#What is amazon dropshipping

[proriverblog]

What is amazon dropshipping 

I. Introduction:

A. In this section, the concept of drop shipping is introduced in more detail. Drop shipping is a business model where the seller does not hold inventory but instead passes on customer orders and shipment details to the supplier, who then ships the products directly to the customer.

B. The focus then shifts to Amazon, highlighting its importance as one of the largest e-commerce platforms worldwide, known for its vast customer base and robust infrastructure. Is.

Section C. explains that Amazon drop shipping refers specifically to using Amazon as a sales platform for products obtained from third-party suppliers, who handle order fulfillment and shipping logistics.

II .How Amazon Drop Shipping Works:

A. This section provides a step-by-step breakdown of the process involved in Amazon drop shipping.

B. It begins by defining the role of an Amazon seller, who registers and lists products on Amazon's marketplace, sets prices, manages customer interactions, and handles payments.

C. The section then focuses on the drop shipper, who plays an important role in procuring products from suppliers. The dropshipper coordinates with suppliers to ensure inventory availability and manages order fulfillment and shipping on behalf of the seller.

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[tonyglowheart]

it's so annoying to me that ppl misuse the term "dropshipping." Dropshipping is when someone finds a listing off like aliexpress or amazon for cheap and then list it on, like, ebay or etsy, but they're not handling the product at all, they're placing an order on their source site and putting in your shipping info, which you gave them when you placed the order elsewhere

if someone orders in bulk off aliexpress and then repackages it themselves to ship to you, they're not dropshipping. you might consider it reselling, but it's not dropshipping.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

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

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[hypokeimena]

I was just talking about this "mass handmade cookie cutter product" phenomenon, I was just at a con with four discreet 3d printer booths all of whom had the exact same articulated dragon with roses on it's back? and I literally own one of these at a small scale it's adorable i like the model quite a lot, but like. it's a $4 STL file online, the filaments are $20 each on amazon, once you buy the printer you can just print them in any size forever and charge whatever people will buy because they don't realize the seller has don't like. none of the design or labor involved in producing this item, despite the fact that they did factually make it themselves on a small enough scale that it's not out of place at a handmade maker con. it's odd.

IT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I AM INSANE. IT MAKES ME FEEL OUT OF TOUCH WITH CONSENSUS REALITY!!!! like it's not the same as dropshipped items bc i think those should just flatout not be allowed without VERY clear signposting - like if you are selling mass produced notions for other people's creative products you should be legally required to state who your supplier is so ppl can look up how much you're upmarking shit, bc like. there IS a market for "the factory sells those buttons in batches of 100 and i only need 5, so i'll pay a little more for a middleman to have purchased the batch of 100 and handle all the inventory" like that is a service that makes sense. to have exist. but ohhhhh my fucking god.

but what you're describing is really true, i think there's a mix between like... i know small artists who sell stuff at markets and cons and stuff pay a table fee, so they want to make back what they spent on that, and so it makes sense to want to be sure that some of what you're making is going to sell, and maybe it even makes sense to do what you describe - buy an STL file, print off some proven winners.

but from the buyers' perspective, it means that half the art markets i go to are full of enamel pins that say CAT MOM and stickers about liking avocados and pride flag keychains, bc that's what sells, and anything that's original sits unsold - or it's more expensive bc it wasn't mass-produced and had higher labor costs, so it takes longer to move... so ppl stop stocking or bringing it... and it's like if all of this is the same why am i even here. T_T

[miaclemeverett]

amazon standing lamp - using drugs and sex and other unhealthy distractions and coping mechanisms to deal with losing people you love out of your own fault. the top-heavy amazon standing lamp part is a really old wilbur joke (back in 2020 he joked about naming a song this) and it also reminds me of how (i think it was him?) he once said that he moves house so often that he loses so many belongings and only has a few things left that he cares about, i think this pairs really well in the song how the artificial meaningless things are all that remain

mine / yours - the breakdown of a relationship, seeing the warning signs and the things you take for granted assuming a person will stay with you forever despite it all

around the pomegranate - this song reminds me a lot of "since i saw vienna", when a place (california in this song) becomes so married to a person that it serves as a source of comfort and nostalgia for when things were simple and happier. being on the road you can never set down roots and people come and go from your life

i don't think it will ever end - he lives life in front of millions of people (chat in this song) watching his every move, like an actor he either has to play the part he's made for himself or isolate himself from this audience, it's a repetitive cycle that sends him downhill

glass chalet - back in the dark days of 2021 i remember wilbur would always joke (SLASH SERIOUS) about quitting streaming and disappearing off the face of the planet for years without a single word. VERY HEALTHY MINDSET exhibited right here in this song

melatonin 130 - I LOVE 100 GECS!! but in all seriousness the constant reminder that you have mental illness/anxiety your entire life and you can only cope with it, that it impairs you even when you should be happy cus obviously you're living out what you thought was your dream and everyone else thinks you should be on top of the world duh!

oh distant you - JUST KILL ME. your sister was right but WORSE!!!!!!!! again you take for granted that someone will stick with you forever and only after it's over realizing that you can't fill the hole where they were. and again we're back on fixating on who is the villain in this narrative

eulogy - your sister was right but worse 2, this song focuses on the whispers (good and bad) leftover from a relationship. harkening back to screensaver where he says that the subject in talking about their relationship basically makes him sound like hitler, and your sister was right where he talks about the warning signs the subject should have seen, this squarely places the blame on him

dropshipped cat shirt - I LOVE 100 GECS!!! but anyway the grueling day-to-day of being on the move, singing to people who adore you and make up a version of you in their head, latching onto unhealthy coping mechanisms to keep going, you have everything you ever needed and wanted but you're bored out of your mind

the median - short but sweet! as i said earlier, wilbur always has to play a part, and this audience projects their version of himself as the truth

trying not to think about it - I KNOW I PUT DAMN NEAR THE WHOLE SONG DOWN HERE BUT LISTEN. again realizing how much you take for granted the assumption that someone will stick with you forever. wilbur has mentioned before how as a hypochondriac, he's never taken seriously by doctors whenever he doesn't feel well. also this idea of romance and love as something just for the aesthetic, not as something that gives you stability and meaning but realizing that it can be that for you until its too late.

10 week rule - who got him pregnant?? but in all seriousness i think this can be read as a way of turning a new page, but obviously its not as simple as just getting rid of something unwanted

[copperbadge]

Custom Wax Stamps

banesidhe

Would you be willing to share the source for custom stamps? I also do these and have had a hard time finding stamps with what I want on them

Oh sure! I hope it's okay that I pulled this out into its own post, I didn't want to spam the OP on the other. Apologies in advance if you know any of what I'm about to say, I'm just going to infodump and I want to make sure I don't miss anything. I will say that the process was smooth and pretty painless for me, much more so than I expected.

As preface, if you haven't been to the Craspire website, they have acres of stamps for very cheap, and I think the vast majority of sellers on Amazon/Ebay/Etsy actually just dropship from Craspire. If you're looking for variety, I'd definitely look there. (If you have, again, apologies, it just took me a while to find it and I spent more than I should have on a couple of my stamps before I started buying direct from them, so I like to make sure I mention it.)

There are a ton of shops on Etsy offering custom stamps, with wildly varying prices -- when I was doing research I saw one that was $55 for just the stamp, and another that was $30 because you couldn't buy the stamp without a starter-kit bundled in (furnace, spoon, wax). Definitely don't pay that much. I didn't get super exhaustive with my research because I couldn't really find a better price than a shop that I'd already done business with, and I knew they were reliable, so I just stuck with them. The shop is PraeyDesigns -- they have reasonable rates overall and everything I've bought from them has been good quality, so they're one of my go-tos for both stamps and wax (there's cheaper wax available but I like their selection). They offer a number of different sales pages for custom seals, so I'll link direct to this one, the one I purchased.

On that page, the third image lists the sizes they offer -- I bought the 3cm oval because I needed it "long" to accommodate the tail on my image. For reference, most larger stamps you buy prefab are 4cm rounds, most of the smaller stamps are 3cm rounds; that particular page only offers up to 3cm but PraeyDesigns does have other custom stamp pages that offer 4cm. In any case, it looks like the page just offers you the chance to pick from a variety of designs, but they do explicitly offer custom engraving from your own image; under "add your personalization" you should give the size head you want and then say, "I have an image for a design, please message and I will send it to you."

They reached out about 24 hours after I purchased, through Etsy, and asked for the image; this is what I sent them, also through Etsy's messenger function, and the result:

I'm given to understand that they generally have to retrace the image regardless of size or quality to turn it into a vector, so they can take a fairly low-res image and do a lot with it, but I tried to give them as clean a JPG as I could to work with. While the result is not absolutely identical, for an engraving smaller than a quarter it's pretty damn accurate and I think most of the minor shifts in design were for clarity's sake.

But I was pleased it really was that simple -- I bought the item, they said "Please send the design", I sent it, they confirmed they had it, and I didn't hear from them again until they sent me the shipping notification. Potentially if you don't have as clean an image they might need to talk to you about issues with the design, so I would make sure you have a very clean-line black-and-white image to send, but they seem pretty competent and they do good work.

Love to see what you get if you end up getting one! Definitely tag me. :)

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I told my boyfriend the necklace he got me is not as good as he thinks it is?

My boyfriend was recently very excited to get me a choker necklace. He told me he was excited because he got a nice, handmade one off Etsy, as opposed to buying one off Amazon.

The thing is, it's clearly (to me, an experienced discount shopper) something from a dropship store.

To be clear: I love the necklace! I'm not someone who needs top quality stuff all the time. It's really cute and solidly good quality, just clearly not handmade as he was led to believe. He's also sent me other stores he believes sell handmade goods on Etsy that are also clearly dropshippers.

I DON'T want to tell him as a way of saying "this necklace is bad quality and I don't like it," because I do like it and it's solidly mid quality (not bad,) it's very cute and I intend on keeping it and wearing it often. I just am concerned that he may have (probably did) buy it at a really inflated price for what it is, and don't want him to continue believing that everything from Etsy is handmade. He's from a different financial background than me, and I feel that may be why he didn't recognize the store as something that's reselling cheaply made goods as handmade, since I was raised to always be looking for discounts and to do a lot more research into things i buy. He was just really excited that this necklace was "really nicely handmade" (something that honestly he would care about more than me, he really likes getting me nice things) when it really isn't as nice as he thinks it is. He's also someone who cares a lot about the ethics of things like this.

TLDR:

I might be the asshole because: it could come off as unappreciative of the gift he got me, cynical, and/or negative.

I might be the asshole if I DIDN'T (AKA I might not be the asshole) because: He's probably overpaying for what he got, he might overpay in the future for items solely because he believes Etsy = handmade

WIBTA if I told him, gently, that some of the things on Etsy are dropshipped, including the necklace he was really excited about, and to make sure he's not getting scammed?

What are these acronyms?

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[brf-rumortrackinganon]

“My sense is that Meghan's market is more of the TJ Maxx demographic.” Interesting assessment of Meghan’s market. From a business perspective, brands who end up at TJMaxx, Marshalls, etc. (owned by the same company TJX) are typically bought in due to 1) supplier has made too much (overstock) and it isn’t selling 2) it’s getting close to the end of its expiration dates (close out) and it sold in at a much cheaper cheaper price to TJX. She’d still need a regular place to sell before she tries to offload (usually at a much lower margin / maybe even a loss) to TJX. I’m basing this on my experience with working in food industry and resorting to these retailers for the same reasons.

Exactly my point. The TJX brand is the end of the line for so much product and merch these days (especially fast fashion) that it's inevitable Meghan's products will end up there if this turns into the deal she wants to be. The key thing is that she needs product first. That she launched without a real product is very telling.

To me, what I think it says is that she's not getting the investors or partners that she wants so she launched ASAP to use the media's hype as part of her negotiation or recruitment strategy. (In addition to taking advantage of Kate's absence, of course.)

I made a suggestion in an earlier post that Meghan's competitors are the socialite/influencers that are launching their own brands or already have brands. A great many of those brands use print-on-demand dropship merch. They save on overstock storage and production fees by only keeping a limited selection in stock and marking up their own prices to cover "demand."

I see Roop heading in that direction. If they can't find a distribution vendor (e.g., Kohls, Target, Macy's, etc.), they'll do dropshipping but at such low quantities they always sell out - which is the same tactic Meghan uses when she wants to be a fashion influencer (she wears something already heavily discounted and with so little stock that she can take credit for "selling out").

What is interesting, and why I think Roop has a good argument for exclusivity with TJX companies, is Rae Dunn. Most of her product is sold exclusively through TJX and she has a deal with a company called Magenta Inc., an online retailer that's thought to be behind Rae Dunn products in places like Amazon and Walmart.

So there's precedent for Meghan/Roop to sell exclusively with TJX, with perhaps a side deal for an online storefront like Magenta offers. But that's not the audience or market Meghan wants (even though she herself is the "wine mom" elder millennial motivational-quote-spouting stereotype that buys Rae Dunn and shops at TJX stores so it's a natural fit). She wants Roop in luxury marketplaces that prices out the very people who would actually buy Meghan's product.

She's stuck between a rock and a hard place. I think she realizes it now while watching the metrics on social media plateau from a total lack of engagement and total absence of content (hence throwing Mandana under the bus in Page Six). Which is surprising. Given the way she rolled out Sussex.com with the IG Vancouver kickoff - four or five days straight of new Sussex content and material - I expected the same thing with Roop; 1st day - social media launch, 2nd day - lunch papwalk, 3rd day - product launch, 4th day - "checking out my product" charity visit/papwalk, 5th day - Netflix cooking show promo, and so on.

I know, I know. Stop giving her ideas. I'm trying!

[pomelowed]

Just went down a rabbit hole yippee!!

I follow this blog called @/my-kawaii--world because I like the aesthetics and this post came across my feed: https://www.tumblr.com/my-kawaii--world/753409702367477760/hey-this-site-seems-sketchy-af-as-a-lot-of-the?source=share

Those stuffed animals were so cute that I immediately went to the store to order one! But before I did I, like I usually do when finding new online stores, looked around to see what else they sell. I like doing this just to see if the items are really mismatched or if the other listings seem to be lower quality than what I'm trying to order. Well, the store, called Lavender Creations, seemed to offer a lot of items I saw on places like Alibaba or Temu. In fact, the mushroom purse they sell is one my sister bought off of Aliexpress. No worries though, artists oftentimes get their creations ripped off by dropshippers and their ilk so wasn't a death knell but definitely was a red flag. This led me to check it on scamadvisor and whoo boy.

It scored 36/100. The site has existed for years and it has a SSL but I wasn't worried about the site being a scam that'll steal my credit card info, I was just trying to figure out if it was a dropshipper and welp. One of the negative reviews stated that the supposed flash sale was in fact a daily sale (and I can confirm since me writing this post took long enough that the sale that was supposed to end at midnight is still ongoing despite the fact it's currently 1 AM). That was a dead ringer that this site most definitely wasn't the original creator or at least someone reliable. So, google lens it was for a reverse image search aaaaand

yeah ok unsurprising. Will say, none of these listings have the black & white one I was going to buy and that the dandelionevine was the only other one to sell the white version but also it's selling them for $60 which is way more than lavender constellation that sells them for $44 or $30 with the "sale". Also, amazon link is dead unfortunately because it supposedly was being sold for $25, the cheapest yet.

Now, if this was simply just a case of dropshipping then I would've left it at my reblog I made warning others about it BUT there's that first listing, Plush This?? They're the reason I'm making this post.

As far as I can tell they're the original creators! Awesome, great I can purchase him from here even if it isn't the b&w version I wanted, let me just read the full listing to see the specifics,,,,,, wtf

WHAT??? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WAS DESIGNED BY AI????? THIS IS A CAN OF WORMS I DIDNT PLAN TO ENCOUNTER????? Apparently, that's their whole thing: let AI design a plush and then recreate it which is honestly a really cool concept if AI wasn't known for literally stealing others' work (I'm ignoring the fact it would also mean it takes designers' jobs, which is also a shame).

If the AI was ethically trained then I suppose it counts as an original work? It's a bit of a grey area since no one actually owns the likeness of a cat (not yet at least) and plenty of artists create their own works by referencing others. So, who's to say an AI doing the same thing is unethical? I mean, there's a real human effort being put into realizing an imaginary item because this doesn't seem to be the usual AI scam of rendering an image and pretending it's genuine to generate purchases. But that ignores the fact there are limitations to artists on what they can produce (copyright laws exist and fair use clauses do too). So AI shouldn't be exempt from giving its fair dues to the people it should be "inspired" by and it should also be punished if it steals like a human does. Plus, the current state of AI is a lot more like replication than anything near inspiration so really that question cannot be applied in the current generation of AI.

There's one giant elephant in the room I haven't addressed yet: who is to say that the cat plush isn't based on some niche Etsy creator who had their creation ripped off by the AI model? Idk how it was taught so idk if the images were ethically sourced and thus if my money is going into a design that hasn't been stolen in some way. I'm sure they gave the AI a bunch of reference images of a Devon Rex from different angles and told it to make it a stuffed animal. But was the AI fed ethically sourced references of what is a plush? Or was it given Etsy and told to go ham in copying everything??

And, if the AI model WAS trained with stolen images, how awful really is the dropshipping aside from the ungodly prices?? I mean, my usual issues with dropshipping are: they try to sell junk for obscene prices, original works are reproduced without permission, & the profits of the original creator are stolen. But which of those issues are applicable in this scenario? The original work is seemingly high quality as implied with the reviews I see on Lavender Constellations & Plush This, so not all listings are churning out low quality crap, meaning the first issue is resolved. I mean, if people are receiving quality items that they feel is worth the price then there isn't any issue in that department. But those last two issues I have are the kicker, who is the original creator in this scenario?? Is it Plush This or is it the amalgamation of artists that go uncredited?? If the former then, yeah, these sites should not be selling their work. Yet, the latter seems much more in line with what I know about how AI is trained: unabashedly scanning and copying others' works without consent or compensation. Thus, I don't really feel too badly about it being resold on so many stores. It's already stolen work so they're all thieves to me.

Man, idk. It's unfortunate AI isn't simply a tool and the current state of things have festered and spread thanks to the lack of regulations. I imagine the AI models we have today that are made of stolen artworks will just be the concrete foundation and people wont see reparations for their work. Kinda one of those "them's the breaks (brakes?) kid" where laws will come into place that'll prevent AI from stealing others works. The question is will the people it already stole from be repaid? Or will they just have to live with the fact that the AI modules that are common use have stolen their work and wont stop continuing to profit off of that theft into the foreseeable future?

All of this is to say I'm not even sure if Plush This is the real creator!! I know I said I was almost certain they were but that's really only because the whole marketing scheme of their site is that the plushes they create are based off AI generated images and that kind of statement is too specific to only use as a selling point.... right?? Well let me start with this:

So, yes, according to Leila Wang, creator of PlushThis (why no spaces?), everything is AI to physical. Grand. Don't get me wrong, that's a real skill thats being just wasted imo, but back on track. Here's the website for you to check it out yourself: https://plushthis.com/ also they use MidJourney according to this article from last year: https://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/503245/introducing-plushthis-worlds-first-ai-generated-plushies-brand-revolutionizing-stuffed-animal-design

Scamadvisor gives it a 90/100 but only gives one review as an example when most of the listings have reviews, which is odd. This part is literally just me putting on a tinfoil hat so take the bit with a grain of salt, but I think they're having their AI write their reviews. They're all very,,, bland? I don't know if anyone has played that website game called "Human or Not" but the reviews are giving AI. As an example, here's the listing for a dragon plush they have:

and then here's a comment under it

It's a strange mix up to have when it's very clearly white. Worth noting they also sell a green dragon plush.

Also, the rest of the comments tend to usually have a comment on how soft they are? And if not that then how high quality the fabric is. And they all have the same grammar with what I think the nail in the coffin being the fact not a single review has missed adding at least a period to the end of the last sentence. Yes, that level of proper grammar isn't uncommon,,,, but for every single review??? Yeah, I'm not buying it. All this added to the fact Scamadvisor only pulled one positive comment out this sea leads me to believe these aren't real reviews and are just HTML code or whatever tf.

Ok, whatever, site is faking reviews with AI and staged photos. Big whoop, just don't buy from them,,,, WELL this is all going back to how I'm not sure PlushThis is the real creator of that cat plush. Tbh what I think is happening is a mix of dropshipping and "orginal" plushes. Why?

This lil blurb states every first image listed is an AI generated image.

Let's look at this guy: https://plushthis.com/products/cute-rabbit-stuffed-animal?_pos=72&_sid=8df0505e5&_ss=r

There's only two images given and when I look him up in reverse image search:

Look at all those. PlushThis doesn't come up despite this image supposedly being AI.

This guy? https://plushthis.com/products/pink-black-racoon-stuffed-animal-toy?_pos=1&_sid=ffe901991&_ss=r

Yeah, only PlushThis matches.

So, what does this mean? I think it means that the cat more than likely IS a dropshipped item THAT THEY DIDNT CREATE??? Which is crazy because the blurb attached to it is one of the few times they mention in a listing that the stuffed animal started as an AI image. In fact, that blurb is what caused me to spiral down into this!! IT ALSO THROWS OUT MY PREVIOUS STATEMENTS ABOUT THE ETHICS OF ALL OF THIS!!! This isn't my only receipt as the cat that started this all is listed here: https://www.dscopilot.ai/products/1005006873166491

It states that the supplier is the whitebeard' store on aliexpress. Now, this could always be a ripoff of PlushThis' original creation but I doubt they're the original creators at this point. Since every creation's first image is AI, that either means they didn't share the AI image, their whole gimmick, or it wasn't designed by AI and thus couldn't provide a generated image. So, the next course of action was seeing if Taihua Toys Hong Kong Co, PlushThis' parent company, is related to any of the sellers on other sites and that's too tall of an order for me. That's a way bigger deep dive than I'm capable of in this moment, but if I ever do try and see if I can confirm my suspicions, I will reply to this. Hopefully soon since a lot of the sites listed when I reverse image searched the cat no longer have it for sale. Is it possibly a parent company trying to clean up the internet and make it less obvious the item is actually cheaply mass produced?? Who knows, not me.

[pemberlyy]

Wow.

so i just got done listening to Mammalian Sighing Reflex. I tried so hard not to cry listening to it but when I got to Melatonin 130 I just broke down from there and could not stop crying.

the lines in particular;

“the breathing exercises hurt, and dont do fuck all.”

“ill live with you until our bones grow old.”

“help, why the fuck am i feeling self-absorbed when im finally happy.”

hit wayyy too close to home.

the instruments throughout this entire album just tickle a part of my brain that i had no idea existed. they’re beautiful.

THAT FUCKING BRIDGE IN DROPSHIPPED CAT SHIRT! WHAT. IN. THE ACTUAL. FUCK. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW.

“OHHHHH HOW NICE IT MUST BE TO, FEeEeELL SoOoOo BOREED.”

I always love the trumpets in the background of any of wilburs solo stuff. they just sound so dreamy idk.

FUCK ‘OH DISTANT YOU’ [affectionate] I WANNA CRAWL IN A HOLE AND DIE.

‘mine / yours’ ugh.

“you; Kiss me like it was your job

So tender and carefully, teeth before tongue (I wanna be yours)

Not in the way that the romantics do (I wanna be yours)

But with the grace of a workplace and child dispute”

You know, I don't need much more

But wanna be mine, wanna be yours

You know, I don't need much more

I wanna be mine, wanna be yours

I take you for granted

Because the alternative's far more alarming”

</3

Around the pomegranate lyrics i will relate to until i die;

“I just want to feel normal again

I just want to have meals with my friends

I just can't go through this again

Find my comfort in envisioning the end”

GLASS CHALET. THE LYRICS. THE GUTAIR. THE LITTLE BEEPING BEAT IN THE BACKGROUND NOT SURE WHAT THAT INSTRUMENT IS.

HIS VOCALS ON THIS OH GODS ABOVE. THEY JUST FILL MY EARS.

The vibes i get from this album is mostly; crywank and jack stauber mixed with obviously wilburs own style of writing and music. im not comparing it to those artists or saying he copied those artists but i just get those vibes and they are lovely. i fuckin love it. lol

ANYWAYS. Will Gold has fucking done it again with a masterpiece for the books. cant wait to listen to the album on repeat for the next few months until my brain melts into a puddle of goo.

ranking of favorites on first listen:

Mine / Yours

Glass Chalet

Melatonin 130

Oh distant you

Dropshipped cat shirt

Amazon standing lamp

trying not to think about it

around the pomegranate

i dont think it will ever end

eulogy

10 week rule

[smile-files]

rant alert!!!!!!!!!!!

something that's been really bothering me lately is how capitalism is hardcore exploiting our generation's desire to explore/create identity

like aesthetic culture is nice on paper but in practice it just means buying a butt load of stuff that we don't need. like, say i like cottagecore, and by extension the strawberry shortcake franchise. it isn't enough for me to just say i like them aesthetically, or whatever -- i have to buy clothes and merchandise or what have you for that part of my identity to feel tangible. i need to be able to embody this aesthetic in every part of my being for it to feel real

and i've interacted with enough brand instagram accounts (such as the strawberry shortcake instagram) to know that companies are all over creating aesthetic, nostalgic nonsense to sell to us, knowing we'll buy anything cutesy that panders to us and the things we like. and we can't help but feed into it. and they act all relatable and gen-z-core too which doesn't help

consumerism drives me nuts, all the more so because i actively partake in it. i love collecting stuff, especially stuffed animals, but adding to the collection with new items involves spending money on a bunch of plastic and polyester things that take up space and will end up in a landfill someday. like, sure, i like them, and people know for sure that i love stuffed animals when they know i have over 100 of them and keep buying them, but if i'm being completely honest i don't get as much out of them as i'd like to think i do. i'm considering making a photo/drawing catalog of all of the plushies i have now and donating the ones who'd do better in a different home! the same applies to all of the toys i have as well

when i was little i used to collect rocks and sticks and pine cones... things in nature that are just as cool and give me just as much joy as my stuffed animals and toys but a) don't take up a huge amount of space b) don't cost money c) don't hurt the environment and d) don't feed into the capitalist, consumerist black hole that's quickly eating us all

honestly... and this might be a hot take... but the whole concept of "aesthetics" that's been on the internet in recent years that has compelled ourselves to shape our wardrobes and possessions in favor of a pretty, inhuman ideal that supposedly affirms our identities is likely just a project by Big Consumerism to get us to buy more stuff that we think makes us feel more like ourselves. like yeah we all deserve to have our own style and our own tastes but that should not necessitate buying 15 billion new outfits from your local target to prove to yourself or anyone else that it's your style and tastes. buying a dropshipped mushroom nightlight off of amazon does not make you any more of a cottagecore girly than someone who doesn't. we shouldn't all be trying to fool each other over instagram reels that we all perfectly fit this aesthetic with our cool clothes and knickknacks and random decorations and be constantly jealous of each other

and it all just feeds into fast fashion and non-sustainably-made products and all that... like if companies know we'd buy anything that fits our aesthetic they'll throw out any notion of making lasting goods that aren't made of plastic and garbage and the blood of innocent baby animals or whatever. we keep eating it up. and we keep buying more and more of it to create an every-expanding hoard of objects that supposedly reflect every facet of our soul

(and i know it's the companies' fault at the end of the day! but i do think we, as individuals, have to think about how we happily succumb to it!)

i'm starting to think that my happiest life would be one lived with a small handful of cool clothes (as it is, most of the clothes i find cool are old ones my aunt sends me or ones i thrift), a small handful of stuffed animals i have a genuine love for (e.g. barry, any homemade plushie), and a gargantuan collection of nature stuff like rocks and sticks and pine cones. i can't help wanting to collect -- i'm like a dragon! but what i can help is what i choose to collect, what system i choose to feed into. i have a huge love for stuffed animals, but if anything, i'm doing a disservice to them and my appreciation for them by repeatedly buying new, low quality ones which i ultimately don't care much about -- and having fewer of them by no means diminishes how much they mean to me. one should not judge a fan by the amount of merchandise they've bought, after all

we are trying to live vicariously through our stuff, which isn't surprising given the hellish socioeconomic landscape, but it only makes us languish and look at devices all day and buy useless stuff and not try to make our lives actually good. this is what capitalism wants!!! augh!!!!

also... folks can't buy sustainable stuff because it often costs more and is less widely sold. but whose fault is that? capitalism!!!!! they could make wool cheaper than polyester for all they cared!!!!!!! they could get rid of money altogether!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i don't really know what i want to say in all of this... but i care about nature and i care about being genuinely happy and digging my own grave in an aesthetic landfill does nothing for that

[fadeawaywithyou]

immediate first reviews of the (non-nightcore) Mammalian Sighing Reflex album from Wilbur!

spoilers below if you haven't listened to his album! I really like it! Also, I'm not looking into lyrics online just yet, it's very late and if I do that I won't sleep cause it'll just consume my mind for hours.

-Amazon Standing Lamp: I love the guitar here and I laughed when it took me about 5 seconds to realize the higher voice isn't a woman, but actually Wilbur Soot singing alongside himself. He's sampling something at the end I don't know.

-Mine/Yours: The lyrics about kissing like a job and tongue and teeth *mwah* and the last line ohhhhhhh boy. The beat reminds me of a beating heart.

-Around the Pomegranate: the instrumental at 30 seconds in is SO GOOD the beat with the distorted voice is so fun. i can make out the lines "no one else can save you" and "nowhere you [can?] return to". This whole song is very fun despite the lyrics and meaning. It's just a very experimental. I like when the music gets very loud. Speaking of the lyrics the ending where Wilbur says he wants to feel normal again is just...I'm gonna go lay on the floor.

-I Don't Think It Will Ever End: Again with the experimental music! It kinda immediately reminds me of that part in Bo Burnham's Inside, the song "All Eyes On Me" where he has a mid-song monologue. It is very interesting in a meta-sense due to the comparison I can't help but make between this and Wilbur's streams. Where he's got a "chat" or audience responding to him in a cheery voice no matter what he says.

-Glass Chalet: I like the scratchy feeling in the instrumental. He's throwing stones in a Glass Chalet, which according to google is like a fancy type of cabin found in the mountains (the alps, specifically?). Also, I love the sampling he's doing with the talking at the end.

-Melatonin 130: I like the distorted voice at the end. He's really experimenting with this album and I'll keep saying it because I love it! I love the ending lyrics about everyone hoping you fail and the apes with coloring books, I think he said?

-Oh Distant You: The music takes up most of this song, instead of the lyrics, but what is sung is very nice.

-Eulogy: One of the lyrics hits very close to home. Not in a good way, but not in a bad way either. I guess it'll depend on the day I listen to the song. It's a good song. I like it a lot.

-Dropshipped Cat Shirt: The distortion kinda reminds me of those hyperpop songs that went viral on tiktok back in 2020 and it's very new to hear it used in this way with these lyrics and the general tone of the music. The last line! God, what is it with this album and the final couple of lines that hit me upside the head? I just need someone to tell me I'm tired???? God DAMN. shit...

-The Median: Very good. I like these shorter songs in between full-length songs. It's just a minute long but I really like it.

-Trying Not To Think About It: The lines about romance and marriage...man that's relatable. this is probably gonna be my favorite song. And then the rest of the song just.../pos but ooooooof

-10 Week Rule: It's a good song. Was NOT expecting that line in the chorus, which I'll let people reading this find out themselves.

Overall, this is an excellent album! I really love it and I will be listening to it constantly. This gives me the same feelings that YCGMA gave me, while still staying very distinct. It's not more POLISHED than ycgma, but it's clearly made with Wilbur's more improved skills in music making. (there is a word for this i can't remember rn)

I'm gonna commit to picking a favorite song after a couple more listens, but so far I really like Trying Not To Think About It and Around the Promegrante. This is a very creative album and I'm glad he's experimenting here. This doesn't sound like Lovejoy, and I'm super happy. It's unique, it's fun, and it's sad!

[collapsedsquid]

First, even before we headed out to buy some gifts and other items, I was on Amazon trying to get some other gift-shopping done. I hate Amazon. But more often than not, out here in the Midwest, it’s the only option for some specific items. Still, it sucks. Using Amazon now, in 2023, is like running through a maze of trap doors and fake items. Is that really a PS5 controller in the specific color I want? Or is it one of the many fakes and dropshipped imposters? You have to check the seller and the price and hope that what you order actually arrives and isn’t damaged before it gets to your house. Or stolen off your porch. Perhaps, like we did, you decide to say “Fuck Amazon!” and go to local stores or brick-and-mortar supercenters to pick up your items. Good luck! I looked online for a particular item and found it in stock at a store in my area. Yet when I got there, the item I’d been told was in stock was…not in stock. When I asked one of the very few overworked staff members at the store about the item, they all seemed far too busy and tired to answer with anything more than “Maybe next week?” Eventually, we did find some of our items, but our trials and tribulations were not over, as we then discovered, like usual, that most of the checkout lines were closed. The Target we were at had around 20 of them, but only two were open. Two workers were being forced to check out and deal with hundreds of Christmastime shoppers. It was not going well. So we went to self-checkout, only to discover long lines due to some machines not working. One person was in charge of managing the machines and all the people using them. It was also not going well.

Problem with capitalism is that it makes it impossible to shop