It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP."

Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists (except me) interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/

Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem – it really does! Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households.

The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices – terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either – Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't – our hands are tied…by us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash.

And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies.

The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies – if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured – then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight! What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions.

And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?"

That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans.

It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors.

I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms:

https://macdailynews.com/2024/06/19/steve-jobs-felt-certain-apple-would-never-have-existed-without-woz-and-him-making-blue-boxes/

Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple – a company literally founded on theft – now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you.

I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things – like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators – that is not piracy.

Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could – and does – terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta – or the entire shop.

We can address that digital sovereignty risk – and make billions at the same time – by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them – and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians – and the world – want to buy and will pay us a fortune for.

Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.

(Image: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0; SABYST, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Angela Frances Hui

I want to start off by asking about your book’s title. What is a reverse centaur, and why is it a useful concept when it comes to understanding AI?

Cory Doctorow

In automation theory, a centaur is someone who is assisted by a tool. Whenever you use a spellchecker, or ride a bicycle, you are a centaur. A reverse centaur is someone who’s recruited to assist a machine. The example everyone knows is Lucille Ball working in the chocolate factory — she and Ethel have to pluck chocolates off the assembly line and put them in the chocolate box. The owner of a machine will want to utilize the machine to its maximum throughput, because that’s how they make their money back. The human, the reverse centaur, is going to be the slowest part of the system. So, you crank up the machine to run at the very outer limit of the human being’s endurance and capability, which means that you’re not just using a person, you’re using a person up.

When you talk to people about AI, you get people who are skilled workers and historically reliable narrators of their own experience, and they tell you that using AI helps them in all kinds of ways and makes their work better. And then you meet people who, again, are skilled workers and reliable narrators of their experience, and they tell you that that very same AI tool is making them miserable, and they can’t believe how poor the quality of the work they’re producing is. My proposal here is that the answer to this conundrum is that the first group are centaurs, and the second group are reverse centaurs.

As a science fiction writer, the one thing I know to be very true is that what a machine does is way less important than who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to. That’s the dispositive question we should be trying to answer when we talk about labor and automation, whether or not we’re talking about AI.

Effective AI Criticism

Angela Frances Hui

Your book is about how to be an effective AI critic. Can you tell us more about what effective AI criticism entails and, conversely, what it means to be an ineffective AI critic?

Cory Doctorow

If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble.

Military families are experiencing a sharp rise in food insecurity, driven largely by the rising cost of groceries, according to a survey conducted before the start of the Iran war in February and its inflationary impact.

The biennial report by the Military Family Advisory Network, a national nonprofit that supports military and veteran families, surveyed more than 10,000 families between October 2025 and January 2026. The report examines how economic security, health care access, spouse employment, community connection, family functioning and military life satisfaction shape family well-being and force readiness.

More than 41% of respondents said they were experiencing food insecurity. That’s a dramatic jump from 2023, when 16% reported food insecurity. Both surveys predate the war-related inflation that has since raised costs for many military families, as Capital & Main previously reported.

More than half of respondents (53.8%) identified food costs as a barrier to eating healthy, citing the high price of groceries and healthy options in particular. One of the most striking findings, the report said, was that many families reported skipping meals or portions of meals so that other family members could eat.

“People are struggling. Things have gotten a lot more expensive, especially with the gas prices,” said the spouse of a deployed service member living near Camp Pendleton in Southern California who asked to remain anonymous due to her fear of retaliation. Her family is receiving extra pay during her husband’s deployment. “But when he comes home, that will not be true anymore,” she said, noting that she knows other spouses who are being squeezed by rising inflation.

Thawing permafrost, disappearing glaciers, shifting and declining wildlife populations: Alaska, the largest and wildest American state by far, is in a slow-motion climate and ecological crisis at an Alaska-sized scale. Are state and federal politicians dreaming up transformative investments in new infrastructure, enabled by tens of billions in subsidies, that will blaze a new trail for Alaska’s future? Yes, they are!

Oh, wait—they just want another pipeline. The same pipeline, in fact, that has been a pipe dream of Alaskan officials since the 1980s, but was never built because of its ballooning costs. Alaska LNG would be a massive gas infrastructure project involving a new gas treatment plant and 807-mile pipeline cutting across the state to transport methane gas from near Prudhoe Bay to a new liquefaction plant and export terminal in the south, west of Anchorage. Dropped a decade ago by BP, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil because of its price tag and remote location, it has been kept nominally alive by the state-owned Alaska Gasline Development Corporation. Now, the proposed pipeline has a new developer in Glenfarne, which is also behind yet-unbuilt LNG facilities in Texas and Louisiana.

By Glenfarne’s projection, construction of Alaska LNG could cost up to $55 billion. The real cost, if built, is likely to be much higher. A new report from Public Citizen analyzing the final cost of constructing operating LNG terminals in North America found that the average cost overrun was 59.7 percent. LNG Canada, the project most comparable to Alaska LNG for requiring a custom-built pipeline over hundreds of miles of challenging terrain, ran more than 130 percent over budget. As report authors Lois Parshley and Mekedas Belayneh note, “Alaska’s proposed pipeline route traverses a longer distance, and more severe terrain, in a labor market that is structurally thinner [than LNG Canada].”

Then there is rapidly escalating competition from renewables. Global electricity generated from wind and solar has increased by more than 350 percent since just mid-2020, and surpassed generation from natural gas for the first time in history in April this year. Nations around the world are frantically investing in green energy and industry to defend themselves from energy price shocks; any gas from this pipeline might go begging by the time it’s completed.

Donald Trump has found a way to soothe Democratic fears that Republicans in Congress will continue to savage the poor, funnel money to the rich, and make the nation safe for corporate dominion. He’s effectively shut down Congress until it passes an unpassable bill.

Trump is demanding that the SAVE America Act—a voter suppression bill he thinks will save his hide in the midterms—reach his desk first before he’ll take care of any other congressional business. First it was Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless spying program that the intelligence hawks were poised to ram through again until Trump said SAVE had to be attached. Then a signing ceremony for the ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan agreement that passed with over 90 percent of Congress in both chambers, was abruptly canceled Wednesday because Trump asked for SAVE first. (That will likely become law anyway, as I’ll explain.)

Now this controlled burn is going to set fire to the last chance for Republicans to do anything else meaningful before the midterms. The SAVE Act has poisoned this process entirely, and there’s really no path for it to happen.

Remarkably enough, there are other potentially worthy bipartisan deals under discussion, for a $35 monthly co-pay for all insulin prescriptions and for child online safety rules, to name two. None of them will get done as long as this SAVE thing hangs over the proceedings.

Why is Trump destroying a Republican Congress’s ability to affirm his priorities? First, he really does think he can rig the elections in his favor and avoid accountability. But second and perhaps more important, Trump and his loyal sentry Russ Vought are running the government to their satisfaction without congressional input, defying legislative spending prerogatives and unilaterally budgeting government operations. So who cares if Congress can’t pass a law? Laws are not being followed anyway. The core of the constitutional system, Congress’s control of federal spending, has been effectively suspended.