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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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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

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ramblings-of-a-chaotic-neutral · 4 months ago

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Hello everyone! Here's a new au for you all! Don't worry, I'm still going to be doing a part 3 for the Disir au, but this is something for you all while you wait! Enjoy! :D

This au takes place in a modern setting where Merlin has been waiting for Arthur for over 1500 years. Merlin believes that Arthur will rise directly from the lake, as Kilgharrah led him to believe, but in actuality, Arthur, Gwen, and all the knights were reincarnated and born into new lives without any memory of their past lives.

In this modern setting, Arthur's reincarnation, Arthur Penn, works for a top-secret task force in MI6, known as the Knights. The Knights are tasked with monitoring and hunting down dangerous otherworldly or supernatural threats.

The Knights task force was successful for many years, up until one fateful mission. The team was exploring a cave with high levels of strange radiation, which usually indicated strong supernatural forces. While they didn’t encounter anything in the cave, agent Lance DuLac got separated from the group somehow and was missing for several hours before they found him sitting in front of some crystals, seemingly entranced.

While he was physically fine, Lance was never quite the same afterwards, having strange dreams or speaking in an unknown language at random. Since one of their best agents was left near-insane and they didn't even find anything, that mission was deemed a disaster, which led to the Knights getting disbanded by their superiors.

After the Knights were disbanded, Arthur was put on several solo missions, hunting down supernatural creatures, but he eventually got a new mission.

MI6 had been following and observing an entity known as Emrys for decades, ever since the 1930’s, when reports of an “immortal man” first reached intelligence agencies.

Ever since Emrys's immortality and presence through history was confirmed, MI6 always had someone trailing him and documenting his actions. However, he had never shown any real threat to humanity despite his estimated power level sitting at that of a god’s. In fact, the only documented case of any sort of power from that they had observed in their 90 years of tailing him was during WWII, when a bomb was dropped over his little cottage and he made it disappear with a wave of his hand.

Over the years, the post of watching Emrys had become the most laid-back and least threatening job in the entire supernatural department of MI6. After all, he had never hurt anyone in the entire time that they had watched him, so all an agent had to do was keep their distance and they’d be fine. Hell, it was practically a 9 to 5 job. It was, as far as jobs within the supernatural department went, extremely boring.

Which made agent Arthur Penn extremely overqualified for the post. Unfortunately, agent Gwaine Greene, who had been assigned to Emrys post in the years following the Knights’ disbandment, had been running his mouth to their superiors that Arthur was too high strung and throwing himself into one dangerous mission after the next and needed a lighter mission to cool down. And, even more unfortunately, their superiors had listened to that loudmouth.

So now Arthur was being assigned to watch an old man for an unspecified amount of time. Yay, this was exactly what he hoped his career as an agent at MI6 would look like. Agent coordinator Gwen Smith gave him his debrief, showing him the extensive file that MI6 had on Emrys, his abilities, his routine, and his alternate appearances, because apparently this bloke could change his age as well.

So, Arthur begins his new assignment with a generally bad attitude, but he still performs his duties. Arthur tails Emrys, during which time Emrys mostly sticks to the routine that Gwen had showed him: walking around a nearby lake every morning, then going into town for lunch and to chat with locals about mundane things like the weather, going back home, reading and writing and cooking and cleaning, and then going to bed. Rinse and repeat.

However, as the weeks go by, Arthur notices something… strange. All the previous agents who had post had reported that, even if he knew they were trailing him, Emrys never really paid them much attention. A passing glance or a knowing smile perhaps, but never anything overt. A few years ago, one agent even made the bold move of having a drink next to Emrys in a pub, and Emrys had only asked him if he was "off the clock". If Emrys was upset about being followed, he certainly didn't show it.

So this? This had never happened to any of the other agents watching Emrys before.

A few weeks into his new post, Emrys had started… staring at Arthur. The stares were accompanies by an unnerving feeling, like Arthur was an insect pinned against a microscope. Like Emrys was looking into Arthur very soul and judging him for something.

The feeling of being watched by Emrys made the hairs of the back of Arthur's neck rise, just like whenever he was facing down monsters that looked like they crawled out of humanity's worst nightmares. He was the one supposed to do the watching, not the other way around!

After only three days of Emrys's petrifying stares, Arthur decided to go back to headquarters and give them an update. If Emrys's behavior had changed so suddenly, it might be a sign that the entity was planning something bigger, and they needed to be prepared for anything the immortal could throw their way.

Arthur's paranoia at being watched must have really gotten to him over the past few days though, because for the entire trip back to London, he swore he could see glimpses of Emrys out of the corner of his eyes. But every time he whirled around to see if Emrys truly was following him, there was nothing there. Besides, Emrys had never once left that little town by the lake in over 90 years. Why would he leave now?

Arthur arrived back at headquarters by the end of the day, and he quickly arranged a meeting with his superiors. If Emrys was plotting something, the entire supernatural division had to go on high alert.

About halfway through through the meeting, however, the lights started to flicker and the entire building started to shake, as if a massive earthquake was happening. Everyone sprang into action, weapons in hand and ready for any attack, but Arthur's eyes went wide with panic. He knew, somehow, what- or who- was behind this.

Sure enough, a guard burst into the room a couple second later, yelling about how Emrys was in the lobby making demands and shaking the earth with his anger.

Arthur and his bosses ran out to the lobby and were met with a horrible sight: Emrys standing at their front door with the guards' weapons disintegrating before they could even take aim at him.

"I will not ask you again. Where is he?"

Emrys's voice was more impatient than furious, but the threat of his power was more than enough to send a shover down everyone's spine, Arthur's most of all. Because while his superiors and fellow agents were frantically whispering to each other, trying to figure out who Emrys could be referring to, Arthur knew. There was only one mortal Emrys had shown any interest in over the past 90 years, after all.

"He's after me." The whispering of the agents around Arthur ceased as a horrified hush fell over the group. "I don't know why, but he's looking for me."

The agents around him shared a look, which slowly morphed from terrified to determined.

"Then we have to make sure he doesn't get to you," Gwaine said, uncharacteristically solemn. "Whatever reason he wants you for, it can't be good for anyone."

The other agents around them nodded and murmured in agreement, even as their voices were quickly drowned out by the rumbling of the building around them and the sounds of gunfire and screams behind them.

Suddenly, Lance, who had been silent the entire time, cut in.

"I know a back way out of the building. I can sneak Arthur through the back and escape to a safehouse, somewhere Emrys can't find us."

"No, absolutely not. I won't run away and leave you all to fight-"

"Arthur." Gwen's voice cut off his denial. "For all we know, if he gets his hands on you, he could become even more dangerous. Please, if not for your sake, then for everyone's: don't let him get to you."

Arthur swallowed thickly, holding back tears. Lance looked at him, his face growing more and more panicked as the sounds of conflict grew closer and closer to their hiding spot.

"Alright, I'll go, but I expect to see all of you when I get back. You told me not to let him get ahold of me, but the same goes for all of you: no dying on me today, got it? Especially not to some ancient bloke."

His friends smiled and nodded at him, and Lance took his arm and started leading him through the building, running down narrow hallways and darkened corridors until they reached a small, hidden exit on the side of the building, disguised among the building's brick exterior. The two of them burst out of the building into the adjacent alleyway, out of breath from their frantic sprint.

"Alright, where to now? How do we get to this safehouse of yours?"

Lance turned to face Arthur, but there was something strange about him. His face looked oddly conflicted and... guilty?

"I'm sorry, Arthur."

"What? Lance, what are you-"

Arthur froze as a figure stepped into entrance to the alley, blocking the only escape route. Arthur's hands reached for his gun, but he froze as two burning golden eyes stared into his soul.

And then, the world around him went dark.

I hope you all enjoyed this au! To clarify, Lance was trapped in the crystal cave and saw his memories of his past life as Lancelot, which led to him seeking out Merlin and forming a plan with him to get Arthur assigned to Emrys watching post so that Merlin could take Arthur to the crystal cave and finally reunite with his king.

And, as always, thank you for reading through my ramblings! :D

#merlin #bbc merlin #merlin bbc #merthur #arthur pendragon #merlin au #merlin prompts #emrys

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cheftsunoda · 9 hours ago

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ꜰʟɪɢʜᴛ 22 — ɪꜱᴀᴄᴋ ʜᴀᴅᴊᴀʀ

written blurbs

isack hadjar x !flight attendant reader

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isack hadjar, always on the move with the formula 1 calendar, meets you—his flight attendant—on a routine trip. but nothing about you feels routine. a quiet glance, a conversation over bad coffee, and a missed connection later, he realizes he’s in deeper than he expected. you work flight 22, and he starts booking it whenever he can. you fall for him too, but your schedules never quite line up—and both of you are scared of what this could become.

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(a/n) : at the beginning of june, i promised an anon a rookie series and as promised here is a start. i will be doing sporadic posts regarding the rookies all month long and they will all be based off of my favorite kali uchis songs! enjoyyyy

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word count ; 4.45k

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The terminal is quieter than usual for a Friday night. You’re grateful for that — your feet already ache, and you haven’t even boarded the aircraft yet. You’ve still got a good forty minutes before you have to report to the gate, so you slip into the airline lounge, hoping to catch your breath before the long-haul overnight shift.

The soft hum of ambient jazz plays over the speakers. The lights are dim. Someone’s clinking ice into a glass at the self-serve bar in the corner. You exhale deeply, shrug your jacket off, and sink into the oversized armchair near the window — the one with the view of the runway lights flickering against the dark sky. It’s peaceful. For about thirty seconds.

Because then you hear the chair next to you shuffle and creak. You glance sideways, instinctively, and almost wish you hadn’t — because sitting there, hood pulled up, legs stretched out, is Isack Hadjar.

You don’t recognize him right away. Not in that tired, real world way. He’s not grinning like he does during interviews or flanked by engineers. He just looks… soft. Quiet. A little worn down. A duffel bag slung low on one shoulder, a crumpled boarding pass sticking out of the side pocket. He looks like someone trying not to be noticed — and failing, just a little.

You quickly look away.

But then he speaks.

“Hey—do you know if they have real food here or is it all, like, snack mix and lies?”

His voice is smooth, tinged with the slight rasp of exhaustion. You glance back, lips twitching.

“Depends. Are you in economy or business?”

He smiles, caught. “Business. Barely. Last seat.”

You hum, standing and nodding toward the far corner. “Go left. Past the sad fruit plate. They sometimes have pasta. Sometimes. If the stars align.”

“Risky,” he says, standing too, stretching his arms over his head. He’s tall — taller than you expected. And lean. Still lanky in a way that tells you he’s younger than you first thought. His eyes linger on you for a second longer than they need to. “Thanks.”

You don’t expect him to come back. But ten minutes later, he does — holding a plastic ramekin of suspiciously orange penne and a Coke. He sits back down beside you, uninvited but not unwelcome.

“I’m Isack, by the way,” he says, like it’s just something people say in airports. Like it’s normal.

You try not to show your surprise. “I know.”

His smile widens, just a little. “That obvious?”

You shrug, teasing. “You’re not exactly anonymous. And I watch the races.”

That earns you a real laugh. It’s low and warm and bubbles in his throat like he hasn’t had anything to laugh about in a while.

“You crew?” he asks, nodding at your ID lanyard.

“Yeah. Flight 22 to Heathrow. Overnight haul.”

“No shit,” he murmurs. “That’s my flight.”

You blink. “Really?”

He taps the boarding pass tucked into the sleeve of his backpack and hands it over. 2A.

“Well, look at that,” you murmur, handing it back with a smile that threatens to give away more than you intend. “Guess I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

Something flickers in his eyes. “Guess so.”

And for the first time in a long while — even with the hum of engines outside, the ache in your ankles, the weight of hours ahead — you don’t feel tired. You feel... awake.

And as you both sit there, quietly watching the runway light up with incoming flights, you can’t help but wonder if fate doesn’t book her own tickets sometimes — choosing seats and gate numbers and awkward airport chairs just to get two people to look up at the same time.You have no idea you’re about to spend eleven hours with him, thirty eight thousand feet in the sky.

But Flight 22 is just getting ready for takeoff.

⋆｡° ✮

The cabin is already filling when you hear the soft buzz of boarding chimes. You’re standing near the galley in your pressed uniform, checking overhead bins and helping passengers get settled. It’s routine, like muscle memory now — you hardly notice faces anymore. You’re running on autopilot. Until you see him.

Isack steps onto the plane, hoodie swapped for a loose t-shirt and jacket. His curls are messy from the airport nap and his carry-on is slung lazily over one shoulder. He looks up, scanning the rows — and then he sees you. Your eyes meet. His lips curve. It’s not the smirk you expected. It’s softer. Familiar. Like you’re an inside joke in the middle of a crowd. You try not to smile — but you fail miserably.

“Small world,” he murmurs as he walks past, just low enough for only you to hear.

You clear your throat, keeping your tone professional. “Seat 2A, Mr. Hadjar. Right up front.”

He gives you a playful side glance. “That’s Isack.”

You arch a brow. “I’m on-duty. It’s Mr. Hadjar for now.”

He chuckles, and the sound trails behind him as he slips into his seat — just as another passenger asks for help with their bag, dragging you back into motion. But even as the plane fills and the safety demo begins, you feel that little glance still humming somewhere under your skin. He watches you closely as you do your job to a tee.

After what feels like forever, everyone has boarded and your coworker has began to the take off process. You pick up the overhead speaker and begin your safety speech. Isack has eyes on you the entire time and that huge smile covers his face. You tried your best to avoid eye contact and deny that blush creeping up on your cheeks.

“There's several exits on this aircraft in the event of an emergency. At this time, please fasten your seat belts, as we are preparing for take off And welcome aboard, Flight 22.” You finish, turn back to your seat and await take off.

⋆｡° ✮

It’s quiet now. The cabin lights are dimmed to a soft blue, most passengers curled up under thin blankets, heads tilted toward the windows. A few TV screens glow. You’ve done the drink service, checked the aisles, answered the call buttons. Everything is calm. You grab a bottle of water and drift up toward the front — just to check in. He’s awake.

Of course he is. Headphones in, curled sideways in his seat, reading something on his phone that clearly isn't holding his attention. He glances up when you approach.

“Still alive?” you whisper, holding the water out to him.

He accepts it with a quiet smile. “Barely. That pasta was a war crime.”

You stifle a laugh, lowering your voice even more. “Tried to warn you in the lounge.”

He rests his head against the seat and studies you for a moment. The overhead light casts soft shadows across his face — over his cheekbone, the slope of his nose, the slight crease between his brows. There’s a stillness in the air. A gravity.

“You don’t seem like you belong here,” he says suddenly.

You blink. “Here as in…?”

“Serving mini pretzels at 2 a.m.,” he says, voice low and rough from sleep. “You feel like you belong somewhere else. I don’t know. A record shop. An old movie theatre. A dream someone keeps having.”

Your heart stumbles. It’s not a pick-up line. It doesn’t feel rehearsed. It’s just… honest.

“Funny,” you murmur, “I was just thinking the same about you.”

He watches you like he’s memorizing this moment. “This job ever make you feel invisible?”

You swallow, caught off-guard. “Sometimes.”

“I see you.”

The cabin is quiet, but the space between you feels louder than ever. Not chaotic — just filled with something real. Something unsaid. Something still rising, like the plane did just hours ago.

You shift your weight, almost reluctantly. “You should get some rest, Isack.”

He nods slowly. “Yeah. I just... didn’t want to miss you walking by.”

You walk away before he can see the way your lips part in surprise — before he can see the smile you don’t quite fight this time.

There are still six hours left of Flight 22.

And somehow, you already know — this flight might land, but something else just took off.

⋆｡° ✮

The plane touches down with a soft thud — the kind you barely feel, the kind pilots quietly pride themselves on. The runway blurs past the windows in streaks of grey and gold as the early morning light breaks over Heathrow. It’s too early for the city to be awake, but somehow… you are.

You’re used to this part — the shuffle of passengers unbuckling seatbelts before the chime, the rustle of jackets pulled from overhead bins, the echo of thank you and goodbye as they step off into the jet bridge and back into the world.

What you’re not used to is him still being in his seat. Isack stays put. He doesn’t stand. Doesn’t reach for his bag. Doesn’t even glance at his phone. He just watches the slow wave of passengers drift toward the front of the plane — and then glances up at you.

There’s a slight smile at the corners of his mouth. Like he’s decided something. Like he’s waited the entire flight for this moment.

You tilt your head as you pass by his seat, playfully quiet. “Tired? Or just really committed to avoiding customs?”

He chuckles under his breath. “Maybe I just wanted to say goodbye without an audience.”

You pause. He’s the last one. The plane is empty now — quiet in a way that feels almost sacred. Like the last few pages of a good book you don’t want to end.

“Go on,” you tease, crossing your arms gently, your voice softer now. “Give me your big dramatic send off, Hadjar.”

He stands slowly, carefully, as though part of him is still debating this. But then he pulls a small folded slip of paper from his pocket — the corner of a torn boarding pass — and hands it to you with the faintest smile. Scrawled across it in blue ink.

Isack H. +44 •••• •••••

Been a lot of places and seen a lot of faces. But nothing like you, flight 22.

Your fingers tighten slightly around the note. You glance up at him, pulse somewhere between your ears and your chest.

“I’m not sure this is standard post flight protocol,” you whisper.

He shrugs. “Neither is meeting someone in an airport lounge and thinking about them for eleven hours straight.”

You laugh, trying not to show how much that lands.

He shifts, suddenly shy. “I know you probably get weird passengers flirting with you all the time. I’m not trying to be… one of them. But I don’t know. It felt like we were already on the same page. Or maybe just the same flight.”

You press your lips together, heart already betraying you with the warmth in your smile. “You really worked that metaphor, huh?”

He grins. “I’ve been sitting on that line since hour four.”

You laugh again, softer this time, and tuck the paper into your jacket pocket. “Thanks for not trying to use it over the intercom.”

He lifts his duffel over his shoulder and stops at the threshold of the aircraft door. Just before stepping off, he turns.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “For what it’s worth… I really hope this isn’t the only flight I ever see you on.”

And with that, he disappears down the jet bridge, leaving behind nothing but the warm trace of citrus and sandalwood and something hopeful in the air.

You’re still standing by the galley when the cleaning crew boards. You’re still thinking about that note in your pocket — like he’s already hoping there’s a next time. And for the first time in a long time, as the sky brightens over the airport tarmac, you feel like you’re not just working flights — you’re chasing something.

⋆｡° ✮

You’re halfway through your shift, curled in the crew lounge at the airport hotel, the hum of the city outside mixing with distant car horns and the occasional plane overhead. The soft glow of your phone screen cuts through the dim light as your fingers swipe through messages from family, friends, and the usual work updates. And then — a buzz. A new message from an unknown number. You open it.

Hey. I just landed. You’re here too? This has to be some kind of cosmic joke, right?

Isack. Your breath catches. You stare at the message, heart skipping a beat. It’s been barely a week since Flight 22, but already it feels like a lifetime — and yet, here he is, as real as the dim hotel lamp beside you. You type back quickly, trying to play it cool.

Yeah, crazy timing. I’m on a layover before heading back to London. Didn’t know you’d be racing here.

His reply is almost instant.

I’ve got the whole weekend. Maybe we can catch a coffee? Or something stronger after the race?

Your fingers hesitate. It sounds so easy — so perfect — and yet your mind floods with every caution you’ve ever had about mixing work, life, and the chaos of racing. But the warmth blossoming in your chest is impossible to deny.

I’d like that. But only if you promise not to make me chase you down the paddock.

His laughter practically beams through the text.

Deal. I’m terrible at running. You’ll have to catch me.

For a moment, you just sit there, phone in hand, heart loud in the quiet room. This—this feeling—so new, so fragile—feels like it might just be something real.

Because for once, the world isn’t spinning too fast, the flights aren’t blurring together, and the distance isn’t a thousand miles. It’s just you. Him. And the possibility of something that feels like home.

⋆｡° ✮

The city lights flicker through the rain-speckled taxi window as you sit beside Isack, the hum of the engine and soft jazz on the radio wrapping around you like a secret. The night feels stolen — a rare pause in the relentless pace of your lives. You both agreed, quietly and without much planning, to slip away after your shifts — no suits, no uniforms, just you two in worn sneakers and the weight of the day falling off your shoulders.

He pulls the collar of his jacket up against the chill as you step onto the slick pavement, and you catch the small smile he gives you — that look that says, I’m glad you’re here. The streets smell of wet pavement and late-night coffee, the buzz of distant laughter spilling from open doorways of cozy bars. You wander together, no destination but the rhythm of your steps.

Inside a dimly lit jazz club, the air thick with the smoky sweetness of bourbon and the gentle sway of a saxophone, you find a corner booth. He orders a couple of drinks — something smooth and warm — and slides the glass toward you with a grin. Your hands brush as you take it, and the spark between you flares quietly, unspoken but unmistakable.

The conversation flows easily, the kind of effortless connection that feels like it’s been waiting under the surface, just needing the right moment to rise. You talk about the weirdness of airports, the loneliness of the road, the small things that keep you sane — a favorite song, a secret comfort food.

At one point, Isack leans forward, eyes catching the light in a way that makes your breath hitch. “You know,” he murmurs, “I’ve never met anyone who makes the chaos feel less… chaotic.”

You smile softly, heart tightening. “Me neither.”

Outside, the rain has stopped. The city glistens, every puddle reflecting neon signs and streetlamps. You step out, shoulders brushing, and without quite realizing it, your fingers intertwine.

He stops you beneath a flickering streetlamp, close enough that you can see the warmth in his eyes, the faint tremor of something vulnerable beneath the confident facade.

For a heartbeat, neither of you moves. Then his hand cups your cheek, thumb tracing a light path along your skin.

“I’ve wanted to do this since that first flight,” he whispers.

Your heart pounds, everything narrowing to the space between you.

And then, tender and sure, his lips meet yours.

The kiss is soft, slow — a promise wrapped in warmth. It tastes like the rain, like late nights, like all the moments you didn’t know you were waiting for.

When you finally pull apart, his forehead rests against yours, breath mingling.

“Flight 22,” he says with a grin, “might just be my favorite flight after all.”

You laugh, the sound light and free, and for the first time, you let yourself believe that maybe, just maybe, this could be the start of something real.

⋆｡° ✮

The first light of dawn filters softly through the sheer curtains, casting a pale golden hue across the quiet hotel room. The city outside is still waking up — distant car horns, muffled footsteps, the gentle hum of early traffic. But inside, time feels suspended between yesterday and whatever comes next.

You lie on your side, fingers entwined in the crisp white sheets, heart still pounding from the weight of the night. The taste of his kiss lingers on your lips — tender, sure, like a promise whispered against the chaos you both live with.

Beside you, Isack stirs. His lashes flutter open slowly, eyes heavy with sleep but sharp with something raw and honest. He watches you for a moment, as if committing you to memory, before finally breaking the silence.

“Hey,” his voice is low, tentative. “I don’t want to scare you… but I need to say it.”

You turn to face him, the soft morning light catching the subtle shadows of his cheekbones and the curve of his mouth. There’s vulnerability there — unguarded, real.

“I want more,” he says simply. “Not just the stolen moments on layovers or in airports. I want to see where this could go... if you’ll let me.”

Your breath catches. His words settle over you like a fragile hope, but beneath it lies a knot of fear you’ve carried too long.

“I want that too,” you whisper, voice barely steady. “But... it’s not that simple.”

Isack’s brow furrows slightly. He reaches out, his fingers brushing your arm in a tentative gesture, searching for connection.

“What’s holding you back?” he asks gently.

You pull your knees up, wrapping your arms around them as if trying to hold yourself together. The weight of your past presses down on you — the heartbreak, the betrayals, the loneliness that made trust feel like a luxury you couldn’t afford.

“It’s the baggage,” you say, voice thick with the ache you’ve kept hidden. “Not the kind you check in at the airport and forget about. It follows me everywhere — every city, every flight, every goodbye. I’ve learned to build walls because letting someone in... means risking everything.”

His eyes soften, filled with understanding, but also a quiet determination. “I’m not here to break you,” he says. “I want to be the one you choose to let inside.”

You want to believe him. You want to believe in the warmth of his hand on your cheek, the steady kindness in his gaze. But years of hurt make your heart hesitate.

“Sometimes,” you admit, “believing isn’t enough. I want to trust again, but I don’t know if I can. Not yet.”

A heavy silence stretches between you, filled with the unspoken fears and fragile hopes that neither of you can fully voice.

Isack shifts closer, his hand tentatively reaching for yours. You don’t pull away, but you don’t squeeze either. It’s an invitation — a lifeline — and you’re torn between grasping it and stepping back.

“I don’t expect forever,” he says softly. “Just a chance. One step at a time.”

You nod, tears prickling your eyes, but before you can say more, the weight of reality presses in.

You stand, pulling your jacket around you like armor, heart pounding in your chest.

“I have to go,” you whisper, voice trembling. “My flight’s in a few hours.”

He rises too, the vulnerability replaced by a quiet strength as he steps toward the door with you.

“Please don’t close this door,” he says, voice cracking just a little. “Not yet.”

You look back at him one last time — a mixture of hope and heartbreak swirling in your gaze.

“I’m not closing it,” you promise, “just... taking a moment to breathe.”

And then you step into the hallway, the soft click of the door shutting behind you ringing like a final note — or maybe, the beginning of something new.

As the hotel room falls silent, Isack sinks back onto the bed, fingers brushing the spot where your hand had rested.His thoughts echo the bittersweet words you both carry.

“Maybe we’re not gonna make it... but at least I’m going down with you.”

⋆｡° ✮

You’re barely awake when the pager buzzes sharply against the quiet hum of the crew lounge. The early-morning airport chaos hasn’t started yet, but your heart leaps anyway—because you know what this means.

Flight 22 to JFK. All crew report immediately.

Your breath catches. Flight 22 again.

You blink at the schedule on your tablet, scanning the roster for details, and then you see it: the passenger manifest.

Entire Formula 1 grid on board. Including Isack Hadjar.

It feels like your chest has been squeezed by an invisible hand.

You’re both exhilarated and nervous. It’s surreal to think you’ll be flying the people who live your other world—the fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled universe of racing. And, of course, there’s Isack. The memory of his soft smile and that tentative morning lingers in your mind like a secret melody.

The crew briefing is a whirlwind—schedules, special security protocols, VIP hospitality. You find yourself juggling your usual checklist with the knowledge that every step you take will be watched by drivers, media, and maybe, just maybe, Isack.

The terminal is buzzing with the excited energy of the grid arriving in small clusters. You catch glimpses of familiar faces—some laughing, others focused, all brilliant in their own way. Your pulse quickens when you see Isack stride through the jet bridge, the same easy confidence he wears both on and off the track.

He spots you, and there it is again—the quiet smile that sends a shockwave through your chest.

Throughout boarding, the cabin is a controlled chaos. You’re balancing passenger requests, coordinating with other crew, and stealing glances at Isack when you can. The hum of the engines seems to pulse with your heartbeat.

During the climb, the tension eases for a moment. You find yourself near his seat, pretending to adjust a blanket or offer a drink just so you can catch his eye. His grateful smile feels like a lifeline.

“Glad you’re here,” he murmurs, voice low enough to keep between you.

You shrug, cheeks flushing. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

The hours stretch out, filled with stolen conversations beneath the dim cabin lights. He talks about the upcoming premiere, the madness of the season, and how he wishes this moment felt less surreal.

You laugh quietly, sharing stories about life in the skies—long layovers, funny passenger encounters, and the odd comfort of airplane coffee.

The intimacy grows in the quiet spaces between announcements and service carts. Your fingers brush accidentally once, twice, and neither of you pulls away.

The chaos of the day outside this metal tube fades until all that remains is the space between you and the slow-building promise in his gaze.

As the plane descends toward New York, you realize something has shifted. The distance you tried to keep has shrunk. The hope that this connection could be more isn’t just a whisper anymore — it’s a roar.

And somewhere deep inside, you know this flight—Flight 22—might just be the start of the journey you both need.

⋆｡° ✮

You never imagined love would feel like this. Not calm. Not perfect. Not a cinematic fairytale with a neat ending and string music in the background. No—this is turbulence. This is check-ins and delayed flights and last-minute decisions. This is you, half-breathless in an oversized hoodie and tangled hair, running down a street in New York at 3 a.m. to get to Isack’s hotel before he flies out again. Because you had to say it. Because you had to choose him. Because you’d rather go down in flames with him than live safe without him.

You don’t knock. He opens the door before you can, like he was waiting. Like he knew. His eyes are tired. He hasn’t even packed yet. But the second you walk in, everything softens. You drop your bag at your feet. Your voice is a whisper.

“Let’s get away from it all.”

He blinks once—then twice. Like he’s trying to figure out if you’re real, or just the dream he’s been having for weeks.

“You serious?” he asks, stepping closer, barely breathing.

You nod. “I don’t care where we go. Don’t even care if we fall apart in three months. I just know I don’t want to be anywhere if it isn’t with you.”

He’s still now, chest rising slowly, like he’s scared to break the moment.

“Our baggage might be too much,” he says softly. “We’re both messed up. Our lives are insane. I travel every week. You live on planes. What if this doesn’t work?”

You smile, sad and infinite and real. “Then it crashes. But at least I’m going down with you.”

He breathes out a laugh, but it cracks at the edges. His eyes are shining.

“You’ll hate me sometimes,” he whispers. “You’ll question everything.”

“Probably,” you say. “But I’ll still choose you.”

A silence stretches between you. It’s not heavy. It’s sacred.

He steps forward, wrapping his arms around your waist and burying his face in your neck. You cling to him like a life raft in open water.

“We can’t promise forever,” he murmurs.

“No,” you say, holding him tighter. “But we can promise this.”

He pulls back just enough to look at you—really look—and you see it all in his eyes, the fear, the awe, the reckless devotion.

You press your forehead to his.

“You and me,” you whisper. “Flight 22.”

He kisses you like he’s saying yes. Like he’s saying take me on away. Like he’s saying I’d rather fall with you than fly alone. And when you wake up hours later—curled into each other, surrounded by half-packed bags and a love so terrifyingly real it aches—you know nothing in this world can compare. Not even the crash. Because sometimes, love isn’t about the landing. It’s about the takeoff. And you’ve never felt more free.

⋆｡° ✮

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