#The Content Technologist

[younes-ben-amara]

عندما يُلخِّص لك تشات جي بي تي نصًّا فإنه في الحقيقة لا يُلخِّصه ولا هم يحزنون

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐تعرف ما هي صيد الشابكة وتطالعها بانتظام؟ اِدعم استمرارية النشرة بطرق شتى من هنا: 💲 طرق دعم نشرة صيد الشابكة. 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #120 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #120✨ مُبشِّر🥫🧠 طعام الفكر🕋 القرآن الكريم هو المنقذ الذي وَحَّد…

[freshpoetbrand]

[sexymemecoin]

The Metaverse: A New Frontier in Digital Interaction

The concept of the metaverse has captivated the imagination of technologists, futurists, and businesses alike. Envisioned as a collective virtual shared space, the metaverse merges physical and digital realities, offering immersive experiences and unprecedented opportunities for interaction, commerce, and creativity. This article delves into the metaverse, its potential impact on various sectors, the technologies driving its development, and notable projects shaping this emerging landscape.

What is the Metaverse?

The metaverse is a digital universe that encompasses virtual and augmented reality, providing a persistent, shared, and interactive online environment. In the metaverse, users can create avatars, interact with others, attend virtual events, own virtual property, and engage in economic activities. Unlike traditional online experiences, the metaverse aims to replicate and enhance the real world, offering seamless integration of the physical and digital realms.

Key Components of the Metaverse

Virtual Worlds: Virtual worlds are digital environments where users can explore, interact, and create. Platforms like Decentraland, Sandbox, and VRChat offer expansive virtual spaces where users can build, socialize, and participate in various activities.

Augmented Reality (AR): AR overlays digital information onto the real world, enhancing user experiences through devices like smartphones and AR glasses. Examples include Pokémon GO and AR navigation apps that blend digital content with physical surroundings.

Virtual Reality (VR): VR provides immersive experiences through headsets that transport users to fully digital environments. Companies like Oculus, HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR are leading the way in developing advanced VR hardware and software.

Blockchain Technology: Blockchain plays a crucial role in the metaverse by enabling decentralized ownership, digital scarcity, and secure transactions. NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and cryptocurrencies are integral to the metaverse economy, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade virtual assets.

Digital Economy: The metaverse features a robust digital economy where users can earn, spend, and invest in virtual goods and services. Virtual real estate, digital art, and in-game items are examples of assets that hold real-world value within the metaverse.

Potential Impact of the Metaverse

Social Interaction: The metaverse offers new ways for people to connect and interact, transcending geographical boundaries. Virtual events, social spaces, and collaborative environments provide opportunities for meaningful engagement and community building.

Entertainment and Gaming: The entertainment and gaming industries are poised to benefit significantly from the metaverse. Immersive games, virtual concerts, and interactive storytelling experiences offer new dimensions of engagement and creativity.

Education and Training: The metaverse has the potential to revolutionize education and training by providing immersive, interactive learning environments. Virtual classrooms, simulations, and collaborative projects can enhance educational outcomes and accessibility.

Commerce and Retail: Virtual shopping experiences and digital marketplaces enable businesses to reach global audiences in innovative ways. Brands can create virtual storefronts, offer unique digital products, and engage customers through immersive experiences.

Work and Collaboration: The metaverse can transform the future of work by providing virtual offices, meeting spaces, and collaborative tools. Remote work and global collaboration become more seamless and engaging in a fully digital environment.

Technologies Driving the Metaverse

5G Connectivity: High-speed, low-latency 5G networks are essential for delivering seamless and responsive metaverse experiences. Enhanced connectivity enables real-time interactions and high-quality streaming of immersive content.

Advanced Graphics and Computing: Powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) and cloud computing resources are crucial for rendering detailed virtual environments and supporting large-scale metaverse platforms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI enhances the metaverse by enabling realistic avatars, intelligent virtual assistants, and dynamic content generation. AI-driven algorithms can personalize experiences and optimize virtual interactions.

Wearable Technology: Wearable devices, such as VR headsets, AR glasses, and haptic feedback suits, provide users with immersive and interactive experiences. Advancements in wearable technology are critical for enhancing the metaverse experience.

Notable Metaverse Projects

Decentraland: Decentraland is a decentralized virtual world where users can buy, sell, and develop virtual real estate as NFTs. The platform offers a wide range of experiences, from gaming and socializing to virtual commerce and education.

Sandbox: Sandbox is a virtual world that allows users to create, own, and monetize their gaming experiences using blockchain technology. The platform's user-generated content and virtual real estate model have attracted a vibrant community of creators and players.

Facebook's Meta: Facebook's rebranding to Meta underscores its commitment to building the metaverse. Meta aims to create interconnected virtual spaces for social interaction, work, and entertainment, leveraging its existing social media infrastructure.

Roblox: Roblox is an online platform that enables users to create and play games developed by other users. With its extensive user-generated content and virtual economy, Roblox exemplifies the potential of the metaverse in gaming and social interaction.

Sexy Meme Coin (SEXXXY): Sexy Meme Coin integrates metaverse elements by offering a decentralized marketplace for buying, selling, and trading memes as NFTs. This unique approach combines humor, creativity, and digital ownership, adding a distinct flavor to the metaverse landscape. Learn more about Sexy Meme Coin at Sexy Meme Coin.

The Future of the Metaverse

The metaverse is still in its early stages, but its potential to reshape digital interaction is immense. As technology advances and more industries explore its possibilities, the metaverse is likely to become an integral part of our daily lives. Collaboration between technology providers, content creators, and businesses will drive the development of the metaverse, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Conclusion

The metaverse represents a new frontier in digital interaction, offering immersive and interconnected experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds. With its potential to transform social interaction, entertainment, education, commerce, and work, the metaverse is poised to revolutionize various aspects of our lives. Notable projects like Decentraland, Sandbox, Meta, Roblox, and Sexy Meme Coin are at the forefront of this transformation, showcasing the diverse possibilities within this emerging digital universe.

For those interested in the playful and innovative side of the metaverse, Sexy Meme Coin offers a unique and entertaining platform. Visit Sexy Meme Coin to explore this exciting project and join the community.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

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

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

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

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

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/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

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

[ravenkings]

The Kremlin stage-managed Russia’s presidential vote over the weekend to send a singular message at home and abroad: that President Vladimir V. Putin’s support is overwhelming and unshakable, despite or even because of his war against Ukraine.

From the moment the preliminary results first flashed across state television late Sunday, the authorities left no room for misinterpretation. Mr. Putin, they said, won more than 87 percent of the vote, his closest competitor just 4 percent. It had all the hallmarks of an authoritarian Potemkin plebiscite.

The Kremlin may have felt more comfortable orchestrating such a large margin of victory because Mr. Putin’s approval rating has climbed during the war in independent polls, owing to a rally-around-the flag effect and optimism about the Russian economy. The Levada Center, an independent pollster, reported last month that 86 percent of Russians approved of Mr. Putin, his highest rating in more than seven years.

But while the figures may suggest unabiding support for Mr. Putin and his agenda across Russia, the situation is more complex than the numbers convey. The leader of one opposition research group in Moscow has argued that backing for Mr. Putin is actually far more brittle than simple approval numbers suggest.

“The numbers we get on polls from Russia don’t mean what people think they mean,” said Aleksei Minyailo, a Moscow-based opposition activist and co-founder of a research project called Chronicles, which has been polling Russians in recent months. “Because Russia is not an electoral democracy but a wartime dictatorship.”

In a late January survey, Chronicles asked one group of Russian respondents what they wanted in key policy areas and a different group what they expected to see from Mr. Putin — and documented a substantive difference between desires and expectations.

More than half of respondents, for example, said they supported restoring relations with Western countries, but only 28 percent expected Mr. Putin to restore them. Some 58 percent expressed support for a truce with Ukraine, but only 29 percent expected Mr. Putin to agree to one.

“We see that Russians want different things from what they expect from Putin,” Mr. Minyailo said. “Probably if they did have any kind of alternative, they might make a different choice.”

Compelling alternative choices, however, have been systematically eliminated over the near quarter century that Mr. Putin has been in power in Russia.

Opposition figures have been exiled, jailed or killed. Independent news outlets have been driven out of the country. And a wave of repression unseen since the Soviet era has led to lengthy prison sentences for simple acts of dissent, such as critical social media posts.

Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who carried the hopes of many Russians for an alternative to Mr. Putin, died under mysterious circumstances in an Arctic prison last month. After declaring victory late Sunday, Mr. Putin called Mr. Navalny’s death an “unfortunate incident.”

The war has only further closed what little space used to exist for alternatives to Mr. Putin’s agenda to gain traction in public.

“There is a sophisticated case to be made about why this war is so much against Russia’s interest, and that part of the spectrum is missing,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “It is now happening in exile, and the government is erecting a lot of barriers to people tapping into this content.”

By casting those against the war as saboteurs, he said, Mr. Putin’s regime has succeeded in making “the opposition something that is really unattractive — more for outsiders, not for mainstream people.”

In years past, Russia’s so-called “political technologists” allowed a semblance of competition and open debate in presidential elections to drive turnout and give the race a patina of authenticity. But this year they took no chances.

Yekaterina S. Duntsova, a relatively unknown TV journalist and former municipal deputy from a city 140 miles west of Moscow, tried to run for president on an antiwar platform but was swiftly disqualified. So was Boris B. Nadezhdin, another under-the-radar politician who collected more than 100,000 signatures required to enter the race but could not get on the ballot.

“They deemed both of them dangerous enough not to let them on the ballot,” Mr. Minyailo said. “That tells a lot, to my mind, about the nature of the regime and about how stalwart Putin’s position is. If his regime thinks there is a danger to letting a provincial journalist collect signatures, that tells a lot.”

Russian opinion polling regularly shows that a relatively small segment of the Russian population are die-hard supporters of Mr. Putin and a similarly sized group are aggressive opponents, many of them now abroad.

The majority, pollsters have found, are relatively apathetic, supporting Mr. Putin passively, with no other alternative coming onto their radar. They are particularly influenced by the narrative on television, which is controlled by the state.

“Deep wells of social inertia, apathy and atomization are the real source of Putin’s power,” Mr. Gabuev said. Many Russians, he said, don’t have a sophisticated framework for thinking about certain issues, because there is no public discussion taking place.

And those Russians who do articulate desires that differ from Mr. Putin’s actions are not necessarily willing to fight for what they want, Mr. Minyailo noted. Many Russians believe they have no influence on the country’s course of events.

Still, the increase in support for Mr. Putin among Russians in the two years since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is unmistakable across multiple polls.

Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, said that a number of metrics showed consolidation around Mr. Putin.

“We monitor many indicators, not only approval rating,” Mr. Volkov said. “We ask open-ended questions. We ask about the economic situation. We ask about the mood of people. All these indicators are pointing in one direction.”

Armed with a vast propaganda apparatus, Mr. Putin has convinced millions of Russians that he is valiantly defending them against an antagonistic Western world bent on using Ukraine as a cudgel to destroy their nation and their way of life.

“The state narrative has generated this idea that it’s Russia versus everybody else,” said Katerina Tertytchnaya, a comparative politics professor at the University of Oxford. “ It’s very important, this narrative of being under siege. The lack of an alternative is also cited as one of the reasons that people support Putin. People cannot conceive of an alternative.”

It is not only that Mr. Putin seems superior to the alternative candidates that the Kremlin allows to appear on state television. He also comes across as a better choice compared to nearly all his historical predecessors.

Mr. Gabuev noted that despite the war tarnishing much of Mr. Putin’s legacy, his first two terms in particular brought the greatest combination of material prosperity and relative freedom Russians had ever seen — and for those uninterested in politics, good will remains.

“That’s the paradox, they really are the happiest life in the country’s history,” Mr. Gabuev said. “Because the combination of wealth and material prosperity and freedoms being present at the same time was never higher.”

[loominggaia]

ZAREENITE POLITICAL PARTIES

Elections are held every 10 years in Zareen Empire. Zareenite citizens may choose a new Great Leader from 3 political parties: the Industrialist party, the Naturalist party, and the Technologist party.

Each party typically holds power for several decades before the Zareenite people grow weary of the status quo and elect a new one. Historically, the order tends to flow in a circular fashion: Industrialist to Naturalist to Technologist, then back to Industrialist. Zareenites call this the “Forward Cycle”.

Occasionally the order is disrupted, and the cycle runs backwards or jumps around at random. Usually this disruption is caused by election interference, either by foreign or domestic entities. Zareen Empire seems to function at its best when the cycle flows forward, and experiences major instability when it flows out of order.

Though these 3 parties are fiercely competitive with each other and try to hold power for as long as possible, the truth is that they each need the support of the others to survive. If just one party was removed, the other two would eventually collapse behind it. Each party has its own strengths and weaknesses, and none of them are sustainable for longer than a few decades.

It is typical for one party to lead for 2 to 6 terms in a row (20 to 60 years) before a new one is elected. Terms shorter or longer than that are considered abnormal and are likely due to election interference.

⚙️INDUSTRIALIST PARTY⚙️

Industrialists prioritize economic prosperity above all else. This party is supported by corporations, the military, and the industrial sector.

Top sponsors:

High Empress Qara (Great Leader of Zareen Empire)

Zottan Industries (General manufacturing company)

Masterlite Energy (Electric company)

Chippo (Commercial goods distributor)

Zareenite Department of Defense (Military)

Lor Galor (Media conglomerate)

Under Industrialist leadership, Zareenites enjoy a cheaper cost of living, abundant blue collar jobs, and the freedom to say whatever is on their mind, no matter how distasteful it may be. Media companies are free to publish controversial content with little regulation. Likewise, corporations are free to extract and process resources with reckless abandon, dumping their pollution wherever they please. The military is free to provoke other nations and plunder even more resources.

Industrialists reduce funding to education because educated workers are not interested in the blue-collar and military jobs they provide. Zareen Empire experiences a “brain drain” under Industrialist leadership, where white-collar jobs are reduced and educated workers leave for foreign lands to find work. Industrialists fill the labor gaps by making immigration easier, welcoming workers from less desirable lands.

Industrialist Manifesto:

-Less government regulations across the board.

-War is good for the economy.

-Pollution is a natural byproduct of commoners and should not be demonized.

-The empire should provoke foreign powers to obtain resources.

-The environment should be sacrificed for the good of the economy.

-The Nymph Pact is detrimental to the economy.

-Iron is a sacred resource that should be subsidized.

-The empire should cater to commoners above everyone else.

-The immigration process should be easier.

-Automatons are best used as weapons.

-Less funding for education, more funding for defense.

Pros of Industrialist Leadership:

-Thriving economy, abundant blue collar jobs

-More social freedoms

-Uncensored media

-Cheaper goods for consumers, cost of living decreases

-More subsidies for business owners

-More benefits for soldiers, police, and veterans

Cons of Industrialist Leadership:

-Citizen health and safety declines

-Underfunded schools

-White-collar crime increases

-Foreign war inevitable

-Environmental pollution increases

-Welfare programs cut, poverty increases for vulnerable populations

🌳NATURALIST PARTY🌳

Naturalists prioritize society’s well-being above all else. This party is supported by environmentalists, social rights groups, and the civics sector.

Official sponsors:

-Gaia Defense League (Environmentalist campaign)

-Labor Rights for Zareenites (Workers' rights group)

-Litti & Goss Law Firm (Legal practice)

-Mothers for Morality (Media censorship activists)

Zareenite Department of Health (Government healthcare program)

-Empire Sports League (Athletes guild)

Under Naturalist leadership, Zareenites reap the benefits of worker’s rights, a cleaner environment, and improved healthcare. They can also rest easy knowing that Naturalist leaders will never provoke a foreign war. Naturalists prioritize everyone’s right to safety and equality, so they silence hate speech and place restrictions on the media, ensuring that citizens are not exposed to programs that glorify antisocial behavior. These kinds of restrictions extend to just about every aspect of a citizen’s life, for better or worse.

The Naturalist party upholds the Nymph Pact by halting tech advancement, restricting goods production, and shuttering some industries completely. This improves citizen health, safety, and pollution levels significantly, but also causes the economy to stagnate and corporations to lay off many workers. Naturalists support this under-employed population with welfare. This welfare is taken from the defense budget, which was previously inflated by the Industrialists.

Naturalist Manifesto:

-More government regulations across the board.

-War is detrimental to society.

-Pollution is harmful to people and should be eliminated.

-The empire should placate foreign powers to keep the peace.

-The economy should be sacrificed for the good of the environment.

-The Nymph Pact is beneficial to society.

-Iron is a harmful substance that should be banned.

-The empire should cater to allkind equally.

-Immigrants should be vetted based on morals.

-Automatons should never replace people.

-Less funding for defense, more funding for welfare.

Pros of Naturalist Leadership:

-Citizen health and safety improves

-No foreign wars and less domestic conflict with nymphs

-More welfare programs increases quality of life for citizens

-Society is more accommodating to diverse populations

-Environmental pollution decreases

-Improvements to all civic services (parks, museums, public transportation, etc.)

Cons of Naturalist Leadership:

-Stagnant economy, cost of doing business increases

-Media censorship

-Higher taxes, cost of living increases

-Tech innovation halts

-Blue-collar crime increases

-Increase in poverty

🔍TECHNOLOGIST PARTY🔎

Technologists prioritize technological innovation above all else. This party is supported by academics, scientists, and the research sector.

Official sponsors:

Tungsten Body Company (Robotics manufacturer)

Zygrow (Artificial fertility service)

ChroMight Technologies (Biotechnology laboratory)

Beryl Technical Institute (S.T.E.M. college)

Zareenite Department of Science (Research institution)

World Athenaeum (International knowledge repository)

Under Technologist leadership, Zareen Empire is thrust into a new era of innovative technologies. Advanced gadgets become more accessible to the average citizen, providing convenience and more free time for leisure. The Technologist party prioritizes automatons in particular, campaigning for equal rights for both biological and artificial life.

Technologists need bright minds to make their dreams a reality, so they cut many of the Naturalist’s welfare programs and divert those funds toward education. These educated citizens develop more advanced automatons that are capable of more types of work. But in order for these robots to function in society properly, infrastructure must be made more accommodating to their artificial senses. Urban planning is then designed around the needs of automatons, and citizens find their once charming cities becoming more bland, uniform, and grid-like.

Technologist Manifesto:

-Less regulations on industry, more regulations on society.

-Wars should be fought cerebrally, not physically.

-Pollution can be curbed by innovation and clean energy should be pursued.

-The empire should work with foreign powers to obtain knowledge.

-The economy and environment should be sacrificed for the good of innovation.

-The Nymph Pact is detrimental to progress.

-Iron is a useful material but technology can produce suitable replacements.

-The empire should cater to automatons above everyone else.

-Immigrants should be vetted based on intelligence.

-Automatons are best used as tools to benefit allkind.

-Less funding for welfare, more funding for education.

Pros of Technologist Leadership: 

-Education is improved and more accessible

-Crime is reduced overall

-More white-collar jobs available

-Existing technologies improved, new technologies developed

-Less foreign conflict

-Advanced technologies are cheaper and more accessible to citizens

Cons of Technologist Leadership:

-Reduction of blue-collar jobs

-More domestic conflict with nymphs

-Unethical experimentation on animals and people

-Society accommodates automatons over citizens

-Mental health of citizens decreases

-Citizens’ dependence on electricity increases

THE FORWARD CYCLE

Zareen Empire sees a great economic boost under Industrialist leadership. The media becomes a free-for-all of uncensored content and unvetted information, which influences citizens’ hearts and minds with outrageous entertainment. But eventually, Zareenites grow weary of the pollution, war, and behavioral sink of its citizens. They wish for peace, better health, a cleaner environment, and a more ethically-minded society, so they elect the Naturalists into power.

The Naturalists clean up the pollution and resolve the foreign conflicts left behind by the Industrialists. They also place regulations on every aspect of life, ensuring safety for body and mind. Power is shifted away from big business and into the hands of its workers, and urban planning is shaped around the needs of peoples rather than trucks and automatons.

All this over-regulation begins wearing on the Zareenites’ nerves after a while. They grow weary of the stagnant economy, of increasing censorship and dependence on welfare. Nothing around them seems to be progressing except for tiresome social discourse. They become sick of the Naturalists, but the horrors of Industrialist leadership are still fresh in their minds and they don’t wish to return to the past. They wish for a new era of innovation and fresh ideas, so they elect the Technologists into power.

The Technologists immediately dump funding into education, providing Zareenites with upward economic mobility as a wealth of new tech and research jobs are created. This education boost reduces crime significantly, and advanced devices that were once unobtainable to the working class are now cheap and abundant. Every aspect of life becomes more convenient as menial tasks are shifted into the backs of automatons. However, this convenience eventually turns to loneliness as citizens spend more time with their fancy new technology than with each other. Their jobs are being stolen by robots left and right. Worse yet, more robots and fancy gadgets require more electricity, and the empire spirals ever closer to its impending energy crisis.

The Zareenites decide enough is enough–they’ve had it with these Technologist eggheads and their machines! The empire needs more resources to sustain all this new technology, so the Industrialists are elected again. The Industrialists convert a large chunk of the working robots into soldiers and send them to plunder resources from foreign lands, opening more blue-collar jobs for citizens. The economy improves, pollution increases, and foreign relations sour.

And the cycle continues…

SEE ALSO

High Empress Qara Zareen

Bucketheels

ChroMight Mechaskema

Ask: Zareen

Ask: Qara

Ask: Politics

Ask: Technology

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

Read the Series

[tanadrin]

The invention of the basic BCI was revolutionary, though it did not seem so at the time. Developing implantable electronics that could detect impulses from, and provide feedback to, the body's motor and sensory neurons was a natural outgrowth of assistive technologies in the 21st century. The Collapse slowed the development of this technology, but did not stall it completely; the first full BCI suite capable of routing around serious spinal cord damage, and even reducing the symptoms of some kinds of brain injury, was developed in the 2070s. By the middle of the 22nd century, this technology was widely available. By the end, it was commonplace.

But we must distinguish, as more careful technologists did even then, between simpler BCI--brain-computer interfaces--and the subtler MMI, the mind-machine interface. BCI technology, especially in the form of assistive devices, was a terrific accomplishment. But the human sensory and motor systems, at least as accessed by that technology, are comparatively straightforward. Despite the name, a 22nd century BCI barely intrudes into the brain at all, with most of its physical connections being in the spine or peripheral nervous system. It does communicate *with* the brain, and it does so much faster and more reliably than normal sensory input or neuronal output, but there nevertheless still existed in that period a kind of technological barrier between more central cognitive functions, like memory, language, and attention, and the peripheral functions that the BCI was capable of augmenting or replacing.

*That* breakthrough came in the first decades of the 23rd century, again primarily from the medical field: the subarachnoid lace or neural lace, which could be grown from a seed created from the patient's own stem cells, and which found its first use in helping stroke patients recover cognitive function and suppressing seizures. The lace is a delicate web of sensors and chemical-electrical signalling terminals that spreads out over, and carefully penetrats certain parts of the brain; in its modern form, its function and design can be altered even after it is implanted. Most humans raised in an area with access to modern medical facilities have at least a diagnostic lace in place; and, in most contexts, they are regarded as little more than a medical tool.

But of course some of the scientists who developed the lace were interested in pushing the applications of the device further, and in this, they were inspired by the long history of attempts to develop immersive virtual reality that had bedevilled futurists since the 20th century. Since we have had computers capable of manipuating symbolic metaphors for space, we have dreamed of creating a virtual space we can shape to our hearts' content: worlds to escape to, in which we are freed from the tyranny of physical limitations that we labor under in this one. The earliest fiction on this subject imagined a kind of alternate dimension, which we could forsake our mundane existence for entirely, but outside of large multiplayer games that acted rather like amusement parks, the 21st century could only offer a hollow ghost of the Web, bogged down by a cumbersome 3D metaphor users could only crudely manipulate.

The BCI did little to improve the latter--for better or worse, the public Web as we created it in the 20th century is in its essential format (if not its scale) the public Web we have today, a vast library of linked documents we traverse for the most part in two dimensions. It feeds into and draws from the larger Internet, including more specialized software and communications systems that span the whole Solar System (and which, at its margins, interfaces with the Internet of other stars via slow tightbeam and packet ships), but the metaphor of physical space was always going to be insufficient for so complex and sprawling a medium.

What BCI really revolutionized was the massively multiplayer online game. By overriding sensory input and capturing motor output before it can reach the limbs, a BCI allows a player to totally inhabit a virtual world, limited only by the fidelity of the experience the software can offer. Some setups nowadays even forgo overriding the motor output, having the player instead stand in a haptic feedback enclosure where their body can be scanned in real time, with only audio and visual information being channeled through the BCI--this is a popular way to combine physical exercise and entertainment, especially in environments like space stations without a great deal of extra space.

Ultra-immersive games led directly, I argue, to the rise of the Sodalities, which were, if you recall, originally MMO guilds with persistent legal identities. They also influenced the development of the Moon, not just by inspiring the Sodalities, but by providing a channel, through virtual worlds, for socialization and competition that kept the Moon's political fragmentation from devolving into relentless zero-sum competition or war. And for most people, even for the most ardent players of these games, the BCI of the late 22nd century was sufficient. There would always be improvements in sensory fidelity to be made, and new innovations in the games themselves eagerly anticipated every few years, but it seemed, even for those who spent virtually all their waking hours in these spaces, that there was little more that could be accomplished.

But some dreamers are never satisfied; and, occasionally, such dreamers carry us forward and show us new possibilities. The Mogadishu Group began experimenting with pushing the boundaries of MMI and the ways in which MMI could augment and alter virtual spaces in the 2370s. Mare Moscoviensis Industries (the name is not a coincidence) allied with them in the 2380s to release a new kind of VR interface that was meant to revolutionize science and industry by allowing for more intuitive traversal of higher-dimensional spaces, to overcome some of the limits of three-dimensional VR. Their device, the Manifold, was a commercial disaster, with users generally reporting horrible and heretofore unimagined kinds of motion-sickness. MMI went bankrupt in 2387, and was bought by a group of former Mogadishu developers, who added to their number a handful of neuroscientists and transhumanists. They relocated to Plato City, and languished in obscurity for about twenty years.

The next anybody ever heard of the Plato Group (as they were then called), they had bought an old interplanetary freighter and headed for the Outer Solar System. They converted their freighter into a cramped-but-servicable station around Jupiter, and despite occasionally submitting papers to various neuroscience journals and MMI working groups, little was heard from them. This prompted, in 2410, a reporter from the Lunar News Service to hire a private craft to visit the Jupiter outpost; she returned four years later to describe what she found, to general astonishment.

The Plato Group had taken their name more seriously, perhaps, than anyone expected: they had come to regard the mundane, real, three-dimensional world as a second-rate illusion, as shadows on cave walls. But rather than believing there already existed a true realm of forms which they might access by reason, they aspired to create one. MMI was to be the basis, allowing them to free themselves not only of the constraints of the real world (as generations of game-players had already done), but to free themselves of the constraints imposed on those worlds by the evolutionary legacy of the structures of their mind.

They decided early on, for instance, that the human visual cortex was of little use to them. It was constrained to apprehending three-dimensional space, and the reliance of the mind on sight as a primary sense made higher-dimensional spaces difficult or impossible to navigate. Thus, their interface used visual cues only for secondary information--as weak and nondirectional a sense as smell. They focused on using the neural lace to control the firing patterns of the parts of the brain concerned with spatial perception: the place cells, neurons which periodically fire to map spaces to fractal grides of familiar places, and the grid cells, which help construct a two-dimensional sense of location. Via external manipulation, they found they could quickly accommodate these systems to much more complex spaces--not just higher dimensions, but non-Euclidean geometries, and vast hierarchies of scale from the Planck length to many times the size of the observable universe.

The goal of the Plato Group was not simply to make a virtual space to inhabit, however transcendent; into that space they mapped as much information they could, from the Web, the publicly available internet, and any other database they could access, or library that would send them scans of its collection. They reveled in the possibilities of their invented environment, creating new kinds of incomprehensible spatial and sensory art. When asked what the purpose of all this was--were they evangelists for this new mode of being, were they a new kind of Sodality, were they secessionists protesting the limits of the rest of the Solar System's imagination?--they simply replied, "We are happy."

I do not think anyone, on the Moon or elsewhere, really knew what to make of that. Perhaps it is simply that the world they inhabit, however pleasant, is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot appreciate it. Perhaps we do not want to admit there are other modes of being as real and moving to those who inhabit them as our own. Perhaps we simply have a touch of chauvanism about the mundane. If you wish to try to understand yourself, you may--unlike many other utopian endeavors, the Plato Group is still there. Their station--sometimes called the Academy by outsiders, though they simply call it "home"--has expanded considerably over the years. It hangs in the flux tube between Jupiter and Io, drawing its power from Jupiter's magnetic field, and is, I am told, quite impressive if a bit cramped. You can glimpse a little of what they have built using an ordinary BCI-based VR interface; a little more if your neural lace is up to spec. But of course to really understand, to really see their world as they see it, you must be willing to move beyond those things, to forsake--if only temporarily--the world you have been bound to for your entire life, and the shape of the mind you have thus inherited. That is perhaps quite daunting to some. But if we desire to look upon new worlds, must we not always risk that we shall be transformed?

--Tjungdiawain’s Historical Reader, 3rd edition

[christian-dubuis-santini]

C'est ainsi que je me suis retrouvé parmi les rapetisseurs de monde, les postmodernes, les transhumanistes, les mondialistes, les globalistes, les journalistes, les technologistes, les algorithmés du bulbe, les scientistes, les socialistes, les progressistes, les transexualistes, les climatistes, les covidiotistes, les antiracistes, les antifascistes, les attestationistes, les confinistes, les vaccinistes, les enfermistes, les cul-erre-codistes, les maquinnesaitistes, les phoquechèqueuristes… je n'exigeais pas grand-chose et j'étais prêt à en trouver encore moins. Des barbares depuis des temps immémoriaux sont devenus encore plus barbares par la diligence, la science et même la religion, profondément inaccessibles à toute transcendance, abîmés jusqu'à la moelle à tous les degrés de l'exagération et de l'insuffisance, ternes et inharmonieux, je ne connais pas de peuple plus divisé en lui-même que les occidentés, vous y voyez des ingénieurs, des avocats, des artisans, des chefs d’entreprise, des financiers, des docteurs, des influenceurs, des journalistes, des écrivains, des maîtres et des esclaves, des jeunes et des anciens, mais pas d'hommes - n'est-ce pas comme un champ de bataille où les mains et les bras et tous les autres membres sont démembrés en tas, tandis que le sang de la vie s'écoule dans le sable ?

Chacun a droit à son écran, direz-vous, et je le dis aussi. Seulement, chacun doit être ce qu'il est, avec de l'amour, il doit être ce qu'il est, car c'est ainsi qu'un esprit vit dans ses actes, et s'il est poussé dans une profession où l'esprit ne peut vivre, qu'il la repousse avec mépris et qu'il apprenne à lire, à écrire, à dessiner, à composer, à labourer la terre, à pêcher, à chasser, à se battre ! Mais les occidentés se contentent du néant de la vie, et c'est pour cela qu'il y a tant de travail bâclé chez eux et si peu d'activités libres et agréables. Pourtant, cela pourrait être le travail de l'homme, s'il n'était pas si dépourvu de sentiment pour toute la beauté de la vie, si seulement la malédiction de la pseudo-culture ne pesait pas partout sur ce peuple éclaté.

Les vertus des anciens ne sont que des vices éclatants, comme l'a dit une mauvaise langue, je ne sais plus laquelle, et pourtant leurs vices eux-mêmes sont des vertus, car ils ne sont pas des vices ; un reste de l'esprit d'enfance et de beauté vivait encore parmi eux, et de tout ce qu'ils faisaient, rien n'était fait sans âme. Mais les vertus des occidentés sont un mal éclatant, rien de plus que la peur de l'homme, de la femme, de l’enfant, des efforts serviles arrachés au cœur stérile, et qui laissent sans esprit l'homme qui, gâté par la sainte harmonie des natures plus nobles, ne peut supporter les sursauts de la discorde qui crie dans tout l'ordre mort de ces hommes.

Je vous le dis: il n'y a rien de saint qui ne soit profané, qui ne soit dégradé dans ce peuple qui a perdu le rapport à son origine, même les sauvages, ces barbares calculateurs les poursuivent comme on applique un calcul, et il ne peut en être autrement, car là où un vice de l'homme s’est une fois formé, là il sert son but, là il cherche son profit, il est jaloux de ses profits, il n'est plus emporté par l'enthousiasme, à Dieu ne plaise ! et quand il fête, quand il aime, quand il prie, et même quand arrive la belle fête du printemps, quand le temps de la réconciliation du monde dissout toutes les inquiétudes et fait naître l'innocence dans un cœur coupable, lorsque, enivré par les chauds rayons du soleil, l'esclave oublie joyeusement ses chaînes et, apaisé par l'air divinement vivifié, les ennemis de l'homme sont aussi paisibles que les hommes, paisibles comme des enfants - quand même les chenilles poussent des ailes et les abeilles pullulent, l’occidenté,

l’occidenté, lui, reste confiné à sa profession, à son divertissement. Il ne se préoccupe guère du temps qu'il fait !

Mais c'est toi qui jugeras, sainte nature ! Car s'ils étaient humbles, ces hommes, s’ils ne se faisaient pas la loi pour le pire d'entre eux !

s'ils ne dénigraient pas ce qu'ils ne sont pas, et pourtant qu'ils dénigrent, s'ils ne se moquaient pas de Dieu, des dieux anciens!

Ou bien n'est-ce pas le divin que vous, occidentés, raillez et appelez sans âme ? L'air que vous buvez n'est-il pas l'air que vous buvez ? ne vaut-il pas mieux que vos bavardages ? que vous tous nourrissez, hommes astucieux ? Les sources de la terre et la rosée du matin rafraîchissent votre bosquet ; pourriez-vous faire cela ? Vous pouvez tuer, mais vous ne pouvez pas donner la vie, non pas sans l'amour, qui ne vient pas de toi, que tu n'as pas inventé. Tu t'inquiètes, tu fais des projets pour échapper au destin, et tu ne comprends pas que ton enfantine technique n'est d'aucun secours ; pendant ce temps, les étoiles se meuvent inoffensives au-dessus de toi.

Vous dégradez, vous détruisez la nature patiente là où elle vous tolère, et pourtant elle vit dans une jeunesse infinie, et tu ne peux pas bannir son automne et son printemps, vous ne gâtez pas son éther.

Ô elle doit être divine, car tu peux détruire et pourtant elle ne vieillit pas, elle ne vieillit pas, et malgré toi le beau reste beau.

C'est aussi un déchirement quand on voit vos artistes, et tous ceux qui respectent encore le génie, qui aiment le beau et le cultivent. Les bonnes âmes ! Elles vivent dans le monde comme des étrangers dans leur propre maison, elles sont comme le patient et souffrant Ulysse lorsqu'il s'asseyait à sa porte déguisé en mendiant, tandis que les prétendants éhontés clamaient dans la salle et demandaient : Qui nous a apporté le vagabond ?

Pleines d'amour, d'esprit et d'espoir, ses jeunes Muses grandissent pour le peuple disparate des occidentés ; on les revoit sept ans plus tard et ils errent comme des ombres, silencieux et froids. Ils sont comme la terre que l'ennemi sème avec du sel pour qu'il ne pousse jamais un brin d'herbe ; et quand ils parlent, malheur à celui qui les comprend !

Qui ne voit, dans leur titanesque projet comme dans leurs technologies protéiformes, la bataille, le combat désespéré que leur esprit troublé livre aux barbares contre les barbares auxquels il a affaire.

Tout ce qui existe sur terre est imparfait - c'est la vieille chanson des occidentés. Si quelqu'un pouvait dire une fois à ces âmes perdues que tout n'est si imparfait chez eux parce qu'ils ne laissent rien de pur sans être corrompu, rien de saint n'est épargné par leurs mains grossières et leur esprit grossier, que rien ne prospère parmi eux parce qu'ils ne respectent pas la racine, le germe de l'épanouissement, l’origine divine, que la vie parmi eux est rassise, lourde de soucis et pleine de discordes froides et muettes, parce qu'ils méprisent le génie de l'homme qui apporte la force et la noblesse dans les actes humains, la sérénité dans la souffrance, l'amour et la fraternité dans les villes et les maisons..

C'est aussi pour cela qu'ils ont si peur de la mort et qu'ils subissent, au nom de leur vie en coquille, toutes les disgrâces, parce qu'ils ne connaissent rien de plus élevé que l'œuvre bâclée qu'ils se sont donnée.

Là où un peuple aime le beau, où il honore le génie de ses artistes, là où l'esprit commun flotte comme l'air de la vie, là l'esprit timide s'ouvre, la suffisance se dissout, et tous les cœurs sont pieux et grands, et l'enthousiasme donne naissance à des héros. La patrie de tous les hommes est dans la langue, et l'étranger lui-même peut s'y attarder avec plaisir. Mais là où la nature divine et ses artistes sont ainsi insultés, là le plus beau plaisir de la vie est écarté et toute autre étoile est meilleure que la terre. Là, les hommes deviennent de plus en plus stériles, de plus en plus désolés, de plus en plus dégénérés alors qu'ils sont tous nés beaux ; la servilité s'accroît, et avec elle l'impudence, l'ivresse s'accroît avec les soucis, et l'abondance, la faim et la crainte de la famine ; la bénédiction de chaque année devient une malédiction, et tous les dieux s'enfuient.

Et malheur à l'étranger qui erre par amour et arrive chez un tel peuple, et malheur trois fois à celui qui arrive chez un tel peuple comme je l'ai fait, poussé par une grande joie comme je l'ai fait, ou poussé par un grand chagrin, cela revient au même ! Assez ! tu me connais, lecteur, et tu le prendras bien, car j'ai parlé en ton nom.

Je parlais aussi pour tous ceux qui sont dans ce pays et qui souffrent comme j'ai souffert.

(Avec Hölderlin au XXIe siècle)

[mariacallous]

Leaked documents from a source close to the Putin administration reveal that Russian propagandists have a new target in their sights: government critics and opposition supporters. In an attempt to win over this skeptical audience, they’ve been repurposing out-of-context clips from a popular YouTuber’s old interviews, adding their own messages in the descriptions. They’ve also tried coming up with news stories they think might attract the attention of independent Russian media outlets (like Meduza). Here’s what they’re doing.

Dialog, an “autonomous nonprofit organization” (ANO) created on Vladimir Putin’s orders to spread disinformation, is using targeted advertising and repurposed material from “foreign agents” to try to promote a pro-Kremlin narrative to those who oppose the current Russian government, according to leaked documents shared with Meduza.

As part of the initiative, Dialog repurposed content from Russian YouTuber Yuri Dud (declared a “foreign agent” in Russia) and added captions encouraging people to go to the polls, according to a document from 2023 titled “Election Campaign on the Internet.” Specifically, the organization utilized excerpts from an interview Dud conducted with the Communist Party’s 2018 presidential candidate Pavel Grudinin before that year’s elections. Dialog shared the clips with phrases such as “If they come to the elections, falsifications will be impossible,” and “Dud recommends,” and then used targeted advertising to promote these clips “solely” to social media users critical of the government.

The document, written by Andrey Tsepelev, the deputy general director of Dialog Regions, aims to implement a “relevant system for managing internet operations in election headquarters.” However, the specifics of how this system works aren’t detailed, and Tsepelev didn’t respond to Meduza's inquiries.

This “relevant system” will be implemented with assistance from the Association of Internet Technologists, which is also headed by Tsepelev. Other co-founders include propagandist Kristina Potupchik, who owns a network of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and Stanislav Apetyan, a board member of the Civil Society Development Foundation (led by former Kremlin official Konstantin Kostin). Artyom Tkachenko, the director of the regional affairs department at Dialog Regions, and Vladimir Tabak, the head of Dialog, are also among the founders.

It was Tabak’s idea to try to engage with Russians critical of the current government, according to two of his acquaintances. A Dialog employee confirmed to Meduza that there have long been internal “discussions about content and narratives that could work for a liberal audience.”

“A couple of years ago, [Tabak] was already saying that he’d gone around the regions to help locals with elections, and he complained that they were all stupid, complete dipshits, knew nothing, didn’t work with analytics, posted strange things, and didn’t know what to do with social media,” explained one acquaintance. “All of that needed to change. So, he’s changing it. Tabak’s logic is basically: you [the authorities] managed to seal off the country, hundreds of thousands of people left, but that doesn’t mean their opinion doesn’t matter.”

So far, the plan has had very little success. Besides distributing repurposed clips from Yuri Dud, Dialog employees also credit themselves with creating “special projects” that have been covered by independent media. For instance, in a presentation about Russia’s recent presidential campaign, there’s a slide on press coverage of the fact that Vladimir Putin’s latest address to Russia’s Federal Assembly was shown in Russian movie theaters free of charge.

“The news spread across Telegram channels (2,491 publications), social networks (3,000 publications), TV (four TV segments), Russian-language media (2,067 publications) and foreign media (55 publications),” states Dialog’s presentation. According to the organization, the total number of views exceeded 31.8 million.

The presentation lists media outlets that reported on the theater broadcast, including Ostorozhno, Novosti (a project by Ksenia Sobchak), Meduza, and Dozhd (TV Rain). Despite Dozhd and Meduza being declared “undesirable” organizations in Russia, Dialog used their logos in the slides — which theoretically violates current legislation and could be considered the dissemination of prohibited materials.

A source in the Telegram industry told Meduza that Dialog highlights the interest of independent media in such news to demonstrate the effectiveness of its projects to the authorities. “It’s not hard to distribute and plant news in their own network of Telegram channels,” the source explained. “It’s much cooler if it’s not just a paid [propagandist] writing about you but a TV channel like Dozhd. They sell it as evidence that Dialog is so effective that it can even get the interest of ‘enemy’ media.”

The source added that Dialog employees are also trying to capitalize on the fact that independent media were forced to leave the country due to censorship, which may make it harder for them to assess the significance of certain news:

Liberal media that have left the country are out of touch with reality, since they’re not in Russia. Therefore, [according to Dialog propagandists], they amplify news that barely interests anyone here [in Russia]. Plus, even though the Justice Ministry has declared Meduza and Dozhd ‘undesirable,’ those working on elections understand that these are popular media outlets with a suitable audience that needs to be engaged and tapped into.

However, Dialog’s presentation doesn’t mention this, nor does it provide examples of other news events that independent media might have written about. It only includes mentions of short publications about Putin’s address being shown in theaters. How exactly this helps Dialog influence and “engage” the “opposition audience” remains unclear.

Nevertheless, propagandists believe that “it holds more weight when your enemies write about you,” explained one of Tabak’s acquaintances. “The media outlets that have left — Meduza, for example — have a huge Telegram audience, 1.2 million followers, and you need to work with that audience too,” he said.

When asked about the mention of independent media in the presentation, Tabak told Meduza: “It's not only you who can write about us; we thought we'd return the favor.” He refused to comment further.

[younes-ben-amara]

كيف تُلخِّص الفيديوهات الطويلة نصيًا وتستخرج فوائدها؟ [إضافة تدعم العربية]

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #101 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #101✨ مُبشِّر🔌🧠 جدير بالاطلاع🎈 إليك 600 مقطع مرئي مشحونة بالنفع📁 من الأرشيف 🤔 ما هو الجِشْطَلْت (Gestalt)؟✒️ الكتابة اليومية تحسِّن النفسية*🖊️ لماذا لا ينبغي عليك أن تدع…

[purrfectwriting]

Who are the main characters and protagonist(s) in Shifting Gears?

Firstly, I'm so so sorry for only just getting to this ask! I've been traveling for the past month, so I haven't been able to answer asks for a while, so I shall respond to this now!

Additionally, tumblr inbox has been strange for me as the icon doesn't show up on desktop for me anymore? And on mobile, i have to scroll through my notes to see asks, the ui can be SO confusing!

But seeing this made me excited as I haven't thought or spoke about Shifting Gears on here, so tysm for this ask!! I genuinely appreciate every single ask you send about my stories or ocs, so thank you so much!!

So for Shifting Gears, I had a cast of characters who I developed briefly a few years back, but I put the story on the backburner in 2020 and just never got back to it.

The general premise of the story is the main character Alena lives in Pixicity, a city which is designed for people to benefit from Pixie Technologies in return for their work and abilities, in whatever capacity they can. She's normally content to live in the city and work for the company, but started feeling uneasy when her grandma passes away in a sudden accident during work. Alena was given very little explanation for her grandma's death, which leads her to go through her grandma's belongings in hopes of clues, only to find a letter to go to Azaadi, and a map on how to go there with only a single return address on it. Alena, in hopes of figuring out what happened to her grandma, decides to head there, while risking her job and in turn, her life.

There's 3 characters I've developed so far, and a 4th character who I started writing the concept of but haven't developed in detail yet.

Alena David: A 24 years old Black woman whose grandma passed away and decides to go to Azaadi to find out what happens to her grandma. She originally worked as a bio-technologist in Pixicity and took a break from her job in the beginning of the story.

Sabira Malik: A 25 years old Indian woman who's Alena best friend, and works as an accountant for Pixie Technologies.

Xinyi Li: A 24 years old Chinese nonbinary person who's known for their fashion looks and tries to help their friends Sabira and Alena with their fashion sense, from time to time.

Omen Malin: I haven't developed him much yet, but he is the one Alena meets in Azaadi who helps her figure out what happens to her grandma!

Those are all the characters I have so far, but if I pick this story up again, hopefully, I can add more characters and develop them more! Thank you again for this ask, I hope you have a lovely day!!

[wedriftlikelonelyplanets]

🍓🧃🧸🪲

🍓 - How did you get into writing fanfiction?

ALRIGHT SO I've been involved in the online RP community since I was like 15-ish...i think? Anyhow, I've been writing for literal years. I am, however, incredibly self-conscious about my own writing. I've dwelled in many a fandom space as well, honestly.

After getting into F1, I've felt like I've been kinda on the outskirts of a community I really love (not on the outskirts for a negative reason, I'm just incredibly shy and worry that I'm annoying), and it's given me kinda...I guess a little burst of confidence. I wrote my first fic after the Hungarian Grand Prix of this year because there was just...something SO COMPELLING about the dynamic between Lando and Oscar during/after that race. Since THEN I haven't been able to stop, and I've really been loving being a part of this community.

That, and the fact that the stuff that I've written has been so well received has made me more comfortable to continue writing within a fandom space.

🧃 - Share some personal lore you've never shared before

OKAY WELL THEN...Idk there's a lot I blab about on the internet so I've gotta think about this one.

I have what is probably undiagnosed hEDS (hypermobile ehlers-danlos syndrome), and likely never will be diagnosed because I'm a fat, female presenting woman. This means I experience a lot of chronic pain, and actually deal with regular shoulder subluxations that put a damper in my ability to do my job sometimes

Despite being an elder emo, I've never actually been to a music festival, despite my longing and desire. This is primarily in part due to the fact that I live in a small city in Canada that doesn't really get a lot of fun music in general

I blab about this a lot, but I'm a Registered Veterinary Technologist, and have been for 5 years, and I'm likely going back to school to actually become a vet, because I finally found a clinic that makes me love my job again!!

🧸 - what's the fastest way to become mutuals with me?

UH GREAT QUESTION. I guess interact with me, chat with me, my askbox AND my messages are always open. I don't specifically mean you need to like and comment on my fics, but like...interact with my content. I love to yap, give advice, and just chat. I've dealt with a sudden influx of followers since starting to write fanfic (this is not said to sound vain), and I feel like I can no longer just follow people willy-nilly anymore. Honestly I often do click through to the blogs of new followers, but I sometimes just get overwhelmed.

Hell, even if you just message me and are like "this song made me think of x, y and z" i'd love you forever.

And interact of anon. I love all of you darling anonymous folks that come into my ask box but i want to stroke your faces lovingly and reblog things from your tumblrs and I can't do that when I don't know who you are.

🐞 - Using this in place of the other beetle BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK ON MY PC but - Write 50 words for your current work in progress and then post that paragraph here

I see what you're doing, anon, keeping me on task and also getting some snippets out of me...(such a mean trick to play...jk)

“More?” Lando asks, and Oscar shakes his head. Lando places the mug back on the tray, reaches out to brush Oscar’s hair back from his face again, fingers catching in the tangled strands. Oscar leans into the touch, presses his cheek against Lando’s palm, presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist where he can reach it. Just a brush of his lips, softer than soft. It should feel infantilizing, to be cared for like this, but it soothes the part of him that makes him feel like he always has to be calm and collected, always in control

THIS IS MORE THAN 50 WORDS, MERRY CHRISTMAS.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

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

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

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

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

or

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

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/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

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

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

[onwesterlywinds]

PROMPT #3: Tempest

Some deep and instinctual part of her had expected a tempest, but at least this sight would be the last one to fill her eyes in this life. A follow-up to Prompt #3, Scale, from #FFXIVWrite 2021. Content warning for implied suicide.

The annals would make note that the hurricane over the southern seas had delayed Emperor Xande's arrival to the Meracydian front. Official imperial records aside, the news of this temporary forestallment somehow traveled to all corners of the great Allagan army in record time, bearing with it the sobering reminder that not even the greatest ruler the star had ever seen was exempt from the whims of nature. Any other man might have been expected to wait for a few days, perhaps in the comfort of an estate; instead, the emperor stood at his flagship's top deck for the better part of a week without rest, grinding his teeth as the storm's static knocked out instruments, scrambled readings, or battered the hull with lightning. All the while, he retained his unerring focus on the coast to the south, heeding not even the whispers of his chief technologist.

But the emperor did not lead his troops to the site of his most recent victory over the dragons, outside of commanding a small contingent of elite fighters and their pacted voidsent to proceed deeper into the heart of the mainland. He marched with his retinue up and along a coastal road, paying no heed to the Meracydian smallfolk cowering from the ruins of their burned villages. More than once, he instructed his soldiers to cut through whole forests of dense underbrush, the better to follow the coast by quitting the main road outright.

At last, at sunset on the fifth day of such travel, the emperor's party emerged into a small clearing that gave way to a cabin and then a cliff. The sound and smell of the ocean's rush was close at hand, closer now than at any point throughout their strange journey.

Inside the cabin, the hearth sat cold, the home in disarray - not the mindless destruction of looting, but the cumulative work of neglect and inaction. A thick layer of dust covered the shrine to the Goddess, a selection of fruits had given way to purple and white mold, and a faint crack in one of the windows permitted a thin, wispy whistle of wind from without.

Perhaps the only detail given any deliberate care or intentionality within the entire cabin was the corpse of the woman in the rocking chair, and the accoutrements she had been bestowed: a faded Meracydian uniform tucked into her lap, the knife in her hand, and the heavy stain of blood covering it all. The woman's corpse was already flyblown, decomposed to the extent of appearing tortured, though Xande knew intimately that such observations had no bearing on the deceased's peace or lack thereof.

Amon met him outside, at the very edge of the cliff and the bygone fate that awaited him below. The second corpse would scarcely have reached half the size of his hypertuned body; exposed to the elements in death, she was smaller still.

And Xande II could see, in the blood that yet covered her own arms up to the elbows, that the storm had not landed this far to the east. If it had, the tides would surely have dislodged her body from the merciless shallows, or else brought forth the rain to clean her for her eventual burial at sea.

"Come, try to remember," the mage invited him. "You have witnessed such a sight before - have you not, my lord? Wherever, whenever could it have been?"

If he had, such memories would have been the province of his predecessor. Certainly the mage knew this as well as he.

Xande raised his great, clenched fist, and the broken girl's red hair rippled in the gusting wind as he summoned his companion from the void. The Cloud of Darkness emerged so fluidly from the sudden dark rend in the sun-shot sky that half his own retinue screamed. The deity needed no instruction, no guidance for what followed: they inhaled and drew the cabin into them - from the dead woman and the uniform she carried, to the fragments of Sophia's altar, down to the house's aged foundations and the stone well beyond it. It was over in mere seconds, with only a patch of barren earth to demonstrate that a family had ever eked a home from the remote cliffside.

The Cloud of Darkness disappeared, then reemerged over Xande's shoulder in a blink. As they made to absorb the body far below them, the emperor lifted his hand again, and their connection to the world from the void was severed.

Amon merely chuckled beside him, and his mirth gave way to outright laughter as they left the girl to decompose - as they began their long trek back to the Meracydian front in earnest.

[studymummy]

2nd August 2024

After having a complete meltdown to my fiancé a few months ago about not being content with where I am at in life, I have started on a completely new career/study journey. It’s taken a long time to get here but I have finally circled back towards my original goals from pre-life/pre-kids.

So I am halfway through my first semester in my goal towards becoming a Veterinary Technologist. I always wanted to be a Vet and then as mentioned, life got in the way. I'm now too old to do Vet Med and have too many responsibilities to be able to not work full time, but this is a happy compromise.

It is taking me a while to find my groove and I have had a few meltdowns over feeling like I don't know HOW to study but i am starting to get the hang of it. Biggest issue is just trying to have a consistent schedule and not burning myself out staying up all night after working all day. Plus side is, I have had to fill in at work in a role that requires a lot of standing around and killing time, so have been getting some notes done at work as well.

Photo of my attempt to take notes at work as well as the cutest study buddy ever.

Shoutout to my fiancé for making me believe I can do this and pushing me to chase my dreams ❤️