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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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Unpersoned

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Unpersoned." It's about the implications of putting critical infrastructure into the private, unaccountable hands of tech giants:

https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/

The column opens with the story of romance writer K Renee, as reported by Madeline Ashby for Wired:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/

Renee is a prolific writer who used Google Docs to compose her books, and share them among early readers for feedback and revisions. Last March, Renee's Google account was locked, and she was no longer able to access ten manuscripts for her unfinished books, totaling over 220,000 words. Google's famously opaque customer service – a mix of indifferently monitored forums, AI chatbots, and buck-passing subcontractors – would not explain to her what rule she had violated, merely that her work had been deemed "inappropriate."

Renee discovered that she wasn't being singled out. Many of her peers had also seen their accounts frozen and their documents locked, and none of them were able to get an explanation out of Google. Renee and her similarly situated victims of Google lockouts were reduced to developing folk-theories of what they had done to be expelled from Google's walled garden; Renee came to believe that she had tripped an anti-spam system by inviting her community of early readers to access the books she was working on.

There's a normal way that these stories resolve themselves: a reporter like Ashby, writing for a widely read publication like Wired, contacts the company and triggers a review by one of the vanishingly small number of people with the authority to undo the determinations of the Kafka-as-a-service systems that underpin the big platforms. The system's victim gets their data back and the company mouths a few empty phrases about how they take something-or-other "very seriously" and so forth.

But in this case, Google broke the script. When Ashby contacted Google about Renee's situation, Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson insisted that the policies for Google accounts were "clear": "we may review and take action on any content that violates our policies." If Renee believed that she'd been wrongly flagged, she could "request an appeal."

But Renee didn't even know what policy she was meant to have broken, and the "appeals" went nowhere.

This is an underappreciated aspect of "software as a service" and "the cloud." As companies from Microsoft to Adobe to Google withdraw the option to use software that runs on your own computer to create files that live on that computer, control over our own lives is quietly slipping away. Sure, it's great to have all your legal documents scanned, encrypted and hosted on GDrive, where they can't be burned up in a house-fire. But if a Google subcontractor decides you've broken some unwritten rule, you can lose access to those docs forever, without appeal or recourse.

That's what happened to "Mark," a San Francisco tech workers whose toddler developed a UTI during the early covid lockdowns. The pediatrician's office told Mark to take a picture of his son's infected penis and transmit it to the practice using a secure medical app. However, Mark's phone was also set up to synch all his pictures to Google Photos (this is a default setting), and when the picture of Mark's son's penis hit Google's cloud, it was automatically scanned and flagged as Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, better known as "child porn"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

Without contacting Mark, Google sent a copy of all of his data – searches, emails, photos, cloud files, location history and more – to the SFPD, and then terminated his account. Mark lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer), his email archives, all the household and professional files he kept on GDrive, his stored passwords, his two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, and every photo he'd ever taken of his young son.

The SFPD concluded that Mark hadn't done anything wrong, but it was too late. Google had permanently deleted all of Mark's data. The SFPD had to mail a physical letter to Mark telling him he wasn't in trouble, because he had no email and no phone.

Mark's not the only person this happened to. Writing about Mark for the New York Times, Kashmir Hill described other parents, like a Houston father identified as "Cassio," who also lost their accounts and found themselves blocked from fundamental participation in modern life:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

Note that in none of these cases did the problem arise from the fact that Google services are advertising-supported, and because these people weren't paying for the product, they were the product. Buying a $800 Pixel phone or paying more than $100/year for a Google Drive account means that you're definitely paying for the product, and you're still the product.

What do we do about this? One answer would be to force the platforms to provide service to users who, in their judgment, might be engaged in fraud, or trafficking in CSAM, or arranging terrorist attacks. This is not my preferred solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious!

We can try to improve the decision-making processes at these giant platforms so that they catch fewer dolphins in their tuna-nets. The "first wave" of content moderation appeals focused on the establishment of oversight and review boards that wronged users could appeal their cases to. The idea was to establish these "paradigm cases" that would clarify the tricky aspects of content moderation decisions, like whether uploading a Nazi atrocity video in order to criticize it violated a rule against showing gore, Nazi paraphernalia, etc.

This hasn't worked very well. A proposal for "second wave" moderation oversight based on arms-length semi-employees at the platforms who gather and report statistics on moderation calls and complaints hasn't gelled either:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave

Both the EU and California have privacy rules that allow users to demand their data back from platforms, but neither has proven very useful (yet) in situations where users have their accounts terminated because they are accused of committing gross violations of platform policy. You can see why this would be: if someone is accused of trafficking in child porn or running a pig-butchering scam, it would be perverse to shut down their account but give them all the data they need to go one committing these crimes elsewhere.

But even where you can invoke the EU's GDPR or California's CCPA to get your data, the platforms deliver that data in the most useless, complex blobs imaginable. For example, I recently used the CCPA to force Mailchimp to give me all the data they held on me. Mailchimp – a division of the monopolist and serial fraudster Intuit – is a favored platform for spammers, and I have been added to thousands of Mailchimp lists that bombard me with unsolicited press pitches and come-ons for scam products.

Mailchimp has spent a decade ignoring calls to allow users to see what mailing lists they've been added to, as a prelude to mass unsubscribing from those lists (for Mailchimp, the fact that spammers can pay it to send spam that users can't easily opt out of is a feature, not a bug). I thought that the CCPA might finally let me see the lists I'm on, but instead, Mailchimp sent me more than 5900 files, scattered through which were the internal serial numbers of the lists my name had been added to – but without the names of those lists any contact information for their owners. I can see that I'm on more than 1,000 mailing lists, but I can't do anything about it.

Mailchimp shows how a rule requiring platforms to furnish data-dumps can be easily subverted, and its conduct goes a long way to explaining why a decade of EU policy requiring these dumps has failed to make a dent in the market power of the Big Tech platforms.

The EU has a new solution to this problem. With its 2024 Digital Markets Act, the EU is requiring platforms to furnish APIs – programmatic ways for rivals to connect to their services. With the DMA, we might finally get something parallel to the cellular industry's "number portability" for other kinds of platforms.

If you've ever changed cellular platforms, you know how smooth this can be. When you get sick of your carrier, you set up an account with a new one and get a one-time code. Then you call your old carrier, endure their pathetic begging not to switch, give them that number and within a short time (sometimes only minutes), your phone is now on the new carrier's network, with your old phone-number intact.

This is a much better answer than forcing platforms to provide service to users whom they judge to be criminals or otherwise undesirable, but the platforms hate it. They say they hate it because it makes them complicit in crimes ("if we have to let an accused fraudster transfer their address book to a rival service, we abet the fraud"), but it's obvious that their objection is really about being forced to reduce the pain of switching to a rival.

There's a superficial reasonableness to the platforms' position, but only until you think about Mark, or K Renee, or the other people who've been "unpersonned" by the platforms with no explanation or appeal.

The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power.

This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy – and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments – came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer.

The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model.

It's that Microsoft – like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants – routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account.

There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding.

Now, perhaps some people really should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business – but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that no one should be able to provide you with service.

This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provider accidentally terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck on purpose.

The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a feature and not a bug.

It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, right up to the point where we're so pissed that we quit.

Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem – it's Mark's problem.

The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.

Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's capacity to defenstrate all of us, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped deliberately, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me.

If you'd like an e ssay-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/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

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

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

#pluralistic #google #monopoly #big tech #locus magazine #crowdstrike #single points of failure

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follow-up-news · 5 months ago

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A federal judge on Wednesday indicated he will order major changes in Google’s Android app store to punish the company for engineering a system that a jury declared an illegal monopoly that has hurt millions of consumers and app developers. Over the course of a three-hour hearing in San Francisco, U.S. District Judge James Donato made it clear that the forthcoming shake-up he is contemplating will probably include a mandate requiring Google’s Play Store for Android phones offer consumers a choice to download alternative app stores Donato has been weighing how to punish the Google since last December when a jury declared the Play Store a monopoly following a four-week trial. The verdict centered on Google’s nearly exclusive control over distribution of apps designed for Android phones and the billing systems for the digital commerce occurring within them — a system that generates billions of dollars in annual revenue for the company.

#google #android

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appaspect-technologies · 7 months ago

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Key Features of Mobile Applications You Need to Know

A unique mobile application for your company will help you develop brand awareness and loyalty, ultimately enhancing business-to-customer connections, happiness, and profitability. In order to develop your business, you can reach a top-notch mobile app development company in San Francisco. In this blog, we have mentioned the key benefits of mobile applications that you need to be aware of.

#app development company San Francisco #mobile app development company San Francisco #mobile app development San Francisco #mobile app development Service San Francisco #mobile app development agency San Francisco

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mariacallous · 5 months ago

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Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.

A WIRED analysis found 16 of the biggest so-called undress and “nudify” websites using the sign-in infrastructure from Google, Apple, Discord, Twitter, Patreon, and Line. This approach allows people to easily create accounts on the deepfake websites—offering them a veneer of credibility—before they pay for credits and generate images.

While bots and websites that create nonconsensual intimate images of women and girls have existed for years, the number has increased with the introduction of generative AI. This kind of “undress” abuse is alarmingly widespread, with teenage boys allegedly creating images of their classmates. Tech companies have been slow to deal with the scale of the issues, critics say, with the websites appearing highly in search results, paid advertisements promoting them on social media, and apps showing up in app stores.

“This is a continuation of a trend that normalizes sexual violence against women and girls by Big Tech,” says Adam Dodge, a lawyer and founder of EndTAB (Ending Technology-Enabled Abuse). “Sign-in APIs are tools of convenience. We should never be making sexual violence an act of convenience,” he says. “We should be putting up walls around the access to these apps, and instead we're giving people a drawbridge.”

The sign-in tools analyzed by WIRED, which are deployed through APIs and common authentication methods, allow people to use existing accounts to join the deepfake websites. Google’s login system appeared on 16 websites, Discord’s appeared on 13, and Apple’s on six. X’s button was on three websites, with Patreon and messaging service Line’s both appearing on the same two websites.

WIRED is not naming the websites, since they enable abuse. Several are part of wider networks and owned by the same individuals or companies. The login systems have been used despite the tech companies broadly having rules that state developers cannot use their services in ways that would enable harm, harassment, or invade people’s privacy.

After being contacted by WIRED, spokespeople for Discord and Apple said they have removed the developer accounts connected to their websites. Google said it will take action against developers when it finds its terms have been violated. Patreon said it prohibits accounts that allow explicit imagery to be created, and Line confirmed it is investigating but said it could not comment on specific websites. X did not reply to a request for comment about the way its systems are being used.

In the hours after Jud Hoffman, Discord vice president of trust and safety, told WIRED it had terminated the websites’ access to its APIs for violating its developer policy, one of the undress websites posted in a Telegram channel that authorization via Discord was “temporarily unavailable” and claimed it was trying to restore access. That undress service did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about its operations.

Rapid Expansion

Since deepfake technology emerged toward the end of 2017, the number of nonconsensual intimate videos and images being created has grown exponentially. While videos are harder to produce, the creation of images using “undress” or “nudify” websites and apps has become commonplace.

“We must be clear that this is not innovation, this is sexual abuse,” says David Chiu, San Francisco’s city attorney, who recently opened a lawsuit against undress and nudify websites and their creators. Chiu says the 16 websites his office’s lawsuit focuses on have had around 200 million visits in the first six months of this year alone. “These websites are engaged in horrific exploitation of women and girls around the globe. These images are used to bully, humiliate, and threaten women and girls,” Chiu alleges.

The undress websites operate as businesses, often running in the shadows—proactively providing very few details about who owns them or how they operate. Websites run by the same people often look similar and use nearly identical terms and conditions. Some offer more than a dozen different languages, demonstrating the worldwide nature of the problem. Some Telegram channels linked to the websites have tens of thousands of members each.

The websites are also under constant development: They frequently post about new features they are producing—with one claiming their AI can customize how women’s bodies look and allow “uploads from Instagram.” The websites generally charge people to generate images and can run affiliate schemes to encourage people to share them; some have pooled together into a collective to create their own cryptocurrency that could be used to pay for images.

A person identifying themself as Alexander August and the CEO of one of the websites, responded to WIRED, saying they “understand and acknowledge the concerns regarding the potential misuse of our technology.” The person claims the website has put in place various safety mechanisms to prevent images of minors being created. “We are committed to taking social responsibility and are open to collaborating with official bodies to enhance transparency, safety, and reliability in our services,” they wrote in an email.

The tech company logins are often presented when someone tries to sign up to the site or clicks on buttons to try generating images. It is unclear how many people will have used the login methods, and most websites also allow people to create accounts with just their email address. However, of the websites reviewed, the majority had implemented the sign-in APIs of more than one technology company, with Sign-In With Google being the most widely used. When this option is clicked, prompts from the Google system say the website will get people’s name, email addresses, language preferences, and profile picture.

Google’s sign-in system also reveals some information about the developer accounts linked to a website. For example, four websites are linked to one Gmail account; another six websites are linked to another. “In order to use Sign in with Google, developers must agree to our Terms of Service, which prohibits the promotion of sexually explicit content as well as behavior or content that defames or harasses others,” says a Google spokesperson, adding that “appropriate action” will be taken if these terms are broken.

Other tech companies that had sign-in systems being used said they have banned accounts after being contacted by WIRED.

Hoffman from Discord says that as well as taking action on the websites flagged by WIRED, the company will “continue to address other websites we become aware of that violate our policies.” Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer says it has terminated multiple developer’s licenses with Apple, and that Sign In With Apple will no longer work on their websites. Adiya Taylor, corporate communications lead at Patreon, says it prohibits accounts that allow or fund access to external tools that can produce adult materials or explicit imagery. “We will take action on any works or accounts on Patreon that are found to be in violation of our Community Guidelines.”

As well as the login systems, several of the websites displayed the logos of Mastercard or Visa, implying they can possibly be used to pay for their services. Visa did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, while a Mastercard spokesperson says “purchases of nonconsensual deepfake content are not allowed on our network,” and that it takes action when it detects or is made aware of any instances.

On multiple occasions, tech companies and payment providers have taken action against AI services allowing people to generate nonconsensual images or video after media reports about their activities. Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University who has expertise in the legal regulation of pornography and sexual violence and abuse online, says Big Tech platforms are enabling the growth of undress websites and similar websites by not proactively taking action against them.

“What is concerning is that these are the most basic of security steps and moderation that are missing or not being enforced,” McGlynn says of the sign-in systems being used, adding that it is “wholly inadequate” for companies to react when journalists or campaigners highlight how their rules are being easily dodged. “It is evident that they simply do not care, despite their rhetoric,” McGlynn says. “Otherwise they would have taken these most simple steps to reduce access.”

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shantiinfosoftllp · 9 months ago

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Shanti Infosoft pioneers react native app development in Sarasota, crafting innovative solutions tailored to client's needs. Our services combine cutting-edge technology and creative flair for impactful mobile experiences.

#React Native App Development Agency in Sarasota #React Native App Development Services in San Francisco #React Native Mobile App Development Company in Las Vegas

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murphbloom · 3 months ago

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basics.

full name — Samuel Bloom - exclusively goes by Murph

faceclaim — Adam Brody

gender & pronouns —cis man, he/him

age — 42

birthday — 12/9/1981

sexuality — hetero, sad but true

occupation — unemployed

neighborhood — Deer Park

length of time in blue harbor — since the beginning of October

tldr. tw: divorce (full bio can be found at the bottom of the intro)

murph is called murph because it was a running joke all his life that he was cursed with bad luck. so instead of allowing murphy to be a name that haunted him his entire life, murph decided to simply make it his identity. people can't make fun of you if you do it first!

he's the oldest of two boys and the least favorite. his family is the loud rambunctious type and the gene seemed to skip him. he liked comic books and robots and listening to obscure indie bands in his bedroom. so he got pushed onto the backburner a lot in favor of his brother who was the big man on campus with his football and his hundreds of friends and his endless charm

he was born and raised in the san francisco area but went to college in southern california for a change of pace and for a chance to not be in his little brother's shadow. his studies were in coding and game design and it was nice to feel like he was finally excelling at something

he finally shook off that lingering awkward teen thing at some point in his college career and actually started dating. if he hadn't already fully become murph he might have dropped the nickname because things were going really well!

after graduation, he got a job at a fairly big name gaming company. but as it turned out, he was less passionate about designing games than he was about playing them, finding that app development was actually more his speed.

he took a leap of faith and left his steady job for a start up company where he managed projects and teams. it wasn't exactly what he wanted to do, but he felt like he was getting on the right track

because he can be something of a workaholic, his romantic life suffered. until it didn't. he met someone who was like his opposite in every way— much more like his brother than him— but he thought their differences was what made the relationship so solid. she pushed him out of his comfort zone, which he needed. eventually, with her support, he left the company to venture out on his own. with an old college acquaintance eager to invest, murph put together his own team and finally was at a place where he could bring his ideas to life. he didn't have to manage anybody else's projects for the first time and could focus solely on his brainchild: sidequest— an app with a very easy-to-use interface that connects people for odd jobs. it's a little more complicated than that but i'm just a girl, so pretend there's really cool techy stuff here that blows your mind <3

riding the high of a particularly big breakthrough, murph proposed to his girlfriend on a whim. she said no. which would have been fine because, if he thought about it, their shelf life was likely reaching its expiration. what he wasn't prepared for was her confessing that she was actually in love with his BROTHER

like, yeah, sure, it made sense when he thought about it because he was always the spare Bloom, but damn??? right in front of my fruit salad???

anyway, that sucked a lot. but at least he had his app!

oh, except wait. he didn't. because that investor "friend" of his? well, he got dollar signs in his eyes and saw an opportunity to take credit for all of murph's work. and with some ironclad contracts with shitty little fine print that basically said he already owned anything and everything murph created using his money, he was forced out. but at least they cut him a check, right?

honestly, murph was super bummed out. he had a shit ton of money but nothing really to show for it

that's about the time he met valley. he really didn't think he had anything to offer anyone and he was too scared to put himself out there again just to get chewed up and spit out so soon after he'd already been thoroughly wrecked. but he kind of didn't have a choice. she was persistent in the beginning and so beautiful and charming and he honestly never stood a chance

he fell soooooooo hard for her. like the sun rose and fell with HER. he realized he never knew a single thing about love until he met her because nothing else quite compared. and for five years, they were very happy

and then fuckass george had to get involved. valley's shitty ex husband reached out to murph and told him everything, sent proof of certificates and pictures and all kinds of things murph couldn't explain away. it destroyed him to think that, once again, he'd put everything into something that turned out to never really be his in the first place. he was in a sort of state of shocked numbness for a long, long time. anger came way later and he never really asked any questions of her or got any answers. she was just here and then she was gone

he allowed himself to wallow for a while, and even after he picked himself up and did his best to move on, the people closest to him could see that he needed to be forced out of his rut. enter: blue harbor. it's quieter, a big change of scenery. and there's nothing there that could possibly remind him of his ex wife!

i am sorry that this section is called tldr and i basically just rewrote the entire bio but with bullet points. if you've made it this far, i luv u

headcanons.

when murph and valley decided they wanted a dog, they went to the shelter and asked for the dog that had been there the longest. they adopted her sight unseen and came home with a very scruffy terrier mix that they named fig

he is SO clumsy. it's cute and it's sad. like a big puppy that doesn't know how to control it's limbs yet

he has a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and he tends to lean on that in social interactions because talking to people is both hard and overwhelming so if he's making people laugh then he's winning

i had so many more in my head when i was at work and couldn't write anything down and now it's all evading me so i'll update more when i think about it!

wanted connections.

neighbors in deer park

dog friends???

???

???????

?????????? help brain no work

full bio.

Murphy’s law states anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

For Samuel Bloom, that adage was a lifestyle. And a name.

It was meant as a joke— calling him Murphy. A nod to just how wrong everything always seemed to go for him. But Sam adopted it, made it his own. If he couldn’t beat them, then he would join them. And so, he became Murph.

From the beginning, it was clear that Murph’s younger brother was the favorite. His parents weren’t mean, they didn’t treat him poorly in favor of his brother, but it was still there and still obvious all the same. His brother was the sports guy, the charismatic one, the friend magnet. Murph… well. Murph liked comics and robotics, he liked finding solutions to problems in unique ways. He was just wired differently and so he never took it personally when he’d have the house to himself for a long weekend during one of his brother’s away games. Or when they chose to sit in on a football game instead of his first robotics competition.

College felt like a new beginning. Maybe there Murph could be the guy who won. He wouldn’t be recognized as the Other Bloom. He was the only Bloom. And for a little while, that was true. He made some friends— a few of which he still has today— and even had a string of girlfriends. Most of those were fleeting and none of them were endgame level serious. But it was still a little life he cultivated for himself. And it was one that he was proud of. He was pursuing coding and video game design, both fields something he believed would only evolve with time. He wanted to evolve with it.

And so, he did. He got a job with a modestly sized company right out of college. It was a decent job, paid the bills just enough that he could afford a studio apartment and dinner at least two nights a week that wasn’t instant noodles. And then he slowly moved up the ladder, small raises here and there affording him an apartment with actual rooms and dinner not from a cup any night he wanted.

Eventually, Murph realized his passion lay not with video game design but with app development. As the market for that grew, so, too, did his ideas. When an old college buddy reached out to him, offering a job at his startup company, Murph took a leap of faith. It was slow going in the beginning, and had it not been for his savings, he might have returned to studio apartments and cup noodles, but eventually, they hit their stride. It still wasn’t quite where Murph wanted to be— managing teams rather than bringing his own ideas to life. But it was still so clear that he’d found himself in the right field, so he took the wins where he could.

Seven years of growth found him well. He’d upgraded his one bedroom apartment to a two bedroom house in a nice little neighborhood. It was more space than he needed for himself, but eventually, maybe, he’d fill it with a family. That part of his life was slower-going. Perhaps it was because he had never quite learned how to split his time, prone to bouts of inspiration that he’d have to work through until it was spent which meant long days and nights in the office. Apparently that was not a recipe for a fruitful marriage.

But then he did meet someone. She was his opposite in many ways. She was loud and friendly where he could be withdrawn and shy, she loved to go out and meet new people when he preferred quiet nights in. She shook him out of his comfort zone and he tethered her to earth. It should have made sense. For Murph at the time, it did. And she was different from the others: she stuck around. She became part of the family, finding her place among them easier than even Murph had. In many ways, she was a lot like his brother, the magnetic type that you couldn’t help but be drawn in by. And she encouraged him to reach for more.

So, two years later, he did. In 2016, he took another leap of faith— this time he bet on himself. He had an idea for an app that he believed was missing in the market. Something with an easily navigable interface that could connect people with small jobs or other needs. He called it SideQuest, a nod to his love of games. He found an investor in the form of an old college acquaintance and secured himself a team. Not having to worry about the money aspect, Murph threw himself into his work. Watching his vision come to fruition might have been the most exciting thing to ever happen to him, and on a particularly good day a year into development, he decided to take another big leap. He asked his girlfriend to marry him.

He wished he could say that the worst thing she told him was no. No he could have handled with grace. No would have made sense when he removed himself from the situation and really thought about their compatibility. But it was so much worse than no. Because, as it turned out, she had fallen in love with his brother. Honestly, he should have seen it coming. He’d been the Other Bloom his entire life, it just made sense that two beams of light might intersect and leave him lost in the shadows they cast. When they got engaged only a year later, it crushed him. Even as he realized that he’d never felt an ounce of the passion for their relationship that he had for his job. It was only that that kept him afloat, throwing himself into his work in a full tilt.

Until that was taken from him too. His friend had seen the potential for SideQuest, and with the work on it mostly done, Murph was strong-armed into parting ways with the company. He had no financial stake in the company and iron clad contracts stated in fine print they had the right to claim his work for their own. Technically, they didn’t owe him anything. But they were ‘gracious’ enough to cut him a very sizable check. One that could have meant he’d never have to work again.

He felt defeated. And when he met a beautiful woman in a bar, he was wary, guarded now in ways he’d never been before. He was uninterested in putting himself out there to be ruined again. But she was persistent, and in the end, he was weak. She made him realize that he’d been wrong to think that anything he’d ever had before could have held a candle to love. Real love. She fit seamlessly into his life, breathing color back into his world. He allowed himself to be swept away in her current. They married, even beating his brother down the aisle, and for five years, they were happy.

And then, he learned the truth. It was hard to believe she might have invested five years of her life just to take half of everything he owned, but it was impossible to ignore the proof. And it made sense, in the end.

Because he was Murph. And anything that could go wrong, would.

Anything that could go wrong, did.

#bh.intro #about.#i feel like you can clearly see where i lost the plot

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