Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)

Can you still find a VCR in your home? Decades ago they were everywhere, able to record TV, skip ads and store shows. Today they have vanished — not because the tech grew old, but because someone deliberately 'disinvented' them.

The VCR was a real rebel

In the 1970s the VCR became the fastest-adopted home appliance in history. TV stations and movie studios hated it because viewers could skip ads and record programs. They sued all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1984 that a new device was legal as long as it had 'substantial non-infringing uses.'

How big companies killed it

The studios, not giving up, teamed up with electronics firms to create the DVD, embedding 'hook IP' in the machines — intellectual property that any lawful manufacturer had to license. They forced in 'region coding', so a disc bought abroad might not play. Nobody wanted this 'feature'; it existed purely to annoy consumers.

The anti-circumvention trap

In 1998 the US passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making it a crime to bypass an 'access control'. From then on, adding a password or encryption to any device made it illegal to modify — so refilling ink, fixing a tractor, or linking an insulin pump to a glucose monitor could become felonies.

The streaming-era regression

Today's Netflix, Disney+ all have access controls, so recording their streams is a felony. That's why they can drop shows and raise prices at will — you can't save a copy, so you just have to follow along.

A twist: Trump helps by accident

Trump's tariffs showed other countries that their anti-circumvention laws were buying them nothing in return. If any nation lifts those one-sided restrictions, an entrepreneur could build a new VCR — not just for video, but for fixing phones, refilling ink, and standing up to all the rent-extracting monopolies.