I know it's not quite your usual genre, @pluralistic, but I'd love to see a political thriller, targeted like Burn-In (by Singer & Cole) towards political, military, and intelligence readers, covering anti-circumvention and #enshittification vs competitive compatibility, #RightToRepair, and #RightToOwn from the lens of geopolitics, foreign policy, and #nationalSecurity.
It's 2026, and China and Russia are about to invade Taiwan and another former Soviet bloc country, respectively. A successful joint NATO intelligence operation has revealed the 2027 invasion plans, including the planned coordinated disruption of the infrastructure of the target countries' allies, and their allies in turn. The would-be invaders have not learned of the intelligence operation.
To impede response, the would-be invaders plan to use China's control of the manufacturers of cloud-tied ICS hardware controlling electricity, fossil fuels, water and wastewater, telecommunications, airports, passenger and freight rail, container cranes, mil-industrial supply chains, medical devices, and other #criticalInfrastructure to impede responses from #NATO, #AUKUS, as well as Japan and South Korea if they intervene. To ensure access, they plan to use Russia's and China's extensive remote access to consumer IoT devices and CPE routers throughout all the target countries. The intelligence operation has revealed these plans.
Strategically, countering these plans would require repealing anti-circumvention laws, without which remediation of all the relevant means of malicious remote access cannot be accomplished on time. However, much like the fossil fuel lobby campaigning for policies which, if not reversed, eventually lead inextricably to human extinction, all the technofeudal oligarchs whose rent extraction depends on anti-circumvention use all their means, corrupt and otherwise, to keep these laws upheld.
The novel takes place after the intelligence operation's success, and before the planned invasions. The protagonists and antagonists in the Little Brother and Homeland universe suddenly find themselves paradoxically aligned in goals and interests, but their mission to prevent the catastrophic disruption to infrastructure and all the consequent harms is continually thwarted by DMCA 1201 and similar laws, the Zuckermuskians, and the politicians they own.
