This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “There Were Always Enshittifiers,” about the historical context for my latest novel, Picks and Shovels:
It used to be a much fairer fight. It used to be that if a company figured out how to block copying its floppies, another company – or even just an individual tinkerer – could figure out how to break that “copy protection.” There were plenty of legitimate reasons to want to do this: Maybe you owned more than one computer, or maybe you were just worried that your floppy disk would degrade to the point of unreadability. That’s a very reasonable fear: Floppies were notoriously unreliable, and every smart computer user learned to make frequent backups against the day that your computer presented you with the dread DISK ERROR message.
In those early days, it was an arms race between companies that wanted to control how their customers used their own computers, and the technological guerrillas who produced the countermeasures that restored command over your computer to you, its owner. It’s true that the companies making the “copy protection” (in scare quotes because the way you protect your data is by making copies of it) typically had far more resources than the toolsmiths who were defending technology users.