Think of the US "realignment" after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which saw the "Dixiecrats" (southern Democrats) defect en masse to the Republicans - or think of all the reliably Democratic "rustbelt" precincts that swung for Trump in 2016 (and, to a lesser extent, in 2020).

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Coalitional realignments are wellsprings of political change, for good or ill. In her 2023 must-read book *Doppelganger*, Naomi Klein provides a clear-eyed look at how liberals sidelined leftists in the progressive coalition, and how that opened space for the right to peel off working people and get Trump elected:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not…

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And the right relies on racebaiting and other appeals to cruelty and hatred to get millions of low-income people to elect politicians who will make their rich bosses even richer, at their expense:

pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/tur…

But coalitions aren't always manufactured. The most powerful, transformative coalitions coalesce out of a recognition of real, shared interests.

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As @thepublicdomain has written, the term "ecology" turned a thousand issues into one movement, fusing people who cared about endangered owls with people campaigning on the ozone layer, by giving them a word ("ecology") that brought all those issues under one umbrella:

pluralistic.net/2020/08/29/chi…

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Today, we're seeing a growing "Privacy First" movement that recognizes that so many of America's ills start with the country's poor privacy protections (Congress last updated consumer privacy law in 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented).

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Whether you're worried about Big Tech brainwashing, AI deepfake porn, red state Attorneys General following teens into abortion clinics, or cops rounding up the identities of protesters with "reverse-warrants" served on Google, you're *really* worried about privacy:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…

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Whenever you see a coalition forming - or rupturing - you've found a leading indicator of change. Today, I found one of those indicators: Microsoft has announced that it is abandoning "kernel-level anti-cheat":

notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-pa…

This is esoteric stuff, but it has far-reaching implications for some of our most important tech and policy questions, from mass surveillance to monopoly, from digital catastrophe to Dieselgate.

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About 20 years ago, a team of researchers at Microsoft had a weird and (mostly) terrible idea. They figured out a way to allow computers to send information about their configurations over the internet to untrusted third parties, in such a way that *the owners of the sending computers couldn't falsify that information*:

pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/tru…

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This is called a "remote attestation." It allows a server to make sure that it's sending data to an app on a phone, and not a computer program on a laptop that's pretending to be be an app on a phone.

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This has beneficial uses (the encrypted messaging app Signal uses remote attestations so that the Signal program on your phone can assure itself that it's talking to a computer that's running an unaltered version of the Signal server app, which makes it much harder to spy on Signal conversations):

signal.org/blog/private-contac…

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But it's also got a *lot* of harmful and anticompetitive uses. For example, remote attestation can be used to ensure that you're not running an ad-blocker or other privacy-preserving technology, forcing you to choose between accessing a service and protecting your privacy:

pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/sel…

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Remote attestation - and "trusted computing," the underlying subsystem that makes it possible - gives manufacturers the power to order your device to lie to *you*, and also prevents your device from lying to *them* on your behalf (say, by promising them that you haven't disabled the trusted computing module even after you have). This is key to everything from HP forcing you to pay $10,000/gallon for ink to Tesla lying to you about your car's range:

pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edi…

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And while there are plenty of potentially good applications for a module in your computer that you - the computer's owner - can't examine or override, these are vastly outweighed by the risks associated with such a module. For one thing, if someone can figure out how to install malicious software in that module, then - by definition - you can't know what it's doing, or prevent it from doing it:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/des…

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And boy, do malware authors *loooove* to infect your computer's trusted computing module with undetectable, unstoppable viruses:

pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/des…

All of these risks and abuses were foreseeable in the early 2000s, when Microsoft was teaming up with the semiconductor industry to roll out trusted computing.

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To get trusted computing in spite of the problems it would unarguably create, Microsoft needed a coalition of the willing for trusted computing. That's where gamers came in.

As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:

reddit.com/r/truegaming/commen…

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Trusted computing promised to supercharge DRM and make it orders of magnitude harder to break - a promise it delivered on. That made gamers a weird partner for the pro-trusted computing coalition.

But coalitions are weird, and coalitions that bring together diverging (and opposing) constituencies are *very* powerful (if fractious), because one member can speak to lawmakers, companies, nonprofits and groups that would normally have nothing to do with another member.

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Gamers may hate DRM, but they hate *cheating* even more. As a class, gamers have an all-consuming hatred of cheats that overrides all other considerations (which is weird, because the cheats are *used* by gamers!). One thing trusted computing is pretty good at is detecting cheating.

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Gamers - or, more often, game *servers* - can use remote attestation to force each player's computer to cough up a true account of its configuration, including whether there are any cheats running on the computer that would give the player an edge. By design, owners of computers can't override trusted computing modules, which means that even if you *want* to cheat, your computer will still rat you out.

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As a class, gamers can be relied upon to endorse measures that make cheating harder, even when that wrecks other things they care about. That's something we learned the hard way in 2007, when Blizzard - the giant games company that's now part of (who else?) Microsoft - sued some hobbyists who'd made a software program called "bnetd":

eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

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Bnetd was a standalone replacement for Blizzard's Battlenet servers. Battlenet servers connected up gamers for multiplayer games. Among other things, Battlenet servers allowed Blizzard to check the license key for every player (rejecting players who used keys that were circulating on pirate boards), which is something Blizzard *really* cared about.

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Battlenet *also* enforced anti-cheating measures, something that *players* (even players who didn't care whether their opponents were using valid license keys) valued highly.

The bnetd authors were motivated by another factor altogether: Battlenet *sucked*. The servers were slow, laggy, and crashed. Bnetd allowed players to stand up their own servers, and to imbue those servers with "house rules" about how the gameplay would run.

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After all, the difference between "house rules" and "cheating" is whether all the players agree. Sometimes, those house rules turn into *great* games, like Portal, which started out as a user's mod to Half-Life:

half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Deve…

Blizzard went after bnetd for two reasons: first, to make life worse for players with invalid license keys; and second, because bnetd was making them look incompetent.

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I wasn't surprised that Blizzard attacked bnetd - but what *did* surprise me was the sheer number of gamers who leapt to Blizzard's defense. Theoretically, these players were class allies of the bnetd authors, whose project was to give them more reliable and flexible servers to play on. But once Blizzard successfully framed the bnetd lawsuit as a way to stamp out cheating, large numbers of gamers switched sides and fought against their own interests.

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Time and again, "we're stamping out cheating" has proven itself to be a reliable way to recruit gamers to fight against their own interests. A couple years after bnetd, gamers once again leapt to Blizzard's defense in its lawsuit over an automation program called "Glider":

arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/01…

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