#advertisement for sale a car
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kply-industries · 4 months ago
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"These cars are stylish! I'll break your ribs!"
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stone-cold-groove · 6 months ago
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From the car files: cover of the 1955 Oldsmobile sales brochure.
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quirkle2 · 8 months ago
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yaknow . ads obviously work, otherwise companies wouldn't put them everywhere, but i wanna know who in the fresh hell is falling for them. i don't think an ad, save for like,,, trailers for movies/games, has Ever worked on me. most of the time when i'm doing something and an ad interrupts me in any way i make a mental note to Not buy that product in the future outta spite.who is out here watching a febreze commercial and going Damn ur right guess im a febreze truther now
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machetelanding · 1 year ago
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thedealvault · 3 months ago
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🦆💨 "Pew Pew Madafakas" Air Freshener – Because Your Car Needs Attitude! 😆🚗
Keep your ride smelling fresh while adding some hilarious personality with this Cologne-scented "Pew Pew Madafakas" air freshener!
🔥 Bold & Funny Duck Design ��� Perfect for Rearview Mirror Hanging 🏡 Works for Cars, Lockers, or Home Decor 🌿 Long-Lasting Cologne Scent
Because why not let your air freshener match your vibe? 😎🦆
🛒 Get yours here: https://tinyurl.com/3etz78fj
#CarAccessories #FunnyFinds #MemeVibes #PewPew #FindsVibesCulture
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hileynoteson · 1 year ago
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i think it is so silly that discount tires sends me promotional emails and sales. Like what do tey think im going to do? impulse buy tires?
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flmboyz · 1 year ago
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1959 Mercury Car Commercial
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hooptygreg · 6 days ago
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The Red Bull Mini Cooper: How a Tiny Car Helped Fuel a Giant
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newspaper-advertisement · 3 months ago
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Book Vehicles Ads in Newspapers Effortlessly and Reach the Right Buyers
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asheanon · 8 months ago
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❛ Tell me about them? ❜
Asks a curious Angela at Lorien, regarding the group.
From: ❝𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐦𝐞❞ rp meme
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“Ah, yes! A splendid array of talents they are, truly.” He began as their attention was fully directed to the other three.
They were stationed at a distance across the way, almost blending in with the throng of partygoers. It was commonplace for Lorien and Mina to be speakers of the group, well versed in the nature of representation - or "reppin'," as the kids say.
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Mina, jubilant as ever, fraternized with others that were present as Branson brooded alongside her, briefly glancing over at the two. Sal, though associated, seemed to be in her own world; she wore a smile that felt cryptically aware of many things, however. Including them.
“Our precious little percussionist, warming many a heart with rhythm and revelry - beautifully balanced by the chilling strings of our sullen soul on strings. And the pianist… our pianist, ever the melodic and mysterious mistress.~”
A distinct levity reached his voice at the given subject. There was a sense of enduring pride. His sincerity was tangible.
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“Some of Lindblum’s finest, in my humble opinion.” Which wasn’t very humble, but this mattered little.
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strawlessandbraless · 2 months ago
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Hitler doing a Volkswagen car advertisement for the inventor and one of his biggest donors in 1938
Trump doing a Tesla sales pitch on the White House Lawn for shadow President Elon Musk and largest donor in 2025
[ID: The first photo is a black and white picture of Adolf Hitler and the owner of VW smiling in a car with many Nazis behind them. The second photo is color picture of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a red Tesla. Musk is smiling while Trump is looking forward with his mouth open. End ID]
Image ID by @qquesadilla
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monkeyssalad-blog · 9 months ago
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Austin A40 - A50 'Cambridge' : publicity brochure : Austin Motor Company, Longbridge, Birmingham : nd [c.1954] by mikeyashworth Via Flickr: The new Austin A40 and A50 range of saloon cars - known as the Cambridge - were first introduced in September 1954 and replaced the older A40 Somerset. The style seen here, the A50 having the same body design but a newer, larger engine, was in production until the MkII versions with Pinin Farina body design was introduced in 1959. The A40 designation had already been 'swapped' in 1958 when the smaller Cambridge was dropped and the marque given to the new Farina vehicle. The brochure is very lavish in its extent and use of colour and has several of these marvellously evocative illustrations - here the A50 speeding along a seemingly Alpine road with our driver, still wearing his hat, being admired by his passenger. Sadly the artwork does not appear to be credited but it is very much of the 'style' of the period.
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gotmiltank · 1 year ago
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he's trying his best 🎈 pixelated flying pika rearview mirror accessory
♡ shops & socials ♡
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bamsara · 10 months ago
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Possibly a controversial opinion but Ads being unavoidable by unskippable ads at the start of videos or taking up 3/4ths of a page of an news article you're trying to read is abhorrent and fucking sucks but I will never give shit to some small youtuber/streamer using up a minute of time to talk about a sponser that will pay them a whole whopping ✨$50 usd✨so they can have gas money this month
No Idgaf about the thing being advertised and its annoying as fuck to have shit constantly shoved in your face all the time 'buy this' 'buy that' 'consume this' 'buy right now big sale give us your money' 'consume capitalism catastrophe'
but I'd rather some creator get the advertisement money to help pay the bills rather than the sponser company spending that money for slots on a news website thus just giving that money to another big company and having loud ass ad videos play audio in the corner of a screen with an 'X' mark so faint it's almost impossible to turn off without muting the tab while I'm trying to read about medieval wheelchairs.
The car salesman would probably not advertise the cars if it didn't help pay the bills and the youtuber would not advertsie the goofy ass adam and eve sponsership if it didn't help pay the bills also. anyway i love ad blocker. This rant is brought to you by: a mean comment left on a youtube channel about craft tutorials mad that she had a 30 second sponsor.
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loverofoldsadlosers · 10 days ago
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SLOW RIDE
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(inspired by true events; getting turned on by sexy trucks for sale while browsing…. recommend the song “slow ride” by foghat)
Thinking about classic car collector Joel. (smut)
He’s got years on you, clearly, the tattoos inked onto his flesh have seen more birthdays than you: he has lines around his eyes that crinkle when he smiles, skin freckled and bronzed by decades of sun that have brought him the beauty of countless sunsets and sunrises before you even existed. It makes sense, looking so well preserved in his age, that he would seek out a career dedicated to conserving and restoring the cars he does. One’s rusted and faded and simply, old. What he didn’t expect on the dull morning of posting an advertisement for an equally dull, rusted, frankly hopeless ‘1970 Ford’ was you.
Young, shiny, new — a rare commodity amongst the regular buyers of his collection, and certainly a stand-out amongst the venerable antiques in the store; including Joel himself. You stumbled across his yellowing lawn with the grace of a newborn foal. Tripping slightly over your own feet, making him question why on earth you wore those long, seemingly uncomfortable, laced-up boots. Another relic, he supposed. An inkling of your taste before you had even introduced yourself. A reasoning for you, here, at his garage, a girl chasing a past she never belonged to. “Hello!” you smile, offering a hand toward him and slightly faltering when he hesitates. He stares down at your hand. The smooth expanse of your skin, the polished manicure on your fingers, the light weight of it when he finally meets your outstretched palm with his own; soft, gentle, a direct juxtaposition to the grease under his fingernails and the rough callouses that scratch against your silky flesh. “You here for the ad?” he assumes, scanning a quick glance over your frame once before settling back on your face. “Yes, I am.” His eyebrows slightly pinch together. He’s puzzled. Looking at you, and then your satiny chest, and then your equally as velvet-looking legs, and then back at you. Wondering what the hell you would know about a car like that and staring at you without even hiding his confusion. “That Ford?” You nod, and his expression almost sours. He’s squinting at you, shielding his eyes from the burning afternoon sun and giving you a brazen look-over once again; as if he missed something in his previous examination, a physical sign to dismiss his notion that you had no business here at all. Not buying a car older than the both of you, not on an old man’s front lawn, and certainly not dressed like that. In small, honestly tiny denim shorts, leather boots that stopped at your knees, and a blouse scantily covering your collarbones from his view. Was this what the kids were wearing nowadays? Let alone to meet some facebook-marketplace-stranger? You weren’t one to be shy. Usually, you were confident, collected, cool. But with Joel - this stranger - staring you down so intensely and so obviously, you were left skittish. Frozen in place, unable to do anything but fidget with the seams of your shorts with jittering hands and wide eyes. “You know a lot about cars? That’s a tough case back there.” Is all he says. Like there hadn’t been an excruciatingly long pause of him outright scrutinizing you, leaving you close to running tail-in-tow. “Well, I drive one, hah.” You try to quip. Laughing a dry, short heave of a laugh and inhaling a shaky breath when his stoic expression doesn’t change in the slightest, no hint of amusement or playfulness. This is a business deal after all, you guess. A serious purchase garners a serious atmosphere. You suppose you’re slightly more nervous than usual not just because of how out-of-your-depths you were, or because this man in front of you was a complete stranger in a location that took you more than an hour to get to, but because you didn’t expect, well, him. Tall enough to slightly tower over you, thick mustache and greying scruff on a sharp jawline, large biceps that bulge in the crossing of his arms as he frowns at you, plush lips with a lit cigarette between them, dark brooding eyes that glare at you.
He was beautiful. Even more-so in the sunlight. Aquiline nose, furrowed brows, sliver of skin peeking from below his unbuttoned flannel, exposing tufts of chest hair to your pleasure. He was so handsome it was intimidating. “You can take a look at it…” he sighs and places a dirty cloth you hadn’t realized he was holding over his broad shoulder, walking toward his garage and lifting the door.
A delicious trail of hair trailing up the expanse of his stomach from the waistband of his weathered jeans. You follow him inside the garage. You didn’t know a lot about cars. You knew barely enough to drive one. But you knew that rust was not ideal, and that’s what the ute in front of you was entirely soiled by. Hard, corrosive rust, eating away at the beautiful cherry-red exoskeleton. “You haven’t wanted to fix her up a bit?” you ask, trying to carefully not give away that you had done more than just read the ad he had posted (you had read over his entire facebook page, and then his brothers, and then almost the entire Miller family.) You had seen his previous restorations, and they were nothing short of flawless. “No time.” You knew this too. Joel was opening a brother-owned-partnership, Miller Contracting. “Ah.” “So what’d you think?” A deep, southern drawl. Smooth like the purr of an engine, syrupy, husky, manly. “Um…” “You got skill to fix her up?” “Well…” “She ain’t gonna be easy like that Honda you’ve got parked out there.” You tuck your bottom lip between your teeth and pout. Underestimating just how much proficiency you would need to actually entirely restore a car. “Does she start?” “You read the ad at all?” You sigh in slight defeat and his strong, capable hand you had admired earlier comes up to pinch the bridge of his nose, sighing with you in something closer to an annoyed grunt.
“I could… I can fix her up for you—“ your eyes brighten immediately, pivoting your entire body toward him and getting close enough to him he’s sure you are about to hug him; the fifty-five-year-old stranger. “It would have to cost you, obviously.” Oh. Right. “How…how much?” Of course. It would cost a lot. That’s why you had come here in the first place, allured by the affordable price tag only to be shocked when the price matched the product. “Ain’t gonna be cheap.” For the first time since you had greeted him outside, you peer up at him; meeting his scowl with your wide-eyed gaze. Inadvertently, you flutter your lashes and slightly touch the side of his boot with your own, and his eyebrow lifts. Were you…? “And it’s not…bargain-able?” What were you doing? “Christ, what’d you think this is, kid?” You blink. Still looking at him with wide-eyes that went larger in the second. “I-“ “This ain’t how things work around here.” He gives you that same look from earlier, studying you with a downward tilt of his eyes and you were mortified. “Um…I’m sorry, I just—“ He stares at you. At your coquette bite of your lip, at your smooth skin, at your doe eyes and deer-in-headlights expression, and he sighs Low, and disappointed. Cutting you off before you could finish your apology, shaking his head as if he has no other choice, but to say: “Get on your knees.”
What?
“What?” “Well, I ain’t gonna do it for free, now am I?” You stare back at his enigmatic expression and catch a glimpse of something you missed before; the corner of his mouth lifted in a sleazy smirk. You blink.
A deer in the headlights. Now, he’s fully grinning, cigarette long forgotten beneath the crushing sole of his boot. “Well?” You should probably leave. You should probably run into your own perfectly working car and drive off, far from this secluded house and gallery of mouth-watering cars you would never have the chance of owning. Flee from the man in front of you, smirking dangerously and built: broad shoulders and a muscled back you see rippling beneath his worn flannel.
You drop to your knees, and he laughs. “You do this a lot?” you shake your head and quickly work on his large leather belt, fumbling with the clasp and trying to unbuckle it fast as if you didn’t move onto your knees yourself. “Show me how much you want that car and maybe I’ll do somethin’ bout it.” You peer back up at him and his smirk has only widened, staring down at you with what you now recognize as him ogling you; his eyes moving toward your eyes, to your lips, to your chest. And then, he pulls himself out. You gasp. He’s huge. Throbbing, curved just-so, thick in his hand and you gulp. “Well?” You replace his grip with yours, wrapping your shaking hand around him and feeling the weight of it in your palm. Hot, and heavy, and huge. You bring another hand to meet the gap and start moving, waiting for him to say something as he just stares. “You think that’s all I want from you?” You tuck your bottom lip between your teeth and he grunts a low heady sound when your hand grazes his tip. “C’mon,” he says lowly. “Give him a little kiss.” You bring him to your lips, your shaking hands jittering him against you as you suckle slightly, tasting the salty taste of him and he groans, his hands flying to clutch tightly at your hair. “C’mon baby, give daddy a bit more than that.” Shit. You tense your thighs together momentarily and open your mouth further, the stretch burning as you try to fit more of his girth into your mouth. You try to breathe through your nose, but he’s just too big, sending you gagging with barely half of him in your mouth and he just pushes your head down further, until you’re pressed against the salt-and-pepper trail of hair on his abdomen. “Fuck,” he growls, when you swallow. Trying to contain some of the spit that dribbles down your chin as you whine, attempting to tell him that it’s too much. But then you look up. He’s gazing down at you with beads of sweat rolling down the thick of his neck, mouth slightly a-jar and eyebrows pinched. When your eyes meet his, his expression morphs back into that wicked smirk; tugging at your hair to pull you almost off him before thrusting back into your mouth. You gag in surprise, and he laughs again. A deep, sadistic noise, cut off by his own gravelly moan. “You’re fucking nasty.” He thrusts impossibly deeper down your throat, sending you spluttering around him and you swear he just gets harder, gets bigger. When he finally pulls you off, allowing you a gift of air that you gasp loudly, he slaps the length of him against your face; smearing your spit around your cheeks with another low laugh. “This how you always get your way? Get on your knees like a slut?” You go to retaliate - wanting to whine a ‘no’, reiterate to him that you’ve never done something like this, you’d never been depraved enough to get on your knees for a stranger, let alone one old enough to be your father. But then, he just brings himself back to your mouth, grunting an “open up” before shoving his length down your throat once again. But this time, you move down the length of him unprompted, his hand only tangled in your hair to hold you there, but doing it at your own volition. Dragging your tongue down the underside of him and rubbing your thighs together when he moans, loud and raspy. “Fuckin’ eager, huh?” he slaps the side of your face sharply, and you can’t help but moan with him. You can hear the obscenity of it all echoing through his garage. It’s wet, loud, messy, and you grasp at his thighs for leverage until he pulls you off entirely; looking at you with a heaving chest and furrowed brows. You chase him with your mouth again, but he just smirks at you, and then hisses:
“Get on your hands and knees.”
A/N: hello i have never wrote full smut before …. hope it was okay i can’t even proofread it 😣😣
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!
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Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:
https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/
This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.
I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.
Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.
But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.
As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:
I. Competition
II. Regulation
III. Self-help
IV. Labor
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax
But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes
In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:
https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act
But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").
The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.
Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.
The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.
Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/
With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.
And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.
Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy
Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers
Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms
That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.
One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/
What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.
A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.
The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus
Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.
But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.
At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith
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Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.
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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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
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