#ask game 05

[s-lycopersicum]

get prime numbersed !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All righty!

2. show us a picture of your handwriting?

Oh, lucky I still have this photo of my three fonts:

3. 3 films you could watch for the rest of your life and not get bored of?

Oh, three may be difficult for me, but Wolf Children immediately comes to mind! I watched that one many times...

5. what made you start your blog?

I know how to make gifs and I'm about to make it everyone's problem.

No, but, I think I just joined Tumblr to follow artists and just... stuck around.

7. what scares you the most and why?

Should I ever need help, and manage to ask for it, I'm scared of what would happen if nobody answered.

11. what do you consider to be romance?

I.. don't know? I don't have much perspective to answer that. Not unless anime stuff counts, maybe not even then...

13. what are you doing right now?

Laying down in bed, getting cozy to sleep :3

17. name 3 things that make you happy

Comments on the stuff I make, also getting to make art has been making me really happy recently. Oh, and talking to my friends!

19. favourite thing about the day?

The color of the sky as the sun rises.

23. say 3 things about someone you hate

All the people I hate are very far away, and occupy very little of my mind.

29. what do you do when you’re sad?

I have a special selection of anime to watch in those occasions.

31. are you messy or organised?

Oh so messy. I try to be organized, though... It just doesn't last long.

37. share a secret

I... I have... been wanting to buy a bass ever since watching bocchi. Not that I want to get into music or anything... I just want to play with one...

[jtl-fics]

gimme that tbd (p&q)

WIP Wednesday 4/17/24 | TBD

He closes that chat and instead pulls up the one between himself and Aaron. It’s right at the top since he has the message pinned but it’d likely be at the top regardless of that since he and his brother regularly speak with one another.

That remains another mystery no matter how many times he tries to understand it. Still, Andrew isn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Aaron:  We’re getting everything set up in the house. Aaron:  Kate told me to tell you to get off your phone.

Andrew: Don’t unpack my stuff. Focus on your own.

<<Prev | First | Next >>

[iconsumethesoulsofthedamned]

@aggressiveguitarnoises Matthew brown!

[d4rkwater]

JOSEPH BARKER, ele é filho de POSEIDON e CONSELHEIRO do chalé 3 e tem 24 anos. a tv hefesto informa no guia de programação que ele está no NÍVEL III por estar no acampamento há TREZE ANOS, sabia? e se lá estiver certo, JOSEPH é bastante ALTRUÍSTA mas também dizem que ele é TEIMOSO. mas você sabe como hefesto é, sempre inventando fake news pra atrair audiência.

🐚︵‿ HISTORY. 

Joseph é filho único de uma renomada bióloga marinha, nasceu em pleno verão de Agosto na Califórnia e ali morou durante seus três primeiros anos de vida. Graças ao emprego de sua mãe, o jovem passou grande parte da sua infância viajando pelo mundo, morando de frente para o mar, onde acabou adquirindo uma enorme paixão pelo surf. Seu rendimento escolar era mediano, mas as justificativas para as notas não serem sempre as melhores eram devido às mudanças contínuas de estado e, não muito raramente, de continente. 

Sua convivência com a mãe era das melhores, vendo nela não só uma figura materna como também a paterna que nunca teve a chance de conhecer. Seu pai sumiu antes mesmo da mãe saber que estava grávida, fruto de uma relação de poucos dias, mas que foi o suficiente para marcar a vida da mulher para sempre. Joseph era tudo o que Lilian tinha e fazia questão de sempre protegê-lo. Até mais que o necessário, assim achava. 

A paixão pelo oceano vinha do esporte e também das curiosidades que aprendeu graças à profissão de sua mãe. Joseph, com menos de 10 anos, já tinha conhecimento sobre uma extensa lista de animais marinhos e, mesmo não possuindo um contato direto - apenas quando sua mãe permitia - sua ligação com as criaturas era deveras confusa e interessante. O único animal ao qual possuía um medo absurdo era o tubarão. E tudo começou quando um amigo quase perdeu a vida durante um campeonato de surf, sendo atacado pelo grandioso animal após ser confundido por uma tartaruga. 

As coisas começaram a ficar estranhas quando, em uma noite de tempestade na Ilha Wake, atual local de trabalho e pesquisa de sua mãe, criaturas estranhas surgiram e passaram a atacar ambos. E mãe e filho só escaparam porque Joseph, sem compreender muito bem, ouviu um chamado vindo do mar. Ao chegarem na praia foram recebidos por um grupo de homens desesperados, Joseph os questionou sobre as criaturas, mas foi taxado de louco, afinal, para todo mundo ali a ilha estava em chamas. Ninguém sabia dizer como ou quando o incêndio começou, espalhando-se rápido e queimando boa parte da reserva, mas com sorte todos os poucos habitantes - em sua maioria profissionais - saíram com vida. 

Os acontecimentos, aos poucos, foram se tornando frequentes e era sempre a mesma coisa. Os relatos que saíram na mídia ou eram comentados pelos vizinhos não batiam em nada com a realidade que Joseph e sua mãe estavam enfrentando. O perigo se tornava maior a cada novo ataque, tanto que Lilian pouco a pouco ficou encurralada e, num belo dia, viu-se obrigada a contar seu maior segredo para o filho. No começo achou que toda aquela história sobre deuses e ser filho de Poseidon não passava de uma piada de péssimo gosto, não era mais uma criança - ele sempre dizia - para acreditar em fantasias como aquelas. E por mais que lutasse e sua mãe tentasse encontrar modos de não enviá-lo ao endereço deixado há muito tempo por seu pai, Joseph foi arrastado contra a própria vontade para um acampamento de “verão”. Tinha apenas onze anos quando pisou pela primeira vez no acampamento para semideuses, ainda relutando para acreditar que todas aquelas crianças - e alguns jovens adultos - fossem realmente filhos de deuses que, para si, só existiam em livros e filmes. 

A nova realidade levou alguns dias para finalmente fazer sentido, o mais cômico foi descobrir a existência de outros “irmãos” por parte de pai. A nova “escola” de certo modo era mais divertida que todas as outras que já frequentou em sua vida. Além dos treinos, algo que no começo foi um tanto quanto complicado, Joseph se mostrou um aluno exemplar principalmente em mitologia grega e combate contra monstros. 

🐚︵‿ POWERS:

Mimetismo de água: O usuário possui um corpo composto por água ou é capaz de transformá-lo para adquirir essa forma. Enquanto está sob essa forma, ele geralmente pode optar por manter ou não seu corpo esteticamente semelhante à sua forma normal, além de adquirir todas as vantagens da água: seu corpo se tornará "intangível", com objetos o transpassando sem causar danos, o que o concede vantagem contra diversos tipos de ataque inimigo. Além disso, ele poderá moldar seu corpo de forma livre e maleável, podendo se dividir e se remontar ao seu bel-prazer, bem como se misturar com outras fontes de água, passar por superfícies estreitas, entre outras utilidades.

Supremacia Aquática: Joseph herdou de seu pai autoridade divina sobre falar (normalmente e telepaticamente) com equinos e criaturas do mar, principalmente de tratá-los com deferência e respeito senhorial.

🐚︵‿ SKILLS:

Agilidade sobre-humana e durabilidade sobre-humana. 

🐚︵‿ WEAPON:

Adagas Duplas ― Frostguard: As adagas duplas são armas de combates focadas em curta distância. São feitas de água do oceano em seu estado sólido temperado com bronze celestial e suas lâminas são levemente curvadas para cima. Possuí uma fina camada de gelo, graças a matéria prima utilizada em sua criação, que reveste toda a lâmina por puro charme. Quando arremessadas, após acertar o alvo, costumam aparecer novamente nas mãos de seu portador. Apesar da aparência simples, são ótimas em batalhas cujo a agilidade se sobrepõe a força física. Sua cor é dourada.

Tridente: Um tridente feito de ouro imperial, com lâminas afiadas e detalhes em forma de conchas marinhas. Pode ser usado por qualquer um, porém quando empunhado por filhos do mar, permite controlar as marés e as correntes oceânicas com grande precisão. Além disso, pode conjurar poderosas ondas para afogar os inimigos. O tridente pode ser usado por até 1 hora antes de exigir um período de descanso de 12 horas.

Bracelete da Tranquilidade: Um bracelete feito de prata lunar, entrelaçado com fios de seda azul. Quando ativado, emite uma aura calmante ao redor do usuário, dissipando a raiva e a agitação emocional. Além disso, concede resistência mental contra ataques psíquicos e ilusões. O bracelete pode ser ativado por até 30 minutos antes de exigir um período de descanso de 12 horas.

BENÇÃO DE MACÁRIA. Recebeu sua primeira missão quando tinha treze anos. Na época, ainda não dominava muito bem seu poder, mas na luta se destacava e muito. Era rápido, esperto e sua força parecia aumentar sempre que um companheiro estava em perigo. Dos três campistas, ele era o mais preparado psicologicamente apesar de tão novo. E mesmo com tudo para dar certo, a missão acabou sendo um fracasso. Joe lutou até derrotar a Quimera sozinho enquanto a filha de Apolo, aprendiz de curandeira, entrava em pânico. O filho de Atena, por outro lado, sofreu um ataque tão grave que acabou morrendo antes mesmo de Joseph conseguir levá-lo de volta para o acampamento. No caminho, quando o amigo já não tinha mais forças, Joe o colocou com cuidado no chão, próximo a sombra de uma árvore, onde buscou o tranquilizar. Claro que não evitou o próprio choro, mas foi forte o suficiente para conter as lágrimas enquanto fazia companhia para o outro. Tratou de fazê-lo sorrir, mesmo diante de tamanho medo e dor, deixando carícias em sua mão e mantendo a cabeça apoiada em sua perna enquanto conversavam. Joe fez o possível e o impossível para confortar o amigo até seu último suspiro. Diante de tamanho cuidado e carinho, o filho de Poseidon chamou a atenção de Macária a Deusa da boa Morte. Ela observou tudo o que havia feito, se comovendo com toda a dedicação que teve em fazer daquele momento drástico, algo memorável e feliz. Como gratidão pelo seu bom coração, Macária decidiu abençoar o filho de Poseidon com o dom do Pressentimento. Joseph é capaz de sentir e saber quando uma pessoa conhecia, que tenha um vínculo mais forte, está em perigo com um grande aperto no coração e uma grande tristeza. Quando isso acontece, ele é levado instantaneamente até o local onde a pessoa está, podendo protegê-la/ajudá-la ou, dependendo da gravidade, apenas se despedir.

[cobble-stone]

hmm uhh because I am predictable. for the palettes, Joy with Speak To Me? or Taneesha with Menace because hehe funny she is a menace

fun fact she rejected the lumberjack role solely so she could continue to leave floating trees everywhere. she’s absolutely a menace and i love that about her.

palette ask game

[agentkalgibbs]

I don't even remember why I started following you but I'm glad I did! :D

i'm glad you did too, my friend! and i think it had something to do with a certain caitlin todd, iirc, but what can i say? we have great taste in kate's men 😂

[nibwhipdragon]

🖤🤎🕸🍻💞 for the ask game!

🖤(I admire you from afar)

Same here! I don't think our main interests line up too much, but it's nice to see your art and the sort of stuff you reblog!

🤎(I want to know you better)

Once again, I feel the same. We're mutuals, but it feels like we're not with how little we talk and know about each other haha

🕸(We've talked once)

...Have we????

Ok ok actually after giving that some thought I think I did send you an ask saying happy birthday once? It was before I followed you I think?

🍻(I want to talk to you)

SAME. I WANT TO TALK TO YOU SO BAD. Like. I know Arrax is my only mutual I talk to on a daily basis, even exchanging our discords and that, but like. I basically don't talk to you at all and I feel bad for it haha

You seem to post about final fantasy a lot, after I finish Sonic Frontiers (hopefully) I'll continue playing ff7 remake, and that'll pave the way to us talking more (and maybe I'll finally find out the context to "Me? Gongaga")!

💞(I love both your blog and the content)

Even the divorce stuff? Even the purposefully terrible drawings of characters doing weed and smoking massive blunts? That's...surprising for sure!

[claudiajcregg]

5-6am me time! Please :) but really, any will be marvelous

(from the wips tag game you can find here!)

Thank you, Mia 🥰 This is actually the story I most recently finished (where finished = first draft), just three weeks ago, or so... And the one where the first line in this comes from! So, it still needs some editing and rewriting here and there.

The inspo came while rewatching the pilot, when CJ says, "Five a.m. to six a.m. I can work out, as you see. I can think about personal matters. I can meet an interesting man." I had a vague idea for the first story, then a few more came in – there are currently five total... I even remember writing quite a bit of this at work, lol 🙈

I suck at picking snippets without finding many, many faults in them. This is from the first of those, set in 1999 (circa "A Proportional Response").

It was always especially gratifying to work out after dealing with Hoynes, especially if she could do some kickboxing. Imagining punching the smug smile out of his face was always rather gratifying. The weasely vicepresident would forever be her worst, most incomprehensible mistake, the one time she should have known better but didn’t. C.J. hated the way she behaved around him, letting him walk all over her. Whether that was fear that he would one day use that night of awful judgment against her, or her own shame, she was never sure. The repulsion and resentment still remained, five years in. But today… Today’s thoughts as she ran focused on Sam. Sweet, naïve Sam, who had accidentally slept with a prostitute and – having later found out what she did for a living – wanted to save her, because he knew what was best for her. C.J. loved that ray of sunshine of a man like a brother, but the absolute belief that he could be his friend’s savior, as if that poor woman had no agency, annoyed her. Or maybe, just maybe, what got under her skin were his protests that his personal life and whoever he was friends, or more, with shouldn’t matter.  Welcome to the club, Spanky. We can get jackets made.

[s-lycopersicum]

#4 for ask game :)

4. what’s an inside joke you have with your family or friends?

Oh, let's see...

There's this popular saying (also a famous song title) along the lines of: "the sleeping shrimp will be carried away by the waves". In general, it's a warning that those who don't act will be left behind, but in this household it's used exclusively for justifying eating some food or snack the other's been sleeping on.

But the saying got abstracted to a point where there's just "shrimp" now. If someone gets the last slice of cake, or the last of a bottle of juice, they'll simply invoke "the shrimp rule", or say "shrimped", even just "you know how it is with shrimp".

[jtl-fics]

New kings please!! These little snippets literally make my whole week 🩵

6/26/24 WIP Wednesday (OPEN) | New Kings AU

“He’s alone, in bad shape, and in constant danger. You didn’t think to tell us that? It’s not like all of us are stuck being on court mandated drugs and need to meet with Bee.” Aaron leans in, “Do you honestly think that none of us would help?”

“I need to find him.”

“Does it matter that it’s you? Does it really matter that it’s you?” Aaron asks.

“Yes.” Andrew grits out and Aaron leans back.

[iconsumethesoulsofthedamned]

@ganem-ouchie for Abigail Hobbs

[bsaka7]

what's your favourite esteban moment? what's the sexiest f1 car EVER? if you could go to a concert with any f1 driver, what concert would it be and who would you pick?

thank u!!!... idk if I have a fav esteban moment... i LOVED his recent suzuka battle with Lewis....I really like his 2022 grill the grid where you can just. Hear how much more confident he is in himself now. i Love his alpine day in the life video...

Sexiest F1 car is the Renault r26 to me. good looking and colors to die for. Runners up are Ferrari 412t2 and ferrari f2004. Idk that much about older F1 but. Ah. Just gorgeous.

i feel like the f1 drivers and i do not have too much musical overlap, which I believe if any of them did have cool music taste, they would say because they would know it's cool. who is taking me to Belle&sebastian. who is taking me to Ethel Cain. anyone who has ever mentioned Coldplay (seb, Charles) r automatically out. i feel like a vaccines concert (just because their 2011 album was a juggernaut and i really just feel like they would slap live... I wish I could have seen them touring combat sports) with like...alex would be fun. or maybe I should say Bruce with idk... seb can have a pass on his Coldplay sins if he gets me good seats to bruce. this question was fun but hard!

[turnabovt]

TAG DUMP !

[ursamajori]

15 51

15– roses - carly rae jepsen

51– hum hallelujah - fob

(send a number 1-100 and i’ll say what it is on my spotify wrapped!)

[feladaras]

tags

01. ↣『 ooc 』

01. ↣『 psa 』

01. ↣『 wishlist 』

01. ↣『 edits 』

01. ↣『 promos 』

02. ↣『 self 』

02. ↣『 headcanons 』

02. ↣『 wardrobe 』

02. ↣『 study 』

02. ↣『 aesthetic 』

02. ↣『 desires 』

03. ↣『 in character 』

03. ↣『 verse ╱ main 』

03. ↣『 verse ╱ companion 』

03. ↣『 verse ╱ modern 』

04. ↣『 dash games 』

04. ↣『 memes & ask prompts 』

00. ↣『 queue 』

#05. ↣『 rel. ╱ vhen ┈ arborvye 』

#05. ↣『 rel. ╱ silas ┈ deadlynightshcde 』

#05. ↣『 rel. ╱ haleth ┈ enmourn 』

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

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

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

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

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!