#SOCIAL MEDIA + TECH GIANTS

[chloeworships]

FYI

I wanted to share this as confirmation of what the LORD told me and about the people God warned ⚠️ There is blood involved 🩸

It’s not just that, it’s journalists as well. Do you know how many warnings I’ve been receiving for them? 👀 both the journalists who uphold integrity and truth and the ones who spread misinformation? It’s frightening!!!

God would never ever lie to me about this “threat”.

Innocent people don’t belong in jail because you disagree with their narrative or opinion of you.

I’m also posting this because last night I heard both the words “complaint” and “opponent”. I’m just sharing with you what God has shared with me.

[mishkakagehishka]

Some innovation this capitalism is breeding

[apieinvestavimapaprastai]

Meta Platforms Inc. Stock Price Forecast: Long-Term Investment Insights

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Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, Inc., is a multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates several widely-used social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Meta is also heavily invested in augmented and virtual reality technologies, with products like Meta Quest (VR headsets) and…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

[Image ID: Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious -Publishers Weekly]

I won’t sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became “five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[Image ID: A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI”]

The Internet Con isn’t just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it’s a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.

How do we do that? With interoperability: the ability to plug new technology into those crapulent, decaying platform. Interop lets you choose which parts of the service you want and block the parts you don’t (think of how an adblocker lets you take the take-it-or-leave “offer” from a website and reply with “How about nah?”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But interop isn’t just about making platforms less terrible — it’s an explosive charge that demolishes walled gardens. With interop, you can leave a social media service, but keep talking to the people who stay. With interop, you can leave your mobile platform, but bring your apps and media with you to a rival’s service. With interop, you can break up with Amazon, and still keep your audiobooks.

So, if interop is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?

Well, it used to be. Interop is how Microsoft became the dominant operating system:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

[Image ID: Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one’s better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That’s The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality. -Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine]

It’s how Apple saved itself from Microsoft’s vicious campaign to destroy it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Every tech giant used interop to grow, and then every tech giant promptly turned around and attacked interoperators. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Big Tech did it, that was progress; when you do it back to Big Tech, that’s piracy. The tech giants used their monopoly power to make interop without permission illegal, creating a kind of “felony contempt of business model” (h/t Jay Freeman).

The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts’s Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.

What’s more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality. Because we are living through the Great Enshittification, and crises erupt every ten seconds, and when those crises occur, the “good ideas lying around” can move from the fringes to the center in an eyeblink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo

[Image ID: Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL]

After all, we’ve known Big Tech was rotten for years, but we had no idea what to do about it. Every time a Big Tech colossus did something ghastly to millions or billions of people, we tried to fix the tech company. There’s no fixing the tech companies. They need to burn. The way to make users safe from Big Tech predators isn’t to make those predators behave better — it’s to evacuate those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

I’ve been campaigning for human rights in the digital world for more than 20 years; I’ve been EFF’s European Director, representing the public interest at the EU, the UN, Westminster, Ottawa and DC. This is the subject I’ve devoted my life to, and I live my principles. I won’t let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won’t carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college. That’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means that my books aren’t enshittification bait.

But not selling on Audible has another cost, one that’s more important to me: a lot of readers prefer audiobooks and 9 out of 10 of those readers start and end their searches on Audible. When they don’t find an author there, they assume no audiobook exists, period. It got so bad I put up an audiobook on Amazon — me, reading an essay, explaining how Audible rips off writers and readers. It’s called “Why None of My Audiobooks Are For Sale on Audible”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

[Image ID: Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age. -Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock]

To get my audiobooks into readers’ ears, I pre-sell them on Kickstarter. This has been wildly successful, both financially and as a means of getting other prominent authors to break up with Amazon and use crowdfunding to fill the gap. Writers like Brandon Sanderson are doing heroic work, smashing Amazon’s monopoly:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/guest-editorial-cory-doctorow-is-a-bestselling-author-but-audible-wont-carry-his-audiobooks/

And to be frank, I love audiobooks, too. I swim every day as physio for a chronic pain condition, and I listen to 2–3 books/month on my underwater MP3 player, disappearing into an imaginary world as I scull back and forth in my public pool. I’m able to get those audiobooks on my MP3 player thanks to Libro.fm, a DRM-free store that supports indie booksellers all over the world:

https://blog.libro.fm/a-qa-with-mark-pearson-libro-fm-ceo-and-co-founder/

Producing my own audiobooks has been a dream. Working with Skyboat Media, I’ve gotten narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson, @neil-gaiman​ and Stefan Rudnicki for my work:

https://craphound.com/shop/

[Image ID: “This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn’t want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When Its Gone”]

But for this title, I decided that I would read it myself. After all, I’ve been podcasting since 2006, reading my own work aloud every week or so, even as I traveled the world and gave thousands of speeches about the subject of this book. I was excited (and a little trepedatious) at the prospect, but how could I pass up a chance to work with director Gabrielle de Cuir, who has directed everyone from Anne Hathaway to LeVar Burton to Eric Idle?

Reader, I fucking nailed it. I went back to those daily recordings fully prepared to hate them, but they were good — even great (especially after my engineer John Taylor Williams mastered them). Listen for yourself!

https://archive.org/details/cory_doctorow_internet_con_chapter_01

I hope you’ll consider backing this Kickstarter. If you’ve ever read my free, open access, CC-licensed blog posts and novels, or listened to my podcasts, or come to one of my talks and wished there was a way to say thank you, this is it. These crowdfunders make my DRM-free publishing program viable, even as audiobooks grow more central to a writer’s income and even as a single company takes over nearly the entire audiobook market.

Backers can choose from the DRM-free audiobook, DRM-free ebook (EPUB and MOBI) and a hardcover — including a signed, personalized option, fulfilled through the great LA indie bookstore Book Soup:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

What’s more, these ebooks and audiobooks are unlike any you’ll get anywhere else because they are sold without any terms of service or license agreements. As has been the case since time immemorial, when you buy these books, they’re yours, and you are allowed to do anything with them that copyright law permits — give them away, lend them to friends, or simply read them with any technology you choose.

As with my previous Kickstarters, backers can get their audiobooks delivered with an app (from libro.fm) or as a folder of MP3s. That helps people who struggle with “sideloading,” a process that Apple and Google have made progressively harder, even as they force audiobook and ebook sellers to hand over a 30% app tax on every dollar they make:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

Enshittification is rotting every layer of the tech stack: mobile, payments, hosting, social, delivery, playback. Every tech company is pulling the rug out from under us, using the chokepoints they built between audiences and speakers, artists and fans, to pick all of our pockets.

The Internet Con isn’t just a lament for the internet we lost — it’s a plan to get it back. I hope you’ll get a copy and share it with the people you love, even as the tech platforms choke off your communities to pad their quarterly numbers.

Next weekend (Aug 4-6), I'll be in Austin for Armadillocon, a science fiction convention, where I'm the Guest of Honor:

https://armadillocon.org/d45/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

[Image ID: My forthcoming book 'The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation' in various editions: Verso hardcover, audiobook displayed on a phone, and ebook displayed on an e-ink reader.]

[leo-fie]

Mastodon, friends! Mastodon! It's not owned by a tech wannabe monopoly for one thing.

German language lbst.me instance is nice and cozy.

Okay, dear mutuals and followers .. with Tumblr obviously struggling hard and very ominous downscaling in the future - what is your raft to safe your stuff on if Tumblr will go down sometime next year?

Hopefully Tumblr will paddle back towards the stuff its userbase really wants (like adult content!). But what if they do what they are best at and worsen our experience to the point of absolute non-usability?

Where will you go? Where are you already having a holiday home at?

For me it's Mastodon and Bluesky.

I won't return to Twitter or Reddit because of their pure, unbridled toxicity. I won't move to Instagram, because it's so anti-adult content, it's laughable. DeviantArt does nothing for me and feels so very clunky with the slow UI-of-a-thousand-pulldown-menus. Cohost is dead as the dodo bird. Dreamwidth has such a horrible 90s experience if you are trying to post pics.

So, what is your exit-strategy? I don't want to lose contact with all of you! You are my kind of people!

(Of course, I really, really, REALLY hope Tumblr will recover and move back to its old, glorious, anarchic, NSFW ways. But I'm so very wary. And weary.)

[tfp-is-my-lifeblood-lol]

I saw a Youtube comment talking about how, in the episode "Crosscross," Silas was able to track Jack's location and personal info via social media, so why didn't the Decepticons just do THAT all this time, so they could track the humans/Autobot base?

Then all the commenters agreed that it's because the CAPTCHA "I am not a robot" thing actually works on Decepticons, because they are, in fact robots.

I love this and it shall now be my crack headcanon.

(In all seriousness, I actually don't think it's a plot hole. I think it's a great example of the Decepticons' characterization.

The real reason Decepticons never tried social media tracking is because they're too proud to use human technology. To them, it's considered "inferior."

I'm fascinated by the idea that, if they hadn't underestimated human technology, they could have found all these Autobot secrets, like the location of their base and humans, EASILY. But they never bothered, because "oh, that's worthless human tech."

Keep in mind, in one episode, Starscream actually did explore the human internet, and almost located Bumblebee that way, but the others made fun of him for it (the tap-dancing monkey incident) so we can see they don't respect it enough to give it their time.

It also kinda shows how MECH, to some extent, has an advantage against the Autobots because they're all humans, and are therefore better aquatinted with Earth. Even Airachnid didn't realize social media would be a useful weapon until Silas explained it to her. The Decepticons are obviously more powerful since they're giant aliens, but MECH uses their humanity and Earth knowledge as their greatest strength. It's kinda neat.

[defsiarte]

I highly recommend joining Cara right now!

It’s a new portfolio/social media hybrid website made by artists, for artists, as a way to network, find jobs, and see art. Born from ArtStation, Behance, DeviantArt, Instagram, and countless other websites’ implementing predatory AI policies, it aims to fill a gap left in the community for those who don’t wish to support that stuff.

To me at least, it really captures the better parts of being on DA in the early 2010’s. Account setup is very streamlined, your feed is all art and no ads, and the community is very active (Due to a huge exodus of users moving there from Instagram due to Meta’s new AI policy).

The app has all the same functionality as the main site too! You’re able to customize your timeline, mark your work availability, and even toggle your profile between just being a regular timeline and exclusively a portfolio of your strongest works (I have nothing up though bc I just made my acc lol).

A lot of new websites have popped up in the past couple years due to how awful and predatory tech giants have become, and personally I’m all for it. I don’t want an internet where everyone uses the same 5 websites to get all their content. Anyway yeah I highly recommend Cara.

You can see the official explanation of their features and stuff here.

Obligatory plug to own acc

[enigma2meagain]

🚨🚨 URGENT! Congress trying to pass anti-LGBT bill under the guise of “child safety”!

UPDATE 09/05/2023:

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of her bigotry

So Marsha Blackburn, in her infinite wisdom, decided to admit in an interview with the bigoted Family Policy Alliance that the Kids Online Safety Act is a GIANT anti-transgender bill (or at the least, it’s so poorly written that it makes targeting transgender people easier). Naturally, after this blunder, she and Blumenthal are trying to do damage control. But WE have the videos, and people’s responses to this open confession in the links below:

Alejandro Caraballo’s Tweet with the Video.

Erin Reed’s followup article

Attempts at damage control commented on by Ari Drennen

PinkNews’ article about it.

Beacon Broadside Article

Mashable Article

So with all that in mind, please make way to the Bad Internet Bills website to tell your Senators that you STRONGLY advise them to drop their support/refuse to support this awful bill in light of this, or that their re-election chances will drop considerably.

-----

UPDATE 02/14/2023: Richard Blumenthal is a lying snake who’s trying to get both KOSA and EARN IT Act back into law.

He persistently continues to ignore all of the backlash against these bills, the criticisms and highlighting the serious flaws of the bill by numerous human rights and LGBTQ organizations, and it’s telling that there seems to be no one who opposed the bill at the hearings today.

Fortunately, there are those are speaking up against it, such as Evan Greer from Fight For The Future.

Keep your eyes and ears open. We will be hearing more about these bills as time goes on.

----

UPDATE 01/30/2023: Well, Chuck Schumer has chosen to backstab human rights and pro- LGBTQ communities, as well as the internet by trying to fast-track KOSA. The time table is as follows:

REINTRODUCTION OF THE BILL IN FEBRUARY

HOLDING MARKUPS IN MARCH

And holding a floor vote in JUNE

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1620088145554579456

KEEP IN MIND, this was the man who blocked legitimately good anti-Big Tech bills like AICOA on the pretense they would be “too much”, but was perfectly fine with the travesty of KOSA.

This man is in Big Tech’s pockets, because only they can afford to pay the fines that such a restrictive pro-censorship bill would enforce. The only people this bill helps are the exact people it claims to stop, while LGBTQ people have to pay the price for the greed of the corrupt congressmen and women.

All of the relevant links are still below, but I will be updated this as we go.

---

UPDATE 01/17/2023: Nothing has happened yet, but there have been rumblings of our “favorite” Senator Blumenthal talking about trying to push KOSA in again. I’ll mostly be keeping an eye on things for now, and you guys should too on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and news outlets.

---

UPDATE 12/20/2022: KOSA BILL HAS NOT BEEN INCLUDED IN THE FINAL OMNIBUS BILL! WE DID IT!

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1605261800479547392

That being said, this is very much a reprieve, since Blumenthal and Blackburn, and their cohorts have made it clear they intend to get this bill back into Congress next year. But WE DID IT. We managed to get this bill stopped from being added in the omnibus bill.

I want to thank all of you who helped to reblog this post, signed the various petitions and the open letter, and especially if you went and called your Senators. Without your effort, this might have turned out VERY differently!

Thank you all, and I hope the rest of this year is a pleasant one!

----

So, this is a particularly long post, but it’s an absolutely IMPORTANT ONE. PLEASE REBLOG! LIKING IS USELESS!

UPDATE 12/14/2022: Two weeks ago, 90+ human rights, LGBT, and tech orgs signed onto an open letter telling Senators NOT to pass this bill. in response, over 230 orgs led by the American Psychological Association signed a letter urging senators to push this bill forward.

An updated version of the bill has been pushed forward by Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn, who claim to have changed the bill in response to feedback, but insight by the likes of Evan Greer and Ari Cohn have made it clear that the changes are superficial at best, and arguably fail to properly address the problems of the original bill.

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1603139423071309825

We got blindsided by this, and we REALLY need your help!

Further explanation HERE: https://www.tumblr.com/fullhalalalchemist/703545300138262528/urgent

POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. about your opposition to this! The more voices speaking out the better, and we can’t do this alone!

The Hashtags are:

#KOSA

 #STOPKOSA

 #KidsOnlineSafetyAct

“Kids Online Safety Act” (no hashtag and quotes, just the regular words)

And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).

ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE OMNIBUS/MUST PASS SPENDING BILL:

Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441

Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542

Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965

LINKTREE WITH ALL INFO HERE: https://linktr.ee/stopkosa

----

ORIGINAL POST:

In a particularly scummy move, the Kids Online Safety Act is going to be put into the must pass end of year spending bill: www.axios.com/…

The two laws best positioned to get rolled into big year-end legislative packages, according to advocates and lawmakers, are:

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to guard kids from harmful content using new features and safeguards and to make privacy settings "on" by default for children. The law also mandates privacy audits and  more transparency about privacy policies.

At first glance, the bill doesn’t sound bad, since it’s about helping “protect children” online. But like every “protect the children” type law, this would censor the internet of anything “harmful” to children aka any LGBT, NSFW, or whatever the Right doesn’t like, force everyone to upload their govt ID’s to even access anything online, and surveil everyone else. Gutting everyone’s privacy in an era where we see massive state violence and encroaching fascism globally. This is not only pushed by the same people (Senator Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn) who created the awful EARN IT Act, but also has many of the same flaws, such as pro-censorship, anti LGBT resources and content, and pro-mass surveillance.

But the biggest problem, as Mike Stabile has pointed out, is HOW the mechanism to which this works: The State Attorney General.

This addition would allow states like Texas and Florida to sue companies for having LGBTQ+ content, along with sex education resources, incentivizing these platforms to ban that content. To be more specific, the bill allows the state attorney general to sue if they believe that platforms do not protect minors from a list of harms that includes politicized terms like "grooming" which, as we've seen can include any sort of LGBTQ information, entertainment or literature.

RuPaul on TikTok?

A clip on transgender youth on Facebook?

A gay character in a Disney movie?

Suicide hotlines for gay youth?

Cue a suit from Texas or Florida targeting the entire web.

And the problem is that given the current political climate and the cruel behavior of a number of GOP aligned political groups in positions of power, this only ends up making things RIPE for abuse and mass censorship (since companies will probably end up choosing to acquiesce to their demands rather than risk being subject to liability) not to mention the damage this would cause to children who might need resources regarding LGBT or sex education.

Furthermore, the definition of “sexually exploitative material”, “grooming”, and “child porn” has been used in the past year to target transgender people, drag queens, and the wider LGBTQ+ community by likening their very existence as sexually violent. Yet another way this bill’s language will be used to target a community that is already facing violence. Every night, Fox News blasts a story on “sexualization of children '' to fear-monger around the LGBT community. One needs to not look any further than the right-wing ecosystem to see how KOSA would easily be weaponized.

This article by Mike Masnick on Techdirt also goes further into KOSA and its adjacent bills.

To make matters even worse, on top of the usual suspects of NCOSE ( They used to be called Morality in Media, and are a far right group disguised as an anti sex trafficking org infamous for being religious assholes who HATE anything to do with sex or LGBT) supporting this travesty of a bill, it’s been revealed that the Senate leader is claiming there’s no opposition.

This is literally giving the fascists a dangerous tool to abuse, all for the sake of political brownie points against ‘Big Tech’. A tool that far right groups like the Heritage Foundation have OPENLY stated will abuse to silence LGBTQ+ or sex-ed content for youth everywhere if it passes.

The ONLY way this works is by making sure who is and isn’t a minor is to have some form of age-verification scheme. And the only way to do that is through a third party like ID.me which has recently come under scrutiny for, you guessed it, data leaks. So everyone who accesses anything online will be forced to upload their govt IDs. How is this protecting anyone’s privacy?

With all that said, what can we do?

Well, the same thing we did for the EARN IT Act; we make a LOT of noise, and get the word out.

If you have read all of the above and want to fight this, sign this open letter against KOSA.

And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).

ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE }OMNIBUS:

Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441

Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542

Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965

There is a call script with phone numbers here.

Fax them, email them. Tell them they MUST oppose this bill. CONTACT any major human rights, LGBT, and cybersecurity related organizations aligned and let them know about this bill, and the harm it can cause to LGBT rights and children! If you need more information on KOSA, we have a LINKTREE HERE.

EMPHASIZE THE HARM TO CHILDREN WHEN YOU CONTACT PEOPLE, SINCE THEY’RE TRYING TO CLAIM THAT THIS WILL HELP PROTECT CHILDREN’S PRIVACY, WHEN IT DOES THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

There’s also a Petition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation  and from Fight For the Future.

[usedpidemo]

Voguish (Itzy Ryujin)

(Thank you for the commission! I hope its to your liking.)

—————

If you had any other choice, you’d rather be stuck at where you were previously: earning a modest income, just enough to get by from job to job, performing straightforward work, and most importantly, friendly clientele to attend to. It wasn’t surprising; you knew this industry was built on the backs of some of the most snobbish, arrogant people you’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, but—

“You’re late. Again.”

Shin Ryujin was probably among the absolute worst.

If you’re going to make an honest assessment, Ryujin isn’t that bad. Serving as her head stylist for the better part of a year, she’s by far the client you’ve spent the most time with. She doesn’t talk a big deal about the money she’s making or prattle into a conversation intricately designed to inflate her ego to the moon, unlike some of the other A-listers you’ve had the ‘privilege’ of working under. 

However, her attitude is definitely up there.

It’s not even a little over a minute. In fact, you’ve been standing at her entrance door two minutes before the clock hits ten. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the right; her style, her rules. She doesn’t care that you're sweating buckets rushing her newly minted outfit from across the street up to the 27th floor. Any moment where she doesn’t look like a million dollars is a moment wasted.

“My apologies, Ryu—”

Ryujin’s glare puts the fear of God into your soul. “What did I say about using my name?” 

You pause. Gulp your throat. “My sincerest apologies, Miss Shin.” 

“Hmph.” Grimacing with disgust, she hastily snatches the dress from your possession, proceeds to slam the door on you, tone bordering on shouting, “Come inside. You’re late.”

Entering the door shortly after, you’re welcomed by a film crew in the process of recording her as she struts around the living room suite holding your dress in her hands. If there’s anything you’ve learned from attending to her, she’s as effortless of an actress as she is as a model. The moment her eyes face the camera, she instantly transforms into the picture perfect icon that has all of social media buzzing.

Moving out of the way has become muscle memory at this point. When she’s in front of the cameras, you’re merely an onlooker. 

“So this is my outfit for tonight,” she says enthusiastically into the camera, proudly flaunting the outfit—a convincing facade to the untrained eye. For the press, she’s this likable, larger than life figure living her best life, attending all these invitation-only parties and wearing the most stylish dresses. 

“It was a risque design, and I wanted to try something bold for once. It was love at first sight when I saw it,” she comments, and you know very well this wasn’t her first choice. They won’t know that this was the 12th option, handpicked just last night after weeks of trial and error, only to be thrown away right after. At her request, you had it ordered on incredibly short notice, and the plan almost fell through. It was hard to deny Ryujin’s wants, no matter how impractical or unfeasible they were. 

In a way, this was to be expected. Ryujin emanates this young, it girl energy. Like any aspiring icon, she usually wants to stand out from a usually safe crowd. Not that it hasn’t stopped you from interfering a handful of times, much to her annoyance. After all, you’d assume she was going to a casual party or some red carpet event, not a prestigious gala with some of the biggest people in the world in attendance. You name it: politicians, CEOs of tech giants, industry titans who make the cover of Forbes and Time every other month. There are high standards that must be kept, and she’s doing anything but uphold those standards.

The camera pans away from her, and she immediately tosses the clothing aside with zero regard whatsoever. You manage to save it before it becomes near valueless. No matter how bothersome she acts, you can’t bring yourself to call her out on her antics; not just because there are several careers at stake, including yours, but you know what she’s capable of doing when her patience exceeds breaking point. It’s a firsthand experience to catch Ryujin in a state that isn’t picture perfect.

“Where are you?” Ryujin shouts from the other room, irate. “Slow as ever, my goodness.”

When you approach her, she’s on her phone, seated in front of the mirror with her legs crossed, having commanded the camera crew to vacate the room, leaving you alone with her. It’s only when you are together that she’s her true self, and it’s not far from what you usually experience even with other people around. They understand it’s in their best interest not to interfere.

Turning her eyes, she catches you idling with her sharp stare. “Well? Are you just gonna stand there and look at me all day? You already do that on the regular.”

Her behavior’s something neither cameras nor testimonies will ever publicly reveal: that Ryujin’s practically a spoiled brat behind closed doors. Any attempts to expose her have been silenced by huge settlements, NDAs, and every legal bind in the book. And when those don’t work out, there’s the strangely coincidental disappearance of potential witnesses that read like every tin-foil hat post written by some gullible conspiracy theorist on the internet. 

In retrospect, perhaps there’s some merit to the rumor that her father is supposedly the head of some mafia organization, but you digress. She has never brought her personal history up in interviews, other than she’s been adopted by the founder of a relatively unknown investment firm. An elaborate lie.

She’s engrossed on her phone, unable to keep herself still while you struggle to apply makeup on her face. Time’s of the essence, she usually says, but she’s purposeful with how much time is wasted, with the primary objective of finding an excuse to lay on you. It was never going to be fair from the start. All the moments where you were late, in her eyes, were intentionally done to put you in the wrong. 

To be fair, the numerous stylists who’ve taken care of her warned you in advance. You couldn’t deny the opportunity for a huge paycheck.

“Miss Shin, please stay still,” you say, carefully stringing your words together, delivered in the least offensive tone possible.

To your surprise, she complies. It’s a miracle. She never obliges with your requests, let alone direct commands.

Applying the rest of her makeup takes only minutes. Usually, you’d be going back and forth, and you’d be in front of the mirror for hours. See how easier everyone’s job is when all parties cooperate and collaborate effectively? You’re doing your part like it’s second nature; you only wish Ryujin was this accommodating more often, and not whether her brain flips a coin to determine her attitude for the day.

“You look amazing, Miss Shin,” you comment, staring at the mirror, her face radiating with the glow of a million bucks.

Taking her attention off the phone, even if it’s only for a second, proves to be a chore, as proven by her particularly grumpy expression. She scans herself, peers through every little detail in the mirror—showing more interest in herself during this brief moment than her dozens of photoshoots over the last month—and gives the smallest of nods. You even see the tiniest of grins escaping her lips, too.

Her steely attitude unwavering, she commands you, sternly, “Bring me the dress. Now.”

A clap of hands and the door opens like magic. Your co-stylist briskly walks toward you, outfit in hand, promptly handing it over before immediately leaving the room. No words are necessary; she makes it clear who’s allowed to touch her, let alone dress her, and it’s only you. Handling Ryujin was as meticulous and methodical as preserving a historical treasure.

She finally gets off her chair, hands prepared to loosen her robe before something catches her attention. “Door.”

It’s common sense. You hurry over to the opened door, slam it shut. Then the magic happens.

Ryujin nonchalantly slips her bathrobe off her shoulders, letting it freely fall to the floor. She’s draped in nothing but the thinnest of underwear, her asscheeks openly poking through the fabric. It’s amazing how she’s allowing you to see her like this, her barest, when most of her shoots and red carpet dresses have been nothing but conservative. Sometimes seductive, but mostly safe. There’s nothing left for your imagination. On the other hand, you’re so used to this vivid sight, it’s almost part of your daily routine. You shouldn’t be fazed, but her perfect figure has you staring, shamelessly, like it’s your very first time seeing nudity.

At times, it leaves you vulnerable. Like now.

“You were doing quite well too,” she comments, snarkily, gazing at your blank expression through the reflection, snapping you from your daze.

Gulping your throat, you find yourself embarrassed, ears flushed red. Even while you go through the methodical process of measuring and dressing her, the shame lingers. You find yourself unable to glance at the mirror. The very few flashes and glints that meet you when you turn you face your reflection, you find her suppressing a tiny giggle. 

As you put on the finishing touches on her outfit, she brings the point home, “We’re already late by an hour.”

A quick look at your watch tells you it’s almost eleven. Ten minutes before the next hour. At first glance, it’s still early, but it can be deceiving. Parisian traffic is notoriously unforgiving, event or no event, showing no partiality. Getting from one place to another is a whole day’s work.

Then you remember the fans and paparazzi congregated at the hotel’s entrance. This crowd that you had to brute force through just to get her dress on time. The hotel security can barely hold them back, and you can hear several sirens screaming miles away, most likely police presence. Many persons of interest will be gathered in one setting, after all.

“How do you feel, Miss Shin?” you ask, taking a step back to let her soak in her meticulously curated appearance. 

She blinks rapidly. Then she takes a deep breath.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

—————

Everywhere you look lies nothing but chaos. Chaos and cameras.

Barricade is filled with an indistinguishable mix of both paparazzi and media from all over the world. Lights, whether from above or from cameras, flash in every direction that it’s almost blinding. Deafening shouts pierce through your ears that whispering is impossible. You’ve been to as many red carpet events as these journalists and photographers, but you’ve never attended an event of this magnitude until now.

Left and right, there’s a random celebrity being interviewed by a news junket. The women you spot are dressed to the nines, adorned in colorful and graceful garb, while the men are decked as if they're attending Sunday service. You can see it now: another round of fashion bloggers berating and cursing the men for their simplicity and lack of creativity, but that’s to be expected. 

Your phone vibrates from within your shirt pocket. It’s Ryujin, having disappeared somewhere in the crowd.

> Where u at? 😤

You immediately reply back. Your conversations have been practice for your future relationship:

> Can’t find you in this crowd 

> Taylor Swift is just across me XD

> Scarlett Johannson too

> And I think I saw Zendaya and Yuna talking with each other, can’t confirm though, they’re far away

To which she answers:

> Stop playing around.

> Get over here NOW

> Do you style any of them? 

> You don’t.

> Come here. NOW.

It’s a simple but strong warning. Aside from the fact that you’re there to attend to Ryujin’s needs and not larp as a celebrity, there's a change in her attitude during these events. She becomes strangely more attached. It’s become a byword for you to mention other women around her, yet she interacts with them in a friendly light for the cameras to see.

Ryujin’s preoccupied with what’s presumably the umpteenth interview of many when you finally reunite with her. She takes another moment to pose for the next wave of cameras, picture perfect as always, then after, she finally turns her gaze, meeting yours. It has been ten minutes since her last text, and you have many reasons to say why you’ve vanished.

None of which truly matters.

“There you are.” She says, glaring angrily at you, tone laced with contempt, sounding like you were gone for days.

“I can explain, Miss Shin,” you try to say, but it has no effect as she approaches you, careful as ever to keep a picturesque facade in front of the media. You can see her holding herself back from popping a vein. “Apparently President Biden and his wife are in attendance and we were told to make way for his entire security team—”

The way Ryujin pulls you by the ear while you both retreat from the chaotic crowd is comical. In a sea of cameras and eyewitnesses, some tabloid’s bound to catch you, take the unfolding scene out of context, and write a rushed article that spreads like wildfire, but no, it doesn’t draw an ounce of attention. She's a small fry in a pond of bigger fish, after all. Over your corner, you see a dozen Secret Service slowly guide the president along the carpet, parting everyone around old Joe. In a way, watching him brings you to a strange realization: that you can empathize with the poor geezer. You’re both in the same predicament, being strung along to places you have no zero interest in.

It’s an effective distraction. An air of tense, awkward silence falls upon you both as you stare at each other, your personal conflict hidden away from the public eye. You open your mouth, about to say a word, and—

Whack!

Ryujin hits you with the hardest of palms, all her pent-up frustration released with a single, powerful smack of your cheek. The force echoes throughout the enclosed space like thunder. Your lips draw a little blood. A quick rub of your face reinforces the consequence for your actions. Rough. Still, to say she looks unhappy after enforcing her will upon you is an understatement.

And just when you try to open your mouth (without the intention to complain; you’ve given up at this point), she follows it up with a second slap, with about half the impact of the first. This time, the other cheek. Her gaze is scathing, lethal, hypnotic—as if challenging you to try her already short patience. Say something, motherfucker, is subtly etched on her expressive lips without the need to verbalize them. 

Another tense moment of silence. She makes sure your eyes never leave her contact. When it finally breaks, her judgment echoes in your head like the toll of a death bell—a lingering reminder that you’ve truly fucked up.

“You’ll be seeing me after tonight,” she says, each word delivered like an arrow straight to your heart. Before facing the world again, she adds another devastating blow, “My hotel room. Midnight. Sharp.”

—————

For the most part, in the eyes of the public, you seem to have done a fantastic job styling Ryujin for tonight’s gala. Within hours of the event, numerous articles published of the event list her among the best dressed stars, praising the bold nature of her outfit, as she intended in that vlog-style video from earlier. It’s all smiles as you watch her from afar, casually mingling with every celebrity in attendance. In case she needs to remain fresh, have new makeup applied, or change into a new dress for afterparty purposes—sometimes all of the above—you’re closely on standby. Ultimately, she doesn’t; not a single time she has called or texted for assistance. In a way, it’s alarming.

Her reminder sticks firmly on the back of your mind. Every word she says, she means it—no matter how small or big they are. It lingers even as her personal driver and bodyguard messages you with the instruction to return to the car, where she’s mysteriously absent, having been commanded by Ryujin herself to send you and the rest of her personnel home. It’s uncharacteristically strange; either she’s changed her mind and is having a good time at the event, or she’s probably drunk out of her mind, and the latter is typically the norm.

When you retreat to your room, you nervously watch as the clock slowly ticks towards the inevitable. It’s like witnessing your death. You know you can’t stop it, and you can’t look away, either. With the understanding that you’ll likely see the sun rise when it’s all said and done, you don’t even bother to slip into your sleepwear. 

The clock turns midnight. Seconds later, you receive a text on your phone. The message. It immediately disproves any theory or hope of meeting her good graces:

> Meet me in my room. Don’t even think about hiding or running, cause I will know

Of course you comply; you really have no other choice.

Five minutes later, you’re at her door again, with nothing but your suit, ready to face her judgment. It swings open of its own accord. Without any formalities, you step inside the familiar living room, now tidied up and cloaked in near darkness—a stark contrast to the mess it looked earlier in the day. Not a sign of her presence can be seen or felt. If you’ve been feeling uneasy before, now you’re straight up anxious, and the terror leaves you pale.

The door slams shut. Now you’re completely in the dark, with nothing to latch or cling to but your own resolve, which is slowly fading too. You want to speak her name, but you know you’ll be trying fate again, and fate has dealt you a cruel hand already. You didn’t want to fall even further. 

Your slow breaths are the only sign of life.

And the faint voice in your ear.

Wait—

Before you know it, you feel your throat tense up and your body tremble frantically. Faint shadows coil around your waist and neck, and in that moment, your fate has been sealed. 

“At least you’re not late this time.” Ryujin whispers into your ear. Then your eyes snap wide open.

“Agh!” 

A powerful surge of pain overwhelms your entire body, renders you weak in the knees. You fall to the ground, barely keeping yourself from completely melting onto the carpet with your hands. Still, the pangs remain too much. You can barely hold up on all fours, let alone move your arms and legs. 

It’s not enough. A soft hand hovers across your arched back, brushes through your hair, before it’s immediately followed by a direct blow to your nape. Your shout of agony reverberates throughout the dark room while you’re forced further down on your knees. Nearly forced into a prostrate position, you’re barely holding on. Another hit of this force could knock you unconscious, maybe worse.

“You’re going to learn your lesson today,” says Ryujin, strutting from behind you, cloaked in what appears to be a white gown. She’s holding something that you can’t identify, but you can tell she’s not in the mood to play games. Sparks of electricity flash and fade close to her hand. It was a taser all along. You probably would have guessed that from the intense shocking pain you’re currently feeling.

“Bedroom, slowpoke,” she sternly commands you as she saunters toward the room first, leaving you alone to pick yourself up. You’re still reeling from the two shocks of electricity applied to your waist and neck; it stings. Your body struggles, aches, cries out in despair, but you ultimately muster up enough power to follow her minutes later.

What greets you in the bedroom is a dimly lit bed, with Ryujin as its centerpiece, and both ends of her figure bathed in a faint wave of orange lamp light. She’s draped in nothing but the same hotel-issued bathrobe from earlier, her legs crossed, gazing at you from behind designer shades, smirking with malicious intent. It’s regal, seductive, inviting, intimidating. You honestly could stare at this sight all day long.

Before you entertain the thought, she cuts it off. “Strip.”

Her gaze lingers as you quickly bare yourself in front of her. She grins, giggles, adjusts her glasses with each piece of clothing removed. It flashes at her widest when you’ve divested your shirt and your pants, revealing your chest and your evident bulge, unknowingly growing hard behind the elastic fabric. It seems to spark a new idea within her, even though she’s the type of woman who follows through with her plans after they’ve been organized and premeditated.

She hops off the bed, slowly saunters toward you with trained, modellike fashion, using you as a makeshift catwalk. Turning the corner, she retreats behind your back, gripping a hand on your neck, craning the other down your bare chest. Her tongue tickles the back of your ear, which morphs into the smallest of smooches while she drags you to the bed like a hostage. As she hauls you over the mattress, she continues to feel your skin and body, your ears titillated by the gentle moans and whimpers from her sultry lips.

Your bump knees with the bed before she sends you flying over the edge. Temptation comes knocking at the door of your suppressed lips; you’re itching to cry out in pain, pleading for a bit more consideration. You know it’s a futile effort. When it comes to sex, Ryujin was anything but gentle. 

“Don’t look. Stay still.” 

Following her command is second nature to you; even when your positions were interchanged, it was merely an illusion—you were never in control. Ryujin plants a palm around your throat, forcing your stare against the bedrest. The clanging sound of something resembling a belt or a buckle keeps you curious. Tense, breaths keep you calm. Deep down, you know what’s about to happen; there’s no stopping it, you can only brace for impact. 

In the gap between the point of no return, she tells you her mindstate, how her frustration and apparent jealousy never receded. “I hated every minute I spent there. You have no idea how difficult it was to keep a face in front of everyone, especially after seeing Yuna. Fucking. Yuna.”

Your reaction comes out, not through coherent words, but through a labored groan. You feel her finger circle rings around your ass, sticky and wet. Of course she was there, social media couldn’t stop buzzing about her appearance—and she rarely shows up to these galas. Now it’s all making sense. After all, you were Yuna’s stylist before Ryujin snatched you away. 

Ryujin continues to apply lube around your sensitive hole, occasionally fingering you. Holding in the groans from the discomfort proves to be impossible, but she prefers to hear you whine, especially when her name is spoken. It’s the perfect reprieve from the evening’s frustrations, keeping her from raising her voice to the ceiling. “She pisses me off so fucking much. First stealing my thunder at every fashion week, now this? I thought she hated art galas?”

It’s evident that she doesn’t like Yuna in any shape whatsoever. If not for the cameras and all the famous people in the building, she’d already be trading blows with her. If there was any one person she wanted dead, it would have to be Shin Yuna. Of course, knowing this, you never included your time with her on your job application, let alone mention the fact you briefly spoke at the event behind her back. She was in an already spiraling mood, and you didn’t need to make it even worse.

“I was thinking of using dildos for tonight, maybe just my fingers even, but I don’t think it’ll be enough. I really hope you understand.” That last sentence—she sounds apologetic, remorseful, but the warning is ultimately shallow; she’ll rough you up, wreck you, ruin you, and enjoy every moment of it. You’re merely a blank canvas to her twisted fantasies.

“Oh, oh–fuck!” She cries out, joining your deep scream in harmony as she plunges the dildo into your warm, wet hole. This isn’t your first experience on the receiving end of Ryujin’s strap, yet every plunge feels as destructive and spine breaking as the first. No pleasantries or formalities, just apply the lube then hit. The idea of teasing you goes against her very blunt, assertive nature.

“Shit—oh fucking shit, you’re so goddamn tight,” she says, snaking a hand around your waist as her plastic dick slowly penetrates your hole, little by little. She has you grasping at pillows, staring at the ceiling then down to the sheets, until you find the twisted image of her hips slowly pounding against your ass, letting the pleasure of pegging overwhelm her. It should be excruciatingly painful, an agonizing reminder to never get on her wrong side, but no, there’s something hot about getting dicked by a tough woman like her that arouses you.

Eventually, she comes to her senses, finds her footing, and remembers that she’s meant to punish you, not reward you. She knows how good you make her feel, even if your cock is meant to be inside hers, not the other way around. You can’t help speaking your mind, and it boosts Ryujin’s ego to the moon. “Please. Fucking use me, Miss Shin. Fucking ruin my hole like how I ruin yours, miss.”

Even upside down, you can see how visibly delighted she is to hear those words every single time. Can’t hide that wide smirk plastered on her lips, no matter how upset she is. It’s intoxicating. No matter how hard you’re huffing, the pleasure she derives from using you keeps you going. 

Slamming your eyes shut, Ryujin does what you both want. Fucks you with her dildo hard, clenches and quelches with each careful, intricate stroke. Sometimes you’re in that position, taking her ass and ravaging her body as your own. Now it’s her turn, and she’s been taking after you. Between thrusts, she slaps your cheek, pulls on your neck and hair. You’ve built this alarmingly toxic work relationship, but the sex has never felt this invigorating, so cathartic. The perfect use of frustration to be channeled into something pleasurable and rapturous. 

You’ve never seen Ryujin this focused, this committed to wrecking you. She’s using your hole with such ferocity you think she’ll make you bleed out. Behind those glazed, pleasure-filled eyes, she sees nothing but red. Difficult as it is, you follow a string of moans from her lips hidden beneath a continuous echo of groans from your end. It doesn’t help that these walls are thin and everyone on this floor can hear your escapades.

Neither of you care. There’s a good reason as to why she booked the whole floor to begin with.

The bed quakes, and quakes, and quakes—until it doesn’t. 

A puzzlingly calm fills the room after countless minutes pass. Ryujin’s frantic breaths close the silent gap, having pulled the dildo from your hole. It’s slick. You realize the change of pace. 

“Miss Shin, why did you stop?”

She doesn’t reply immediately. When she does, she’s still catching her breath between spoken words. “I told you—it wasn’t going to be enough. Lay down for me, will you?”

Without a second thought, you comply. This gives you an opportunity to truly see her in the flesh for the first time tonight. She’s wearing a combination of corset and lingerie, her juicy thighs layered with lace garter. Hopping off the bed, she unbuckles the strap around her waist, tossing it aside to the floor. You then focus on her plump ass, accentuated by her slim thong.

Damn, she looks better now than she does naked. You feel proud that she’s wearing your tailor-made lingerie.

Before you entertain the thought of undressing the very underclothes you’ve prepared for her, she slips the boxers off your ankles. She climbs onto the bed, stands atop you. Even with her short stature, in this position, she’s larger than life, a dominating presence that only desires complete control. 

“Hmm, I don’t know what I should do. I could let you fuck me, but that doesn’t sound right for a punishment,” she comments, playfully placing a finger on her chin, jokingly thinking. For a brief moment, it does appear that she’s stumped.

When the idea hits her, her eyes widen, and she has this self-conceited look, as if she’s got it all planned out. 

She reaches a hand down to her knee, slowly peels one of the stockings down to her ankles. Then she does the same for the other half. The way she positions both legwear on your cock is intentional; it’s to stir the idea of pounding into her cunt a real possibility. Your gaze remains fixated on Ryujin’s face, ever flawless in her scantily-clad figure, being her model self atop you. 

As she tugs on the lace of her panties, you start reacquainting your mind with the image of her tight cunt. She lowers it, barely down her thighs, enough space to tease, enough to make your heart race. Her attention is nowhere close to you; she has other priorities, and fingering herself is one of them. She rubs a digit around her heat, moans out in ecstasy with the same energy as getting fucked. The trembles of her body send aftershocks that reverberate all over the bed. 

It’s already hot enough to get fucked by Ryujin’s strap, but this—the sight of Ryujin pleasuring herself, mouth gaped wide open—is a hundred times better. This is the same reaction she has shown throughout the numerous times you’ve railed her, even though you’ve seen that face during sex. Against the mirror, against the water’s reflection, against the tinted windows of her cars—her face serves as motivation that keeps you hard whenever she demands it. Your hands begin to move on their own, reach down to the groin unknowingly, unsure of whether she’d want you to masturbate or not.

You feel your hard cock, already partially soaked with precum, dripping on her garter. As much as you want to keep them on, you can’t go against the deep seated urge to masturbate with her. Her foot begins to lean against your waist, right as you begin to stroke your shaft with your fingers. Moaning alongside her, you thrust your hips upward, passionately murmuring her name, with nothing but a singular thought: her pussy.

It’s etched on your needy lips. “You’re so sexy, Miss Shin. Please let me fuck you, God—”

She whines as though your hot breath is against her neck, growling a tone higher than normal. Her left foot is slowly clenching around your balls, the other at the bridge between your thigh and your crotch, gently nudging your free hand to move aside. She’s beginning to apply pressure on you, perhaps a subtle gesture to make you stop and give way for her feet to take over, but you’re engrossed in the moment to fully realize. Then again, subtlety isn’t her speciality.

It’s only when her foot presses down on your active hand that you slow to a complete halt. You gently rest her soles on your shaft, slowly wrap her soft toes around your tip. For the most part, their grip is shaky, but when they stick, they feel so slick, so warm, and significantly better than whatever effort your fingers can muster. She can’t wear heels without a few kisses placed on them, you recall; something about being Cinderella growing up, how she prefers to be treated, to receive nothing but showers of praise and attention, and you’re doing just that.

Her digits seemingly acknowledge what they’re stepping on, and soon enough it becomes the perfect makeshift ring to stimulate your cock. Her toes just feel the best, most direct spots around your sensitive shaft, gradually building momentum for when you eventually paint her pretty feet. At least, that’s the goal. You’re both drowning in pleasure, chasing separate highs, but using each other’s bodies as conduit for your own personal gain.

And it’s not that she doesn’t know; she knows. You’ve caught a glimpse of her half-lidded eye peeking down. She sees it, merely chuckles at the notion, and continues to finger herself atop your helpless body. Mutual trust brings you together; she won’t stop you as long as you won’t do the same to her.

“Yes, fuck, I’m gonna cum so hard,” you say, breaths hurried, and it isn’t a matter of if, but when. “Every part of you feels so good, Ryu.”

You’re past formalities at this point. She’s too far gone to care that you've called her by her casual name. Her fingers, both slick and warm at once, are catching fire from the frenzied pace she’s rubbing her clit, certain her dripping juices will find solace on your splayed figure. Racing with her orgasm, her underwear is halfway down her meaty legs, her very foundations shaking. Inadvertently pressing her foot tightly on your cock, she’s holding on for dear life, and it threatens to steal your soul before you reach that immaculate high.

With friction at an all-time high, one rough, slippery slip between her toes, all while your loins burn , moving as if you’re burying yourself deep in her cunt, eager to fill her with seed. The thin thread snaps. Sends you careening over the edge.

Your fall is accompanied by the endless scream of her name. To have your cock be graciously drained by her feet, it would be disrespectful not to. She’s still going, chasing that high even as your cum geysers all over her feet, spills over your knees, your belly, on the sheets, as if her own slick didn’t already make an utter mess of this five-star bed. You’re mentally cheering her on, distracting yourself from the endless cascade of seed gushing beneath you. 

This disastrous mess finds you again, this time in the form of Ryujin’s orgasm. She orgasms, cries her loudest cry, her features at their most corrupted. Her pussy gushes like a rushing waterfall, completely soiling her legs and panties with her slick juices. Your groin manages to salvage whatever her thighs haven’t absorbed, and it’s a sticky pool that latches onto her dainty feet. When she steps off your cock, the squelch of wet seed splatters on the sheets until she touches the ground.

You both take some time apart, let the aftermath of your orgasms fizzle out. Ryujin assesses the damage to her body; she’s still a model, after all. She hastily rids of the soiled underwear, treating it like some kind of contaminated object that can only be cleansed by fire. From the looks of it, she’s committed something dangerous, and you’ve done something scandalous. 

“Shit. We got carried away,” you say, lifting your head from the bed, panicked.

“No. You got carried away,” she replies, facing you with that familiar icy gaze. The honeymoon period is over. “Did I allow you to plant my feet on your cock? Huh?”

Swallowing your throat, you understand that she’s technically right, but also, she most certainly enjoyed the feeling of stepping on you—something you can use against her. Still, Ryujin’s word overrides all reasoning, no matter how logical they are.

You see her facade fall apart when she approaches you again. She climbs onto the bed like a cat, arches her back, and sends you back down to the mattress when she pounces on you. On her lips is the widest smirk you’ve ever seen on her. 

She wants more.

Rising to her feet, she plants her toes directly on your chin, oozing with the remains of your cum mixed with hers. “You did this, now you’ll clean it up.” 

As your tongue laps it up, she occasionally disrupts your rhythm by kicking you several times. Not that you’re hurting her (you couldn’t even if you tried) but for the delight of bringing you misfortune. It’s completely in line with the typical abuse and inhumane treatment you face from her during work hours. You won’t complain, but that was never in the cards, anyway. 

“I can’t believe my stylist is a complete freak. Fucking hell,” she comments, glaring you down as you give her toe the occasional kiss. She’s visibly disgusted by the realization sinking in, but deep down, she knows you’re the exact stylist she’s been looking for. 

—————

And as if that’s not enough, she’s found a punishment perfectly suited for you. 

“Just so you know, you’re not getting paid after the stunt you pulled on me today,” says Ryujin, in reference to your accidental disappearance during the red carpet. You’re laid out on the floor, prone, your groans stifled by the living room carpet. Meanwhile, her feet tread all over your bare back at a steady tempo, leaving what could have easily been hickeys red marks and footprints on your skin.

“How long do I have left, Miss Shin?” you ask, voice almost indiscernible.

“About ten minutes,” she replies, looking out the hotel room window, watching dawn slowly break over the Parisian sky. “Don’t ever disappoint me again, do you understand? Freak.”

——————

(A/N: First commissioned work complete! Definitely exploring elements out of my specialty, did you expect her to peg OC? Fun dynamic to write, thank you for reading!)

(P.S. If you want to have your own story/idol written, you can send me a commission :D)

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc readings pt. 11

tech edition

It's not your fault you're a jerk on twitter, katherine cross, wired

Becoming human again: a reading list for the extremely offline, lisa bubert, longreads

The internet is rotting, jonathan zittrain, the atlantic

ambient cruelty, linda besner, real life magazine

Searching for lost knowledge in the age of intelligent machines, adrienne lafrance, the atlantic

Ghosts of the future: the smart home is a haunted house, julia foote, real life magazine

The internet is flat, charlie warzel, galaxy brain

How TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India, rachna khaira, rest of the world

Vivid hues: what does it mean to think of the internet as a color? anna rose kerr, real life magazine

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare, peter guest, rest of the world

The $2 per hour workers who made chatgpt safer, time

I cut the 'big five' tech giants from my life. It was hell, kashmir hill, gizmodo

Social media is not self-expression, rob horning, the new inquiry

The narcissism of queer influencer activists, jason okundaye, gawker

On losing perspective, or, why i don't give a fuck about geronimo the alpaca and nor should you, rachel connolly, novara media

The exploited labour behind artificial intelligence, noema

The class politics of the instagram face, grazie sophia christie, tablet

Google, amazon, and meta are making their core products worse on purpose, ed zitron, business insider

All advertising looks the same these days. Blame the moodboard, elizabeth goodspeed, eye on design

Seen by, megan marz, real life

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[leidensygdom]

Fighting AI and learning how to speak with your wallet

So, if you're a creative of any kind, chances are that you've been directly affected by the development of AI. If you aren't a creative but engage with art in any way, you may also be plenty aware of the harm caused by AI. And right now, it's more important than ever that you learn how to fight against it.

The situation is this: After a few years of stagnation on relevant stuff to invest to, AI came out. Techbros, people with far too much money trying to find the big next thing to invest in, cryptobros, all these people, flocked to it immediately. A lot of people are putting money in what they think to be the next breakthrough- And AI is, at its core, all about the money. You will get ads shoved in your fave about "invest in AI now!" in every place. You will get ads telling you to try subscription services for AI related stuff. Companies are trying to gauge how much they can depend on AI in order to fire their creatives. AI is opening the gates towards the biggest data laundering scheme there's been in ages. It is also used in order to justify taking all your personal information- Bypassing existing laws.

Many of them are currently bleeding investors' money though. Let it be through servers, through trying to buy the rights to scrape content from social media (incredibly illegal, btw), amidst many other things. A lot of the tech giants have also been investing in AI-related infrastructures (Microsoft, for example), and are desperate to justify these expenses. They're going over their budgets, they're ignoring their emissions plans (because it's very toxic to the environment), and they're trying to make ends meet to justify why they're using it. Surely, it will be worth it.

Now, here's where you can act: Speak with your wallet. They're going through a delicate moment (despite how much they try to pretend they aren't), and it's now your moment to act. A company used AI in any manner? Don't buy their products. Speak against them in social media. Make noise. It doesn't matter how small or how big. A videogame used AI voices? Don't buy the game. Try to get a refund if you did. Social media is scraping content for AI? Don't buy ads, don't buy their stupid blue checks, put adblock on, don't give them a cent. A film generated their poster with AI? Don't watch it. Don't engage with it. Your favourite creator has made AI music for their YT channel? Unsub, bring it up in social media, tell them directly WHY you aren't supporting. Your favourite browser is now integrating AI in your searches? Change browsers.

Let them know that the costs they cut through the use of AI don't justify how many customers they'd lose. Wizards of the Coast has been repeatedly trying to see how away they can get with the use of AI- It's only through consumer boycotting and massive social media noise that they've been forced to go back and hire actual artists to do that work.

The thing with AI- It doesn't benefit the consumer in any way. It's capitalism at its prime: Cut costs, no matter how much it impacts quality, no matter how inhumane it is, no matter how much it pollutes. AI searches are directly feeding you misinformation. ChatGPT is using your input to feed itself. Find a Discord server to talk with others about writing. Try starting art yourself, find other artists, join a community. If you can't, use the money you may be saving from boycotting AI shills to support a fellow creative- They need your help more than ever.

We're in a bit of a nebulous moment. Laws against AI are probably around the corner: A lot of AI companies are completely aware that they're going to crash if they're legally obliged to disclose the content they used to train their machines, because THEY KNOW it is stolen. Copyright is inherent to human created art: You don't need to even register it anywhere for it to be copyrighted. The moment YOU created it, YOU have the copyright to it. They can't just scrape social media because Meta or Twitter or whatever made a deal with OpenAI and others, because these companies DON'T own your work, they DON'T get to bypass your copyright.

And to make sure these laws get passed, it's important to keep the fight against AI. AI isn't offering you anything of use. It's just for the benefit of companies. Let it be known it isn't useful, and that people's work and livelihoods are far more important than letting tech giants save a few cents. Instead, they're trying to gauge how MUCH they can get away with. They know it goes against European GDPR laws, but they're going to try to strech what these mean and steal as much data up until clear ruling comes out.

The wonder about boycotts is that they don't even need you to do anything. In fact, it's about not doing some stuff. You don't need money to boycott- Just to be aware about where you put it. Changing habits is hard- People can't stop eating at Chick-fil-a no matter how much they use the money against the LGBTQ collective, but people NEED to learn how to do it. Now it's the perfect time to cancel a subscription, find an alternate plan to watching that one film and maybe joining a creative community yourself.

[wilwheaton]

Despite Rogan’s assertions otherwise, there are dozens of tangible and recent examples of Musk’s conservative shift. Just ahead of last year’s midterm elections, he told Twitter users that they should vote Republican (after sharing a Nazi meme). Musk later advocated for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. And during a recent trip to Capitol Hill, he only scheduled meetings with Republicans—and wished McCarthy a happy birthday—while ignoring congressional Democrats. Prior to his get-out-the-vote message, meanwhile, he spread a baseless conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi’s attack that originated in far-right circles. The billionaire edge lord has also openly embraced MAGA tropes, such as whining about the “woke mind virus” and mockingly joking that his preferred pronouns are “Prosecute/Fauci.” (That is, when he’s not tweaking the Twitter algorithm to artificially juice his own engagement and flood users’ feeds with his tweets.) Additionally, Republicans have expressed their ever-growing admiration for the tech giant, going so far as to openly “thank God” that he bought Twitter. Some GOP lawmakers, even as they investigate “government interference” and its “weaponization” of social media, have boasted about talking company strategy with Musk.

Joe Rogan Can’t Figure Out Why People Think Elon Musk Is a ‘Right-Winger’ Now

[kiefbowl]

it's kinda funny thinking back to the 90s and early aughts when sitcoms and comedies and whatever would make jokes about the internet by having out of touch ludite characters say something to the effect of "I think the internet is a fad" with the obvious joke being we will never live without this thing again. and true, like so many of institutions rely on the internet to do their day to day functions. but when it comes to the social use, I do think there is a critical mass of unfun and ineffective the internet could become where people actually do start bailing in large numbers and it feels like we're inching closer and closer. I don't think social media will disappear completely, but I think a lot of tech giants vastly underestimate how many casual users there are. like there is not infinite growth of facebook. there is not infinite growth for twitter. not even for tik tok. like if the website you use to keep in touch with your grandmother can't even help you do that anymore, the addiction of scrolling isn't that strong. it's not heroin for real.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech monopolists use their market power to invade your privacy

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

It's easy to greet the FTC's new report on social media privacy, which concludes that tech giants have terrible privacy practices with a resounding "duh," but that would be a grave mistake.

Much to the disappointment of autocrats and would-be autocrats, administrative agencies like the FTC can't just make rules up. In order to enact policies, regulators have to do their homework: for example, they can do "market studies," which go beyond anything you'd get out of an MBA or Master of Public Policy program, thanks to the agency's legal authority to force companies to reveal their confidential business information.

Market studies are fabulous in their own right. The UK Competition and Markets Authority has a fantastic research group called the Digital Markets Unit that has published some of the most fascinating deep dives into how parts of the tech industry actually function, 400+ page bangers that pierce the Shield of Boringness that tech firms use to hide their operations. I recommend their ad-tech study:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study

In and of themselves, good market studies are powerful things. They expose workings. They inform debate. When they're undertaken by wealthy, powerful countries, they provide enforcement roadmaps for smaller, poorer nations who are being tormented in the same way, by the same companies, that the regulator studied.

But market studies are really just curtain-raisers. After a regulator establishes the facts about a market, they can intervene. They can propose new regulations, and they can impose "conduct remedies" (punishments that restrict corporate behavior) on companies that are cheating.

Now, the stolen, corrupt, illegitimate, extremist, bullshit Supreme Court just made regulation a lot harder. In a case called Loper Bright, SCOTUS killed the longstanding principle of "Chevron deference," which basically meant that when an agency said it had built a factual case to support a regulation, courts should assume they're not lying:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

The death of Chevron Deference means that many important regulations – past, present and future – are going to get dragged in front of a judge, most likely one of those Texas MAGA mouth-breathers in the Fifth Circuit, to be neutered or killed. But even so, regulators still have options – they can still impose conduct remedies, which are unaffected by the sabotage of Chevron Deference.

Pre-Loper, post-Loper, and today, the careful, thorough investigation of the facts of how markets operate is the prelude to doing things about how those markets operate. Facts matter. They matter even if there's a change in government, because once the facts are in the public domain, other governments can use them as the basis for action.

Which is why, when the FTC uses its powers to compel disclosures from the largest tech companies in the world, and then assesses those disclosures and concludes that these companies engage in "vast surveillance," in ways that the users don't realize and that these companies "fail to adequately protect users, that matters.

What's more, the Commission concludes that "data abuses can fuel market dominance, and market dominance can, in turn, further enable data abuses and practices that harm consumers." In other words: tech monopolists spy on us in order to achieve and maintain their monopolies, and then they spy on us some more, and that hurts us.

So if you're wondering what kind of action this report is teeing up, I think we can safely say that the FTC believes that there's evidence that the unregulated, rampant practices of the commercial surveillance industry are illegal. First, because commercial surveillance harms us as "consumers." "Consumer welfare" is the one rubric for enforcement that the right-wing economists who hijacked antitrust law in the Reagan era left intact, and here we have the Commission giving us evidence that surveillance hurts us, and that it comes about as a result of monopoly, and that the more companies spy, the stronger their monopolies become.

But the Commission also tees up another kind of enforcement: Section 5, the long (long!) neglected power of the agency to punish companies for "unfair and deceptive methods of competition," a very broad power indeed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

In the study, the Commission shows – pretty convincingly! – that the commercial surveillance sector routinely tricks people who have no idea how their data is being used. Most people don't understand, for example, that the platforms use all kinds of inducements to get web publishers to embed tracking pixels, fonts, analytics beacons, etc that send user-data back to the Big Tech databases, where it's merged with data from your direct interactions with the company. Likewise, most people don't understand the shadowy data-broker industry, which sells Big Tech gigantic amounts of data harvested by your credit card company, by Bluetooth and wifi monitoring devices on streets and in stores, and by your car. Data-brokers buy this data from anyone who claims to have it, including people who are probably lying, like Nissan, who claims that it has records of the smells inside drivers' cars, as well as those drivers' sex-lives:

https://nypost.com/2023/09/06/nissan-kia-collect-data-about-drivers-sexual-activity/

Or Cox Communications, which claims that it is secretly recording and transcribing the conversations we have in range of the mics on our speakers, phones, and other IoT devices:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

(If there's a kernel of truth to Cox's bullshit, my guess it's that they've convinced some of the sleazier "smart TV" companies to secretly turn on their mics, then inflated this into a marketdroid's wet-dream of "we have logged every word uttered by Americans and can use it to target ads.)

Notwithstanding the rampant fraud inside the data brokerage industry, there's no question that some of the data they offer for sale is real, that it's intimate and sensitive, and that the people it's harvested from never consented to its collection. How do you opt out of public facial recognition cameras? "Just don't have a face" isn't a realistic opt-out policy.

And if the public is being deceived about the collection of this data, they're even more in the dark about the way it's used – merged with on-platform usage data and data from apps and the web, then analyzed for the purposes of drawing "inferences" about you and your traits.

What's more, the companies have chaotic, bullshit internal processes for handling your data, which also rise to the level of "deceptive and unfair" conduct. For example, if you send these companies a deletion request for your data, they'll tell you they deleted the data, but actually, they keep it, after "de-identifying" it.

De-identification is a highly theoretical way of sanitizing data by removing the "personally identifiers" from it. In practice, most de-identified data can be quickly re-identified, and nearly all de-identified data can eventually be re-identified:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Breaches, re-identification, and weaponization are extraordinarily hard to prevent. In general, we should operate on the assumption that any data that's collected will probably leak, and any data that's retained will almost certainly leak someday. To have even a hope of preventing this, companies have to treat data with enormous care, maintaining detailed logs and conducting regular audits. But the Commission found that the biggest tech companies are extraordinarily sloppy, to the point where "they often could not even identify all the data points they collected or all of the third parties they shared that data with."

This has serious implications for consumer privacy, obviously, but there's also a big national security dimension. Given the recent panic at the prospect that the Chinese government is using Tiktok to spy on Americans, it's pretty amazing that American commercial surveillance has escaped serious Congressional scrutiny.

After all, it would be a simple matter to use the tech platforms targeting systems to identify and push ads (including ads linking to malicious sites) to Congressional staffers ("under-40s with Political Science college degrees within one mile of Congress") or, say, NORAD personnel ("Air Force enlistees within one mile of Cheyenne Mountain").

Those targeting parameters should be enough to worry Congress, but there's a whole universe of potential characteristics that can be selected, hence the Commission's conclusion that "profound threats to users can occur when targeting occurs based on sensitive categories."

The FTC's findings about the dangers of all this data are timely, given the current wrangle over another antitrust case. In August, a federal court found that Google is a monopolist in search, and that the company used its data lakes to secure and maintain its monopoly.

This kicked off widespread demands for the court to order Google to share its data with competitors in order to erase that competitive advantage. Holy moly is this a bad idea – as the FTC study shows, the data that Google stole from us all is incredibly toxic. Arguing that we can fix the Google problem by sharing that data far and wide is like proposing that we can "solve" the fact that only some countries have nuclear warheads by "democratizing" access to planet-busting bombs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

To address the competitive advantage Google achieved by engaging in the reckless, harmful conduct detailed in this FTC report, we should delete all that data. Sure, that may seem inconceivable, but come on, surely the right amount of toxic, nonconsensually harvested data on the public that should be retained by corporations is zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Some people argue that we don't need to share out the data that Google never should have been allowed to collect – it's enough to share out the "inferences" that Google drew from that data, and from other data its other tentacles (Youtube, Android, etc) shoved into its gaping maw, as well as the oceans of data-broker slurry it stirred into the mix.

But as the report finds, the most unethical, least consensual data was "personal information that these systems infer, that was purchased from third parties, or that was derived from users’ and non-users’ activities off of the platform." We gotta delete that, too. Especially that.

A major focus of the report is the way that the platforms handled children's data. Platforms have special obligations when it comes to kids' data, because while Congress has failed to act on consumer privacy, they did bestir themselves to enact a children's privacy law. In 2000, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which puts strict limits on the collection, retention and processing of data on kids under 13.

Now, there are two ways to think about COPPA. One view is, "if you're not certain that everyone in your data-set is over 13, you shouldn't be collecting or processing their data at all." Another is, "In order to ensure that everyone whose data you're collecting and processing is over 13, you should collect a gigantic amount of data on all of them, including the under-13s, in order to be sure that not collecting under-13s' data." That second approach would be ironically self-defeating, obviously, though it's one that's gaining traction around the world and in state legislatures, as "age verification" laws find legislative support.

The platforms, meanwhile, found a third, even stupider approach: rather than collecting nothing because they can't verify ages, or collecting everything to verify ages, they collect everything, but make you click a box that says, "I'm over 13":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

It will not surprise you to learn that many children under 13 have figured out that they can click the "I'm over 13" box and go on their merry way. It won't surprise you, but apparently, it will surprise the hell out of the platforms, who claimed that they had zero underage users on the basis that everyone has to click the "I'm over 13" box to get an account on the service.

By failing to pass comprehensive privacy legislation for 36 years (and counting), Congress delegated privacy protection to self-regulation by the companies themselves. They've been marking their own homework, and now, thanks to the FTC's power to compel disclosures, we can say for certain that the platforms cheat.

No surprise that the FTC's top recommendation is for Congress to pass a new privacy law. But they've got other, eminently sensible recommendations, like requiring the companies to do a better job of protecting their users' data: collect less, store less, delete it after use, stop combining data from their various lines of business, and stop sharing data with third parties.

Remember, the FTC has broad powers to order "conduct remedies" like this, and these are largely unaffected by the Supreme Court's "Chevron deference" decision in Loper-Bright.

The FTC says that privacy policies should be "clear, simple, and easily understood," and says that ad-targeting should be severely restricted. They want clearer consent for data inferences (including AI), and that companies should monitor their own processes with regular, stringent audits.

They also have recommendations for competition regulators – remember, the Biden administration has a "whole of government" antitrust approach that asks every agency to use its power to break up corporate concentration:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

They say that competition enforcers factor in the privacy implications of proposed mergers, and think about how promoting privacy could also promote competition (in other words, if Google's stolen data helped it secure a monopoly, then making them delete that data will weaken their market power).

I understand the reflex to greet a report like this with cheap cynicism, but that's a mistake. There's a difference between "everybody knows" that tech is screwing us on privacy, and "a federal agency has concluded" that this is true. These market studies make a difference – if you doubt it, consider for a moment that Cigna is suing the FTC for releasing a landmark market study showing how its Express Scripts division has used its monopoly power to jack up the price of prescription drugs:

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/express-scripts-files-suit-against-ftc-demands-retraction-report-pbm-industry

Big business is shit-scared of this kind of research by federal agencies – if they think this threatens their power, why shouldn't we take them at their word?

This report is a milestone, and – as with the UK Competition and Markets Authority reports – it's a banger. Even after Loper-Bright, this report can form the factual foundation for muscular conduct remedies that will limit what the largest tech companies can do.

But without privacy law, the data brokerages that feed the tech giants will be largely unaffected. True, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is doing some good work at the margins here:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

But we need to do more than curb the worst excesses of the largest data-brokers. We need to kill this sector, and to do that, Congress has to act:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/20/water-also-wet/#marking-their-own-homework

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

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

[transformers-synergize]

so is the first chapter just human characters? ):

No, it's not just human characters. Chapter 1 part 2 will be posted tomorrow, and it has robots, please be patient.

If you are a transformers fan who dislikes any humans in transformers media for the fact they are human, then Synergize is probably not going to be your thing, sorry. Synergize focuses a lot on human and cybertronian relationships. Synergize is an ensemble cast with multiple characters who get a decent amount of focus, some of those characters being human, I intend to put just as much care and time into developing the human characters as I do the bots. The human characters are not an afterthought or something I'm adding just because I felt like it, they are important members of the cast, both the human cast and cybertronian cast are essential for each other development/character arcs. cybertronian in Synergize are written to be much more alien than in most Transformers media. Synergize's cybertronains have more alien-like behavior, morals, instincts, social dynamics, social structure, anatomy and society, having human characters to contrast that help better show the alienness of the bots. Along with having a character who can learn about the bots alongside the reader and ask questions a cybertronian character wouldn't. It also creates a lot of interesting human bot dynamics and plot opportunities.

Human characters also have an extreme amount of plot utility, Sure, they can't fist-fight a giant bot, but that is not the only way a character can be useful. They have more knowledge on Earth than the bots, so even an unintelligent human has at least a little useful Earth knowledge a cybertronian wouldn't know. Earth is built to cater to humans, and my bots don't have Haloform, so if they need something done only a human can do, then they gotta rely on a human to do it. Humans are also great for disguise, and my bots are trying to stay hidden, getting pulled over and having a human in the driver's seat is way less suspicious than a car driving itself. Humans are small and quiet even compared to small cybertronian, humans joints and internals usually don't make as much noise, along with humans having a much fainter energy signal, making them perfect for stealth and sneaking around. A human might not be able to fight a robot, but if they are mechanically inclined, they could learn how to fix/repair cybertronians. Once you know how to fix cybertronians, you can usually figure out sneaky little ways to break one without needing to be a giant robot (though you still have to risk getting close to one). Humans are immune to some very common cybertronian security systems and weapon types, magnets, EMP devices, malware, and stasis tech, yes, humans are squishy, but you're not gonna kill one with magnets or EMP blast or by trying to give them malware. Also, humans are also just smaller and can fit in more places. Humans are clever creatures, and even though they aren't as strong as a bot, it doesn't mean they can't contribute a lot. Not every plot features human characters, but most do because of both their utility to the plot and the fun dynamics they have with many of the bot characters.

Synergized as a story, both plot structure-wise and thematically, does not work without human characters.