Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)


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A 1960s family living room in which a mom, dad and two kids are mesmerized by a cabinet-style TV. The image has been altered. The TV has an early 1990s VCR atop it. The TV screen is displaying a cross-sectioned human head with brains and spine on display. A huge fist has materialized in the room, with bloody spiked knuckle-dusters, smashing into the VCR. The oil painting over the sofa has been replaced with a pulp image of a male head, its cranium removed and replaced by a dome. Inside the dome is a red eight-segment VCR clock, displaying 12:00. The background in the painting is a tangle of cassette tape. The whole image's colors have been boosted, giving it an overexposed look.

The age of disinvention (permalink)

They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important.

You see, copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers!

There's clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There's also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do not infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid's birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there's an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that might infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you're at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids' shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician's campaign speeches. Anyone who says, "Oh every judge would always call that legal‡ under every circumstance" is admitting they don't understand how copyright works.

‡ Or illegal.

This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a flexible doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws.

Copyright's future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the Betamax decision. By ruling that any technology that had "non-infringing uses" was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since.

Crucially, Betamax ensured that last year's tech lottery winners wouldn't get to prevent next year's winners from emerging. This year's admirals are always last year's pirates, and they insist that what they did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to them is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster!

There's nothing inherently virtuous about "innovation." It's perfectly possible to "innovate" new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you're trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product.

"Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to.

Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this."

That's why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy.

That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal.

The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/

The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved.

That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology. "Hook IP" is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned.

The DVD consortium's hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like "region coding" – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs.

Region coding is an "anti-feature," a technology developed at great expense for which there is no market. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn't care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was terrible.

So there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature.

Anti-features aren't the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium's hook IP licenses didn't just require anti-features, they also banned useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows.

Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: "anti-circumvention law." Under anti-circumvention law, it's a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America's landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for "bypassing an access control":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them.

Every video format and distribution system that succeeded the VCR shipped with an access control: DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD, satellite and digital cable, and, of course, streaming video. This is how they disinvented the VCR. Once every video had an access control, it had "hook IP" that could be used to control all technologies that were capable of receiving, storing, or playing back that video.

Remember Tivo? The first digital "personal video recorders" were true successors to the VCR. They could record any broadcast or cable program, store it forever and fast forward through the ads. They were all "feature" and nary an "anti-feature" in sight. That's because they only worked with analog cable (which, being analog, didn't have "access controls" that qualified them for DMCA 1201 consideration) and broadcast signals (sent over the public airwaves on the condition that they not be scrambled).

Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in.

Today, if you have a PVR, you probably rent it from your cable provider (who can use DMCA 1201 to block other PVRs from working with your cable provider). It's probably slow, with a confusing user interface, and it only records an ever-dwindling subset of the shows your cable company transmits. Notwithstanding that it's a genuinely shitty piece of technology, it's still awful that you can't buy it – the fact that you have to rent that crapgadget month after month means that you're paying for it several times over.

But at least cable signals have PVRs. For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service.

You know how streaming companies play all kinds of bullshit games, like dropping videos from their catalog? Even worse: the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games. If they played those games anyway, you could beat them.

It's not just VCRs. Anti-circumvention law led to the enshittification of everything from tractors to ventilators, phones to smart speakers, thermostats to games consoles, all of which are bristling with hook IP that lets their manufacturers decide what you can do with your own property.

All of this is extremely relevant at this moment, thanks to Trump's tariffs. For more than a quarter century, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted every American trading partner into enacting an anti-circumvention law like DMCA 1201. All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers.

That's where Trump comes in. From the moment his "Liberation Day" tariffs landed, any country that upheld its anti-circumvention laws was sacrificing its national competitiveness, resiliency and integrity in exchange for nothing. Trump reneged on America's obligations to its trading partners, just like he reneged on every deal he's ever made:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

The good news is, this means we can have VCRs again! All it will take is for one (or more) countries to decide to lift its one-sided restrictions on making technologies "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and wait for one (or more) entrepreneurs to figure out that reintroducing the VCR is a winner, just like it was in the 1970s, when the VCR was the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world.

It's not just VCRs, of course. For a generation, entire product categories have been suppressed, all over the world. There is a whole CES (good) worth of products that are truly innovative (good) waiting to be brought to market.

The last time there was this much low-hanging fruit on offer was after WWII, where six years' worth of bombings, austerity and neglect provided endless opportunities to repair, rebuild and replace the worn, crumbling built environment, vehicle fleet and personal belongings of people all over the world.

After a quarter-century of innovation prohibition, there are dozens of lucrative, easily perfected technologies just waiting to be made: the dongle that jailbreaks your phone or console and installs a third-party app store, the dongle that flashes your printer so it takes generic ink; the dongle that lets your mechanic install generic parts in your car and lets farmers fix their tractors. Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them.

A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive. They've accumulated vast wealth at our expense. Their margins are our opportunity.

The VCR was a great idea 55 years ago. 55 years later, it's an idea whose time has come – again.

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 Metacrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

#15yrsago Slashdot’s CmdrTaco steps down https://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/Rob-CmdrTaco-Malda-Resigns-From-Slashdot

#15yrsago Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto’s New City Hall https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewolf011/6076393292/

#15yrsago Coordinated multinational ATM fraud nets $13M in one night https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/coordinated-atm-heist-nets-thieves-13m/

#5yrsago Vaccinate workers at (almost) any price https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/26/chained-to-the-mast/#vaccine-leave-hesitancy

#1yrago By all means, tread on those people https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

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)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (9802 total).

  • "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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