So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That’s a weird way to punish America! It’s like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “Ouch!”

And it’s indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company’s shareholders mad.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The only real solution isn’t reactivating roombas but cutting dependence on US goods and markets. The US market is highly desirable from a purely population angle but isn’t essential today. Moving to an alternative to the dollar, expanding production of essential goods to other nations, etc.

    If you really want to spite the US use retaliatory IP lifting. “Ok, US IP protections are now invalid.”

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Just declare any simple script that does a wget on copyrighted information to be “AI”. AI is immune from copyright infringement it seems.