#02/08/2022

[la-chica-azul-de-alla]

Estoy viciada a tu voz porque nunca te conocí y ni la cara te vi.

Luux

[merpmonde]

The Mulhouse-Thann tram-train

Combining a suburban train service with the ability to navigate city streets sounds amazing. People can live nearer to the countryside, get frequent service into town, and, if everything lines up, commute straight into work without changes and avoiding the main station. The complementarity and opportunity to revitalise a branch line all sounds appealing... but a real challenge to implement. In France, only Mulhouse has truly achieved it.

Tram-trains aren't exactly rare in France: there are several lines around Paris, Nantes and Lyon have them (and many more had tram-train projects at some point). But, while the vehicles are capable of running in both modes, they are mostly used as a cheaper way to operate a line. The Nantes-Clisson and Nantes-Châteaubriant tram-trains, for example, which I have ridden, are just regional trains, running on heavy rail nearly all the way, and only stopping where the trains always used to.

Mulhouse is the only place in France to have true tram-train operations as described in the introduction: the tram-trains add traffic to line 3 between Mulhouse central station and Lutterbach, before switching to train mode and continuing on the branch line to Kruth as far as Thann.

The vehicles themselves are remarkable, as they need to be equipped for both streetcar and heavy rail operations, and each has its own requirements: lighting, horns, power supply, safety features... Mulhouse's vehicles are Siemens Avanto S70s, built in 2009-2010, and operated by SNCF as class U 25500. Similar units were introduced near Paris as early as 2005.

[aiiaiiiyo]

[pink-dia-91]

STOP I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING 😭 THE PAIN.

Waiting and waiting... and waiting

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[antalyabeyazesyaservis]

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[dcentralgamer]

MudRunner™ 2022 02 08 02 17 05 MudRunner™ 2022 02 08 02 17 05

[jius-sims]

Children’s shoes collection 02      

[Jius] Leather Ankle Boots 06-Toddler/Child

18 swatches

10k+ Polygons

---------------------------------

[Jius] Cartoon Animal Slippers 01-Toddler/Child

3 swatches

2k+ Polygons

---------------------------------

[Jius] Rain Boots 01-Toddler/Child

25 swatches

3k+ Polygons

----------------------------------

[Jius] Flat Sandals 04-Toddler/Child

30 swatches

11k+ Polygons

---------------------------------

[Jius] Crocs Clog 01-Toddler/Child

30 swatches

7k+ Polygons

----------------------------------

[Jius] Mary Jane Pumps 03-Toddler/Child

28 swatches

4k+ Polygons

----------------------------------

[Jius] Knitted Socks 08-Toddler/Child

30 swatches

HQ✔️ Custom thumbnail✔️ All lods✔️

Patreon ( Early access )

❤️ Public release on 31 December, 2022 ❤️

[skrubu]

Pictured at an exhibition #valokuvataiteenmuseo #fmp #helsinki #finland #museokortti https://instagr.am/p/Cl6A8iVtWAv/

[artharnessedfromabove]

via [K A Y ▽]

[elicatkin]

[444mera]

CHRONICALLY ONLINE!

hey, you've reached suna. leave a message at the beep.

after a week straight of being holed up in the dorm working on your finals, with an annoyingly noisy next-door neighbor at that, you're finally out at a party. with the stress of piling assignments, deadly deadlines, and an infuriating neighbor who you've endlessly tried to confront but somehow have never seen the face of — it was time to get drunk. usually, the more alcohol you drink, the more single you feel; you're blackout drunk. now flirting with the guy you've been eyeing the whole night, everything's going well. but why does his voice sound so familiar?

pairing: suna rintarou x f!reader

status: ongoing (started may 31, 2024)

genre: 18+ romance, smau + written

tags: social media au, college au, strangers to lovers, crack, fluff, angst, smut if i feel like it

warnings: swearing, alcohol, drug use (marijuana), suggestive and sexual themes, probably a lot of kms jokes/crude humour

taglist is open! comment to be tagged :)

profiles:

art students (and atsumu) | Freaky Singles Looking For Love (18+)

teasers:

semi's gig | where's bo taking us this time?

the setup.

01. hashtag pregame

02. a breath of fresh...vodka

03. that was me last night?

04. regrets, regrets, and more regrets

05. a user wants to send you a message

06. that was you the other night?

07.

08.

09.

10.

the confrontation.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

☆ mera's mail ! hey divas this is my first actual smau (but i've always wanted to make one lol!) i've regressed into my 2020-2022 haikyuu phase and i've been trying to look for smaus to no avail ... so i decided to make my own instead because i'm self-indulgent like that. ALSO the cover photo for this took me an egregious amount of time because i had to start over so i hope y'all like it. recommend some series' you think i'd enjoy! you can send me questions, suggestions, etc. in my ask too. i am also very open to moots mwahahah

[toskarinarchive]

Toskarin Database

Last updated: 2024-08-25, 23:02+00:00

Current Toskarinlike Count: 44

toskarin-blog - First post (2017-11-14, 08:38)

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toskarinfr - First post (2023-12-08, 14:05)

toskarinpl - First post (2023-12-19, 22:31)

yoskarin - First post (2023-12-21, 04:18)

toskarintetris - First post (2024-02-13, 02:26)

kojmahid - First post (2024-02-14, 21:53)

toskarinalternia - First post (2024-02-15, 00:21)

yamitoskarin - First post (2024-02-16, 21:09)

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toskarininthecornerofyourvision - First post (2024-03-02, 04:37)

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toskarinarchive - First post (2024-03-02, 07:05)

toskarinde - First post (2024-03-02, 18:04)

toskarinternetexplorer (deleted) - First post (2024-03-03, 21:23)

tezkarin - First post (2024-03-04, 19:51)

castgil-cmd - First post (2024-03-05, 01:46)

Oskar In (LinkedIn) - First post (2024-03-05, 20:50)

toskarincoffee - First post (2024-03-06, 01:42)

newtoskarin - First post (2024-03-06, 07:58)

halimedefr - First post (2024-04-13, 00:17)

homumi - First post (2024-05-05, 04:40)

toskalain - First post (2024-05-18, 19:57)

ntriderpt - First post (2024-06-13, 17:00)

ntriderie - First post (2024-06-17, 20:47)

cyberbunes - First post (2024-06-20, 17:18)

bulletliger - First post (2024-06-25, 04:20)

kirikomamurafr - First post (2024-06-25, 07:13)

freyalisefr - First post (2024-06-26, 02:06)

ntriderbr - First post (2024-06-26, 04:03)

toskarinbunny - First post (2024-07-06, 21:09)

ingridgal - First post (2024-08-21, 04:32)

[babsrms]

♡ Lookbook.02 feat Olivia- @babsrms ♡

cc list:

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

all nails: @arethabee - rebel collection

all rings: @arethabee - aelia set

all earrings: @arethabee - sienna collection

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

01. top: @arethabee - girls girls girls collection . bottom: @arethabee - secret society collection . socks: @caio-cc - saraiva set . shoes: @jius-sims - boots collection 04 . gloves: grunge revival kit

02. dress: @joliebean - love that journey for us . shoes: @jius-sims - chili collection 03 . necklace: @serenity-cc - cherry set

03. top: @serenity-cc - midnight out collection . bottom: @joliebean - adrenaline set . shoes: grunge revival kit

04. top: @sentate - club caliente collection . bottom: @aharris00britney - axa 2022 . panty hose: @caio-cc - cxs pretty brutal . boots: @caio-cc - hot coffe

05. top: @serenity-cc - the vacanza collection . bottom and slippers: @caio-cc - ipanema set . waist chain: @arethabee - hot girl summer . glasses: @ikari-sims - girliez collection

06. fullbody: @caio-cc - cxs love myself . shoes: @caio-cc - douce set

07. top and shoes: @serenity-cc - midnight out collection . top accessory - @arethabee - nightcall collection . bottom: @caio-cc - teenage dreams . panty hose: @serenity-cc - sparks set . necklace: @pralinesims - necklace ultimate collection

08. top: @serenity-cc - vanilla set . bottom: @arethabee - secret society collection . sneakers: @jius-sims - canvas sneakers 02 . panty hose: @caio-cc - cxs pretty brutal . necklace: @arethabee - august collection

[a-ikuoliver]

────────⌕ SEARCH: IO/KATSUKI-BAKUGOU

updated 11th june 2024

masterlist • archive of our own • wip updates • my kofi please bear in mind all my works will be female/femme reader & remember to check the warnings

worship me | nsfw 18+ | 2.9k — 26/04/2022 *originally posted to gwen0m

summary: an unforgettable autumn night at your private catholic college when Father Bakugo approaches you after late-night studying at the church’s library. warnings: noncon, unprotected vaginal sex, blasphemy, manipulation, dacryphilia, corrupt priest, breeding & threatening

before he cheats | implied nsfw 18+ | 1.8k — 11/08/2022

summary: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and god, does it turn a man on with that fire in your eyes and bat swinging in your hand, ready to key the car of the man who wronged you. warnings: feminine pronouns/nicknames/descriptions, fantasising, mentions of weapons (bat, knife), bakugou gets horny over crazy girls

what's your favourite scary movie? | nsfw 18+ | 4.9k — 03/11/2023

summary: finally convincing one of your best friends to come to the 30th anniversary re-release of scream, he figures out one of your best-kept secrets. warnings: femme reader (called girl, has a pussy, wears makeup n a skirt), death threat kinda lmao, public & unprotected sex, blood mention, knife mention, reader implied to be recon/stealth hero, not beta’d bc i got nervous and we die like men, this is like all lead up my b

do something, babe, say something | angst | 2.0k — 09/11/2023

summary: you tell katsuki bakugou you love him for the first time warnings: gn!reader, miscommunication, self sacrifice

wired | nsfw 18+ | 9.3k — 15/12/2023

summary: honing your kickboxing skills with pro hero dynamight can lead to a) insane improvements of your skills, becoming the best version of yourself with each critique you get, b) a crush like no other you’ve ever had in your life, or c) all of the above? warnings: fem!reader (“girl”, “cunt”, “pussy” used) slight age gap but not a main plot point, a lil bit of violence, making out, brattish reader, choking (ish), hair pulling, dry humping, slight edging, public sex, unprotected sex, implied use of birth control

bad enough for you | nsfw 18+ | 4.0k — 15/01/2024

summary: bathrooms at house parties are only made for one thing warnings:  fem!reader (has a pussy, wearing makeup + skirt), established relationship, toxic relationship, cheating, alcohol mention (tipsy sex), blood/biting/marking/cutting mention, unprotected sex, degradation/name calling (not really but just in case), hair pulling, fingering (f!receiving), oral (m!receiving)

like a girl does | nsfw 18+ | 6.7k — 19/02/2024

summary: you're finally being introduced to your girlfriend's friends, invited to a last minute party, any confidence melting from you when you see another girl clinging to her arm. warnings: fauxcest (bakugou referred to as your step sister/sister), dubcon, bakugou is TOXIC, feminine/girly reader (she/her pronouns; wearing makeup; nails + a dress; long hair/out/on her face), reader referred to as a puppy (degradingly not petplay lmao), pet names (pretty + baby), emotional manipulation, cheating (on reader, implied to be with ochako but not overtly), alcohol + weed mention, reader a lillll bit of a crybaby, public/car sex, oral (r! receiving)

fantasise | nsfw 18+ | 1.5k — 20/04/2024

summary: katsuki sees your sex toys once and is haunted by what you look like using them. warning/s: m! & f!masturbation, sex toys, fantasising

god is a freak | nsfw 18+ | 2.8k — 11/07/2024

summary: god is a bit of a freak, why's he watching me getting railed on the couch, staying pure for a wedding, he's got fucked up priorities — aka an ancient, obsolete god of fertility hears your prayer warning/s: fertility god!bakugou, f!reader, voyeurism, oral (f!receiving), references to sex rituals and safe sex lmao, i think that's everything, mostly lead up

bakugou helping you out when your piercing gets stuck — 11/12/2022

kiri n bakugou, under v overstimulation [nsfw] — 16/11/2022

katsuki watching a rabbit review [nsfw] — 27/10/2023

lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off — 14/11/2023

"make me" [nsfw] — 06/12/2023

if katsuki ever lost his memory — 12/12/2023

sleeping with bakugou — 24/12/2023

big brother bakugou [nsfw] — 11/01/2024

valentine’s day — 09/02/2024

childhood best friends — 23/03/2024

teasing him [nsfw]— 09/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + strawberry daiquiri — 26/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + jagerbomb [nsfw] — 27/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + bloody mary [nsfw] — 27/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + cosmopolitan — 05/05/2024

sirens call — 09/05/2024

© all works belong to @a-ikuoliver, @gwen0m, and dlirious on archive of our own, do not plagiarise, translate, repost, feed my works into ai or recommend my work on other platforms, or bind my fanworks for sale.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)

You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they're doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples' critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that's not what's happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with?

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/private-equity-vampire-capital/

The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of.

Rich people fall for scams just like you and me. Anyone can be a mark. I was:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.

Noted Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith had his own thoughts on this. Galbraith coined the term "bezzle" to describe "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In that magic interval, everyone feels better off: the mark thinks he's up, and the con artist knows he's up.

Rich marks have looong bezzles. Empirically incorrect ideas grounded in the most outrageous superstition and junk science can take over whole sections of your life, simply because a rich person – or rich people – are convinced that they're good for you.

Take "scientific management." In the early 20th century, the con artist Frederick Taylor convinced rich industrialists that he could increase their workers' productivity through a kind of caliper-and-stopwatch driven choreographry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Taylor and his army of labcoated sadists perched at the elbows of factory workers (whom Taylor referred to as "stupid," "mentally sluggish," and as "an ox") and scripted their motions to a fare-the-well, transforming their work into a kind of kabuki of obedience. They weren't more efficient, but they looked smart, like obedient robots, and this made their bosses happy. The bosses shelled out fortunes for Taylor's services, even though the workers who followed his prescriptions were less efficient and generated fewer profits. Bosses were so dazzled by the spectacle of a factory floor of crisply moving people interfacing with crisply working machines that they failed to understand that they were losing money on the whole business.

To the extent they noticed that their revenues were declining after implementing Taylorism, they assumed that this was because they needed more scientific management. Taylor had a sweet con: the worse his advice performed, the more reasons their were to pay him for more advice.

Taylorism is a perfect con to run on the wealthy and powerful. It feeds into their prejudice and mistrust of their workers, and into their misplaced confidence in their own ability to understand their workers' jobs better than their workers do. There's always a long dollar to be made playing the "scientific management" con.

Today, there's an app for that. "Bossware" is a class of technology that monitors and disciplines workers, and it was supercharged by the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home. Combine bossware with work-from-home and your boss gets to control your life even when in your own place – "work from home" becomes "live at work":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Gig workers are at the white-hot center of bossware. Gig work promises "be your own boss," but bossware puts a Taylorist caliper wielder into your phone, monitoring and disciplining you as you drive your wn car around delivering parcels or picking up passengers.

In automation terms, a worker hitched to an app this way is a "reverse centaur." Automation theorists call a human augmented by a machine a "centaur" – a human head supported by a machine's tireless and strong body. A "reverse centaur" is a machine augmented by a human – like the Amazon delivery driver whose app goads them to make inhuman delivery quotas while punishing them for looking in the "wrong" direction or even singing along with the radio:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

Bossware pre-dates the current AI bubble, but AI mania has supercharged it. AI pumpers insist that AI can do things it positively cannot do – rolling out an "autonomous robot" that turns out to be a guy in a robot suit, say – and rich people are groomed to buy the services of "AI-powered" bossware:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

For an AI scammer like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, the fact that an AI can't do your job is irrelevant. From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether a salesperson can convince your boss that an AI can do your job – whether or not that's true:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

The techbro's overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that's exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that's exempt from labor law. But this wheeze is transparent, and easily pierced by enforcers, so long as those enforcers want to do their jobs. One such enforcer is Alvaro Bedoya, an FTC commissioner with a keen interest in antitrust's relationship to labor protection.

Bedoya understands that antitrust has a checkered history when it comes to labor. As he's written, the history of antitrust is a series of incidents in which Congress revised the law to make it clear that forming a union was not the same thing as forming a cartel, only to be ignored by boss-friendly judges:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Bedoya is no mere historian. He's an FTC Commissioner, one of the most powerful regulators in the world, and he's profoundly interested in using that power to help workers, especially gig workers, whose misery starts with systemic, wide-scale misclassification as contractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

In a new speech to NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, Bedoya argues that the FTC's existing authority allows it to crack down on algorithmic management – that is, algorithmic management is illegal, even if you break the law with an app:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-remarks-unfairness-in-workplace-surveillance-and-automated-management.pdf

Bedoya starts with a delightful analogy to The Hawtch-Hawtch, a mythical town from a Dr Seuss poem. The Hawtch-Hawtch economy is based on beekeeping, and the Hawtchers develop an overwhelming obsession with their bee's laziness, and determine to wring more work (and more honey) out of him. So they appoint a "bee-watcher." But the bee doesn't produce any more honey, which leads the Hawtchers to suspect their bee-watcher might be sleeping on the job, so they hire a bee-watcher-watcher. When that doesn't work, they hire a bee-watcher-watcher-watcher, and so on and on.

For gig workers, it's bee-watchers all the way down. Call center workers are subjected to "AI" video monitoring, and "AI" voice monitoring that purports to measure their empathy. Another AI times their calls. Two more AIs analyze the "sentiment" of the calls and the success of workers in meeting arbitrary metrics. On average, a call-center worker is subjected to five forms of bossware, which stand at their shoulders, marking them down and brooking no debate.

For example, when an experienced call center operator fielded a call from a customer with a flooded house who wanted to know why no one from her boss's repair plan system had come out to address the flooding, the operator was punished by the AI for failing to try to sell the customer a repair plan. There was no way for the operator to protest that the customer had a repair plan already, and had called to complain about it.

Workers report being sickened by this kind of surveillance, literally – stressed to the point of nausea and insomnia. Ironically, one of the most pervasive sources of automation-driven sickness are the "AI wellness" apps that bosses are sold by AI hucksters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The FTC has broad authority to block "unfair trade practices," and Bedoya builds the case that this is an unfair trade practice. Proving an unfair trade practice is a three-part test: a practice is unfair if it causes "substantial injury," can't be "reasonably avoided," and isn't outweighed by a "countervailing benefit." In his speech, Bedoya makes the case that algorithmic management satisfies all three steps and is thus illegal.

On the question of "substantial injury," Bedoya describes the workday of warehouse workers working for ecommerce sites. He describes one worker who is monitored by an AI that requires him to pick and drop an object off a moving belt every 10 seconds, for ten hours per day. The worker's performance is tracked by a leaderboard, and supervisors punish and scold workers who don't make quota, and the algorithm auto-fires if you fail to meet it.

Under those conditions, it was only a matter of time until the worker experienced injuries to two of his discs and was permanently disabled, with the company being found 100% responsible for this injury. OSHA found a "direct connection" between the algorithm and the injury. No wonder warehouses sport vending machines that sell painkillers rather than sodas. It's clear that algorithmic management leads to "substantial injury."

What about "reasonably avoidable?" Can workers avoid the harms of algorithmic management? Bedoya describes the experience of NYC rideshare drivers who attended a round-table with him. The drivers describe logging tens of thousands of successful rides for the apps they work for, on promise of "being their own boss." But then the apps start randomly suspending them, telling them they aren't eligible to book a ride for hours at a time, sending them across town to serve an underserved area and still suspending them. Drivers who stop for coffee or a pee are locked out of the apps for hours as punishment, and so drive 12-hour shifts without a single break, in hopes of pleasing the inscrutable, high-handed app.

All this, as drivers' pay is falling and their credit card debts are mounting. No one will explain to drivers how their pay is determined, though the legal scholar Veena Dubal's work on "algorithmic wage discrimination" reveals that rideshare apps temporarily increase the pay of drivers who refuse rides, only to lower it again once they're back behind the wheel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is like the pit boss who gives a losing gambler some freebies to lure them back to the table, over and over, until they're broke. No wonder they call this a "casino mechanic." There's only two major rideshare apps, and they both use the same high-handed tactics. For Bedoya, this satisfies the second test for an "unfair practice" – it can't be reasonably avoided. If you drive rideshare, you're trapped by the harmful conduct.

The final prong of the "unfair practice" test is whether the conduct has "countervailing value" that makes up for this harm.

To address this, Bedoya goes back to the call center, where operators' performance is assessed by "Speech Emotion Recognition" algorithms, a psuedoscientific hoax that purports to be able to determine your emotions from your voice. These SERs don't work – for example, they might interpret a customer's laughter as anger. But they fail differently for different kinds of workers: workers with accents – from the American south, or the Philippines – attract more disapprobation from the AI. Half of all call center workers are monitored by SERs, and a quarter of workers have SERs scoring them "constantly."

Bossware AIs also produce transcripts of these workers' calls, but workers with accents find them "riddled with errors." These are consequential errors, since their bosses assess their performance based on the transcripts, and yet another AI produces automated work scores based on them.

In other words, algorithmic management is a procession of bee-watchers, bee-watcher-watchers, and bee-watcher-watcher-watchers, stretching to infinity. It's junk science. It's not producing better call center workers. It's producing arbitrary punishments, often against the best workers in the call center.

There is no "countervailing benefit" to offset the unavoidable substantial injury of life under algorithmic management. In other words, algorithmic management fails all three prongs of the "unfair practice" test, and it's illegal.

What should we do about it? Bedoya builds the case for the FTC acting on workers' behalf under its "unfair practice" authority, but he also points out that the lack of worker privacy is at the root of this hellscape of algorithmic management.

He's right. The last major update Congress made to US privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented. The US is long overdue for a new privacy regime, and workers under algorithmic management are part of a broad coalition that's closer than ever to making that happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en