Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards
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If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was *good* for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell.
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Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability."
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What's more, the heyday of this kind of adversarial interop was also the heyday of disenshittification, the era in which any anti-feature installed by your existing vendor could be countered by a disenshittifying patch from a new one:
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The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for.
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You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous...or unserious. You bought it, it's yours.
But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown.
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When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks.
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But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level - they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches.
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We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it.
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The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers *legal*, not just *possible*.
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Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be *remediable* slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring.
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You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long sentence.
I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine - either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make *more* code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.
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These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our *policy*, *then* we can fix our *code*:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
eof/
Oct 21, 2026, 9:38 PMjailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink
What did my printer ever do to end up in ink jail, anyway? If you bought, at the store, for money, a printer — and the ink you want to put into it isn't itself made of some kind of contraband devil ink, then you should be allowed to put whatever ink you want into it. If you can figure out how to make it run on ketchup instead of ink, well it's your fucking printer isn't it? Putting normal ink designed to go into printers into it should not be violating any laws. The fantasy that doing so is akin to a prison break — enshrined in law though it may be — is absurd. This was as obvious to to the very few people paying attention to such things when they passed that stupid law thirty years ago as it should be to everyone today. For how long can law so thoroughly opposed to common morality survive?
@kbal No, that's the tragedy. The people who enacted this policy were specifically warned about this. Worse, though, are the politicians abroad who were arm-twisted to passing the law more than a decade later, who could *see* how the law was being abused in the US and passed domestic versions in their own country anyway. Inexcusable.