#and capitalism is to blame

[howtostartarevolution]

So, let’s face it. One of my special interest ist the French Revolution. Or also revolutions in general, though I mostly stick to the French or American one so basically 18th century stuff. Maybe because todays „western“ world basically got born with that. The fall of monarchy and the slow triumph of democracy which, certain setbacks not withstanding, we still find ourselves on.

Especially as Democracy gets challenged once again by the current events of the world. Or maybe the question can also be asked: How much democracy is still in our democracies?

If we go back and look at the ideas that got formulated at the time „Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité“ or „All men (aka humans not the gender) are created equal“ or „There are certain and undeniable rights“ and so on… Or we look at the basic idea of democracy that political power is shared equally by every citizen. That they can invest that power of representatives in elections. And that only this act can legitimize a government and therefore its laws. 

Well, one has to ask oneself how much of that is actually still true, when capitalism has basically created a new aristocracy. Wealth is turned into political power and the „american dream“ is dead since long ago and birth and inherited wealth are the only factors who decide about your success in life today.

Of course there are one or two exceptions, just like in feudalism some people managed to rise beyond their station by education, or patronage or marriage. But at the core in todays society the fluidity between „classes“ has gotten very limited indeed. And while the superrich cruise the world fueling the furnace of climate change and throw their special parties where commoners can not reach them, we are getting very close to the mindset so infamously portrayed in the (only alleged) cry of Marie-Antoinette: „Let them eat cake“.

[niccocum]

So, let’s face it. My special interest ist the French Revolution. Or also revolutions in general, though I mostly stick to the French or American one so basically 18th century stuff. Maybe because todays „western“ world basically got born with that. The fall of monarchy and the slow triumph of democracy which, certain setbacks not withstanding, we still find ourselves on.

Especially as Democracy gets challenged once again by the current events of the world. Or maybe the question can also be asked: How much democracy is still in our democracies?

If we go back and look at the ideas that got formulated at the time „Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité“ or „All men (aka humans not the gender) are created equal“ or „There are certain and undeniable rights“ and so on… Or we look at the basic idea of democracy that political power is shared equally by every citizen. That they can invest that power of representatives in elections. And that only this act can legitimize a government and therefore its laws. 

Well, one has to ask oneself how much of that is actually still true, when capitalism has basically created a new aristocracy. Wealth is turned into political power and the „american dream“ is dead since long ago and birth and inherited wealth are the only factors who decide about your success in life today.

Of course there are one or two exceptions, just like in feudalism some people managed to rise beyond their station by education, or patronage or marriage. But at the core in todays society the fluidity between „classes“ has gotten very limited indeed. And while the superrich cruise the world fueling the furnace of climate change and throw their special parties where commoners can not reach them, we are getting very close to the mindset so infamously portrayed in the (only alleged) cry of Marie-Antoinette: „Let them eat cake“.

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[angerydome]

I told a friend to keep an eye on their banks/cards because people are getting caught up in that recent data breach, and their response was,

“This is all capitalism’s fault.”

And I … err … is it??

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

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

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

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

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[autisticrosewilson]

Um if you write Jason having to get drugs for Catherine I want you dead btw. Not only does it tell me you assume the average drug dealer would give the hard shit to a very small child and then not supervise them at all (classist stereotype that all drug dealers are inherently evil + lazy writing with no grasp on reality) and you genuinely think that Catherine was CONSTANTLY high, as if that's even possible without overdosing far sooner than she did. That's without even getting into the bad mom Catherine propaganda.

[t4tails]

i bring a sort of "there would be no problem whatsoever if we lived in a society with a universal income that didnt depend on wild variables to get jobs that are our only lifelines yet are still willing to fire us at the drop of a hat for something more profitable" vibe to the ai conversation that both pro and anti ai people dont really like

[cognitivejustice]

Fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with five responsible for a quarter of that, based on the findings 

The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just five companies.

Altria [Kraft] and Philip Morris International made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, Danone and Nestlé produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.

“The industry likes to put the responsibility on the individual,” says the study’s author, Marcus Eriksen, a plastic pollution expert from The 5 Gyres Institute.

“But we’d like to point out that it’s the brands, it’s their choice for the kinds of packaging [they use] and for embracing this throwaway model of delivering their goods. That’s what’s causing the greatest abundance of trash.”

[bikananjarrus]

if yord had lived he'd be leading the hunt for qimir and osha and we would've gotten the most delicious tension between him and qimir. qimir would start out frustrated that yord got away, intent on finishing what he started. and yord, once hunted, now hunter, once an exemplary jedi, and now solely focused on revenge disguised as righteous justice (which it is also a bit of that). and qimir starts to enjoy the game, the chase. and in this timeline, sol still dies, osha still goes with qimir, but yord was unconscious, recovering in a bacta tank, so all he knows when he wakes up is that qimir is out there and took osha, his friend, away. so then you also have the tension of that confrontation, the realization that osha has willingly turned, and that maybe yord can't blame her for that, because what has he been doing these past many months, years, maybe, but give in to the selfish desire to finish what he started too?

[hadesoftheladies]

"men are only bad because they're socialized to be violent :( without capitalism there'd be no patriarchy"

quick! who is doing the socializing! who is doing the socializing! no LOOK AT ME! hey *whistles* hey man just tell me just tell me who is doing the socializing if you could just tell me who is doing the socializing that would be so awesome haha!

"but their mothers don't tell them to put the seat back u--" I'm going to ask you very politely while clasping my hands and batting my eyelashes for you to shut up :)

[uncanny-tranny]

I despise the idea that you can only do a certain art project once. You can only release an idea once in this world before you can't. You can't re-try, can't ever re-do, can't ever revise the idea or project because, like marble, it is sculpted and could never change.

You're allowed to paint the same subjects. You're allowed to write the same types of stories. You can crochet the exact same bags. Who cares about if your ideas are "unique" and "revolutionary to the art world"? You can do the same shit forever and ever. Art and love on planet earth <3

[soullessjack]

(seeing an alternative man with eyeliner and emo hair become a painfully normal buzz-faded diet hipster) who did this to you 🥺

[field-cryptobotanist]

The funniest part about delicious in dungeon for me is that I've gotten those exact reactions from people about eating regular blackberries or wild strawberries I just picked from the forest, like you're not ready for monsters if just foraging is a completely foreign concept

[lighthouseas]

it's so fucking sad that preteens are raiding sephora for makeup products meant for adults and not only are said adults bullying them online for views, they are also not addressing the actual issue at hand, which is that there is literally no third space for these kids and they're basically being raised on ipads where they have unrestricted access to the internet at all hours of the day, which is why they are so desperate to imitate what they see online by buying $80 makeup products meant for ADULTS. that's terrifying actually

[balkanradfem]

In my neighbourhood, there was a small abandoned-looking backyard, filled with grass and flowers. An old abandoned house next to it, small metal fence protecting it from the road. I liked walking past it because I love abandoned houses, the nature starts to take over them and I dream of sneaking in, exploring, finding a weird bug or a trinket that looks interesting. I also loved seeing the grass and the flowers, allowed to grow naturally, bees buzzing in it happily.

That was 8 years ago, and since then, the city decided to build a hotel nearby, and the whimsical backyard was to hold a road connecting to it, and to be converted into a parking lot. I mourned the loss of the grass and the flowers, watched them do construction on it, walking past every day. In the end, they left a little patch of soil, planted a few decorative bushes on it, and a few very small, decorative trees. They poured a bunch of tree bark around them as mulch, so grass wouldn't be able to grow anymore. Few meters of bushes and trees was the entire landscaping that the hotel got.

They didn't maintain it though, so eventually the bark decomposed, and grass grew once again. I missed the old big patch of green, but I liked the little patch, bushes and trees well enough, and I hoped the trees would grow large, make some shade, house some animals. They did buy pretty big bushes, and I can imagine the tree saplings also cost them some, so I hoped they would grow to be a part of the neighbourhood.

I was, of course, wrong. I walked past it last week, and found the orange plastic fence all around it, big machines flattening everything to the ground. Trees, bushes, grass, all gone. Another painful punch to my heart, and also general disappointment and frustration to my faith in humanity. It was more profitable to them to clear the area completely than to let those few bushes and trees grow. I don't know yet what they're planning to do with the area, I can assume they're going to pour cement over it first.

Similar goings-on have been happening all over the city. When I first moved in, there was a grassy patch where people would park their car, and then there was also an interesting well-like brick tower in the middle of it, which I found magical and cool to look at. One day the tower was missing, and the grass was flattened, to make it a regular, asphalted parking lot. Parking on top of the grass patch just wasn't good enough I guess. Tower was blocking the space where one car could have been parked.

There was a big space of abandoned bushes, trees and some very big walnut trees, just right next to where I live. They were such a big source of oxygen, walnuts, beauty, and not only that; they were blocking the sound of cars and vehicles on the main road, making our neighbourhood quiet and well shaded. Cars would park under the big trees, cooling in shade while their owners were off. One day as I was going home, two people with chainsaws were cutting it all down. Huge walnuts trees were lying next to the parking lot. I stared in shock and disbelief, and they ignored me. In a few days, the entire green area was cut to the ground, trees collected and hauled away.

The noise from the main road now reaches our building, and it ruins spending any time on the balcony. There's no more green backdrop, no more pretty sights to see, only empty space and buildings. The cars have no shades to park under. The area didn't stay brown for long; invasive species planted themselves within weeks, and are now covering the area. It's covered in thorns and ferns, impossible to navigate trough. They didn't do anything with the area except clear it, and now it's left to it's own devices. I still don't know why they did it.

I've talked about this to a few local people, and they're not as upset about it. 'They're probably going to build a factory there, or a store' was the common response. They've been surprised to hear I'm mourning the trees and the grass, as if such thing has never occured to them before. Technically, we do still have some trees and grass left, but I can see it disappearing, bit by bit, every year.

This lets me know that I'm living among people fully ignorant of what is going on in the environment. They don't know pay attention to how their area is slowly being cemented and asphalted over, soon to be unhabitable to any plant life. They don't know what happened to such areas in more commercialized countries; they are not afraid of food deserts, of what will happen to the air quality, the dust and heat of hot sun reflected in the white asphalt. They don't realize their children will soon be out of safe places to play with, or that soon being outside will become untolerable.

Progress can't be stopped, people will clear out the areas of nature to build something that brings them profit. They'll make money by building a store, or a factory, or a parking lot. The green area doesn't generate money. And money is all we need, it's all anyone on this planet needs.

But will the money-making area still be habitable by humans, 10, 20 years on? When the climate change hits harder, when the temperatures outside are over 40 degrees commonly, just walking from one building from another will become sickening, dangerous. A giant tree surrounded by grass and flowers would be invaluable. A green area shaded and life-supporting, would make it possible for people to be outside, to hide from the sun. An area filled with green spaces, trees and bushes and balanced plant life, would be able to actually decrease temperatures and stabilize everyone's ability to survive. It will become invaluable.

But you can't build a green city in a year, like you can build a parking lot, or a store. You can't bring back the huge walnut trees that shaded you and gave you a refuge from the hot sun.

But they don't think like this. Once the city is out of areas that can be lived in, the heat is overwhelming, the buildings and asphalt reflecting the sun back into people's faces, making it impossible to breathe – people will just take the money they earned and go live in another green space that wasn't ruined yet. As green spaces become monetizable, the more scarce they are, the more people will be willing to pay for them. Then the unlivability of the cities will become an incentive to charge people money to go spend summers outside of them, and only poor people will remain struggling with the heat, missing the big walnuts trees and the green grass that once was theirs to enjoy.

This would not have happened in any circumstances where nature was held sacred and protected by the people. If we understood that our lives and our happiness came from those trees, from the grass and the green spaces, a person would not be able to cut them down and rationalize it with personal profit. Only capitalism could support this brutal destruction of everything that supports life. The moment we started regarding to nature as 'resources', we had it wrong. Nature is where life comes from. The trees and the soil and the rocks, the rivers and the mountains, forests and grasslands, they're the reason we're able to live, to thrive. Taking them away is like taking life away. There's nothing valuable enough to give this away for.

[liyrical]

thinking about pre-2020 korean bls and how a good lot of them had relevant topics and addressed queer people in their society and how the whole scene got commercialised massively post pandemic so now even as more works get churned out they all slowly feel less and less authentic