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I’ll end this thread with a question, which multiple conceptions of “Post American” makes possible: How can this idea of Post American address the logics of American imperial power? Or, more complexly, can a Post American internet be imagined outside the spatial-political logics of the colony? I ask these questions because I think questions of empire and colony linger in our arguments about technology and access, as well as the ways technologies are imagined and constructed in profit-seeking arenas. There may be space in those questions to think in ways that imagine more and different futures for our technologies, their infrastructures and their uses. (2026-01-08 ↗)

This problem is probably out of the scope of Doctorow’s work. He describes in his talk about how coalition building is often fraught and made with compromise. Again, I am otherwise an advocate for his work in general. My hope is more to say, “here is an issue that might be interesting to think about, especially in reference to this term Post American.” (2026-01-08 ↗)

I am partially exaggerating Doctorow’s claims to help underline what I am seeing once I started thinking of a “Post American Internet” in the context of the Dead Pioneers’ framing of “Po$t American”: There is a colonial logic of creating new lands for conquest, and seeing that creation as an opportunity to raid the land for the gains of competing manufacturers. (Of course these ‘lands’ to which I am referring to are ‘proprietary code created by monopolistic enshitifying fascists who have and will steal anything and everything they can’ so it is still very much in our interest to repeal those laws. My concern is much more philosophical: why do we have to see that code as ownable, minable, profitable in the first place?) (2026-01-08 ↗)

The logic that gives me pause is this: 1) Repealing anticircumvention law makes an otherwise inaccessible terrain (proprietary code) suddenly accessible. 2) This accessibility provides an opportunity for people who do not own that code to take it and use it for their own profit. 3) There is an assumption that the pioneering country that repeals these laws first would be the one who might benefit the most from doing so. (2026-01-08 ↗)

@pluralistic I’ll share one paragraph from the essay, describing how businesses could take advantage of the moment when anticircumvention laws are repealed: “So what if Canada repealed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 (that's our anticircumvention law)? Well, then a company like Honeybee, which makes tractor front-ends and attachments, could hire some smart University of Waterloo computer science grads, and put 'em to work jailbreaking the John Deere tractor's firmware, and offer it to everyone in the world. They could sell the crack to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method, including that poor American farmer whose soybeans we're currently tariffing.” (2026-01-08 ↗)