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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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

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

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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#pluralistic #transmediale #lectures #enshittification #big tech #berlin #mcluhan lecture #Youtube

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double-o-doodle · 8 days ago

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Oh look !! Strange hill high au designs

Basically ,, MCDXXX men but what if the Knavish Rapscallion went to possess the staff instead of the bullies and made them supervillains

Half baked story under cut

Basically a freshly possessed Abercrombie storms into the teachers lounge, assuming its a minion hq. The teachers there were fixing themselves up and/or bickering about the heroes. Technology introduction happens and the Rapscal starts plotting to take the tech for himself, but first rounding up some henchmen to make things easier. Murdoch, Grimshaw, Grackle and Creeper were brainwashed and taken away while Kadinsky and Garden were spared due to them being"not evil enough". Garden calmly snaps at the elden nonsense that's been happening recently and plans to storm to the library for answers [Kadinsky following suit cus he lowkey doesnt wanna die]. They meet up with Librarian Lady and tell her the whole story just for her to reveal that she knows the lore of the YOJL thanks to old Bartleby. Garden eventually realizes the kids might be in trouble and declares that they should go help them. With much persuasion, Lady caves in and gets them some magical stuff hidden to combat the Rapscallion and his goons.

This is just the teachers pov I havent done the students yet jeez louise

#strange hill high

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racefortheironthrone · 1 year ago

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How do you think Daredevil would function as the “regular human” of the JLA, if he took Batman’s place on the team? Additionally, has Matt Murdoch ever been a member of the Avengers?

Daredevil has certainly got the fighting skills, but I think he'd struggle on the tech/gadget front and he's not as good as a detective as Batman when it comes to forensic science and the like - although he does have the lie detector thing and his legal knowledge, so he's not bad at it, just not as good at it.

Yes, Matt Murdock was on the New Avengers team led by Luke Cage.

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jadelotusflower · 4 months ago

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Stargate rewatch: 2x04 - The Gamekeeper

"Where there's a garden, there's snakes." Jack coming in with the pessimism, but it's a nice Goa'uld metaphor.

Oh hey, Daniel has allergies again!

This is a Jonathan Glassner episode (with Brad Wright sharing the story credit), directed by Martin Wood.

Time to get strapped into the Trauma Chair!

Jack finds himself back in East Germany, 1982 on a failed mission, Teal'c finds himself with hair.

And Kawalsky is here! I love it when they bring back Kawalsky, it's a shame he doesn't get much to do.

Jack thinks the chairs were a time machine, Teal'c concedes it's possible - park that plot until the end of the season, boys.

Meanwhile Sam and Daniel are at the New York Museum of Art (I assume the Met?) wearing outfits that I unironically love. I'd totally wear that hoodie. Sam's skirt and boots are also a vibe.

Note the spiral device on the door behind them that signifies the exit (although they don't know it). I couldn't see a designated exit in the scene with Jack and Teal'c though.

Daniel says he's been to the museum "many times" which is pretty dark since that's where his parent's died.

When Daniel brushes off the museum employee who tells them the exhibit isn't open she just smiles and walks away - she doesn't get paid enough to care, lol.

Daniel's parents are Claire and Melburn Jackson (the latter will show up again next season as Seth), who are tragically squished by a big block of stone that they were standing under instead of beside for some reason. To her credit, Claire is worried that the slab is swinging but Melburn assures her it's okay - oof.

Jack's attempts to change the outcome of the mission and the Keeper reveals himself. It's Dwight Schultz (Murdoch in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: Next Gen) doing a good job despite his ridiculous hat.

Some of us don't need fancy tech to replay the terrible moments of our lives over and over again - our brains handle that just fine (well certainly not fine…you know what I mean).

Jack decides to sit this one out, while Daniel makes some ineffectual efforts to coax his parents out from underneath the swinging slab of squish. Irreverence aside, it is kind of horrifying to think that Daniel actually witnessed his parents die as a young child - it's not stated here, but a later episode reveals he was eight years old.

Ultimately, they discover that no matter what they do they can't change their history, which could actually be some helpful therapy (and isn't a worlds away from prolonged exposure treatment for PTSD) - but the Keeper isn't trying to help them, and it begs the question of if they had explored all the options, whether he would have eventually allowed them to succeed in changing the events - otherwise where would the satisfaction for the residents?

Aw, his parents call him Danny.

Also, Daniel's eye condition seems to be genetic. Or I've finally cracked the case and his eyesight isn't that bad, but he wears his glasses most of the time anyway to feel closer to his parents - he went into the same profession after all.

It's interesting that the Keeper doesn't choose more recent traumas of Jack and Daniel's lives that they both feel a huge amount of guilt for and wish they could change - Charlie's death and the abduction of Sha're. Perhaps those events are too raw for the Keeper to extract entertainment value from.

Or perhaps those memories are less accessible because the trauma is so fresh - these are events that drive Jack and Daniel and the Keeper wants them trapped, not remind them of why they’re fighting. The failed mission where Jack’s commander died and the death of Daniel’s parents are foundational memories, but they’re not directly relevant to their lives on SG-1 and so safer for the Keeper to have them explore.

Just look at this hat!

The Keeper reveals he was unable to access Teal'c or Sam's minds - the first indication that Sam's physiology has been altered following her possession by Jolinar.

We have the classic fake release from the virtual reality, but not before we have a briefing scene where we're two for two with Daniel wearing his glasses on his head and being the only person drinking coffee.

Daniel also wants to go back and free the residents, he’s fully team Interference now. This week Jack’s team Not Our Problem.

"General without meaning (this time) to sound like a smartass, are you cracked?" LOL

Jack smelt a rat from the beginning, but it's when fake!Hammond mentions him having the chance to see his son that he knows it’s all a lie. George would absolutely never say that.

I have to admit, the idea of being able to project yourself into not only any memory, but anywhere you can imagine is kind of appealing - kind of like a Holodeck. It's the never leaving - and being kept against your will - that's the issue.

We're getting into Matrix territory here with virtual world vs real world, two years before that film was released (although of course it was hardly the first to deal with constructed realities). Would you be happy in a simulation where you could go anywhere and do anything you could imagine, even if it wasn’t “real”? Honestly, maybe, but after 1000 years you’d want to go out and see the flowers.

Daniel puts his glasses back on in the middle of the conversation with the residents for no discernible reason, and I know I'm hung up on this, but as someone who generally tries to make sense of things on a Watsonian level (even if accepting that some things only have a Doylist reason) I can't help but be distracted by it.

"Haven't you people missed me at all?" I have!

The Keeper running around still steepling his fingers is kinda hilarious.

Bye Trauma Chair, see you - inexplicably - in season 8.

And Daniel's glasses are back on his head, I give up.

"YOU ARE RUINING THE GARDEN!" The Keeper's indigence at the residents picking the flowers, lol. I love it when an actor just commits to a role.

Ultimately this is an episode about control - Jack and Daniel have no control over what happened in the past, they have to accept it no matter how they might wonder if things could have gone differently. The Keeper has valid reasons for fearing the residents may destroy the world like they did before and therefore wanting to keep them contained in the virtual world, but that’s not his choice to make, and he must cede their free will to nurture or destroy.

#jlf watches #stargate sg-1 #stargate rewatch #2x04 the gamekeeper #jack o'neill #daniel jackson

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spaceheelies · 1 year ago

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i love james pendrick because he is simply the most suspicious-acting man of all time and is tangentially involved in every deep conspiracy in the show and just happens to be around whenever any major crime happens but whenever murdoch has the nerve to even ask him if he had something to do with it he is like “i cannot believe that you. my homie. would EVER suspect me of doing this. i thought that we were friends. i was innocent of the last crime you questioned me about which means i’m innocent of everything forever. you should know that :(“ like maybe stop being around when people are murdered or buildings are blown up or some tech you invented is implemented in an evil plot, ms. thing ❤️

#murdoch mysteries

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justinspoliticalcorner · 19 days ago

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Matt Gertz at MMFA:

President Donald Trump’s January 6 pardons mark the culmination of the MAGA media’s yearslong campaign to remove the stain from his supporters’ violent assault on the U.S. Capitol — and for their own culpability in that attempted coup. On the first day of his second term, Trump is apparently giving clemency to every participant in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Speaking to reporters while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, he said he would be signing full pardons for “approximately 1,500 people” while providing six commutations. He appears to be wiping the slate clean for all of what he has ludicrously termed the “J6 hostages,” including hundreds convicted of violent assaults on law enforcement. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack and sentenced to 22 years in prison, is getting out tonight. The world watched four years ago as thousands of Trumpists broke through ranks of law enforcement, stormed into the Capitol, and sent into hiding the members of Congress who had assembled to certify the electoral vote. That mob — summoned to Washington, D.C., by Trump and incited by his lies and those of the right-wing media that his reelection had been stolen — was the final salvo in a multifaceted plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office following his defeat at the ballot box. A broad, bipartisan consensus formed in real time that Trump was responsible for a travesty. And the right-wing media and tech elite agreed, denouncingTrump and calling for consequences, while Rupert Murdoch proposed cutting him off from the support of his media empire. But while Fox News stars publicly described the assailants in the immediate aftermath as “criminals” who should be “arrested and prosecuted” and do “jail time,” they also validated the mob’s concerns — and only in private did they point the finger at the president himself. That initial reticence was a signal that the January 6 consensus was fragile — and indeed, as nearly 1,600 participants faced charges over the months and years that followed, Trump’s allies at Fox and elsewhere in the right-wing press went to work dismantling the idea that they had done anything wrong.

The right-wing media apparatus got what it wanted: pardons of the domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol on 01.06.2021 in service of Donald Trump's election lies.

#Capitol Insurrection #Conservative Media Apparatus #Donald Trump #Pardons #Clemency #Commutations #History Revisionism #Trump Administration II

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 10 months ago

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By: Rob Henderson

Published: Apr 25, 2024

Perhaps counterintuitively, gender equality is leading to greater gender-related differences.

In most wealthy nations, women have been steadily closing the gap with men on several fronts. In the United States, women now earn the majority of the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Women now receive more than half of STEM college degrees, and the proportion of women in the tech sector has risen in recent years, to 35 percent in 2023 from 31 percent in 2019. Among Americans younger than 30, women’s earnings rival or even surpass men’s in many metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

As these gaps have narrowed, we might have expected men and women to become more alike in other ways, including their cultural values and politics. Yet we are seeing the reverse.

This is especially true when it comes to political orientation. Recent polls have highlighted increasing polarization along gender lines on various political issues. Since 2014, women younger than 30 have become steadily more left-leaning each year, while young men have remained relatively static in their political views. In 2021, 44 percent of young women in the United States identified as liberal compared with just 25 percent of young men — the biggest gender gap in 24 years of polling.

In the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch recently articulated this stark contrast in a piece titled “A new global gender divide is emerging.” He observes that while older women and men are similar in their political views, young women have veered sharply to the left of young men.

Burn-Murdoch cites the influence of the #MeToo movement, suggesting it empowered young women to address longstanding injustices.

The Washington Post’s editorial board suggested that such polarization is to be expected in the United States, “a large, unwieldy democracy.” The Guardian proposes that digital spaces and social media influencers are luring young people into disparate online platforms that cultivate more extreme political views. No doubt these all play some role.

However, I’d like to propose an idea from my home discipline of academic psychology: the gender-equality paradox. This emerged as one of the most mind-blowing findings that researchers published while I was pursuing my recent doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge.

The paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.

The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.

Of course, there is an overlap for all of these attributes — aggression, for example, is a trait that both women and men can exhibit.

But there’s less overlap — meaning greater differences — in more-equal societies. In China, which scores low on gender parity, the overlap between men and women in personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experience is actually very high, 84 percent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender-equal societies, the overlap is just 61 percent.

More recently, a study of 67 countries found that although women generally tend to hold stricter moral views, gender differences in verdicts in hypothetical court scenarios are largest in wealthier and more equal societies. Specifically, women view misconduct more unfavorably than men in most places, but this difference in judgment is larger in richer and more equal countries.

This gender gap has also been found for physical differences in things like height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure. Across societies, men tend to be taller, heavier, and have higher blood pressure than women. But in rich and relatively equal societies, gender differences are particularly large.

The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.

However, even among college students, women are more left-leaning than men. A Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of 254 colleges and universities found that 55 percent of female students identify as liberal, compared with only 40 percent of male students. Interestingly, at schools ranked below 200 by US News and World Report, 45 percent of women and 33 percent of men identify as liberal. At top 25 schools, though, the difference is more pronounced, with 71 percent of women and 54 percent of men identifying as liberal.

The gender-equality paradox can help to explain why the gender gap is largest at the most selective US colleges, where family income tends to be higher and sociopolitical equality tends to be especially highly prized.

In an interview in The Times of London, the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams succinctly summarized the paradox: “Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”

There are a variety of possible explanations for the gender-equality paradox, but one prevailing view is that as societies become relatively more prosperous and equal, people more fully express their underlying traits and preferences.

Of course, culture matters in explaining gender differences — just not in the way most people think.

In less affluent and less egalitarian societies, gender differences in physical traits are flattened due to scarcity — that is, the absence of food and other resources stunts growth, especially for men, leading to smaller physical disparities. Moreover, gender differences in psychological traits narrow in response to rigid social expectations.

In the most equal nations of the world, it’s not harsh gender socialization by parents and media, strict societal expectations, or institutional forces that widen the differences between men and women. In the absence of dire poverty and strict social expectations, people are in a position to express their intrinsic attributes and preferences.

The freer people are and the more fairly they are treated, the more differences tend to grow rather than shrink. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Z men and women are diverging along political lines to a greater extent than earlier generations did.

Rob Henderson has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/zzoqm ]

Abstract

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

For reference, "liberal" is used here in the American sense of "left-wing," rather than the sense of classical liberalism.

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

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Much of what constitutes modern day "leftism," such as Critical Theory, modern "color conscious" conceptions of "antiracism," and gender ideology is extraordinarily illiberal.

#Rob Henderson #gender differences #left wing #right wing #conservative #progressive #the left #the right #gender polarization #political polarization #religion is a mental illness

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thirdworldgf · 3 months ago

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Trump winning is good in a way that he missed the 2020 mark and it made ppl actually more conservative than they were back in 2016 bc it made him look like a victim + the staged assassination this year, it all worked in his favour and ppl who are backing him!!! The thing most ppl including gen z are weirdly conservative, it’s like a global trend like how liberalism was a trend in the early 2000’s till last obama election. That’s just how the world works I guess? Ppl will shift to a new or a new version of the same ideology after 4 yrs. it’s obvious that most conservative ppl will get tired of republicans especially now that they’ve gotten what they wanted lol, I just how these tech nerd fags like elon,thiel, murdoch etc are running the entire show in secrecy like nobody even cares bc most ppl are on a payroll so weird and gay.

(Pls bare my idiotic political ramblings for a day)

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themirthofanation · 5 months ago

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If you or I made that post we’d have the SS and FBI at our door. This asshat and his useful orange idiot don’t live under the same laws as the rest of us. The most dangerous immigrants are not walking across our southern border. They fly private. And while you are deporting Elon please take Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch with you. Thank you.

#gop #weirdogop #deportelonmusk

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fyeahcompetentwomen · 2 years ago

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Elimination Round Group 2

This is the first of two elimination polls that I'll post today. The top three scorers in this group of 10 will get the three spots left in Group 2 of the bracket! This poll only goes one day, so vote quick!

Endorsement/blurbs under the readmore!

Vala Mal Doran, Stargate: Best thief in two galaxies? No in all seriousness people treat her like a joke but that’s how she protects herself. She was taken as a goa’uld host, forced to live with that trauma and rather than lying down she forged a life for herself which included saving the Galaxy a few times. Smart, good at reading people, good at adapting accordingly. She can fight, she can use and modify alien tech. More street smarts than book smarts but when people underestimate her she uses that too.

Erica Ortegas, Star Trek: They are a pilot. They have flown manually through asteroids and nebulas, without sensors. They have skimmed off black holes to slingshot. If they didn’t do evasive manoeuvres right everyone would die. They are driving the ship. That’s pretty critical. Bonus mention for sword skills in that fantasy nebula.

Dr. Julia Ogden, Murdoch Mysteries: She's Toronto's coroner in 1895, and helps solve many many murders. She also becomes a psychologist and a surgeon, and helps the suffragettes. As a woman, at the turn of the 20th century. She also learns to fight in many layers of dress

Naomi Nagata, The Expanse: There is nothing that this woman can't build, fix, or frankenstein. Also, she survived being thrown out of an airlock by knowing (better than the person who threw her out) what to do in the vacuum of space. She fights with all that she has, and leaves no one behind, and has the biggest heart and heaviest conscience of them all.

Garnet, Steven Universe: Garnet can see into the future! She leads the whole team! She can punch anything into submission AND throw in one-liners when you least expect them!

Death of the Endless, The Sandman: Death of the Endless is the anthropomorphic personification of the concept of death, and she is literally the best at her job, i.e. carrying, ferrying or otherwise welcoming souls of the dead to their chosen afterlife, colloquially known in Sandmanverse as the Sunless Lands. Her duty is everything to her and about her, though Death also adores her siblings equally, even if she's very busy all the time; as she put it most poetically, "When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave." And her vibes are SO. FRICKIN. FUN.

Zari Tarazi, DC: Zari doesn’t need a superpower or combat training for success because she has social skills that rival next to none. She knows her femininity can cause people to underestimate her so she uses it to influence her way in to places most other heroes would need force to access. Her deep understanding of people has helped save the world more than once while running a successful business besides.

Allison Blake, A Town Called EUReKA: Allison was a Department of Defense agent working as a government liaison between Eureka and the Pentagon. She was once a medical doctor and has 2 PhDs. At one point she oversees the main laboratories of Eureka, at another she's Director of Operations for Global Dynamics.

Bad Wolf, Doctor Who: Controls all of time and space, makes Jack immortal, disintegrates the Dalek fleet, is the intelligence of The Moment and is always protecting the Doctor.

#bracket prep #elimination round #1 day poll #poll #group 2 #fuck yeah competent women #fyeahcompetentwomen

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therummonster · 2 years ago

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finally have my hands on the original multiverse tales book, here's my notes list so far!

warning for my reactions to the entire book

both alexis and sterling play tennis

sterling's had trouble with on accidentally catching things on fire

he can also lower his temperature by using his fire powers

their old boss was Ms Murdoch

sterling was quite fasinated by the demons, while alexis has the quote of "please, you can fit everything you need to know about them on a cue card: use blunt weapons and hit them until they're dust."

if it's a demon, it will turn to dust.

the gear they wore on missions consisted of tough armor for upper body, but only thick cargo pants for lower half.

Alexis refuses to wear a helmet

they're both orphans :D and also each other's only friends.

sterling's powers activate by being threatened

sterling is really into demons. "before me stood a beautiful monstrosity."

at this point in their story, this was the first set of fire proof demons they've seen.

sterling kinda got mauled, but alexis is fine!

demons are searching for something.

sterling followed after one of the demons, called the big one's bluff, and cost a life.

i will be redrawing these scenes.

they have a book. ON THE MULITVERSE. chapters include: Killing an Overseer, Lucifer's Orb of Infinite Energies, and Extra-Dimensional Travel.

alexis saw a golden shard in one of the hell hounds mouth.

they seem to be in a higher tech era than our reality

alexis still refuses to wear a helmet on the motorcycle.

motor cycle only has one wheel.

this is where sterling learns to fly

it's a third of a fancy bowling ball

sterling made another bad call on stopping a forest fire and then the demon attacked two people.

sterling can get overheated, in those cases he becomes completely immobile

ALEXIS GOT ATTACKED-

SHE'S IN A COMA

also their doctor is named Locklear

MUMTHER MURDOCH

"shut up and cry, Agent; that's an order."

sterling's nerd is screaming internally like i am while reading this book.

sterling's focusing WE'RE AT THE CLIMAX-

he's using his metal fists, head canon he's got sharp nails and that's how he activates his powers manually.

his plan didn't work.

this is also another time where his brain casually did a 360 in his skull.

HE'S FLYIN!

but so is the demon

it has attacked the innocents again!

THE DEMON IS DOWN!!! STERLING IS A GOD DAMN CANNONBALL!!!

he hit the street hard, his shoulder is dislocated and his leg is probably broken.

ALEXIS IS WEARING A HELMET!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh the news is reporting on his decision...

yep, dislocated shoulder. but luckily his knee is only fractured!

alexis forgives him

he used his powers on the orb!

#popcrossstudios #popcross studios #multiverse tales

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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How to save the new from Big Tech

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

It’s no longer controversial to claim that Big Tech is a parasite on the news business. But there’s still a raging controversy over the nature of the parasitism, and, much more importantly, what to do about it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes

This week on EFF’s Deeplinks blog, I kick off a new series on the abusive relationship between Big Tech and the news, analyzing four different dirty practices and proposing policy answers to all four:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The context here is that various governments around the world have taken notice of the tech/news problem, and are chasing a counterproductive “solution” — the “link tax,” where tech firms are required to pay for the links and short snippets their users or news search-tools make to news-stories. In some cases, the “tax” is indirect: tech is required to negotiate a payment to make up for other misdeeds (like ripping publishers off with ad fraud).

You can argue that this isn’t a link tax, it’s just pressure to bargain, but because these rules typically ban platforms from simply blocking publishers’ content if they can’t reach an agreement, they become link taxes: “You must carry links, and you must pay the sites you link to” isn’t meaningfully different from “You must pay for linking to those sites.”

This “must-carry” dimension — requiring tech firms to publish links to sites they don’t want to link to — has lots of things wrong with it, but in the US, must-carry has a showstopper bug: it contravenes the First Amendment and any law with a must-carry provision is unlikely to survive a court challenge. So people who care about protecting the news from Big Tech predators — like me — need to try other approaches.

But no matter where you are, requiring tech to pay fees to news is the wrong approach. For one thing, it’s a solution that only works for so long as Big Tech stays big: that means that efforts to break up Big Tech, force it to pay taxes and fines, and limit its profits (say, through privacy laws that end surviellance ads) are incompatible with link taxes and adjacent proposals.

The big risk here is that news outlets will become partisans in the fight against shrinking Big Tech, because news companies’ destinies will be linked to the tech giants’ own fate. More immediately, there’s the risk that news companies that depend on negotiating payments from Big Tech will not act as the effective watchdogs we need them to be.

That’s not just a hypothetical risk: in Canada, Big Tech entered into negotiations with the Toronto Star — the country’s widest-circulating paper — ahead of a proposed “news bargaining code” that was working its way through Parliament. Once that settlement was reached, the Star abruptly killed “Defanging Tech” its excellent critical series on the tech giants it had just climbed into bed with:

https://www.thestar.com/news/big-tech.html

Another important risk from “bargaining codes” and link taxes is that they tend to favor the largest and/or most sensationalist news companies, who have the leverage to bargain for the highest sums. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp bargained for a sizable payment from the tech sector — but then it laid off its news workers. Merely transferring money to media giants doesn’t mean an increase in investment in news. That’s especially true in the Canadian context, where a US vulture-capitalist fund bought out the National Post and its nationwide affiliates and then loaded the chain up with debt, while hacking newsroom staff to the bone and beyond. There’s no reason to think that tech payments to the Post will go anywhere except to the financial speculators who are its major creditors.

Meanwhile, the proposed US version, JCPA, has a payout schedule based on the number of clicks a news outlet generates for each platform — a metric that will see the lion’s share of money going to the far-right clickbait sites that push conspiracy theories, disinformation, and culture-war nonsense — and see floods of social media traffic as a result.

Any solution to the tech/news conflict should benefit the news, and the workers who produce it — not the shareholders of the giant companies whose short-sighted consolidation, mass firings, and sell-offs of physical plant created the hyper-concentrated, brittle news sector of today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Luckily for the news, there’s a whole bushel of policy levers we can yank on to make the news better, stronger, and more sustainable, even as tech monopolies and the surveillance they rely on are consigned to the scrapheap of history.

In this series — which will publish weekly over the next four weeks — I’ll dig into four policy prescriptions for making a better news that is free of Big Tech, not dependent on it:

I. Break up ad-tech: Following the lead of Senator Mike Lee’s AMERICA Act, we must end the ad-tech sector’s self-dealing. Ad-tech scoops up 51% of every ad-dollar. That’s thanks to the ad-tech companies practice of offering marketplaces in which they represent both advertisers and publishers: that’s like a game where the referee pays the salaries of the head coaches for both teams. If we pare back the ad-tech tax to, say 10% and split the difference between advertisers and publishers, then every publisher will see an immediate 20% increase in their top-line revenue, without having to “bargain” for a “voluntary” payment from tech companies.

II. Ban surveillance ads: America is long overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action. When we finally get such a law, surveillance advertising is dead. Ad-tech has long argued that people like ads, so long as they’re “relevant,” a state that can only be attained through continuous, invasive surveillance. In reality, no one consents to surveillance — which is why, when Apple gave its users a one-click opt-out from spying, 94% blocked spying (unfortunately, Apple only blocks its competitors from spying on Apple customers; even if you opt out of spying on your Apple device, Apple will continue to spy on you).

The natural successor to surveillance ads is context ads: ads based on the content you’re looking at, not the surveillance data an ad-tech platform amassed on you without your consent. Context ads are intrinsically better for publishers: no publisher will ever know as much about a reader’s behavior than a spying ad-tech platform, but no ad-tech platform will ever know as much about a publisher’s own content than the publisher does.

That means that the benefits of a ban on surveillance ads wouldn’t just be an end to creepy internet spying — it would also transfer power from tech companies to news companies, online performers and other creative workers.

III. Open up app stores: 30% of every dollar spent on app-based digital subscriptions is claimed by two companies, Google and Apple, the mobile duopoly. This app store tax is a pure transfer from news to tech. The EU’s Digital Markets Act and the proposed US Open App Markets Act are both designed to kill the app store tax. Dropping mobile payment processing fees from 30% to the industry standard 2–5% will instantaneously make increase the revenue from every subscriber by 25% or more.

IV. Make social media end-to-end: Tech platforms’ predictable enshittification strategy always ends with publishers no longer being able to reach their subscribers unless they pay to “boost” their content. Social media companies claim to be facilitators of the connection between publishers and audiences, but in reality, they take those audiences hostage and ransom them off to publishers. An end-to-end rule for social media would require platforms to reliably deliver material published by accounts to their own followers, who asked to see that material.

The debate over news and tech starts from the erroneous — and dangerous — assumption that the platforms are stealing the news media’s content, by letting their users talk about, quote and link to the news. This isn’t theft: if you’re not allowed to talk about the news, then it’s not the news — it’s a secret.

The platforms are stealing from news, though: they’re not stealing content, they’re stealing money. Between sky-high ad-tech rakes, app store taxes, and ransom demands to reach your own subscribers, the tech companies have grabbed the majority of money generated by news workers and the companies they work for.

Ending this theft will produce a more sustainable and robust source of funding for the news — without compromising news companies’ ability to aggressively hold tech to account, and without propping up financialized, hollowed-out media monopolies at the expense of an independent press.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes

[Image ID: EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery.]

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

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

#pluralistic #eff #end-to-end #big tech #monopoly #news bargaining codes #link taxes #open app markets act #ad-tech #antitrust #digital services act #breakups #america act #privacy law #app store breakups #app stores #digital markets act

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