#Adoption Curve

[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

[cinnamon-flame]

Last drawing before artfight starts! It's a vacation Abberation!

[thiccner]

Commission for Drogoth38280 (Twitter/X) 💕

[fauvester]

garak vaguely appalled by the quality of children's books on Earth. julian thinks it's hilarious. gets a whole collection of Dr Seuss so he can make disparaging commentary when he reads it out loud to the kids

[floating-in-the-blue]

Happy Wip Anniversary: Alex Adoption Fic

On 17th of May, 2022 I started writing this story that had previously only lived as an indulgent fantasy in my head. A story about Alex getting thrown out of his home for being who he is, and being accepted into a different family for being who he is, and finding love for being who he is. Aka: Hurt - Comfort - Fluff.

Three years later, I've got about 80k and am still not finished (sob). Though I have published 33 other fics in that time so there's that at least. But what can I say, multi-chapters are not my natural habitat. But I'm still working on it on and off. Hopefully, by next year I will have finished it and started actually posting chapters.

I do have a series on AO3 for it (thanks to a different POV wip prompt), so if you want to subscribe so you don't miss the start of posting, I'd be more than thrilled :D

In the meantime, have one extra extra long snippet under the cut in celebration (containing spoilers, duh). I hope you like it <3

Note: There is no actual adoption in the Alex Adoption Fic but this is the important day in Alex's life when Emily and Mitch Patterson become his legal guardians (aka Chapter 17) Alex had spent a lot of time thinking about the day of the court hearing these last few weeks. He hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about waking up on the day. He’d assumed he wouldn’t get much sleep and once Willie had announced his plan of staying overnight, that assumption hadn’t changed, though for different reasons.

He’d been wrong.

Although falling asleep had proven difficult, once he’d managed that, he’d slept soundly through till the next morning until Emily woke him and he opened his eyes to Willie’s face next to his.

It was a weirdly assembled feeling. One part insisting that nothing had ever felt more right and normal, as if he and Willie had already spent innumerable nights together; the other part freaking out over being this close to Willie, having been this close to Willie for hours, sharing the same warmth, the same air, the same blanket and pillow.

He cleared his throat and blinked and croaked out a “good morning” that Willie returned with a huge smile.

Alex was all too aware of Luke bustling about behind him and so he turned his head and croaked out another, louder “good morning,” that Luke cheerfully returned.

“I’ll use the bathroom first,” Luke announced and slipped out of the room with a teasing grin and a wink.

“Yeah, I … okay,” Alex mumbled in the direction of the now closed door, unsure how to disentangle himself from Willie.

Not that he wouldn’t have loved to stay right here in bed, in his boyfriend’s arms for an eternity or two, but since that wasn’t an option, he felt incredibly awkward.

He wasn’t sure if Willie sensed it but, in any case, he sat up and shifted a little away from Alex, towards the wall, and Alex swiftly sat up as well, facing him.

“You sleep okay?” Willie asked, trying to comb through his hair with his fingers.

Alex’s mouth was dry at the sight of Willie wearing his t-shirt, sitting in his bed. After a second, he shook himself out of his thoughts and shrugged. “Better than I expected, to be honest.” He fumbled with his own bracelet, unable to keep eye contact. “Thank you, Willie.”

“Hey, I’m happy if I could help, pancake. Plus, you know, it wasn’t exactly a hardship or anything like that.”

Willie lightly punched his upper arm and Alex couldn’t help the smile overtaking his face.

“Did you sleep okay? Any more weird dreams?” he asked, finally looking up at his boyfriend again.

Willie hummed a little, nodding his head from side to side as he thought, fingers still absent-mindedly combing through his hair.

“Hm … I did dream about going to this pretty cool shop with … someone? I think it was my Mom but I’m not sure. Anyway, they had all sorts of knickknacks and stuff on a table in the middle of the room and then I found a room in the back where people were playing some board game that looked kinda cool. There was another room behind them with more games but I couldn’t really get to that. Didn’t want to bother the people, you know. But then I discovered that there was this wicked cool buffet lining the first room with all sorts of food though I’m not sure where people were supposed to sit and eat?” 

“… that sounds pretty cool?” Alex ventured after Willie had mused over this question in silence for a while.

Willie shrugged. “Yeah, it was pretty cool. I’m always fascinated by the details my brain comes up with, you know? But anyway, they sold Harry Potter napkins, so: not so cool after all, really.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. How disappointing.”

“I know, right?” Willie huffed out an exaggerated sigh and finally gave up on combing through his hair. “Did you dream anything?”

Alex tried to think but there was pretty much just a blank in his mind where he’d been asleep. “No. I’m glad about it though. This day’s gonna be enough of a nightmare anyway, I guess.”

Willie’s face softened. “Well, you won’t have to live through it alone, at least.”

Alex swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat and just nodded. He was glad that Willie didn’t try to convince him it wouldn’t be a nightmare. That everything would be fine and peachy.

Luke returned just then and so Alex and Willie finally scrambled out of bed, Willie going to the bathroom while Alex endured a well-meaning pep talk from Luke. He was grateful, more than that really, that Luke continued to be so stoked for Alex living with them and becoming his ‘real brother’. Alex had given up on reminding him that they wouldn’t really be brothers since he wasn’t getting adopted. Mitch and Emily just would be his legal guardians.

Still, he sighed in relief as Willie returned and it was his time for a trip to the bathroom. He didn’t look into the mirror, just went through his routine as fast as he could. 

Only to then suffer through an uncomfortable breakfast where everyone was too nervous to really eat anything and there were constant glances at watches. Willie and Luke put a decent dent into the food but Emily and Mitch mostly just picked at theirs and Alex flat out refused any food. His stomach was already filled with so much anxiety, food wouldn’t mix well with that. 

At Emily’s urging though, he managed to at least nibble on a toast for a bit. She’d put on her stern Mom/nurse face so he had to give in.

After breakfast, they got ready. Which mostly meant Mitch and Emily gathering their papers and purse respectively, as well as the car keys. Alex just shoved his hands into the pouch of his hoodie with Willie and Luke at his sides. His own personal bodyguards and cheer squad. It did feel a little like going to his execution.

Alex stared straight ahead all through the drive to the court house. He was squeezed into the middle of the backseat, Luke on his left, Willie on his right. He had a suspicion that both were leaning into him a little more than strictly necessary.

His lips were dry and flaky but he kept on chewing them, watching the road ahead.

They were early but none of them had wanted to be late and they were all unfamiliar with the courthouse. 

Bobby was already waiting for them, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jacket, face grim but he mustered up a little smile for Alex, who nodded.

It all seemed so unreal. He felt more like a marionette than a person.

Reggie ran up about five minutes later, face flushed, a huge grin on his face. He clapped Alex enthusiastically on the shoulder, declaring that everything would surely go absolutely great.

Except nothing was great about this.

Surrounded by his friends, Willie, and Luke’s parents, Alex stalked into the courthouse on stiff legs, hands clenched into fists inside the hoodie pouch. He’d left his baseball cap behind and fervently wished he could pull up his hood and disappear.

He moved on autopilot, following wherever the rest were leading him. Herding him, more like. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t have found the right room on his own in any case.

There was a tremor in his every muscle, so faint as from a distant earthquake but he knew it was because he’d started to unravel from inside. Hiding in his brain, his flesh, disconnecting himself from everything.

Breathe. He had to breathe.

The others had become vague shapes, blurred, shadowy. There were voices but none of the words made sense.

He just had to follow them. Just had to breathe.

His legs itched to run, his fight or flight instinct pointing firmly to ‘flight’ but flight was impossible. As was fight.

So he followed. And breathed.

At last they stopped in some corridor. There was a bench and gentle hands were urging him to sit down but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get up again if he sat down now so he resisted. 

The gentle pressure disappeared from his shoulder and he was left standing.

Voices washed around him as white noise while Alex breathed.

Time had lost all meaning and he couldn’t have said whether they waited for five minutes or five hours.

They waited. 

And then they went inside.

The moment he walked through the door, his senses seemed to start up again, objects and people becoming sharper until recognition settled in.

The room did not look like the courtrooms from movies and tv shows he’d watched. No wood. No jury stands. Of course. This wasn’t a criminal court and they rarely showed the other sort in the media. It resembled other utilitarian rooms and Alex took comfort from the sparse, efficient, slightly run down appearance. Some different furniture and this could have been a classroom. A cafeteria. A hospital waiting room.

It was mundane.

Strange, how something so important could happen in a room like this.

Someone ushered them to their places. Uncomfortable, utilitarian chairs. Luke and Willie snatched up the seats on either side of him, Reggie and Bobby behind them. Emily and Mitch sat next to Luke. Emily kept fussing with her blouse and hair, Mitch cleaned his glasses and then kept fiddling with the hem of his sensible blue sweater.

They all kept glancing round to see if his parents would make an appearance.

But there was no sight of the people who had born and fed and educated him anywhere. The people who had loved him for the first seventeen years of his life and would no longer love him for the rest of it.

For something as stupidly insignificant as just not being straight. They had made it his fault, his sin, his choice but it wasn’t a choice and it wasn’t a sin and with his thigh pressed to Willie’s, he knew it wasn’t a mistake.

The judge was a woman somewhere in her fifties, although the wrinkled face made her look older. Maybe she smoked a lot. She seemed stern but not unkind. He hadn’t spotted Mr Sao anywhere.

Every muscle in Alex’s body was wound so tight that he expected something to break every moment. As if all the places he’d been broken before would come undone again.

He inhaled sharply and his hand sneaked over to Luke’s thigh, palm up, all on its own. It was only after Luke had grasped his hand, warmth suffusing his skin, that he remembered that he now also had a boyfriend and that he could ask for comfort from him, too.

It still felt a little strange—his heart beating somewhere high near his lungs—to take his left hand out of the hoodie pouch as well and to extend it for Willie to hold it.

Except Willie didn’t lose a second before grasping Alex’s hand with both of his and keeping it securely in his lap.

And with every deliberate breath, he started to unwind a little, to feel warm again.

Soon, there were warm hands on either of his shoulders, squeezing.

“Okay.”

It was half breath, half croak, and so much easier than ‘thank you.’ There would be time for that afterwards. For now, he accepted all of his friends’ strength he could borrow to get through the next hour or so.

*

It didn’t take an hour. It took approximately seventeen minutes.

Judge Pearson hadn’t needed much more than the apparently thorough report from Mr Sao and the glaring absence of Alex’s parents (plus the obvious show of support Alex had with his chosen new family) to come to the quick and calm decision that Emily and Mitch Patterson would act as his legal guardians until he came of age.

There was a businesslike solemnity to the whole proceeding that felt inadequate to what was actually happening but Alex was glad of it.

Just as he was glad that the judge spared him the response of his parents to Mr Sao’s endeavors to talk to them. There was a small, masochistic part that wanted to know but as Judge Pearson said, it would have served no purpose. His parent’s decision was quite clear by their absence alone.

And just like that, he was no longer his parent’s son.

Well, technically, he still was and if they had wanted, they could have fought to get him back. They also had to pay child support since they were financially able to do so. But since there was no law that could stop them from disinheriting him, that was probably the last support he was ever going to get from them. Financially or otherwise.

Legally, he was still Alex Mercer but for all other intents and purposes, he now belonged to the Pattersons with the full consent of the law.

Once they’d left the courtroom, Luke slapped him on the shoulder and both Bobby and Reggie cheered. Willie gave him a brief hug that was much too short but soon, Emily was hugging him, too, and kissing his cheek, while Mitch clapped his shoulder and smiled encouragingly at him.

Alex, however, just felt numb.

The others were celebrating a victory but he felt like he’d played for the losing team for seventeen years.

“Sorry, I—”

He turned abruptly on the spot and followed the signs towards the nearest bathroom with quick strides. Immediately, his heart was drowned in a mixture of relief at getting away from the others for a bit and guilt for being relieved in the first place. Not to mention the vast undercurrent of mixed feelings about what had just happened and what it all meant.

He almost wished the bathroom was further away because the walking had helped at least a little but he arrived soon after he had started. Thankfully, the bathroom was quite empty. Just clean white tiles and the scent of citrus cleaner filling the room.

Except, maybe two minutes later, the door opened again and Willie entered.

Alex had been staring at his face in the mirror, still dripping from the cold water he’d splashed into it but now he turned, apprehensive in a way he couldn’t explain.

“Hey,” Willie said quietly and then continued to chew on his lower lip.

Alex had rarely seen him so serious.

“Hey.” He rubbed the sleeve of his hoodie over his face to dry off the water.

“Are you okay?”

Alex swallowed and shrugged. “Yeah …” It didn’t sound all too convincing even to himself.

Some emotion flickered over Willie’s face, pity perhaps, but then he’d suddenly crossed the room and was right in front of Alex and Alex’s breath hitched but Willie just slung his arms around his neck and pulled him close and with a shuddering inhale of breath, Alex let himself be held.

Gradually, he relaxed into Willie’s embrace and finally returned it, clinging to Willie as he buried his face in his boyfriend’s neck.

“It’s okay to not be okay,” Willie whispered after a while.

“But everyone’s so happy,” Alex protested, mumbling the words into Willie’s collar.

“Pancake,” Willie said after a moment, “they’re the ones who won something.”

Alex didn’t reply immediately. He let the words sink in and finally accepted that there was no obligation to feel the same as the others because while he had won something precious, he’d also lost something so monumentally part of who he’d been that it would need more time than a handful of months to fill the gaping holes left in his soul. All the places that had once held his parents’ love, his trust in them, the idea of family and what that entailed, had to be refilled with other things. He knew he was on a good path for that but while his body had healed slowly and painfully, his soul would heal even slower. And there would be much more pain.

He knew he’d carry those scars for the rest of his life.

*

He wasn’t sure how long they stood in the bathroom, Willie holding him, Alex holding onto him. Eventually, the door opened and an older man in a suit walked in, clearing his throat in clear embarrassment. 

With an awkward chuckle, Alex let go of Willie. He would have liked to stay longer but public bathrooms probably weren’t the best place to hang out and he did feel considerably lighter than just ten minutes ago.

Letting the guy pee in peace, he and Willie left the bathroom but soon, Willie caught his hand and entwined their fingers.

“Thank you,” Alex croaked out, swinging their hands lightly.

“Of course.”

“I hope the others aren’t too mad.”

Willie bumped into him, a reassuring grin on his face. “Nah.”

And Willie was right. When they finally found their way back to the others, only taking one wrong turn along the way, there was relief on everyone’s faces and smiles but no anger or impatience.

“You okay, dude?” Reggie asked.

And this time, it wasn’t a lie when Alex nodded. “Yeah.”

“I think we could all use a good lunch now,” Mitch said and smiled. “Anyone in favour?”

It was a little early for lunch but they were all in favour.

Later, when they’d all piled into a burger joint and were discussing lunch choices, Emily took him aside.

“It’s okay not to be happy about all of this and I hope you know you don’t have to pretend otherwise just for my and Mitch’s sake.”

Alex’s eyes prickled but he swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” He shook the hair out of his face and took a deep breath before he added: “Thank you. For–for everything. I really am grateful.”

Emily patted his shoulder and smiled. “Of course you are. Doesn’t mean you can’t still wish things had never gotten here. It’s only natural, hunny.”

He nodded again. “Yeah. But there’s a lot of good here.” He glanced over to his friends and Willie discussing the merits of curly fries vs. normal fries.

“Glad to hear it. Now, I think we should get some food into this rowdy bunch.”

“Probably a good idea.” He hesitated and then blurted out: “Can I get a strawberry milkshake?”

Emily laughed in surprise and then smiled brightly. “Yes. Yes of course you can, sweetie.”

And so Alex celebrated. Not that he had lost his parents. But that he had found a new family. One that didn’t frown at strawberry milkshakes, thinking any milkshake, especially a pink one, too childish for someone his age.

[thecryptidart1st]

As part of my friend group’s annual Secret Santa Art Exchange, I drew the most iconic DC villainesses

[jatp-scrapbook]

ray & some of his various kids

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

Arcane season 2, act 2, got me crying on my couch by myself

[cherulee]

i’m gonna bring my self insert farmer juno back bc i wanna draw lance fanart once i finish comms LOL

[waywardsalt]

mmmm a while(ish) back i wrote out a scene from one of my loz aus (the one with an actual name, 'in the court of the crimson king', [often shortened to just 'crimson king']) so uhhhh i edited it a bit to account for some changes made since then and decided to share it here!

(if this is difficult to read for any reason let me know and ill just paste the text in normally)

this was also my first time actually writing bellum for real as opposed to how it works in peus so im still a bit shaky with him

this is meant to be a flashback scene for... somewhere within the story, a lot of the more specific plot details of this au are still murky, but it's the most developed one and most likely to be the next au i actually write. its fun and older than i expected, since my friend was able to find and share some old documents i had shared with him a few years ago and i was surprised to find an early draft for this au in there.

the basic idea of this au is that it is set in a semi-industrial hyrule city, separated into segments (districts?), each of which is run by an anonymous leader who handles both the general matters of their segment as well as being in charge of a lot of crime. bellum is one of the leaders in this scenario.

linebeck lives with his adoptive family (link, aryll, and their grandmother) and helps them make ends meet by going off every other week to earn money through jobs. due to money often being very tight, linebeck secretly moonlights as an urban legend-type figure known as the 'demon of the gray moon', and takes extra jobs ranging from theft to spying to murder, often working directly for bellum, who is a close friend he's known since childhood and the one who helped him cultivate and bring into reality the persona of the demon.

(i need to somehow shorten this synopsis, but there's a lot going on from the start and i have yet to even figure out how things begin, so... it's a work in progress. the plot that takes place has some elements of wind waker and a little bit of phantom hourglass as well as kind of being its own thing)

[kakief]

From Resistance to Resilience: Rewriting the First Draft of Change

From Resistance to Collaboration: The Human Side of Change Ever notice how the first draft of anything—whether it’s a blog post or a major organizational shift—rarely resembles the final version? It’s raw, messy, and often riddled with self-doubt. Author Anne Lamott coined the term “Shitty First Drafts” in her classic book on writing, Bird by Bird, encouraging writers to embrace the mess as a…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON TONIGHT (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrance for their different classes of workers – they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.

Importantly, almost none of these workers – whether low-status or high – are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.

At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.

Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

And then they smear unions to the press and to their own workers with lies (that subsequently leak):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

They make workers use an official chat app, and then block any messages containing forbidden words, like "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251318389

Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.

At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with – they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.

Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers – it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers – both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.

This is "twiddling" – exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts – a captive audience meeting in every pocket.

Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.

But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.

For now.

The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity – instead of unions – as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.

Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.

Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.

Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-22-amazon-cloud-ceo-warns-software-engineers-ai-could-replace-your-coding-work-within-2-years

It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money – they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."

Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance – and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter – than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.

That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges – they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

Which led to their prompt dismissal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses and defeat the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present – it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.

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/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

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

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

[suiana]

yandere! mimic and reader who does NOT give a shit. you've seen them on tiktok, seen how they copy people's voices and use it to do some freaky shit.

you just never expected it to happen to you.

"come over. come over. come over."

unfortunately this mimic copied YOUR voice. and what? you're expected to be scared of it?? scared of your voice???

fuck no.

you know you're not supposed to respond, not supposed to acknowledge them at all. but how can you not when your voice is literally coming from behind that door??

also have i mentioned that it's been weeks? yes, weeks since you started hearing your own voice ask for you to acknowledge it. what the hell is this mimic doing?

today you've finally had enough.

"bro if you're gonna use my voice that's fine. but at least pay rent if you're staying in my house."

a beat.

"𝐟𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮."

"excuse me?"

um... what the hell just happened? did this... entity literally tell you... fuck you???

you... can't believe you're about to start beefing with something that could ruin your life in seconds. but it must be done. so you decide to square up... in your bed. yes, you've adopted the optimal position to get back at this thing. that is to lay on your side while hugging your plushie with one leg propped up.

"okay rude, no fuck you."

"𝐟𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮."

"fuck YOU."

"𝐟𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐦𝐞."

"what?"

okay erm... well at least you know this thing isn't going to kill you now..? nevermind, you think you'd rather have that because why do you feel an ominous presence nearing your bedroom? uh... ahaha...

"𝐟𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐦𝐞."

there, in front of you, is a near identical version of yourself staring down at you with the freakiest expression you could ever think of. in the same voice, it's asking you to fuck it. everything down to the smallest details is the same. the curve of your cheek, the messy hair... wait you lowkey look kind of good...?

is this... selfcest?

"you know i lowkey wanna try fucking myself..."

"𝐨𝐡…"

and then the picture of beauty is washed away by some ghostly looking man that does NOT seem pleased with your answer. okay, maybe if he didn't talk with times new roman font size 12 you wouldn't give a shit.

"𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝."

"bro you were asking to be fucked by me wdym scared"

"𝐈 𝐃𝐎𝐍'𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄."

and now he's... thrashing your room??? wtf dude at least pay rent first???

"𝐢 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐲 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐬𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐝 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐞! 𝐧𝐨𝐭… 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬! 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐞!"

"boy if you don't stop making my room messy i'll do more than just fuck my reflection."

that gets his attention. he pauses, eyes wide before he lets out a growl. woah boy! you roll your eyes at him, rolling onto your other side for maximum comfort.

"if you wanted me to fall for you, you should've chose a different form man. weirdo."

and then you start gooning everywhere #massivedih #dontneedamantogoon

[thiccner]

I'm practicing/trying to draw furry oc's and this came out. I don't even know what name to give her but I liked how it turned out 😂🍑

[ddejavvu]

hiccup finally getting some free time so he wants to get some one-on-one with the reader except toothless keeps seeking some attention from her...

The first three times that the dragon has nudged his giant head into your calves you've been able to placate him with some well-placed scritches against the joint of his jaw, but he gets too eager the fourth time and nearly shoves you and Hiccup off of his bed.

"Toothless!" Hiccup yelps, and you're sure it was meant to be a vikingly roar, but it came out more like a squeak against your lips where you'd been stealing the breath from his lungs. Instantly the dragon knows he's pushed his luck, and adopts the pose you've both deemed 'the most innocent dragon on Berk'.

He pulls his auditory fins backwards, his pupils widening along with his eyes themselves as he ducks down, hunching into himself to appear five times smaller than you both know he is. It's a piteous sight, but not enough of one to appease Hiccup.

"Don't kick him out," You plead, moaning mournfully at the sight of the dragon that's trying very hard not to be kicked out despite Hiccup's insistent shoving at his flank, "He gets lonely outside and the door's just wood anyways, he could burst right through and it's cold outside and I don't want him to be alone and-!"

Whatever Hiccup has muttered to Toothless, probably something venomous about being deprived of tomorrow morning's fish, or being put on babysitting duty for the latest clutch of terrors, works. The dragon rises to his feet, albeit reluctantly, and begins a sad, slow trek down the stairs and towards the front door of Hiccup's hut.

"Go faster." Hiccup gripes, his voice monotone as he watches Toothless slink outdoors, "My dad's coming back within the hour."

Toothless, defeated now with no hope for redemption, warbles back something that sounds distinctly sassy even if neither of you can understand precisely what he's saying. He finally drags himself over the threshold, and with a gruff growl and a flourish of his tail he drags the door shut behind him. It's a bizarre sight, but it doesn't deter Hiccup.

He's on you in a second, barely letting you breathe before his knee is slotted between your thighs and his lips are back on your own. You squeal against his mouth, the sound muffled as you push him back to draw in a breath.

"You're mean." You huff, but you tilt your head upwards when he dives to kiss at the soft, supple skin of your neck, "He's out there all alone."

"I don't care." Hiccup sasses, teeth nipping briefly at the skin of your neck, "He's a grown dragon, he can be outside alone. Besides," He moves up over the curve of your jaw, nose briefly nudging at your cheek as his breath fans hot over your face, "I want to be alone with you."