Pluralistic: How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (23 Aug 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-08-29)

• Cory Doctorow argues that Canada’s current “elbows up” symbolic resistance to Trump’s aggressive tariffs and demands for annexation is failing, and instead, Canada should adopt “True Carneyism” by strategically leveraging Trump’s predictable belligerence and the “enshittification” of American tech to achieve digital sovereignty and economic advantage.
• The core of this strategy involves repealing Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11) to legalize reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology, enabling the development of a Canadian tech sector with “disruptive products” like independent app stores and repair tools.
• This move would attract skilled technologists fleeing the US (a “reverse brain-drain”) and capital from the imminent AI bubble collapse, turning “America’s tech trillions into Canada’s tech billions” and removing the “digital kill switch” America holds over Canadian infrastructure.
• By selling “disenshittification tools” to Americans (e.g., cheap pharmaceuticals, tractor jailbreaks), Canada can foster solidarity with Americans against their common enemy, Trump, creating a powerful partisan army of “American Canada weebs” as a stronger defense than toothless symbolic gestures.