#Law News in Berlin

[spacelazarwolf]

in honor of that anon who said jews have done nothing for the world, here’s a non exhaustive list of things we’ve done for the world:

arts, fashion, and lifestyle:

jeans - levi strauss

modern bras - ida rosenthal

sewing machines - isaac merritt singer

modern film industry - carl laemmle (universal pictures), adolph zukor (paramount pictures), william fox (fox film forporation), louis b. mayer (mgm - metro-goldwyn-mayer), harry, sam, albert, and jack warners (warner bros.), steven spielberg, mel brooks, marx brothers

operetta - jacques offenbach

comic books - stan lee

graphic novels - will eisner

teddy bears - morris and rose michtom

influential musicians - irving berlin, stephen sondheim, benny goodman, george gershwin, paul simon, itzhak perlman, leonard bernstein, bob dylan, leonard cohen

artists - mark rothko

actors - elizabeth taylor, jerry lewis, barbara streisand

comedians - lenny bruce, joan rivers, jerry seinfeld

authors - judy blume, tony kushner, allen ginsberg, walter mosley

culture:

esperanto - ludwik lazar zamenhof

feminism - betty friedan, gloria steinem, ruth bader ginsberg

queer and trans rights - larry kramer, harvey milk, leslie feinberg, abby stein, kate bornstein, frank kameny, judith butler

international women's day - clara zetkin

principles of journalizm, statue of liberty, and pulitzer prize - joseph pulitzer

"the new colossus" - emma lazarus

universal declaration of human rights - rene samuel cassin

holocaust remembrance and human rights activism - elie wiesel

workers rights - louis brandeis, rose schneiderman

public health care, women's rights, and children's rights - lillian wald

racial equity - rabbi abraham joshua heschel, julius rosenwald, andrew goodman, michael schwerner

political theory - hannah arendt

disability rights - judith heumann

black lives matter slogan and movement - alicia garza

#metoo movement - jodi kantor

institute of sexology - magnus hirschfeld

technology:

word processing computers - evelyn berezin

facebook - mark zuckerberg

console video game system - ralph henry baer

cell phones - amos edward joel jr., martin cooper

3d - leonard lipton

telephone - philipp reis

fax machines - arthur korn

microphone - emile berliner

gramophone - emile berliner

television - boris rosing

barcodes - norman joseph woodland and bernard silver

secret communication system, which is the foundation of the technology used for wifi - hedy lamarr

three laws of robotics - isaac asimov

cybernetics - norbert wiener

helicopters - emile berliner

BASIC (programming language) - john george kemeny

google - sergey mikhaylovich brin and larry page

VCR - jerome lemelson

fax machine - jerome lemelson

telegraph - samuel finley breese morse

morse code - samuel finley breese morse

bulletproof glass - edouard benedictus

electric motor and electroplating - boris semyonovich jacobi

nuclear powered submarine - hyman george rickover

the internet - paul baran

icq instant messenger - arik vardi, yair goldfinger,, sefi vigiser, amnon amir

color photography - leopold godowsky and leopold mannes

world's first computer - herman goldstine

modern computer architecture - john von neumann

bittorrent - bram cohen

voip internet telephony - alon cohen

data archiving - phil katz, eugene roshal, abraham lempel, jacob ziv

nemeth code - abraham nemeth

holography - dennis gabor

laser - theodor maiman

instant photo sharing online - philippe kahn

first automobile - siegfried samuel marcus

electrical maglev road - boris petrovich weinberg

drip irrigation - simcha blass

ballpoint pen and automatic gearbox - laszlo biro

photo booth - anatol marco josepho

medicine:

pacemakers and defibrillators - louise robinovitch

defibrillators - bernard lown

anti-plague and anti-cholera vaccines - vladimir aronovich khavkin

polio vaccine - jonas salk

test for diagnosis of syphilis - august paul von wasserman

test for typhoid fever - ferdinand widal

penicillin - ernst boris chain

pregnancy test - barnhard zondek

antiretroviral drug to treat aids and fight rejection in organ transplants - gertrude elion

discovery of hepatitis c virus - harvey alter

chemotherapy - paul ehrlich

discovery of prions - stanley prusiner

psychoanalysis - sigmund freud

rubber condoms - julius fromm

birth control pill - gregory goodwin pincus

asorbic acid (vitamin c) - tadeusz reichstein

blood groups and rh blood factor - karl landsteiner

acyclovir (treatment for infections caused by herpes virus) - gertrude elion

vitamins - caismir funk

technique for measuring blood insulin levils - rosalyn sussman yalow

antigen for hepatitus - baruch samuel blumberg

a bone fusion technique - gavriil abramovich ilizarov

homeopathy - christian friedrich samuel hahnemann

aspirin - arthur ernst eichengrun

science:

theory of relativity - albert einstein

theory of the electromagnetic field - james maxwell

quantum mechanics - max born, gustav ludwig hertz

quantum theory of gravity - matvei bronstein

microbiology - ferdinand julius cohn

neuropsychology - alexander romanovich luria

counters for x-rays and gamma rays - robert hofstadter

genetic engineering - paul berg

discovery of the antiproton - emilio gino segre

discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation - arno allan penzias

discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe - adam riess and saul merlmutter

discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity - roger penrose

discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of the milky way - andrea ghez

modern cosmology and the big bang theory - alexander alexandrovich friedmann

stainless steel - hans goldschmidt

gas powered vehicles

interferometer - albert abraham michelson

discovery of the source of energy production in stars - hans albrecht bethe

proved poincare conjecture - grigori yakovlevich perelman

biochemistry - otto fritz meyerhof

electron-positron collider - bruno touschek

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[washingtonmarvel]

Since my first post about Charmion only scratched the surface, I thought I'd give some more info about a few different aspects of her story here. I hope everyone finds it worth reading.

First, Charmion was a marketing genius. She was one of the most photographed people in show business, her flexed arms ubiquitous in the newspapers of the era, and she gave out free pinback buttons with her image on them at each show. Charmion herself reported in 1905 that she���d given out a quarter of a million buttons over the previous year. I don't know how accurate that number is, but there was definitely a huge number produced and you can often find them for pretty affordable prices on eBay to this day. Charmion would also sometimes give away chocolates, clothes, and other souvenirs to the women in the audience.

Second, during her travels, Charmion made time to personally advise women who needed help with their fitness goals. During her time in New Orleans in 1902, for example, she let it be known that the hours of 5 to 7 would be set aside for any woman wanting a “conference” with her to discuss matters relating to “physical culture.”

Third, Charmion could be considered one of the first female bodybuilders. Through rigorous workouts (including curling fifty-to-seventy-pound dumbbells and one-hour bag-punching sessions), Charmion intentionally tried to build her muscles as large as possible, which was incredibly rare for a woman in that era. Even circus strongwomen, who showed off their strength publicly, often downplayed their muscularity, but Charmion was eager to show off her muscles and actively tried to grow them. Apparently, it worked. By her own account, when she began her career the (already very fit) Charmion weighed 98 pounds at a height of 5’1”. She afterward gained enough muscle that by 1902, she was a solid 130 pounds. Charmion would’ve also felt at home with modern bodybuilders in the sense that on-stage posing was a major part of her performances. After she had finished disrobing on the trapeze, she would conclude her show by standing onstage and flexing her biceps before turning around and displaying her back muscles. The audiences were as flabbergasted as you’d expect. “When she hunches her back,” said one newspaper, “it looks like a cage of boa-constrictors interlaced in a snake-fight”; “her shoulders and arms appear a knotted mass of muscles,” said another.

The less pleasant aspects of Charmion's story are the misogyny and prudishness that Charmion dealt with with throughout her career. There were attempts (some successful, some not) to ban her act in New York, New Orleans, London, and Berlin, and she had to contend with right-wing attacks throughout her career. Here are a few newspaper quotations to show the kind of opposition she encountered:

Times Herald (Washington, D. C.), May 10, 1898: “Her performance is a simple attempt to provoke all the lower passions of which mankind is capable, without passing the limit the law has placed on such an exhibition. It is for this reason that Charmion is revoltingly disgusting, coarse and disagreeable. It is because of this that no man, who realizes what he is doing, or respects himself, will care to take his mother or sister to the National Theater this week.”

Sioux City Journal, May 15, 1898: “Charmion’s object in her trapeze act is indecency.”

The Times (Washington, D. C.), May 15, 1898: “It seems revolting to think that men would go to a place of amusement with the sole idea of witnessing such a performance, but that women should willingly accompany them is nothing less than disgusting.”

The Courier and Argus (Dundee, Scotland), Aug. 5, 1898: “…it is scarcely possible to conceal the fact that Charmion’s performance takes us very much nearer to the frank indecencies of the Parisian variety theatres than we have hitherto strayed.”

Daily Gleaner (Fredericton, New Brunswick), Oct. 26, 1898: “we hail with gratification the drastic criticism by a section of the New York press of such debasing performances as those first given by a woman called Charmion…Charmion’s act had grace and beauty to recommend it, and except that it was performed by a woman it was no worse than the undressing act of the equestriam [sic] acrobat in the circus; but it was the natural forerunner of the others, and so should never have been permitted in a theatre making pretence to decency.”

The Times, January 1, 1899: “Charmion’s ‘turn’ was revolting.”

Toronto Saturday Night, January 18, 1902 [speaking about Charmion disrobing on the trapeze] “There is an unpleasant suggestiveness inseparable from such an act.”

The Kansas City Star, September 19, 1904: “Her turn is offensive to modesty.”

As infuriating as these comments are, the happy irony of the conservative attacks on Charmion is that they only made her more powerful. As even her critics sometimes admitted, the controversy stirred up by those critics served to make her act more intriguing and helped increase her popularity. For a woman devoted to liberating women from the constraints placed on them by the society, her message must have been even more meaningful because so many men tried to constrain her and she overcame that adversity. You can see how little success her critics had by the fact she was one of the most popular vaudeville stars in the world, sometimes earning the equivalent of almost $20,000 per week in today’s money.

Of course, not all men disapproved of Charmion’s act, and she had her fair share of male fans. But almost all her critics were men. And though there must have been lesser-known female critics, there’s only one example I can find of a woman (at least initially) disapproving of her. That woman was Elizabeth Grannis, president of the Purity League, an organization that supported the kind of repression and prudishness that Charmion fought against her whole career. Grannis, with a committee of Purity League members, attended a performance one day in 1901 to “judge for themselves” whether the act was as “impure" as alleged. After the performance (during which Charmion daringly threw a garter into Grannis’s box), a local newspaper said, surprisingly, that Grannis “was pleased by the things done and undone by the actress” and “was delighted with the actress’ control of her muscular system.” Charmion, likely not a fan of the Purity League, was not mollified by the praise. Asked about Grannis later, she bluntly said, “I scarcely approve of her.”

If you all are still interested, I’ll share more posts about Charmion. I’m mildly obsessed with her and there’s loads more fun facts and stories about her. Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Here's a photo gallery for anyone who's still interested in Charmion:

[ngdrb]

In 1923 Adolf Hitler incited an insurrection against the German government. He was tried, given a slap on the wrist, and became a convicted felon. Despite being treated charitably by the judge, Hitler claimed the trial was political persecution and successfully portrayed himself as a victim of the “corrupt" Social Democrats.

Hitler cleverly positioned himself as the voice of the "common man," railing against the "elites," cultural "degeneracy," and the establishment, who he all labeled as "Marxists." He claimed the education system was indoctrinating children to hate Germany, and promised to return Germany to greatness.

To solidify his base, Hitler masterfully scapegoated minorities for the nation's problems, exploiting societal divisions with an "us vs. them" narrative. Many Germans took the bait. Hitler's Nazi Party continued to gain traction, until he became Chancellor in 1933.

Hitler appointed German oligarchs as his economic advisors. He proceeded to privatize government run utilities, solidifying support of the economic elite.

With the working class divided along cultural and ethnic lines, the Nazis shut down workers unions and abolished strikes.

Progressives and trade unionists were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. Corporate profits skyrocketed while working class Germans lived paycheck to paycheck.

Hitler, who became a billionaire while in office, knew he and his clan of oligarchs could get away with the scam if they constantly had an "enemy within" to blame while the corporatocracy robbed the country blind.

An easy target was one of the smallest minorities. Hitler removed birthright citizenship rights of Jews and started rounding them up for mass deportations for being "illegally" in the country.

The German press under Nazi rule highlighted instances of violence by Jews to convince the public that Jewish immigrants were a danger to the "real Germans."

Hitler wasted no time dismantling democratic institutions. Loyalty wasn't just encouraged; it was demanded. Opponents were silenced. Media that dared to questioned[sic] him were vilified as "the enemy" and "Marxists."

Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, bragged about how the Nazis were able to intimidate the media into giving them favorable coverage, and didn't need to give direct orders.

The Nazi regime and its followers collected all books they saw as promoting "degeneracy" or what would be considered "woke" today, and burned them in large bonfires. They also burned books that promoted class consciousness.

Berlin had a thriving LGBTQ community in the 1920s, and even had the first transgender clinic. The Nazis burned it to the ground. LGBTQ people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges. Many were killed in the Holocaust.

The Nazis also saw manhood as under threat by independent women who didn't rely on men. In 1934, Hitler proclaimed, “A women’s world is her her husband, her family, her children, her house." Laws that had protected women's rights were repealed and new laws were introduced to restrict women to the home and in their roles as wives and mothers.

Reproductive rights were severely rolled back, and doctors who performed abortions could face the death penalty.

Despite all of this, the German people didn't have a similar historical parallel to look upon as a warning.

Most Germans never acted like the sky was falling.

Most just went along with their lives as usual, until many of their lives were snuffed out. By the time Hitler's reign was forced to an end by the Allied Powers, 11 million people were murdered in the Holocaust, and 70-85 million were killed in WW2 .

[henrykathman]

The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion

From the same artform that brought you Coraline and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, comes three stories that evoke the existential fear of art.

Original Music by Molly Noise

Bibliography below

Atrocity Guide. “The Animators Who’ve Spent 40 Years on a Single Film.” YouTube, 9 Oct. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hip3pz0Xs&pp=ygUMdGhlIG92ZXJjb2F0. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Brubaker, Charles. “The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass.” Cartoon Research, Jerry Beck, 14 Apr. 2014, cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/.

Bute, Paris. “Introduction to “a Rankin/Bass Retrospective from a New Perspective.”” Citizen Jane, Stephens College, 19 Nov. 2021, www.citizenjane.org/home/cwwicd2ucb2fvs64kgfaocfykjhaum. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Crome, Althea. “Coraline.” Althea Crome | Micro Knitter, 2012, www.altheacrome.com/coraline. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Harold Halibut. Directed by Onat Hekimoğlu, Slow Bros., 16 Apr. 2024.

Hekimoglu, Onat, and Gabriel Schmitz. “Unite Berlin 2018 - Harold Halibut and Making a Stop Motion Game.” Unity, YouTube, 6 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/9usssSQc0wQ. Accessed 6 May 2023.

Jon "Sikamikanico" Clarke. “The Making of Harold Halibut.” XboxEra, YouTube, 21 Mar. 2024, youtu.be/WMyxM9t3o7A. Accessed 19 June 2024.

LAIKA Studios. “Sweater and Gloves: Knitting Coraline by Hand.” YouTube, 11 July 2017, youtu.be/zUvkfcGR-7U. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Mad God Productions. “Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.”” Kickstarter, 17 May 2012, www.kickstarter.com/projects/madgod/phil-tippetts-mad-god/posts.

Olson, Mathew. “Report: Michel Ancel Accused of Abusive, Disruptive Practices on beyond Good & Evil 2.” VG247, 25 Sept. 2020, www.vg247.com/report-michel-ancel-accused-of-abusive-disruptive-practices-on-beyond-good-evil-2. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Ono, Kosei. “Tadahito Mochinaga: The Japanese Animator Who Lived in Two Worlds.” Animation World Network, AWN, Inc, 1 Dec. 1999, www.awn.com/animationworld/tadahito-mochinaga-japanese-animator-who-lived-two-worlds.

Orland, Kyle. “Claptrap Voice Actor Accuses Gearbox CEO of Assault, Underpayment.” Ars Technica, 7 May 2019, arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/claptrap-voice-actor-accuses-gearbox-ceo-of-assault-underpayment/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Pilling, Jayne. A Reader In Animation Studies. Indiana University Press, 1998. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/40033.

Prehistoric Beast. Directed by Phil Tippett, Tippett Studios, 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlaXIRTjNfo

Randles, Jonathan. “VFX Studio with Star Wars, Jurassic Park Credits Goes Bankrupt.” Bloomberg Law, 1 May 2024, news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/vfx-studio-with-star-wars-jurassic-park-credits-goes-bankrupt. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Shanley, Patrick. “Gearbox Software CEO Accused of Contempt in Latest Filing.” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Aug. 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/gearbox-software-ceo-accused-contempt-latest-filing-1235064/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

The Making of “Jurassic Park.” Directed by John Schultz, Amblin Entertainment, 1995. https://youtu.be/8r01mk6F_Pk

The Making of Mad God. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2021. https://youtu.be/sfUOHh0xmwc

The Tale of the Fox. Directed by Irene Starewicz and Ladislas Starevich, UFA GmbH, 10 Apr. 1941. https://youtu.be/Us_Pn6Q1dBQ

Wikipedia contributors. "List of films with longest production time." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of media notable for being in development hell." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of Rankin/Bass Productions films." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "Tadahito Mochinaga." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Nov. 2023. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wilson, Josh. “Phil Tippett: 24 Frames per Second < the Fabulist Words & Art.” The Fabulist Words & Art, 5 Nov. 2021, fabulistmagazine.com/24-frames-per-second-the-phil-tippett-interview/.

Worse than the Demon. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2013. https://youtu.be/ghKqvDNRe4c

[wh0reforcoriolanussnow]

tom wearing a yale law crewneck🫶🏻

Yale crewneck || Tom Blyth x reader

Summary: Tom wears your Yale crewneck 🫢

Warnings: none

Wc: 376

A/n: short n sweet, I haven’t had any motivation to write lately 😭 I was supposed to post this yesterday but I got busy so hereee

divider by @pommecita

You’re seated in the hushed atmosphere of the School library, surrounded by towering shelves of legal tomes and the faint rustle of pages. The dim light casts a warm glow on your determined face as you sift through case notes, fully immersed in your studies.

A message pops up on your phone as your face immediately lights up at the text, you quickly pack up your belongings to meet up with Tom who had just arrived at Campus.

From a distance, you spot your boyfriend, casually leaning against the a tree, focused in his phone. A contented smile graces your lips. The two of you have barely been able to see each other in person due to busy schedule. Yet, there he was, merely a few meters away.

Tom!” you exclaim, a broad grin adorning your face, quickening your steps toward him. He glances up from his phone, swiftly tucking it in his pocket, and the familiar, affectionate smile that warms your heart appears on his lips.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he warmly greets, arms open for an embrace. You melt into his hug, feeling the reassuring circles his hand traces on your back. A contented sigh escapes you, and you share a moment. “I’ve missed your hugs,” you sight, meeting his gaze. He grins, leaning down to seal the sentiment with a tender kiss.

Strolling through the streets of New Haven, your hands entwined, tlaking about anything and everything, you made several stops on your way back to the apartment. When you arrived back home, you changed out of your clothes and into pyjamas—which was just Tom’s shirt— and headed straight to the kitchen to cook dinner for the both of you.

Meanwhile, Tom was in your bedroom, fresh out the shower and looking through your closet for some clothes that he had left behind.

Finding one of your oversized Yale crewnecks, Tom effortlessly slipped it on. The fabric enveloped him, carrying the familiar scent of the shared obsession with a particular laundry detergent.

As he stepped out of the room, your eyes fixated on him. “You look good in it,” you giggled, appreciating the way he effortlessly showcased the oversized Yale crewneck with a playful spin.

“It’s incredibly comfy,” he comments, wrapping his arms around your waist as you skillfully cut up carrots. “Here, let me help,” Tom says, washing his hands before helping you cut the rest of the veggies. “Take it with you when you start filming,” you suggest, and he hums in agreement.

“I should, so I can be reminded that my girlfriend is a genius who goes to Yale,” Tom playfully nudges you eliciting a delightful giggle from you.

tomblyth

Liked by y/n_y/l/n, rachelzegler, joshandresrivera, thehungergames and 5,047,209 others

Berlin dump

view all comments

y/n_y/l/n: my crewneck suits u better babe

↘️ tomblyth: I’m stealing it from you

↘️ rachelzegler: you guys are adorable 🥹

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: I love you 😚

user1: THE YALE CREWNECK OMG

↘️ user2: SO CUTE

↘️ user3: still can’t wrap my head around how he’s dating a Yale student 😂

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: best believe it!

user4: everyone’s talking about him wearing a Yale crewneck but hello? The last picture?

↘️ user5: RIGHTT

user6: Is that y/n in the third pic too??

↘️ user7: I think so yeah!

user8: that last picture is so freakin cute. how does it feel to live MY dream y/n?

user9: whose Yale crewneck is that 🫢

↘️ tomblyth: it’s actually mine cause i go to Yale!!

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: uhuh….

[heterotopian]

The Tale of Two Cities according to Stephi and Heiko - Part 511

Stephi started our political weeks last week. As she said, there is going to be an election in two weeks in uncertain times that might lead to more uncertainties in Germany as well. Over the course of the last two weeks there have been a lot of public against right wings, fascism and nazi tendencies in general.

One reason was the the most popular party in Germany wanted bring in new laws against immigration, protect our borders and let no more immigrants into the country. Those laws are at least in parts shady but the worst part was, that they were willing to get help from a fascist party that is considered to be out of the democratic range as they want to get out of the EU, get back to a national currency, abolish gender politics and stuff like that.

The fact that the next German chancellor is most probably part of this party led to a lot of protests in all cities, e.g. more than 100.000 people in Berlin, 70.000 people in Hamburg, etc. The week before last and last week also had two big public protests in Cologne, 40.000 people in the first and about 16.000 people last week even though they only expected 3000 people. The second picture has been taken there and has a local context as the poster shows a former local soccer/ football player that we would rather see than the possible nest chancellor.

The first picture from Munich shows a newspaper that reports about a hug protest that is about to take place/has taken place in Munich on Saturday. Authorities expected more than 70.000 people for this protest. In the end more than 250.000 (!) people showed up and took a stand.

It is most important to stand up against racism, fascism and all kind of -isms that devalue human life and humanity in general. It feels like we are at a pivotal moment (once again) in Germany.

Have you ever been to a protest? And what were your experiences?

[f1ghtsoftly]

All The Women’s News You Missed This Week

3/3/25-3/10/25

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered a joint Congressional address. Democrats wore pink to protest this and two female Democratic leaders Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Alexandria Occasio Cortez delivered notable rebuttals.  You can watch Slotkin’s address here and read an opinion about AOC’s Instagram live rebuttal here. The world celebrated International Women’s Day with protests both inside the US and abroad, most notably in Latin America. Giselle Pelicot’s daughter has also accused her father of rape, tragically, without her mother’s support. 

The news was filled with feel-good stories about women’s rights, particularly in the Global South, and a variety of interesting investigative pieces centering women’s voices, which left me wondering why those stories aren’t covered as heavily 11 months out of the year. 

Fights continue in the US and Poland for reproductive justice. Women continue to make news for leadership lead on a variety of political issues, both as world leaders, like Mexico’s Sheinbaum, or as activists, like the Berlin Women’s Day protesters who were brutalized by police due to their support of occupied Palestine, Serbian women leading protests against government corruption and a Caribbean woman who founded a nonprofit to fight for disability justice in Antigua. 

Want this in your inbox instead? Subscribe here

International Women’s Day

Feminists express anger, outrage at Women's Day marches in Mexico, Argentina and Peru

We now have an actual DEI Watchlist

Opinion and Investigative: 

The Women Who Wanted to Leave Their Husbands Over Politics

Three women grieve their dream jobs after being fired by the Trump administration

Reproductive Justice: 

Woman, 74, charged under abortion protest law

Young People Are Fleeing States With Abortion Restrictions 

Trump has dropped a high-profile abortion case in Idaho. Here’s what that means

Ultrasound now needed for pill abortions in Wyoming after lawmakers override veto

Women in the News: 

Trump didn't want to talk about Medicaid last night — so AOC did

Heather Hill is running for governor of Ohio. Who is she?

Professor Fiona Raitt: Dundee champion of legal reform and women’s rights, dies at 68

Azerbaijan’s Imprisoned Women Journalists 

Who is Elissa Slotkin, the Democrat who responded to Trump's speech? 

Arizona lawmaker who announced plans in a floor speech last year to get an abortion is resigning

As US and Canada trade barbs, it's so far so good for Mexico's Sheinbaum

LGBTQ: 

California’s Gavin Newsom opposes trans athletes in women’s sports, splitting with progressives

Prosecutors say there’s no evidence so far that torture and killing of missing man was a hate crime

Male Violence Against Women: 

What if m23s struggle was also a feminist one?

Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter: She abandoned me as a fellow victim 

Palestinian women come forward with allegations of increased sexual violence by Israeli forces since Oct. 7

Authorities in the Dominican Republic search for missing American university student

An Israeli woman and her Indian host were gang raped in southern India, police say

Canadian serial killer's victim found in landfill

Mother's murder left irreplaceable void, court hears

Women Getting Justice???

Andrew Tate, social media influencer who faces trafficking charges, sits cageside for UFC 313

Italy approves draft law targeting femicide with punishment of up to life in prison

Jay-Z sues woman who dropped rape claim against him

Women Fight Back: 

WATCH: Massive violence against women by Berlin police at the international women’s day protest 

Diagnosed with arthritis at 24, she set out to hike... and change an unequal society

The Dems' 'Let's All Wear Pink' Stunt Fell Painfully Flat. Here's Why.

‘I screamed and the world listened’: how astronaut Amanda Nguyen survived rape to fight for other victims

Female students mark International Women’s day by leading protests in Serbia against corruption

Activists open abortion center in front of Polish parliament on Women’s Day

Maasai girls take up self-defense as protection from sexual abuse and early marriage

Activists in Trinidad and Tobago push to include women’s occupations on Hindu marriage act

Feel Good Stories: 

‘I’m still dancing’: Derbyshire woman has 105th birthday rave at care home 

A resort entirely staffed and run by women in Sri Lanka seeks to break gender barriers

 Cyndi Lauper ‘cried’ after song title was made into feminist slogan for protests

‘We had all this energy’: the landmark gathering of women that unnerved the Chinese government

Arts and Culture: 

Pamela Bach, Baywatch Actress and David Hasselhoff's Ex Wife, Dies by Suicide at 62

Music Review: The Lady Gaga you loved and missed returns with pop ‘Mayhem’

Movie Review: A reckoning in surreal, riveting ‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’

Movie Review: In ‘My Dead Friend Zoe,’ a dark comedy about PTSD

Alanis Morissette’s furious feminism lives on  

As always, this is global and domestic news from a US perspective covering feminist issues and women in the news more generally. As of right now, I do not cover Women’s Sports. Published each Monday.

[eatingoutmen]

⌜ 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐎𝐎𝐍 ⌟

💌 : 𝜗𝜚 author’s note : please keep in mind that these stories may or may not be released in the order I put set it on, and that each of them are all separate stories and do not have a connection to one another; I will decide for myself in which story should I work on first and then so on and so forth. 𝜗𝜚

˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚ STORY 1 ˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚

“ A SINFUL REDEMPTION . ”

𖦹 IDEA BY : @hornydilfsinyourarea

𖤍 SUMMARY : You have committed a grave sin and went to ask for the priest for redemption, but in order to get it, you must give him something first in order to be forgiven.

𖤐 PAIRINGS : Father Sal Tedeschi x Male Reader

⚠︎ CONTENT WARNINGS ; mentions of murder, mentions of family abuse, sex inside a church, semi-public sex, exhibitionism, praise kink, humiliation kink, slow and sensual to fast and rough sex, creampie, porn with plot.

˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚ STORY 2 ˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚

“ EAT ME OUT , FUCK MY STRESS AWAY . ”

𖤍 SUMMARY : The Professor, or rather your secret boyfriend has been so stressed out from the heist and the chaos from the battles of the law, so he calls you into his office in need of something. You, an oblivious but obedient man decided to pay your boss a visit, little did you know that you were gonna be his personal fuck toy stress reliever.

𖤐 PAIRINGS : [FTM] Sergio Marquina x Male Reader

⚠︎ CONTENT WARNINGS ; cunnilingus, blowjob, handjob, teasing, fingering, slight mean/bratty! reader, punishments, brat taming, exhibitionism, p in v, pussydrunk reader, praising, oral sex (both receiving and giving), slow and teasing sex, fast and rough sex, creampie, bondage (BDSM), dom/sub dynamic, porn with plot.

˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚ STORY 3 ˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚

“ MAKE ME , DETECTIVE . ”

𖦹 IDEA BY : @hornydilfsinyourarea

𖤍 SUMMARY : You have been interrogating Berlin for hours on end, you tried everything to get some information on where the next heist is going to be out of the cocky man but nothing worked, so you decided to finally take matters in your own hands, by pleasuring persuading him with your skillful ways of seduction.

𖤐 PAIRINGS : Berlin/Andrés de Fonollosa x Male Reader

⚠︎ CONTENT WARNINGS ; oral sex, handjob, blowjob, throat fucking, penetrative sex, cock warming, bondage (BDSM), teasing, edging, overstimulation, brat taming, degrading kink, humiliation kink, fast and rough sex, orgasm denial, creampie, porn with plot, plot twist in the end.

˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚ STORY 4 ˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚

“ MY HEART’S TORN BETWEEN TWO SOULS . ”

𖦹 IDEA BY : @hornydilfsinyourarea

𖤍 SUMMARY : You have had feelings for Raquel for a long time now while working with her on capturing the Professor, but when she joined the other side, you were left heartbroken and now tasked to hunt her down and possibly hurting her. In the end of all of that chaos, you left the law and now live alone in a peaceful and quiet life away from the world. But what happens when the woman you still love finds her way back into your life with her new fiancé asking for help?

𖤐 PAIRINGS : Raquel Murillo x Male Reader x Sergio Marquina

⚠︎ CONTENT WARNINGS ; mentions of Sergio & Raquel being engaged, mentions Reader still not moving on from Raquel, Reader getting jealous of Sergio, pussydrunk Reader, slow-burn, angst, fluff, smut, kissing, making out, cuckholding, dom/sub/dom dynamic, oral sex, blowjob, handjob, cunnilingus, threesome sex, spit roasting, anal penetration, vaginal and anal, pegging, cock warming, body worship, praise kink, fast and rough sex, creampie, porn with plot.

˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ���₊˚ STORY 5 ˚₊‧꒰ა❤︎໒꒱ ‧₊˚

“ LA COMPETENCIA . ”

𖤍 SUMMARY : Berlin and Professor, or rather; Andrés and Sergio, set up a competetion on which one of them manages to sleep with you.

𖤐 PAIRINGS : Sergio Marquina x Male Reader x Andrés de Fonollosa

⚠︎ CONTENT WARNINGS ; Reader goes by the codename “Seoul”, alcohol, sub/dom/sub dynamic, blowjob, deepthroating, teasing, brat taming, orgasm denial, multiple orgasms, cumplay, fast and rough sex, penetrative sex, oral sex, creampie, cock warming, porn with plot.

ʚ all works belong to @eatingoutmen do NOT steal, copy or repost anywhere without my permission from ME personally; reblogs and interactions are fine. ɞ

[kittyit]

If you missed the Lesbian Heritages show, you can still see it stream on demand til April 15. Just register and Max Dashu will send you the link.

Regular $20: https://py.pl/1zNJJD

Supporter $25: https://py.pl/1H2wsh

Low-Income: $15: https://py.pl/wkOhd

Lesbian Heritages

International view of woman-loving women, from archaeological finds of paired and embracing women, up to recent history. Khotylevo, Çatal Hüyük, Mycenae, Nayarit, Etruria, Nok, and the Begram ivories. Lesbian love in Hellenistic art, Thai murals, Indian temple carvings, and Japanese erotic books. Some called us mati, zami, hwame, sakhiyani, bofe or sapatão. Lesbians as female rebels: the Amazons, Izumo no Okuni, Juana Asbaje, Louise Michel, Stormé DeLarverie. Women who passed as men in order to practice medicine and roam the world. Punishing the lesbian: in the Bible, Zend Avesta, Laws of Manu; and demonological fantasies. Lesbian musicians (Sotiria Bellou, Chavela Vargas, Ethyl Waters), artists (Edmonia Lewis, Romaine Brooks, Yan María Castro), writers (Emily Dickinson), and actors (Garbo!) Lesbian clubs and scenes in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Lesbian feminists, and Arab, South African, Australian lesbians. And more…

"I am a lesbian, I am reality; I insist on living in freedom: --Rebeldí­as Lesbicas, Peru

[black-fist-order]

In 1923 Adolf Hitler incited an insurrection against the German government. He was tried, given a slap on the wrist, and became a convicted felon. Despite being treated charitably by the judge, Hitler claimed the trial was political persecution and successfully portrayed himself as a victim of the “corrupt" Social Democrats.

Hitler cleverly positioned himself as the voice of the "common man," railing against the "elites," cultural "degeneracy," and the establishment, who he all labeled as "Marxists." He claimed the education system was indoctrinating children to hate Germany, and promised to return Germany to greatness.

To solidify his base, Hitler masterfully scapegoated minorities for the nation's problems, exploiting societal divisions with an "us vs. them" narrative. Many Germans took the bait. Hitler's Nazi Party continued to gain traction, until he became Chancellor in 1933.

Hitler appointed German oligarchs as his economic advisors. He proceeded to privatize government run utilities, solidifying support of the economic elite.

With the working class divided along cultural and ethnic lines, the Nazis shut down workers unions and abolished strikes.

Progressives and trade unionists were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. Corporate profits skyrocketed while working class Germans lived paycheck to paycheck.

Hitler, who became a billionaire while in office, knew he and his clan of oligarchs could get away with the scam if they constantly had an "enemy within" to blame while the corporatocracy robbed the country blind.

An easy target was one of the smallest minorities. Hitler removed birthright citizenship rights of Jews and started rounding them up for mass deportations for being "illegally" in the country.

The German press under Nazi rule highlighted instances of violence by Jews to convince the public that Jewish immigrants were a danger to the "real Germans."

Hitler wasted no time dismantling democratic institutions. Loyalty wasn't just encouraged; it was demanded. Opponents were silenced. Media that dared to questioned[sic] him were vilified as "the enemy" and "Marxists."

Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, bragged about how the Nazis were able to intimidate the media into giving them favorable coverage, and didn't need to give direct orders.

The Nazi regime and its followers collected all books they saw as promoting "degeneracy" or what would be considered "woke" today, and burned them in large bonfires. They also burned books that promoted class consciousness.

Berlin had a thriving LGBTQ community in the 1920s, and even had the first transgender clinic. The Nazis burned it to the ground. LGBTQ people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges. Many were killed in the Holocaust.

The Nazis also saw manhood as under threat by independent women who didn't rely on men. In 1934, Hitler proclaimed, “A women’s world is her husband, her family, her children, her house." Laws that had protected women's rights were repealed and new laws were introduced to restrict women to the home and in their roles as wives and mothers.

Reproductive rights were severely rolled back, and doctors who performed abortions could face the death penalty.

Despite all of this, the German people didn't have a similar historical parallel to look upon as a warning.

Most Germans never acted like the sky was falling.

Most just went along with their lives as usual, until many of their lives were snuffed out. By the time Hitler's reign was forced to an end by the Allied Powers, 11 million people were murdered in the Holocaust, and 70-85 million were killed in WW2 .

Monica Aksamit

Bluesky

[mariacallous]

A guest essay by Laurie Winer.

It's as if the so-called shock and awe of that unholy duo—Donald Trump and Elon Musk—combined with loyalists like Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, Dan Bongino, Ed Martin, and many others, has rendered us, for the moment at least, unable to react.

Magical thinking is far from new. Adolf Hitler came to power amid similar lies and conspiracy theories. We should know where that leads. And, while MAGA may ignore the mountains of books written on fascism, the rest of us are not in the dark about what comes next.

As we brace for further actions from a cabinet catering to a serial fabulist, it is important to note that the president's abstruse nonsense isnot random. It has a history. A history that takes us in only one direction, to catastrophe.

Here, then, are things to watch for, all warnings from the well-known story of the Third Reich.

Daily life will take on a surreal quality and, if we do not take some action or join an organized resistance, our discussions will consist of merely repeating the latest horror.

Sebastian Haffner, writing in 1939, noted that “life went on as before, though it had now become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background…. We were not equal to the situation, even as victims.” Then as now, “many adapt to living with clenched teeth. Unfortunately they form a majority of a visible 'opposition' in Germany. So it is no wonder that this opposition has never developed any goals, plans, or expectations. Most of its members spend their time bemoaning the atrocities. The dreadful things that are happening have become essential to their spiritual well-being. Their only remaining dark pleasure is to luxuriate in the description of gruesome deeds, and it is impossible to have a discussion with them on any other topic.”

People around you will forget that they once were anti-Trump.

Christopher Isherwood wrote of his Berlin landlady in 1933: “Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about Der Furher to the porter’s wife. If anyone was to remind her that at the elections last November she voted Communist she would probably deny it hotly and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.”

The administration will issue absurd denunciations of opponents whose expertise is needed.

Albert Einstein was in Pasadena on the day that Hitler became chancellor, and he never returned to the country of his birth, saying, “As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.” The Nazis attacked him relentlessly in speeches and in news reports. In 1934 at the University of Heidelberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist Johannes Stark, said, “Jewish propaganda has tried to portray [Einstein] as the greatest scientist of all time. However, Einstein’s relativity theories were basically no more than an accumulation of artificial formulas based on arbitrary definitions.” In May 1933, Goebbels issued a brochure entitled “Jews Are Watching You (Juden Sehen Dich An)”, which accused Einstein of disseminating “lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler”. Under Einstein’s picture was the caption: “Not yet hanged (bis jetzt ungehaengt)”.

There will be parades and possibly mandatory public displays of support for the administration.

In July 2017, Trump went to France as Emmanual Macron’s special guest at an elaborate Bastille Day parade staged to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into the First World War. As planes flew overhead and soldiers precision marched down the Champs- Élysées, Trump stood ramrod straight and saluted the French troops for more than a minute, while Macron merely nodded and smiled. Trump has rarely looked as fulfilled; he was clearly in his happy place. He returned from Paris determined to have a military parade of his own, “but better.” His generals did not agree. “I’d rather swallow acid,” Defense Secretary James Mattis, reportedly said. Eventually Trump got his parade, on July 4, 2019, which he called “The Salute to America.” Mattis was by then out, but attendance was mandatory for Trump’s new acting secretary of defense and new acting head of the joint chiefs of staff. The president hyped the event on Twitter, writing: “People are coming from far and wide to join us today and tonight for what is turning out to be one of the biggest celebrations in the history of our Country.”

A few months after Hitler secured power, all the streets in Berlin were sheathed with swastikas. “It was unwise not to display them” wrote Isherwood. A British journalist named Owen Tweedy wrote, “The election [of March 5] has completely altered Germany, both outwardly and inwardly, so much that it is hard to realize we are in the same country we entered a month ago. The Nazis are out-fascismising Fascismo.” Loud speakers blared out speeches by Goring and Goebbels. Like Trump, Hitler also fixated on crowd size. He described his Nuremberg rally as “the greatest mass meeting ever assembled.”

News sources will disappear or be radically altered.

As the White House kicks AP out of its press pool, and Jeff Bezos declares that Washington Post editorials will be in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”, it’s good to remember what Sebastian Haffner wrote about Hitler’s first year: “Many newspapers and magazine disappeared from the kiosks—but what happened to those that continued in circulation was even more disturbing. You could not recognize them anymore. In a way a newspaper is like an old friend; you instinctively know how it will react to certain events, what it will say about them and how it will express its views. If it suddenly says the opposite of what it said yesterday, denies its own past, distorting its features, you cannot avoid feeling that you are in a madhouse. That happened.”

At first The Munich Post, which had closely covered Hitler since the beer hall putsch in November 1923, continued its reporting, running headlines such as “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood,” “Germany Under Hitler: Political Murder and Terror,” and “Outlaws and Murderers in Power.” On March 9, 1933, five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor and eleven days after the Reichstag fire, the SA gutted the newspaper’s offices while the police stood by. Its journalists went into hiding. At least one ended up in Dachau, others simply “disappeared.”

MAGA will continue to believe what the leader says up until the very brink of disaster.

In the summer of 1939, three months after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Robert Jamieson, a British English teacher living in Essen, wrote to Lord Londonderry, who had recently acted as a go-between British and Nazi leaders: “[The Germans] really believe that the Czech government had voluntarily sought Hitler’s protection and that they would all starve if they do not get this lebensraum and colonies.

**

The debate about whether or not we should bring Hitler or Nazism or fascism into a contemporary political debate is obsolete. Now it is crucial that we take seriously the warnings gathered for us by survivors and writers. When you look at a photo of a Jew about to be arrested or shot and he or she is staring straight into the camera, remember that it is you they are looking at.

NOTES

Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner, 1939 (published in 2000).

Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood, 1939

Einstein in Berlin, Thomas Levenson, 2002.

The Man Who Stalked Einstein, Bruce J. Hillman, Briget Ertel-Wagner, Bernd C. Wagner, 2015.

The Guardian, January 24, 2017

Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd, 2017.

Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti, 1960.

“Against Normalization: The Lessons of the Munich Post”, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum, February 5, 2017.

“The Munich Post: Its Undiscovered Effects on Hitler,” Sara Twogood, 2002.

Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to War, Ian Kershaw, 2004.

A long-time journalist, Laurie Winer is a founding editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical (Yale University Press). She now lives in France and is at work on a book called The Hitler Tour.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Dear Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,

I'm writing to you from 2025, well over a century after your death. Hannover looks different now, you would not recognize it. It's a whole different world I live in.

A lot of things have happened since your death. There was a war, and the German Empire fell. Of course, you lived through the end of the Kingdom of Hannover, so this may not be too surprising. There was a democracy, a short-lived one, unfortunately. For a few years, your fellow people would travel to cities like Berlin to live in freedom. Then, it got much worse. The laws were stricter than during your lifetime, scholarship was banned and burned. Many people fled or were murdered. There was another war, Germany was split into two. It was much more dramatic and complicated than that, of course, but imagine that! It has been a democracy for a long time now and Germany is even one country again. The borders look a little different, though.

Paragraph §175 continued to exist, but it was gradually changed and roughly a hundred years after your death we finally got rid of it. Over the decades, the legal situation improved and people became more accepting.

When I was a teenager, marriages were legalized between two men or two women. Legally, you are equal in Germany now, not just when it comes to marriage. Many other countries did the same thing, some earlier or later than us. There's still room for improvement and not all countries have improved but more than you'd think.

The truly bad news, for you, is that your terminology never really caught on. Instead, your colleague Karl Maria Kertbeny's words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are widely accepted. There are many other terms as well and our understanding of sex and sexuality changed a little. But you are still considered ahead of your time. I wish people had understood this earlier.

Still, you are not forgotten. They named several streets after you, one in my hometown. There is a sign about your work not far from where I live. I am talking about you in a class next week.

You did not live to see the fruits of your labor, but your work was not in vain. We are still here.

Signed, a proud Urning/Urninde from Germany

[communist-manifesto-daily]

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Part 1

[ Table of Contents | Next ]

1892 English Edition Introduction - 1

General Introduction and the History of Materialism

The present little book is, originally, part of a larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the same time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength, but, was what more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.

This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderous Gründlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general, and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig “Vorwärts”, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1], and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft" (Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared in Zurich, 1886.

[1] Vorwärts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha Unification Congress.

[ Table of Contents | Next ]

[sedoretu]

Curious — how many are you familiar with? 🔥

Defined however you want, but ideally more than “have heard the name before”:

Harry Truman

Doris Day

Red China

Johnnie Ray

South Pacific

Walter Winchell

Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy

Richard Nixon

Studebaker

Television

North Korea

South Korea

Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs

H-bomb

Sugar Ray

Panmunjom

Brando

"The King and I"

and "The Catcher in the Rye"

Eisenhower

Vaccine

England's got a new queen

Marciano

Liberace

Santayana (goodbye)

Joseph Stalin

Malenkov

Nasser

Prokofiev

Rockefeller

Campanella

Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn

Juan Peron

Toscanini

Dacron

Dien Bien Phu falls

"Rock Around the Clock"

Einstein

James Dean

Brooklyn's got a winning team

Davy Crockett

Peter Pan

Elvis Presley

Disneyland

Bardot

Budapest

Alabama

Krushchev

Princess Grace

Peyton Place

Trouble in the Suez

Little Rock

Pasternak

Mickey Mantle

Kerouac

Sputnik

Chou En-Lai

"Bridge on the River Kwai"

Lebanon

Charles de Gaulle

California baseball

Starkweather homicide

Children of Thalidomide

Buddy Holly

Ben Hur

Space monkey

Mafia

Hula hoops

Castro

Edsel is a no-go

U2

Syngman Rhee

Payola

Kennedy

Chubby Checker

Psycho

Belgians in the Congo

Hemingway

Eichmann

"Stranger in a Strange Land"

Dylan

Berlin

Bay of Pigs invasion

"Lawrence of Arabia"

British Beatlemania

Ole Miss

John Glenn

Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul

Malcolm X

British politician sex

JFK (blown away, what else do I have to say?)

Birth control

Ho Chi Minh

Richard Nixon (back again)

Moonshot

Woodstock

Watergate

Punk rock

Begin

Reagan

Palestine

Terror on the airline

Ayatollah’s in Iran

Russians in Afghanistan

"Wheel of Fortune"

Sally Ride

heavy metal suicide

Foreign debts

Homeless vets

AIDS

Crack

Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shore

China's under martial law

Rock and roller cola wars

I can’t take it anymore (free space)