards https://web.archive.org/web/20160112065749/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/07/a-primer-on-the-damaging-movement-to-privatize-public-schools/

#10yrsago Income inequality makes the 1% sad, too https://hbr.org/2016/01/income-inequality-makes-whole-countries-less-happy

#5yrsago Will Biden bust trusts? https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#thanks-obama

#5yrsago 20 years a blogger https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1037 words today, 5059 total)

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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