My latest @locusmag column is up: "Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor" describes Schneier's "Feudal Security" model, where computer users are unable to defend themselves, and instead ally themselves with a powerful warlord and move into their castle.

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

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These warlords - Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft - all have the best cybermercenaries money can buy stationed at their gates and on their parapets, and they will defend you against anyone the warlord declares to be your enemy.

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But there's a tradeoff: if the warlord turns on you - if Google spies on you, if Apple blocks the app you want, if Facebook won't let Ad Observatory monitor its ads for paid political disinformation - the cybermercenaries turn on you and ensure the warlord gets their way.

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This is actually worse than it seems at first blush. Once a company arrogates to itself the right to decide what you see and what you don't, what you can do and what you can't, then powerful governments will demand that the warlords use that power to serve THEIR ends.

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Google gathers massive dossiers on where you go and what you search for, and, right on schedule, local law enforcement shows up demanding to know where you've been and what you're searching for.

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Apple secures the right to block which apps you can install, and the Chinese government comes along and demands that Apple use that power to block working privacy tools that subvert its national surveillance powers.

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These were utterly foreseeable outcomes of the feudal business model - but they were still hypothetical until well-publicized moments like the Snowden revelations and China's annihilation of mobile privacy tools. Now, they aren't just foreseeable, they're undeniable.

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And yet, the tech companies continue to enact this neofeudalism - and worse, to bar the gates so that you can't escape their walled gardens, pretending that this does not guarantee that they will be deputiized to serve as agents of state oppression.

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This is a rare instance in which tech companies could soften the impact of their greed and indifference: by allowing interoperability, sideloading, and algorithm/ad monitoring, tech companies would seriously reduce the likelihood that they'll be asked to harm their users.

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If a government tells a mobile company "remove all your privacy tools," they could gently remind the state's representatives that users can simply sideload those privacy tools.

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Perhaps the state will demand they go ahead with enforcement - but if so, users can sideload apps and defend themselves. The harms of feudal security could be substantially reduced - if the companies were willing to countenance a trifling reduction in their profits.

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But they will not and do not.

Perhaps the clue is in the misnomer of "feudal security." This isn't feudalism at all, really - its manorialism, the idea that wealthy merchants (not princes) own everything and we are mere tenants in their fields.

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That ambition requires a muscular state that will defend the manors, and closely allies the richest landlords with the crown.

eof/