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arealphrooblem · 2 years ago

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Mutually Assured Destruction Part 11 -- The End!

This is the last part everyone! I may right little snippets after this one if the inspiration strikes, but this is the definitive end to the series.

Synopsis: Villain x Civilian. Civilian can sense other people's powers through auras but hides this ability. They are terrified of the most boring person at their office job, who hides the most powerful aura Civilian has ever felt.

CW: Mentions of death, low self-esteem thoughts, brief vague mention of sex at the end, two kisses

Part One Here

Part Ten Here

At first, they thought he was sick. Jonathan didn’t ever give them a cell phone number, so they couldn’t call and check on him. By Wednesday they drove round for three hours after work, trying to find the neighborhood that housed his apartment, with no luck. By Friday, worry stayed a constant pit in their stomach.

Monday morning brought the news that Jonathan had “transferred” to another in another part of the country. Civilian had to suffer all day through the cloying sympathy of their coworkers. Gloria had even hugged them. Everyone assumed a breakup occurred so horribly awkward that it drove Jonathan to move several hundred miles away a week before the holidays.

For the rest of December, Civilian kept up religiously with the news, looking for something big enough to fit the plans Jonathan had hinted at — massive art theft, large scale arson, hell even a government coup.

There was nothing save for constant Christmas ads that Civilian tuned out.

Eventually they had to accept the truth that Jonathan had just got the fuck out of dodge and didn’t look back. Fine. Civilian knew their ‘relationship’ had an expiration date, that it had never existed in the first place. But they had expected some kind of goodbye, even if it had been a threat to stay quiet — not this slipping away in the dead of night like a ghost.

Maybe his plans fell through and he had to leave before someone else discovered him. Maybe the Agency had found him despite his best efforts and he had to abandon everything. Both scenarios were more likely than the one echoing cruelly in Civilian’s head at night:

That they had driven him away; that he couldn’t take their needy loneliness anymore and bounced.

It’s a thought that hounded them for the next six months, followed them as closely and loyally as their own shadow. As the weeks drifted by, Civilian burrowed further and further inside themselves, rejecting offers from Gloria to eat lunch, rejecting their mother’s requests to call or visit, rejecting drinks after work with the other members of their department.

It wasn’t that Jonathan broke their ability to trust anyone — it was the stubborn, naive belief that if Civilian chose to be alone then they weren’t lonely, that it didn’t count because it was self-imposed, a choice, a preference. And being around other people reminded them so sharply of feeling not alone that they couldn’t handle its absence once the night was over.

The whole thing was ridiculous, and Civilian berated themselves at each night for it. They were acting childish and silly. Jonathan was right: the only thing stopping them from having friends was their own fear. They could find a new job, move to a new city, find a place where Jonathan had never set foot in and build anew.

But they didn’t.

And six months later, the bank went under.

Ironically, the one thing Civilian needed to watch the news for, they had ignored in favor of a Buzzfeed shopping list. Their mom had sent a text with a link to a video and a series of question marks.

Isn’t this your bank????

The video explained how the entire board of directors had been arrested for fraud and embezzlement to the tune of billions.

Billions with a B.

After that number, Civilian’s attention went a little fuzzy. The explanation of the complex series of fund transfers and shell corporations and blah blah blah faded to the background as Civilian tried desperate to work out just how the hell Jonathan made it happen.

Over the weeks, each man screamed his innocence of course, but camera footage and witness testimonies — even ones from the other board directors, all eager to stab each other in the back — denied those claims. Each director passed a psych test with flying colors, despite their protests of their body moving with out their consent. It all looked very much like a bunch of disgustingly wealthy men got caught trying to illegally make themselves even more disgustingly richer.

After a certain point, Civilian could have spoken up about Jonathan, and no one would have believed them anyway.

It was the perfect crime and now Jonathan was walking out there will several billion dollars in his pocket and Civilian . . .

Well Civilian was now out of a job, living off a pathetic severance package, and trying to find a solution to their problem that did not involve moving back in with their mother.

It happened in the middle of the night. The ear-popping pressure of a powerful aura dragged them from sleep. In the soft darkness of their bedroom, they could just make out a shadowy figure looming over them.

In seconds confusion crystalized sharply into fear. Civilian’s hands dove under the pillow for the knife they kept there and yanked it out. Their hand froze in the air, gripped by invisible fingers Civilian knew all too well.

“Did you just pull a fucking knife on me?” The figure asked incredulously.

The familiarity of his voice hit them like a physical ache, like a thumb on a bruise.

“Jonathan?”

The lamp switched on, bathing the room in a dim glow. Civilian squinted and blinked against the sudden light. Standing there, eyebrows raised and dressed in all black, was Jonathan Anderson.

The knife gleamed between them. He glanced between it and Civilian and shook his head.

“You should give me that before you hurt yourself.”

He took the knife gently out of their forcibly relaxed fingers and set it on the nightstand, far out of their reach.

Their chest was a swirling maelstrom of too many emotions to count — joy and fear and anxiety and relief.

But most of all anger.

How dare he just show up after ten months of nothing.

“You should go fuck yourself,” they retorted, sitting up and swinging their legs over the side.

“Awww, Civilian, did I upset you by leaving?” He gave them a mocking frown. “Did you miss me?”

The truth of his words pierced them, sending a hot flush of humiliation up their neck.

“No, I did not miss you, you sick on of a bitch — ”

Jonathan bent down, cupping their face in his hands and cutting them off with a fierce, almost desperate kiss.

“I missed you,” he breathed. “So fucking much.”

Civilian’s heart pounded like thunder in their ears. How often did they daydream this kind of moment happening, and yet now that it was here, they couldn’t help but doubt it. It felt dangerous to believe it.

“How am I supposed to believe that?” they demanded. “For all I know, you could be here to kill me and — and tie up loose ends.”

Jonathan had the gall to laugh. “Where do you think we are — a mobster movie? Do you think I’m going to tie cinder blocks to your legs and throw you off the pier?”

“You wouldn’t need the cinder blocks to make sure I drowned,” they said mulishly. “You wouldn’t even need a pier. You could make me smother myself right now with my own pillow.”

Why they were arguing this, they had no idea. Perhaps stubbornly clinging to the belief that he didn’t care about them protected them from hope. Jonathan’s grin faded into something more somber as he studied them. Then he slowly sank down on one knee before them, putting him at just under eye level.

“Why would I come here to kill you after everything I’ve done to protect you?”

“Protect me? Is that what you calling taking off with no goodbye like I didn’t mean anything?”

“Tell me, Civilian, how suspicious it would have looked if I had stolen all that money and then skipped town? How many people would be scrutinizing the newest hire that suddenly disappeared and anyone who associated with him? How long before the Agency would come sniffing around, looking for someone with my skill-set, and find you and your glorious little secret? Hmm? Tell me.”

Civilian glared at him and his tight, unbeatable logic. How dare he make sense.

“Some warning would have been nice,” they said instead, crossing their arms. “I thought I had — that you ran because — ”

They couldn’t finish the thought, it was too embarrassing. How stupid they had been, obsessing over a silly kiss, when Jonathan was executing such grand larceny on an unheard of scale. Like he had even spared it a second thought.

He gave them a knowing, crooked smile. “You thought I took off because you kissed me and I flipped out.”

“No,” they lied. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” he agreed. “It’s the one thing that made it hard to leave in the first place. And I couldn’t let you know, in case someone did question you. You were my insurance, not my accomplice.”

The one thing that made it hard to leave. Staying angry at Jonathan was getting more and more difficult. Civilian tried to hold onto it, but it slipped through their fingers like an eel.

“So the bank . . .that really was you?” they asked.

This time his smile widened into a full smirk. “Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“Beautiful? It fucked over a lot of people — including me! I’m out of a job now, you prick.”

He shrugged. “People will move on just like they always have. As for you . . .that’s why I’m here.” He reached out and traced the pad of his thumb down their jawline. “To spirit you away.”

Civilian fought and failed to hold back a shiver at the light touch. “You mean kidnap me.”

“It’s only kidnapping if you don’t volunteer for it,” he said. “You’re being very stubbornly angry with me. You must have missed me quite a bit.”

They swallowed thickly. “I hate you,” they lied.

He smile, soft and gentle, his thumb swiping over their bottom lip. “You wish you did.”

Civilian’s pulse fluttered. They wanted very badly to kiss his thumb, his hand, anywhere they could reach. “And where would you take me?” they whispered instead.

Jonathan turned his hand so the back of his knuckles brushed over their cheekbone. “Where do you want to go? I have more money than God, Civilian. We can go anywhere in the world and disappear and never have to look over our shoulders again. What say you to that?”

“What happens if I say no?”

As tempting as his offer was, they had to ask the question, regardless. His answer determined everything.

“You will never have to see me again,” he said, taking his hand away. “And I will find a way to anonymously give you enough money to do whatever you wish in a way that can’t be traced. With me or without me, you will have the same freedom from the Agency that I do. I had planned for that for a long time.”

Whatever resentment for their months alone evaporated in an instant. This time Civilian took his face in their hands and kissed him, long and fierce.

“Take me to Greece first,” they said. “I want to see the ruins.”

Taglist: @those-damn-snippets@heroes-villains-side-blog@anonymousewrites@follow-me-into-the-fog@sunnyside-world, @rivalriotrenegade@trappedgoose-in-a-writblr-room@midnightsillusions@villain-obsessed-word-nerd@deflated-bouncingball @pickleking8 @cesspitoflove@to-sneak-away-and-hide@im-a-wonderling@hasel-anne@ghostly-writer@moonknight-s-cumdump@valiantlytransparentwhispers@galactic-squiddo@boomimhere@organizedchaos03@dungeon-roomba@vidiaka@powerflower119 @cbiom @meltedgallium@skevethefool@sarcasticlittlebook@lisapicklemagick@dragonfirephoenixflame, @royalmuffinsworld@sillypeachduck

#my writing #hero x villain #villain x civilian #enemies to lovers #writeblr #mutually assured destruction

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Booz Allen ticketmastered America's public lands

Ticketmaster’s spectacular failure to competently sell tickets to Taylor Swift’s first concert tour in five years has revived scrutiny of the ticketing/venue/promotion/management monopoly created by Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation, especially the “junk fees” the company sucks out of fans’ pockets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfPiqgLPro8

What’s a junk fee? It’s all the crap that Ticketmaster tacks onto the cost of your ticket, like a “convenience fee” for using a credit card. Once all these fees are assessed, 78% of the price of some tickets is just fees.

https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/biden-is-coming-for-high-ticketing-fees.html

Junk fees aren’t limited to Ticketmaster, they’re everywhere: “resort fees” at hotels, bag and seat-selection fees on airlines, $35 fees for bounced checks, and on and on. Wherever a company has pricing power — because they’re the only game in town, or because you’re desperate — they rip you off with fees:

https://www.yahoo.com/video/1-biden-welcomes-crackdown-junk-161329851.html

Take cable TV. The cable operators have divided up the USA like the Pope dividing up the New World, carefully demarcating each company’s exclusive territory and ensuring that cable companies never compete with one another. That’s why cable is such a dumpster-fire of junk fees — Comcast just jacked up its nonsense “broadcast fee” to $27/month:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/comcasts-sneaky-broadcast-tv-fee-hits-27-making-a-mockery-of-advertised-rates/

OK, fine — turn off the TV and get out there and touch grass! America’s system of national parks and public lands are the jewels in the country’s crown, a remnant of those long-ago days when government could and did do stuff for the American public, an art that (to hear conservatives tell) is now lost to the ages along with the secrets of the pyramids.

Just navigate to Recreation.gov, which consolidates permitting and entry for 13 federal agencies and…

::sad trombone::

…pay your junk fees.

Want to pay your $7 to hike the prized Coyote Buttes North at Arizona’s Vermilion Cliffs National Monument? Sure, just pay a $9 “lottery application fee.” Even by junk fee standards, this is a very junky fee — it’s not a fee for paying a fee, it’s a fee for the chance to pay a fee.

Only 4–10% of lottery entrants get a permit (Coyote Buttes is a very fragile ecosystem and entrance is severely limited), which means that Recreation.gov’s rake from this junk fee is about 1,000% of what it actually makes on hiking permits.

Well, at least that money is going to Coyote Buttes, right? Preserving the petroglyphs and the dinosaur tracks and whatnot?

Nope. The Bureau of Land Management gets the $7 entry fee from the 64 daily hikers who are lucky enough to visit Coyote Buttes. The $14,400 in lottery fees that the day’s hopeful hikers pay to Recreation.gov for a shot at a permit all go to a giant military contractor: Booz Allen.

I know. What. The. Actual. Fuck. On his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller explains how a beltway bandit like Booz Allen became the Ticketmaster of America’s public lands. The deal started in 2017, when Booz got the contract to build Recreation.gov “at no cost to the federal government.”

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back

Booz Allen didn’t promise to run a government website out of an abundance of patriotic zeal. Like all public private Partnership contractors, they wanted to figure out how to scoop of gigantic amounts of public money without any public accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

Booz Allen now gets to run America’s public lands like its own corporate fiefdom. At the outset of its deal, it was able to set its own prices for fees unilaterally — that is, it could simply announce that, say, everyone who wanted to visit Mount Whitney would pay a $6 fee (16,000 applicants, 5,300 of them successful, $100,000 in junk fees for Booz).

But then Thomas Kotab, an “avid hiker,” sued the BLM for the $2 junk fee tacked on top of the reservation system for Red Rock Canyon. The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (the law that allows federal agencies to charge for access to public lands) requires that agencies hold a notice-and-comment for each of these fees. The $2 fee didn’t go through this procedure.

Kotab won…sort of. The court upheld his challenge, requiring that Booz’s public lands junk fees go through public notice. But Booz didn’t refund the $2 it had illegally collected from the people it ripped off to visit Red Rock Canyon — and it figured out how to neuter the notice and comment system.

Here’s how that works: the federal agencies that Booz ticketmasters each have a Resource Advisory Council, which the agencies stack with their own cronies, who then rubber-stamp whatever the agency wants to do. RACs pretend to be accountable to the public, but boy is the pretense thin:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5442009.pdf

So now, when Booz wants to tack a junk fee onto a public space, it gets the relevant agency to do a notice-and-comment for the fee, and the RAC files comments saying that this is a great idea, and the agency throws away all the public comments that say otherwise, and voila, Booz gets another junk fee.

All of this is incredibly frustrating, not just another example of corporate looting of the public’s purse — a huge barrier to our public lands. The idea that the military industrial complex has ticketmastered Teddy Roosevelt’s public parks should shock our consciences.

But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees.

Or, as Stoller notes, “Biden, through his anti-junk fee initiative could simply assert through the White House Competition Council to the 13 different agencies that they end Booz Allen’s practice of charging these kinds of fees.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2022/10/26/the-presidents-initiative-on-junk-fees-and-related-pricing-practices/

[Image ID: A stunning view of sunrise at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In the foreground, a cigar-chomping, top-hatted ogre stands at a podium emblazoned with the Booz Allen logo, yanking on a lever made of a golden dollar-sign. He holds aloft an inverted National Park Service arrowhead logo, pinched disdainfully between his white-gloved thumb and forefinger. Rising up from behind a mountain on the left side of the frame is trustbuster-era editorial cartoon image of Roosevelt, swinging his 'Big Stick.']

#pluralistic

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p-ssypink · 7 months ago

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guys i hate tiktok so intimately as an app. forget it's shitty interface, the fact that you can't escape ads, and what it contributes to the normalization of privacy infringement and data mining/lack of need of individual privacy for specifically minors.

TERFS DNI

what i hate is the corporate sanitization that specifically targets and silences marginalized identities to the point that we have marginalized youths spouting the same reactionary rhetoric as your run-of-the-mill right winger in a woke font. what do you mean gay as a term is only meant for homosexuals and any other use of it in the community is appropriation?

the surface implication alone that bisexual people are not queer enough to call themselves gay is astounding.

that exclusionary, gatekeeping language is the exact same language that homophobes use to persecute us. you're not going to get off the chopping block just because you try to be one of the good ones. as soon as you turn your back on your community and try to dictate the terminology people use to define themselves you are aligning yourself with heteronormative social positionings and therefore standing against everything your community has sacrificed to build this comfy little niche you're stood in to spit your vitriol onto them. you don't respect identities you don't understand so how does that make you any different from your run-of-the-mill homophobe?

it atomizes conversations about marginalized identities down to the most palatable versions of them and strips us of the agency of our language to cater to a broad user base whilst effectively sanitizing the minds of the youth who have tt as their main point of online presence by conditioning them to expect narrow language (and the narrow viewpoints that follow, because when you can't use language as broadly as it's meant to be used, the language you have left can only go so far) as a commodity.

we are actively watching a generation get desensitized to tragedy/injustice whilst being hypersensitive to the language used around them that has been accurate and appropriate language for decades (dykefag, fagdyke, whatever) because it doesn't fit into the narrow model of appropriate language provided for them, and therefore the history and existence of these identities and everything they've contributed to their community is moot because they gendered too close to the sun and you didn't like it? if you don't understand subversion of heteronormativity as a basis of your advocacy for queer people and queer bodies, you do not get to explain or gatekeep any fucking term for how somebody identifies themselves within this community.

you are happy to ignore, stigmatize, and marginalize people in your community because they exist in their identity in a way you find difficult to understand because you are more concerned with not disrupting social positionings then you are with people actually finding and creating language to describe their own identities. (gateway to Reagan applogism) if you don't understand the social positionings of queer bodies how are you ever going to advocate for yourself or your community? you don't even have the social underpinnings to begin to have a conversation about queerness.

and this applies outside of the queer community too - it applies to conversations about Palestine and the rhetoric of "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" being an antisemitic quote even though at it's inception it was a response to the zionist claim that "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty" and tiktok removing videos with the former phrase and kids jumping on the "antisemitic" bandwagon every time they hear it.

it happens with conversations about activism being more than moral grandstanding and how you have to do more than say the few buzzwords that are allowed on your censored cesspool of a preferred media site.

it happens with conversations about race everywhere on TikTok, conversations about problematic media everywhere on TikTok (we should never watch any Disney classic ever because each instance of a problem makes the media inherently bad because we shouldn't be expected to critically engage with the media we consume (HELLO?!)), conversations about genetic and ethnic diversity (hello eugenicists), whatever.

we are actively watching another corporation work in tandem with whatever body is funding them to radicalize our youth against the progress we've made in recent years by proxy of censorship and using their language against them. if we can strip the identities that these kids are "fighting for" down to consummable rot then we've already constructed the fringe groups their disgust-based moral grandstanding will allow them to turn a blind eye to's persecution. you treat your absolutism like gospel.

"furries are zoophiles" you will turn a blind eye to queer and neurodivergent persecution.

"from the river to the sea is antisemitic" you will turn a blind eye to Palestinian persecution if the two-state solution is implemented.

"black squares for BLM" you turned a blind eye to our persecution once the protests stopped.

"hillbillies/rednecks/hicks are all racists" you are turning a blind eye to the systemic disenfranchisement of a group of (typically some of the most open-minded) people because of their language/barriers to higher education.

you are more concerned about performing wokeism than advocating for the people who don't fit pretty into your politics and we are collectively cosigning this radicalization.

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goblincow · 2 years ago

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Why TERFs are Fascists

2500 words that will explain the modern online fascist ecosystem and convince any honest reader that "gender critical" ideology is a major element of how it works (average reading time: 8.3 minutes).

The ways people use social media are very different and because of this I've seen that many comrades involved in building the UK working-class movement are very distanced from a solid understanding of the shape of political discourse online, in the spaces in which a majority of public political discourse now takes place. Even though there are many vocal comrades and union members present in online spaces like twitter or facebook, there is an entire other vastly complex and deeply interconnected space of political discourse that occurs online, where the power and influence that corporate interests wield is nigh inconceivable and keenly felt at all times.

The recent mid-life crisis of elon musk is the perfect beginner course in understanding this through:

The ways that capitalist oligarchs and mega-corporations compete for power and influence as though they were playing a board game;

The present consequences of the cult of infamy that creates internet celebrity and which developed from previous ideas of celebrity via the "mass-democratisation" (or "mass data-exploitation of alienated working class demographics") of the internet and social media sites especially;

At the same time, the ways in which this infamy-culture is directly related to the subservience of mainstream news-media to capitalist ideology via advertising on screens in every pocket and home (in other words we sell our data - i.e. agency - to be used by some of the worst people on the planet to manipulate us in return for advertised access to the public forum - see the Cambridge Analytica scandal for the consequences of this) and the profit motive that algorithmically determines content: in fact the thing that has most rapidly driven change in advertising is the technological improvement of those algorithms to be as efficient at exploitation as possible at all times. Notably this method incentivises a system that makes no distinction between a video of a hate crime and a trending comedy video. See Twitter Main Character Of The Day for other examples.

Now those algorithms are so powerful that they determine the shape of the absolute majority of all political discussion, and are at the same time driven by a content ideology that emerged from the perfect evil marriage-in-triplicate of:

The "media age" Commodification of The Means of Communication (news, social media & the colonisation of the public forum);

The Commodification of Art and Cultural Expression (art becomes content via colonisation of and alienation from community and natural surroundings);

The Cult of the Individual (which desires infamy above all else, favouring the ultra-wealthy and the most extreme).

The relationship between stochastic terrorism and data-driven online existence is obvious: within this evil soup of capitalist ideology, which values power over everything, the means of communication (social media) is a tool to appropriate content (alienated art, labour and identity) that can be manipulated (remember all that stolen data!) as efficiently as possible, and the result is the Culture War, in which fascism thrives.

Just as they always have, capitalist interests create breeding grounds for fascism, here making content as polarizing as possible because it drives engagement and makes numbers go up - the goal is to do this constantly and exponentially for infinity and all time...

Fascist grooming is a fantastic tool towards achieving this goal. Not only does it divide the working class and thus make it easier to exploit and reduce the threat of revolution, you can also look at the current Elon Musk example to see how he is attempting to colonise the means of communication that structure modern stochastic terrorism for personal benefit.

"Shadowbanning" conspiracy-theorist Elon Musk may be hemmoraghing money and destroying everything he touches, but he receives cultural capital with the worst people online in exchange. Is it worth it? He's doing it anyway. The rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate (whom Musk had an executive hand in unbanning from Twitter along with some of the other most prominent alt-right and conspiracy theory figureheads on the internet like Laura Loomer, Roger Stone and David Icke) getting arrested by Romanian authorities after being publicly humiliated by Greta Thunberg and accidentally revealing his hidden location via pizza box was breaking news despite a vast majority of non-online people who received this news having never previously heard of Andrew Tate. Thunberg's comeback currently ranks as the 4th most liked tweet of all time.

Andrew Tate is a recent leading figure in the misogynist Mens Rights sphere, which has historically been one of the leading recruitment tools across all social media for the stochastic terrorist network that is figure-headed by a coalition of conservative grifters (charlatan cult leaders, conmen selling soy-containing anti-soy conspiracy theory protein shakes, frauds who radicalise a fascist-friendly cult to scam a delusional and easy to manipulate captive audience) and mainstream right-wing political figures.

The TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist fascist) movement is a direct mirror to this fascist recruitment program and functions in an incredibly similar way. It may seem to the uninformed that it has come from independent grass roots because it claims to be based on valid concerns of real working class people, but this is a myth as false as everything else you can expect to hear from TERFs: it is funded and nurtured by the exact same evil marriage of right-wing political groups and capitalists that foster the alt-right movement.

The TERF ideology (or "gender critical" movement - though this is a deliberate misnomer in the exact fashion of "national socialism", as it is the violent enforcement of the patriarchal systems of oppression which form the false gender binary that is the explicit goal of the TERF ideology) is widely and obviously fascist, and it is observably false to claim that it is not so: it is artifically bred in the same algorithmically-controlled shallow waters that feed the network of conspiracy theories, cults, and the alt-right, which we would most accurately recognise as the stochastic terrorist network of modern fascism.

All online "culture war" (in other terms the majority of political discussion, polarised by the callously evil profit-motivated design of the medium through which it is communicated to drive engagement and sell ads) is dependent on the existence of this ecosystem, and you only need to look at the following widely available details to see this:

The established political powers that are acting to enforce gender-&-bodily-autonomy-based authoritarianism are simultaneously enacting trans genocide and attacking abortion rights with support from terfs, the alt right and other conservative hate groups;

The deep connections in the shared community spaces of the alt-right and TERF movements;

The Q-anon far-right cultist attempted coup in the US and the constant onslaught of semi-organised terrorist violence that is the result of this network;

The pro-fascist credentials and confused political ideologies (mainly the increasingly conspiracy-fuelled fascist dog-whistling of self identified "anti-woke" conservatives and libertarians) of anyone who is a major figure in the discourse surrounding these movements (elon musk, libsoftiktok chaya raichik, lauren boebert, matt gaetz who as of typing held the deciding vote in electing the now US house speaker Kevin McCarthy, marjorie taylor-green, ian miles cheong, tucker carlson, alex jones, andrew tate, joe rogan, ben shapiro, j.k. rowling, maya forstater, piers morgan, nigel farage, etc.);

The previous major political waves made by the reach of these groups (brexit, trans and abortion rights abuses in the US, the conspiracy-fuelled attempted coup in the US, anti-vaxxers and their influence on global covid responses, mass shootings and fascist terrorist attacks, etc.);

The strategic choice of culture war topics to exploit the algorithm & spread fascist propaganda to seed new recruits who will move up the pyramid of stochastic terrorism (and get scammed along the way, as most prominent exponents of fascist ideology are also hardcore grifters, see the overlap with crypto-bros & NFTs) through the incredibly powerful reach of tik-tok, twitter, instagram, facebook & youtube to all demographics of the working class including children;

The fact that terf ideology makes up a significant percentage of current prominent alt-right discourse in the culture war, and that both terfs and the rest of the online right always perform solidarity for one another when they rally against cross-over culture war topics like cancel culture;

A predominantly white, middle-class & conservative "feminist" group that is aggressively anti-intersectional, preferring instead to act against other oppressed groups in solidarity with the misogynist, vocally anti-feminist "mens rights" chanting alt-right is more accurately described as a patriarchal white supremacist group that seeks emancipation for none and is indistinguishable from other conservative groups who act on behalf of patriarchy.

For further proof, watch as I accurately predict that the most active layer of the stochastic pyramid of fascists will crawl out in droves to support J.K. Rowling when the new Harry Potter game releases next month (which includes a slave class of non-human people who love being slaves actually - you even have some of their severed heads on display in your dorm - and in which you fight against a conspiracy of anti-semitic Jewish-coded greedy evil goblins, in a game whose previous lead developer has a youtube channel where he produced lengthy propaganda for alt-right culture war topics) by abusing queer people and women on the internet. Watch as they relish in discovering tedious ways in which they can use this opportunity to spread misinformation & propaganda to fuel the culture war by attacking the left and any and all "wokeists" (the boogeyman group of anyone who speaks or acts in support of any and all oppressed people, including existing as one of these people, especially used to dog-whistle against POC) and know that J.K. Rowling is well aware of the kind of stochastic terrorism she promotes and considers her royalties an endorsement of her ideology. She is the single biggest, most influential terf.

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In conclusion, it is absolutely incorrect to ever make the claim that the anti-trans movement is not a fascist movement, as it is a significant element of the online modern fascist ecosystem and has not simply emerged from nowhere but instead is a consequence of many obvious factors (not least of which is the development of modern alt-right conspiracy theories), and this movement is another face of the same monster that first came to major online prominence in the form of gamergate - which itself was a development of the "edgy" and extremely racist, ableist, queerphobic and misogynist culture of 2000s & early 2010s internet and social media.

For many queer people, the sheer act of existing in online spaces is a survival of (and therefore an education in) the consequences of these ideologies, which are labelled online in a variety of ways that all fall under the broad category of the alt-right (i.e. modern online fascist) umbrella and whose names all invoke clouds of connotations with violent authoritarianism, fascism and oppression, for instance: incels -> blackpill -> MRAs -> gamergate -> pizzagate -> Qanon -> flat-earthers -> covid denial -> anti-vaxxers -> "groomer" slurs & anti-trans CSA conspiracies. It is easily possible to find multiple recent terrorist attacks that clearly evidence the direct connections between all of these categories. TERFs are just another group in this cloud of shared characteristics.

This venn diagram (at the centre of which is an explicitly and vocally fascist ideology) is not quite a circle, if only because it must have on-ramps for recruitment: the "gender critical" movement is one of these, and it has proved its potential to be an incredibly effective tool for the spread of fascist ideology and stochastic terror, which is a major reason why "the trans debate" is a constant repeat target of the culture war's ire. The relatively small size of trans communities, their very online presence, the role of patriarchal gender oppression in conservative ideology (and the weakening of LGBTQ solidarity as a consequence of the partial capitalist colonialisation of lgbtq communities and the subsequent alienation of queer youth from their many socialist elders) make trans people as perfect a scapegoat for the fascists of today as they have been for the fascists of the past.

This fascist ideology has shown its hand and the only strategy that has the potential to defeat it is an intersectional revolutionary movement of the working class. It would be a dangerous oversight not to learn these lessons that demonstrate why we must put every effort into organising the rise of working class movements in an intersectional way: from strikes to climate protests to the fights for the rights of refugees, indigenous peoples, queer and trans people, POC and racially oppressed communities, all women, disabled people and all other oppressed peoples of the world (ultimately encompassing the entire global working class): we must connect each of these movements in solidarity with one another.

Just as the enemy is a hateful supremacist ideology that seeks to divide and genocide all of us degenerates (speaking in solidarity as an autistic cis man with the nazi diagnosis "aspergers" - so in retrospect those fascists may have even elected not to murder me for being the wrong kind of retard while today's fascist death cultists distort my hypothetical existence into a ritual weapon to aid the spread of plague, what joy) the fight for all of our rights is the fight against one enemy with many different faces for many different people. It is clear that only mass scale, militant, revolutionary anti-capitalist & anti-fascist solidarity will see any of us freed from its influence. The only way to achieve this is to organise, enact tangible and effective solidarity and bring with it the reasons that allow you to acknowledge that it is your fight too.

To do this effectively, I suggest joining your local revolutionary socialist organisation and attending both pickets and protests. Trans and refugee voices are crucial in the UK (hi from terf island) right now, and the place they can have the most influence is the place that has the most potential to destroy capitalism and build revolution: the picket line.

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Thanks for reading, and please do get in touch with your local revolutionary socialist organisation (just search for revolutionary socialist groups in your area) & if they're worth your time they'll have a clear and easily accessible manifesto that can tell you if they're for you and what they stand for.

They will be very glad to have you, eager to share educational resources and happy to find a way for you to get involved that best suits you. Go with a friend and say you want to do some activism but don't know where to begin - it's the truth and the only way to learn. They will be involved in solidarity for strikes and protests, and they will be democratic and actively intersectional: if you go to an upcoming protest or happen to stop by a picket at the right time you will find them there!

Good luck getting involved: if you are in the UK and want advice on how to go about it please message me, unless this post really goes off, in which case I'm expecting I'll catch some heat. I will do my best to point you in the direction you want to go but here is a good start from an organisation I only have positive experiences of working with:

Unite the working class

Intersectional solidarity forever

Terfs fuck around and find out why ✊ means solidarity

#welp that's my essay #revolutionary socialism #intersectional activism #terfs fuck off

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thoughtportal · 8 months ago

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The U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media Company

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives will likely vote to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok, which sets the stage for a possible full ban of the platform in the United States (Update: it did). The move will come after a slow but steady drumbeat from politicians on both sides of the aisle to ban the platform for some combination of potential and real societal harms algorithmically inflicted upon American teens by a Chinese-owned company.

The situation is an untenable mess. A TikTok ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic, monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does. A ban would highlight, again, that people who use mainstream social media platforms run by corporations do not actually own their followers or their audiences, and that any businesses/jobs/livelihoods created on these platforms can be stripped away at any moment by the platforms or, in this case, by the United States government.

Bytedance and TikTok itself have been put into an essentially impossible situation that is perhaps most exemplified in a 60 Minutes clip from 2022 that went viral this weekend, in which Tristan Harris, a big tech whistleblower who has turned the attention he got from the documentary The Social Dilemma into a self-serving career as a guy who talks about how social media is bad, explains that China is exporting the “opium” version of TikTok to American children.

In [the Chinese] version of TikTok, if you’re under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos,” Harris said. “And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. They don’t ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So it’s almost like they recognize TikTok is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr quote tweeted this and said “In America, TikTok pushes videos to kids that promote self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide.”

Put simply: Every social media platform pushes awful shit to users of all ages. This is not a defense of TikTok, but a simple fact that has made up a huge portion of tech reporting for the last decade. Mere weeks ago, the New York Times published an exposé on underage girls being pushed into “child influencing,” a world which is full of pedophiles. Instagram’s effects on teens has been widely documented by Meta’s own employees, and without really trying we have been able to document the sale of guns and drugs, hacking services, and counterfeit services in ads displayed on the platform. Discord is full of communities used for organizing by Neo Nazis and paramilitaries, criminal hackers, crypto scammers, deepfake peddlers, teens who kidnap each other, etc. Facebook is full of AI-generated bullshit that people think is real, was used by foreign adversaries to attempt to influence an election, was credibly accused of being abused to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar, and has had innumerable scandals over the years. Twitter is full of malware and has essentially gotten rid of all of its rules. YouTube is a place that has been used by ISIS terrorists, white supremacists, mass shooters, and child brainwashers. Telegram was founded by Russians, is now based in the United Arab Emirates, and is full of criminals, hackers, and Russian disinformation. We have reported endlessly that all of these platforms are monitored by governments, militaries, surveillance agencies, and commercial interests around the world using "social listening," "social media monitoring," and OSINT tools.

Meta, Google, and Twitter have all moved resources away from content moderation in recent years, and have laid off huge numbers of employees as Republicans have cried “social media censorship.” As Elon Musk’s Twitter has become more of a cesspool in the absence of good content moderation, Google and Meta have realized that they can keep advertisers as long as their platforms are ever so slightly less toxic than Twitter. I am unaware of any political pushes to ban Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, and efforts to meaningfully regulate them to be less harmful seemingly have no political will. The only actual regulation of these platforms have been laws passed by conservatives in Florida and Texas which give them even less ability to moderate their platforms and which is the subject of a Supreme Court case.

This is just to say that TikTok and the specter of China’s control of it has become a blank canvas for which anyone who has any complaint about social media to paint their argument on, and has become a punching bag receiving scrutiny we should also be applying to every other social media giant.

When Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash and Bird ignore local laws or face the specter of bans or regulation, they use push notifications, email, and popups within their apps asking customers to complain to legislators. When these American apps do this, they are simply leveraging their popularity to “mobilize users.” When TikTok does the same, it is Chinese interference in American politics. When American TikTok users use their platform to share their progressive or leftist politics and TikTok’s algorithms allow them to go viral, that’s Chinese interference. When TikTok deletes content that violates its terms of service, that’s Chinese censorship. When Facebook and Google allow advertisers to create psychographic, biographic, and behavioral-based profiles of their users to target ads to them, that’s “personalized advertising.” When TikTok does ads, it’s Chinese spying. When TikTok users see content that promotes suicide, eating disorders, and makes people feel bad about themselves, it’s China brainwashing our children, undermining America, and threatening our existence. When Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube users see the same, it’s inconvenient and unfortunate, but can be solved with a blasé spokesperson statement that these platforms care about safety and will strive to do better.

In the clip above, Harris explains that polls show American children want to be “social media influencers” and that Chinese children want to be “astronauts,” the subtext being that it is like this because bad stuff is not allowed on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Banning TikTok is not going to change this (and Harris does not mention that China has tons of social media influencers as well). Harris says this with some derision, the subtext being that we should not want our children to grow up to be social media influencers.

This should not need to be explained, but because Harris and 60 Minutes did not explain it: Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) is not actually a sterile place that consists only of people doing science experiments and math equations, just as TikTok and all social media in America is not only an unmitigated shithole devoid of intellectual value. But Harris has this idea of Douyin being a safe place for kids because China does not have a free internet. The internet is widely and famously censored by the Chinese government, and ByteDance is complying with Chinese law in China. It is possible to argue (though I would not), that this makes the internet “safer,” and it is possible to argue (though I would not) that a “safer” internet is “better.” If Harris wants Chinese-style censorship of the internet in the United States, then he should argue for that. But in the United States, we have the First Amendment and a host of other regulations that have fostered something resembling an open internet. That open internet allowed for the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

This general principle of not censoring the global internet also allowed for the rise of TikTok, which has millions of users in the United States because people like using it. TikTok is not perfect—in fact, I believe lots of the things on TikTok are very bad. Despite what I have just written, I understand that Chinese interference via algorithmic warfare or spying or any other tactic is a possible threat. China has been accused of using accounts on TikTok to spread influence, in the exact same way as the U.S. government has been caught spreading pro-U.S. influence abroad on Facebook and Twitter.

Like I mentioned, I think that this entire situation is actually very complicated, and is in fact a huge mess. I can understand why some people want to ban TikTok, but I am not sure how the government can do so without violating the free speech rights of millions of Americans and setting us on a path where a relatively open, global internet becomes one that is increasingly geographically siloed. I don’t think we should ban a platform because it competed too hard and became popular, especially when the direct beneficiaries of a ban are companies that are doing most of the same apparent algorithmic poisoning of America, just from within America’s borders. I also do not think it is constitutional, ethical, or good for the government to decide to unilaterally cut millions of Americans off from one of the largest social media platforms in the world and to effectively force its users and more importantly the people who make a living on TikTok to use a balkanized internet dominated by American megacorporations.

#article #tiktok #internet #online privacy #404 media

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amgracy · 5 months ago

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hedging-my-bets · 1 year ago

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Cyberpunk 2077 is a bad game: Electric Boogaloo

Cyberpunk has a problem that could almost be framed as a poignant and interesting limitation meant to point towards an important element of the genre it takes place in, but is almost certainly just a weakness put there due to development issues and poor writing behind the game.

You lose your agency. A lot.

In video games, where generally most of what separates the experience from watching a video is that agency, this is a problem.

Once again, liberal, unmarked spoilers for the game, and brief mention of suicide to boot.

Here's Johnny

Let's get one thing straight, I quite like Keanu Reeves' work for the game. Writing aside, he gives a good performance, his likeness fits the setting perfectly (even though I used the alternate appearance as soon as I realized it was an option) and having him stuck in V's head to pester and support him ties nicely into the main plot.

I still think it's one of these systems that was not quite finished, or thought out, by the time was released, because how much you and him get along are (sort of) one of three "tracked" percentages on your main menu, along with your fame around Night City, and how close the chip in your head is to killing you.

Or something. It's never really explained, and has even less to do with gameplay.

Ostensibly the only one of these that matters is the Johnny stat; your fame/infamy might trip a few switches in missions but doesn't, for example, change how many enemies show up to a fight with you, or make jobs more complicated because there's heat on your head, and the Relic malfunctions are scripted events that happen only during missions with the main cast of characters. You're never going to have a seizure in the middle of a firefight because you've spent too much time dicking around, so the ticking clock aspect isn't there. Maybe at one point the game cared how much time had actually passed in the world, making it a weighty choice to use the option to go to a location ahead of time and wait for the proscribed hour for a job, or even to catch a few hours of sleep.

I focus on Johnny because even though you yourself are in control when he takes over your body (outside of a few cutscenes) you don't get to play your character. You're playing someone else in their body. And that doesn't rub me the wrong way as, say, the constant drugging and kidnapping you experience in Far Cry 5, a game I have boundless wells of hate for after playing it, it does bother me.

Now here is where I admit I've only played through two of the endings. Three, technically, but the one to skip the final mission and end your story on your own terms (with a bullet) doesn't count for a number of reasons. It doesn't even have an achievement, though the cutscene is emotionally powerful and well done and doesn't seem like a tacked on end. It gives the impression that this was, perhaps, something you'd choose if your dwindling health and ability had gotten to the point where you knew you wouldn't even make it through your last run. But without that pressure, there's no good reason for a person who paid for this AAA title to just ignore one of the few impactful sections of content in the game.

The first ending I got focused on taking a deal from Arasaka, the big corporation in town, the one you've made personal enemies of via your actions in the main story, and, because I chose the Corpo background (yet another pathetically pared down swath of content) the place I thought I would have some connections I could leverage. Technically I did; the game did present dialogue choices that were unique to my background during the tense boardroom presentation, but I have a feeling that the other choices might have something of their own to say there, and in any event it wouldn't change the flow of the mission.

I chose that option because I had not unlocked the secret ending, which seems to depend on a specific series of dialogue choices with Johnny Silverhand in a side mission. I'd still maxed out my friendship with him, I'd become a legend in Night City in my own right, but I guess the developers thought that only by saying the right words at the right time, he'd have enough faith in me to let me do my own thing.

Company Man

So, failing that, I took Arasaka's offer, hoping to fulfill Johnny's dream of taking them down from the inside. Unfortunately for me, doing this made him loathe me, it erased all goodwill, because there was no option to turn this deal into some suitably explosive Fuck You to the corporation that had made my life hell probably from the day V started working there.

You're marched into a boardroom to give testimony to the true events of the inciting incident of the game, but, really, you're not needed at all. A copy of the deceased CEO's mind is what really sways the executives. You're just there for flavor, and so that someone capable can kill all the security that shows up to put an end to the meeting. And when you survive, and make it to the man responsible for all this, you're not even allowed to renege on your deal and blow a hole in his skull, as I dearly, dearly wanted to do.

You're shuffled off to space for a long, drawn-out, but again well executed series of barely interactive sequences. They help you, as they said they would; but you're going to die anyway and they refuse to aid with that. Alright. That sucks. That's what I get for not going with the plans that involve an AI's assistance, basically a god in this setting. That's on me. I said fuck you to their offer to upload me to their servers and chose to live what's left of V's life back on earth. Which was going to suck, since everyone I know's last memory of me is getting into a limo with Japanese Business Satan.

In a game that is all about screwing over oppressive and corrupt authorities, it really sucks that this ending exists at all, let alone one you can choose for yourself rather than something you get railroaded into by burning your other bridges.

Why Can't I Just Shoot Him

Now it's important to note that some missions have secret endings only achievable by ignoring the dialogue going on and using violence to some degree. A rampaging set of proto-AIs can be erased or merged into one for one side job, and Johnny makes clear which he'd prefer you to do, but the best thing is to put a bullet in the core and that somehow frees all of them to do whatever the hell they want. How would you know this is an option? Well, most of the times you're in dialogue in situations like this you can't draw your weapon, or you can't shoot the plot-important NPC by mistake. But sometimes this fucks up too.

Another job has you fall for a scam and you wake up naked and stripped of your weapons in a bathroom, ready to be processed by the local organ and cyberware harvesting gang of Scavengers. While, of course, Johnny mocks you.

Again, it's not the player 'falling' for anything. It's stupid to fork over thousands of eurodollars for a braindance you know nothing about. But it's a side job. You don't want to leave money and experience on the table. Presumably, writers and developers put effort into creating some content behind this offer, so as a player you are encourage not to let it pass you by.

This was tense on my first playthrough because even though I was left with my cyberdeck and quickhacks I had very little defense and stat boosts associated with my clothing. Second run was a lot easier; they didn't take my monowire out while I was unconscious. Why not? Well, that would be rude, I guess. You murder your way through some scavengers, get your stuff back, and off a few more for daring to target you.

At the end of that job, you can go back to the man who tricked you, starting the quest, and tell him to leave town. Or you can, with the right dialogue options? I think? Shoot him, like he deserves for what he did to you and countless others. Except if you decide you're letting him leave, he's invincible and can't be killed as he's running away.

Which is strange, because yet another side job lets you rescue a corporate nobody getting beat on by some NCPD officers, get him to pay you as thanks for saving his life, and then blast him for whatever else he has on him. It's within tolerances for those who want to be as cruel as possible in a video game, sure, but that kind of flexibility just isn't present in the rest of the game.

Why be allowed to kill one nobody to eke out some extra cash, but be barred by honor and programming from ending the life of some guy who generally, genuinely ought to die in order to stop him from doing what he's doing over and over? As separate storylines there may be some reasons to justify why one NPC can be killed and not another, but taken as a whole, what is the message being given to the player?

This isn't about "oh well if I want to shoot the shopkeeper and take all the stuff I want for free, I should be able to do that" theory of gameplay. That doesn't have to be supported, but I think a game is more interesting when it is, even if I don't often play that way. But consistency is important.

Does This Count As NTR

The romance system just isn't great and this is really a sidebar that doesn't deserve it's own post, it barely deserves the attention I'm going to give it, but I just want to complain about it.

The options for who you can romance/fuck are sort of even for a male versus female V. Except, not really. There are a couple NPCs who will fool around with any combination of body and voice/pronouns (because those two are what are tied together, it's weird) and the four plot-important, fleshed out NPCs are a mixed bag. Do I think it's weird that Judy will only fall for a female V of voice AND body type? No, it makes sense, but it's weird from, of all things, a balance perspective. No other NPC cares, it's apparently just down to body type for them.

Also the only male gay option is, like, seventy years old. Yeah, he looks good for his age, and he's got the rocker aesthetic going, but c'mon. I wish River was bi, at least. The fakeout response I got going for it after his mission line was amusing, but it still stung a little.

My point in terms of agency is that there's one plot mandated sex scene, in Johnny's memories and his body doing it, and two that can occur while Johnny's in control of your body, and while you can turn down one of the latter, the other is pretty unavoidable. It doesn't gross me out or anything, but it does bug me because, once again, all this stuff is happening in a cutscene, but it's still my character literally under the control of someone else. I can't even say it's the Director, it's the plot moving things along, it's someone else controlling my body.

Maybe one of the writers had a fetish. Maybe a bunch of them did.

The Illusion of Choice

This probably goes into the bucket of "they didn't have time to make it better" but also rubs up against this strangely deep current of cynicism in the writing of this game, and indeed a lot of the tie-in media. Apparently there are a lot of comics put out either released with the special editions of the game and generally printed; I've read a few of them and they all have downer or at best ambiguous endings that basically say "fuck you, nobody wins". And that's okay for NPCs. It's a shitty setting. But for a PC, nah. It's about winning. Or at least trying to.

A lot of the instances I take umbrage with are ones that are most likely writing issues. An NPC is going to die at the end of a storyline, because the writers said so, it's nothing mechanical; you pull the trigger, or someone else does. Sometimes it's the target of someone's long-nursed grudge, sometimes it's because there are missions down the line that wouldn't trigger if they're still alive, whatever. I know Cyberpunk was initially sold as a game where your choices matter, and that label fell away pretty quick as the game neared release, but when a company like CDPR fucks up this bad it bears repeating to the point of absurdity.

Most of the options left to you tend to be spite-driven, or just easy to write and code: turn off a revolutionary gibberish-spouting computer to piss Johnny off, no reward, just a dick move. Again, making him angry locks you out of more content than it opens up, which restricts the way you play your game purely on what you'll get to see if you don't pick the right choices.

You're not here to make Night City a better place, that was never an option, really, and it doesn't have to be one for a game like this. But the core of cyberpunk (the genre) is taking the power made available to you by capitalism and authority (cyberware and other technological advancements) and turning it against them so lessen their influence on the world.

Did Anyone Even Play This

There was a game ages ago called Alpha Protocol. A sort of espionage Mass Effect-like with tone-based dialogue options and skill trees and relationships with NPCs. The great thing about it was that making someone hate you could still have positive effects for you, sometimes even gameplay events in missions that made things easier, you didn't have to suck up to everyone and then have to pick between who you wanted to like you more when faced with a binary choice. If you make someone absolutely hate your guts for being too violent, they can make it easier to sneak past enemies because they're constantly cautioning you to be more subtle. It may not fit with your playstyle, but it's still a mechanical bonus. I'm not sure I've seen any other game do something like this for earning the ire of NPCs or groups of them besides a gain in reputation among their enemies.

In Cyberpunk you can, occasionally, treat someone like shit and they'll still call you for help with the next mission because You Gotta. So the writing is carefully moderated to make sure you can't be too much of a dick. And, you know what, that's fair. If the writers decide they have a floor for how big of a jerk the PC can be, that's their decision. But presenting the player with strangely jerk-centric options that might even reward you greater than being a nice, or even just humane person, muddies those waters.

The Final Fuck You

The other ending I got, on my second run, is the secret ending. As mentioned, you have to choose specific dialogue options with Johnny in a side mission, and generally have a good relationship with him. The internet seems unsure about the specifics but there's definitely a gameplay flag denoting whether you will or will not get the option for this ending.

Which you do by agreeing to Johnny's suggestion that you cede control of your body to him, he brings in his old friends for the final run on Arasaka, and then waiting about five minutes at the dialogue options before he cracks and says, well, yeah, maybe you could do this all on your lonesome.

This is a problem. For a lot of reasons.

It's just tied to how much he likes you, and has nothing to do with that fame stat, or even how strong you are. I could switch on my Sandevistan and cut a dozen people in half with blades sticking out of my arms before the first one hit the ground, but unless I said the one specific thing to Johnny in an old oil field, he wouldn't believe me capable.

Having to wait at dialogue options is actively discouraged in other parts of the game. A lot of conversations will have the NPC bark something at you if you take too long going over your options. As someone with attention issues who alt-tabs out of my games to chat with my friends or fiddle with music playing in the background or even just getting up to use the bathroom with my headphones on, that's really annoying. And it teaches you not to have a lull in the conversation. So you would very likely never encounter this naturally, you have to look up how to do it. And that's a game design sin.

The ending is pretty satisfying, in terms of the experience. You basically walk in the front door and kill your way through Arasaka's deadliest troops, including a fight with Adam Smasher with zero assistance. When I got to that fight in my first run I think it was implied that an allied netrunner took a chunk of his health out for me. This V had no such help. And the fucker has health gates, so every once in a while I'd have to back off and let him finish staggering because it would be ungentlemanly to continue slicing his very expensive armor to ribbons, apparently. This is a dicey situation to be in given that the secret ending mission has the penalty that if you die, once, you go straight to credits. Thank god for Cheat Death, Biomonitor, and Second Heart.

The real problem is the writing at the end. After doing this all on your own, after inviting an AI into the sensitive systems of Arasaka and giving them the keys to the kingdom, as promised they assist you in untangling Johnny's soul from yours. But guess what! You're still dying. And this time you find out that somehow, you're only dying because it's you in your body. If Johnny keeps it, he gets to live out the rest of your natural life as you.

How that fucking works is not well explained. But, again, whatever. Bad writing, it's the mood they wanted to work with, probably has something to do with future content having to take place shortly after the end of the game. Speaking of which, I'm definitely not getting the DLC (supposedly) coming out later this year, not on launch at least. And, probably, not at all.

But in this best ending, if you choose to go back to your body and live out the time you have left, you become the new owner of the Afterlife, the premier bar for edgerunners in Night City, and the start of the real biggest job of your career: robbing the Crystal Palace, an orbital casino that caters to the ultra of the ultra-wealthy. The game of course ends on you floating through space towards it, no idea how that's going to play into the DLC. I guess you're just assumed to have pulled it off before you do whatever content they're going to give us next.

In a lot of ways it's a great note to end on. You got everything you wanted, you got more, in fact. Unfortunately you can't escape your early death, but at least you have more of an idea of when it's coming. An even bigger job than the one you just did, one that's already of historic proportions.

It's very hard to read in this low-res pamphlet, but again, it bears mentioning.

RESTAURANS.

A typo. In your face. At the apex of your story, after getting the secret ending to a difficult game, one already plagued with numerous issues.

#cyberpunk 2077 #long rant #content warning

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