Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn’t theft (25 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow argues that jailbreaking devices isn't IP theft but a legitimate response to US Big Tech's extraction, especially as Canada's anticircumvention laws (passed for a now-broken US trade promise) prevent Canadian businesses from competing. He frames real digital sovereignty as the ability to escape kill-switches, app store taxes, and ad-tech rigging by reclaiming the right to modify devices we own.

Teaching:
• Ashtanga itself is a jailbreak: students learn to modify the inherited 'firmware' of a posture for their actual body rather than running someone else's locked binary
• Cueing can frame intelligent modification as ownership, not cheating — a backbend scaled to your spine isn't 'theft' of the pose
• Use this as a class theme: who owns your practice? If the method runs you instead of you running the method, you've licensed your body to a vendor

Writing seeds:
• Essay: 'Jailbreaking the Primary Series' — why functional modification is the opposite of dilution
• Short post: the 30% tax — what students pay in injury and dropout when they can't modify locked sequences
• Newsletter piece reframing 'tradition' vs 'lineage': one is DRM, the other is open source
• Essay connecting device sovereignty and body sovereignty as the same literacy problem

Idea map:
• Extends his systems literacy throughline: knowing how the method works is the precondition for legitimately altering it
• Echoes his functional Ashtanga stance — the practice is a device you own, not a subscription you rent from a guru
• Resonates with attention as sovereignty: ceding modification rights to an authority means ceding self-perception
• Connects to Shala Daily framing of practice as method: methods that can't be inspected or adapted become extraction

Source: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/25/thieve-different/