#being rewarded to buy a company's product?

[archiveikemen]

"Mobius Chord" Main Story Prologue: Chapter 1

This is a fan-made translation solely for entertainment purposes with no guaranteed perfection; expect mistakes, grammatical errors, and some creative liberties. All original content and media used belong to +ONE by Ikemen Series and KansaiTV. Please support the game by buying their stories and playing their games.

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Koto Suzuno: Alright, I’ll hit send and… there! 

Koto: YES—! I’m done with my manuscript! 

I nearly shot both arms up to celebrate the accomplishment, but decided to lower them and pretend I was stretching.

(I forgot I’m here at Keido to focus…) 

“Keido” was a quiet café hidden in a peaceful alleyway, away from the bustling streets. 

With the warm sunlight shining through the windows, this has been my favourite place since my college days.

The small flower vase on the table sparkled like a gemstone, alleviating the tiredness in my eyes after staring at my laptop’s screen for as long as I could remember. 

Café Owner: Well done, Koto-chan. Here’s a treat for you. 

Koto: Eh? Wow, thank you so much! 

I received a slice of cake from the café owner whom I was on friendly terms with as a reward and enjoyed its wonderful taste while flipping through a magazine. 

— “Fortessimo”. A magazine that focused on the music industry. 

It’s publisher was the company I had just submitted my manuscript to, and my very first article was planned to be featured in it. 

Koto: In a month’s time, an article I wrote will be here… I’m so happy.

Kamiya Takara: Yo, Koto! How’s work? 

Koto: Oh… Kamiya-san! 

Kamiya: You’re here again.

Koto: Indeed. I find myself very productive whenever I'm at Keido. What about you, Kamiya-san? 

Takara: Just taking a quick break. I’ve been staying up all night since yesterday to keep watch… 

Koto: Since yesterday!? You must be so tired…! 

Kamiya-san ordered an espresso from the café owner and rubbed his eyes to relieve the fatigue.

Kamiya: Actually, I was thinking it’s about time I contacted you. 

Koto: Oh… is it regarding my older brother? 

Kamiya: Yeah. Fortunately or unfortunately, there were “no leads” this time as well. 

Riku Suzuno – my older brother. 

Around the time I entered college, he vanished without a trace as though he had been spirited away. 

We have no clue if he was taken away by someone or left on his own accord. 

Kamiya: Naturally, he hasn't contacted you either, huh?

Koto: … Yeah.

Kamiya-san was my brother’s best friend since their schooling days and also a former bandmate of his. He now worked as a detective.

Despite the fact that my brother’s missing person case has long expired, he continued helping search for any leads. 

Whenever information on an unidentified young man surfaced, he would discreetly look into it on my behalf. 

Kamiya: Damn it, what exactly is that guy up to… making his sister worry this much about him. 

Kamiya: In the blink of an eye, you graduated college, got a job at an advertising firm… and now you’re standing on your own as a writer. 

Kamiya: Honestly, even if he does come back, I don't think I’m going to let him act like some great older brother. You’ve really worked hard to get to where you are, Koto. 

Koto: It’s not like that. I’m still only just starting out as a writer. But… thank you. 

Kamiya: Nah, don’t say that. The advertising firm gives you additional responsibilities at work, right? That’s because you're capable enough for that. 

Koto: I think it’s purely due to the company being short staffed, and this time it just so happens that a senior colleague attended the same college I graduated from. 

Koto: By the way, Kamiya-san, will you be attending the “Autumn Gathering”?

It referred to the party happening next week celebrating the college’s 111th anniversary. 

It was mainly organised by alumni, and since my former workplace was involved, I was given a minor supporting role. 

Kamiya: I’ll show my face there if I don't have any cases to work on that day. It’s been a long time, I’d like to meet Go again.

Kamiya: But still, Go’s more suited to be a producer than being in a band himself. 

Go— Miyamoto Go-san was the CEO of the major music company GAIA, he was also a close friend of my brother and Kamiya-san. 

The trio used to be in a band called “ZEZZ”, which was what sparked my interest in music. 

Kamiya: The opening act at the party is said to be “next-generation superstars”— probably one of Go’s artistes. Could it be Lit? 

Kamiya-san scrolled through his phone, checking the event lineup.

(Is Lit going to make an appearance as guest performers…?)

My mind drifted back to my college days, a wave of nostalgia washing over me. 

[woodelf68]

Anyone else remember when orange juice cartons used to be 64 oz. instead of only 52? :(

[bixels]

In the past, people in the Animal Crossing community would make fun of Tom Nook as a sleazy landlord. Since then, he's really rehabilitated his image as this 'heart of gold' businessman (he's the one who puts bells and furniture in trees for you to find! he adopted orphans! he donates to charity!), but New Horizons genuinely paints the most devious version of him.

He's successfully privatized settler colonialism: you pay HIM to move to a "deserted island" (which apparently the oceans in the AC world are just full of) and start a colony that he is directly invested in. At best he's running a weird vacation package scam (you arrive on the island with no money and in debt for "using his services"). At worst, he's using you to set up company towns. For god's sake, he literally has his own fake currency that he forces you to use to pay off your debt. But don't worry, he's repackaged it in a way that definitely doesn't sound like an MLM scam: the Nook Mileage Program!

You're no longer just his tenant or his temporary part-timer, you're his business lackey. The entire tutorial section of the game has you spending actual weeks running around completing tasks and doing hard labor to set up his colony. You're even tasked with preparing his properties and finding buyers for them. No, you aren't a tenant anymore. You work for the landlord. You are directly responsible for finding tenants for him. And he doesn't even fucking pay you. Not for setting up town hall and museum, or his nephew's shop –– which is the ONLY store on the entire island that sells necessities –– or bringing KK Slider to town, or helping populate his town. Not a single cent. No, actually, you have to pay HIM to BUY infrastructure like bridges and stairs and park benches. And all the while, he's telling you're the "resident representative"; you get to call the shots! That the reward is the community's progress. That what you're doing is in everyone's best interest (but most importantly, his).

Since NH's release, people have done a lot of legwork to say that Tom Nook isn't a capitalist while the game shows him at his very worst. He owns the only general store in town. You're forced to use a phone that he modified and branded as his own. Buy Nook-branded furniture and merchandise at the self-serve kiosk in the town hall, a governmental building! There's no conflict of interest here!

But hey, if you're tired of being the landlord/business mogul's goon, you can also find work as a deluxe resort home designer for a company that also pays you in their special company currency that can only be used to buy their products instead of a real salary! Because that's what the Animal Crossing franchise needs! More vacation homes!!!

[suguann]

an. part two of this | masterlist

You tell him you broke up with your boyfriend while he’s away for work, bunked up in a safe house in the middle of nowhere with shit reception, hearing your words as clear as day as if they weren’t the chopped-up version coming through his burner phone.

“It just…didn’t work out.”

It didn’t work out.

He pretends his stomach doesn’t pleasantly twist because he’d expected it to happen eventually. He’s not happy about it—although it does make the desert heat more bearable in his heavy tactical gear—and tells Soap to fuck off when he comments on it.

It was a one-time fuck because Simon doesn’t date. He’s tried in the past before he met you—the flowers, the late-night dinners—but with him being gone almost every other month (sometimes longer, shorter if he’s lucky), it never works out in the end. Sleeping with you twice would fall under that category, the quasi-relationship kind, and make everything messier than it needs to be. 

Just some fun, no strings, those are the words he promised.

If only he believed them.

He does, for all of two weeks until he’s home again, and it’s summer, so you’re wearing a flowy dress that shows off the long expanse of your legs. 

(He’s a goner—not even sure why he tried to think otherwise.)

That one time he’d promised turns into a second, both of you stumbling into your apartment after a night out. The music from the pub still thumping loudly underneath your floor as he pushes you against the front door, hands in your hair—on your waist, underneath your skirt, down your thigh to hitch it over his waist—teasing your mouth open with a swipe of his tongue across your bottom lip.

You make this delighted little noise in the back of your throat, arching into him, and his hand spans down your stomach, beneath your underwear, to nudge your messy clit with his knuckle, wanting to hear all the sounds you make now that he has you alone. 

A whiny cry of his name rewards him—jeans tightening around his waist at the sound—when his fingers go down, down until they press against your tight little hole, one finger pressing inside slowly. "If I make you cum, I get to fuck you here.”

You smile prettily, and it disarms him. “If you make me cum, you can fuck me however you want.”

Neither of you makes it to the bed, falling asleep on the living room floor instead, the blanket from the couch draped haphazardly over both of you with his arm curled over your waist.

That night had been a slip of judgment, a product of wanting something warm and soft after several months of only having his hand for company.

It happens again and again, and he keeps letting it happen until there’s no more hiding under the guise of just fun because it somehow turns into a lot more than that.

Simon can’t explain how it happens—maybe becoming something he can touch and hold and think about often—but he finds himself in an exclusive relationship with you that isn’t exactly a relationship because he’s unsure of the ins and outs that they entail.

(Always has been.)

His father was a shit role model, and it was always easier finding someone new who didn’t know his name or care about his scars and only wanted a nice fuck. There had never been any point in shooting for something serious when it was always out of the question for him, until now, that is.

He takes you to that over-rated restaurant overlooking the Thames Marcus never brought you to. A picture of you and him with the sunset in the background—your smile almost blinding in the photo—becomes his home screen, and he finds he doesn’t care when Soap has something to say about it.

He lets you do nonsensical shit, like buying small plants for his house that are surely going to die from him being gone before he comes up with the great idea to give you a key. It’s just a key.

(It’s more than just a key.)

Simon finds himself asking if he can come over more often throughout the week, which slowly moulds and shifts into nights filled with things other than sex—sleeping after a long day of work, cuddling on the couch, cooking together, going to the movies—he doesn’t try to make a big deal out of it because you used to hang out all the time without sex. 

(Somewhere, there’s a but in there.)

There’s still no label to whatever this is, and he wonders if you want him to be the first to say the thing you’ve both been dancing around for a little over…he can’t remember, but he knows it’s been long enough for your things to mix in with his at his house. 

Be with me because I’m yours, and you’re mine, that’s what he’s trying to say, and it’s never the right time. Men like him—a little broken, rough, and jagged around the edges sharp enough to cut—aren’t good with words like that.

(That’s what he thought.)

If he hadn’t seen you talking to a guy at the pub, eyes crinkling in that same sweet way whenever Simon makes you laugh, he wonders if he would’ve been the first to break from the start. He knows it’s your job as a bartender to be nice, but his jaw clicks at the sight of the guy leaning over the bar and into your space, almost too close.

The feeling doesn’t go away until he has you spread out on your mattress under him—clothes haphazardly peeled out of the way for him to put his mouth on you—your lips pursed tight around two of his fingers to give you something to focus on as his other hand works between your thighs, pressing down on your tongue when gurgled little sounds slip out.

He teases you with a small, pink vibrator he found inside your bedside table, your legs kicking out and toes curling into his calves.

“Mine. This is mine, love,” he groans, pressing you further into the bed with his weight. “Do you understand?”

You nod, tears pearling and leaking from the corner of your eyes.

“Lemme cum,” you whine, words muffled. “Simon, I want to cum. Please.”

He won’t lie that he’s close after jerking into his fist to the sight of you writhing on the sheets—swears he can feel his heartbeat throbbing against the back of his fingers—takes in your surprised expression when he pushes forward, impaling you on the first few inches of his cock.

His stomach twists from the squeal that escapes your throat, and fuck, your cunt, so hot and tight with little pulses that drive him crazy, only growing tighter when he turns up the speed on the vibrator.

“‘Mm, gonna cum. I’m—”

He grits his teeth as you start to flutter around his cock once he’s rooted inside you. “Go on—fuck—go on, love. Let me feel it.”

You look so perfect like this, like a dream: lips parted into an enticing little O with his name tumbling out in breathy mewls, tits hanging out from the bra he shoved to the side, eyes glassy and unfocused. 

“So fucking pretty.” He kisses your throat, panting into your sweat-slick skin, and it’s not long before he’s falling over the edge with you. 

Next time, he’ll have the courage to tell you: that you’re not someone he calls for a meaningless fuck on the weekend, that Simon misses you when he’s gone and can’t wait to come home, that he wants to try with you—except not when he’s balls deep and trembling inside your heavenly cunt.

But the smile he feels against his shoulder makes him think that maybe…

Maybe you already know.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

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!

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

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

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

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

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I left a bad review on a book I haven’t purchased?

(📚📖 to find later)

I’m an audiobook narrator professionally. I do most of my work via independent contracting with a production company. NOTE: they are NOT a publishing house. They do not provide editors/betas/etc for the text, they focus on turning (usually self published) books into audiobooks and marketing those audiobooks.

Most of the books I record with them are great, and I have a lot of fun reading good books! But…some of the books I’ve read for them have been. REALLY. REALLY. bad. Like I personally would have stopped reading within the first few pages bad if it wasn’t literally my job to read the words out loud.

I’m currently reading a book for them that makes me want to tear my hair out. The writing is boring, badly paced, and repetitive. None of the characters are likeable, and the relationships are shallow, the combat is boring, there are no stakes, etc etc. To give you an idea, the main character is the type of kid who on the playground would insist he had a mega super invincibility shield so you couldn’t touch him, but he also had a mega super invincibility shield breaking sword if you decided you wanted a shield too. And the narrative REWARDS HIM for acting that way.

I’ve never left a review on any of the books I’ve narrated before, but this one…i am seriously considering writing a review to try and warn people away from this book.

A few things to consider, though:

1: i am not being paid royalty share from the book, i get a flat rate based on the number of hours in the final audiobook. But as far as I know, the author only starts making money from producing this audiobook once the production company makes back the money they paid me for making it.

2: i would review anonymously/under a fake name and only on the book product page, not the product page for the audiobook version.

3: if an audiobook does not sell, then it is most likely I will not be obligated to continue recording the rest of the series (and it IS a series. At least three books are out as of now. I am currently slated to record them all, provided the audiobook sells decently)

4: the book currently has ~250 reviews already, and a 4.7/5 rating (how???? get some fucking standards), so it’s not like I’m leaving a 1 star review on something that only has 6 reviews.

I don’t think that one bad review would tank the whole series, but I do feel like leaving bad reviews on a product I didn’t even buy might be a dick move, especially if the author’s pay for this book relies on it selling well. But on the other hand, his book sucks and people should know that.

I wouldn’t be leaving a “0 stars: this sucks” review, I’d want to make it comprehensive and detailed. But I’d also feel bad about that because I’m sure the author reads his reviews, and even though his book sucks shit, i don’t want to like…make someone lose their passion to write? But ALSO if you’re making people pay $16 for the book and/or $40 for the audiobook, maybe the book should be fucking good? Idk.

So, tumblr, WIBTA?

[therobotmonster]

No one has a right to destroy art.

Not even the people that "own" it. Because we don't own the art we make. We own a temporary patent on that work. Culture belongs to everyone, and the only reason IP exists is to encourage the production of cultural artifacts by making it a viable income stream.

So when it comes to things like the Batgirl movie, or Coyote Vs ACME, or the Micronauts cartoon, or the Capcom Alien Vs Predator beat-em-up, or any other piece of media that is destroyed or made unavailable due to rights issues or because it's being sacrificed for a tax break, there should be protections for that work.

Either a national database must be maintained to hold those works until their public domain dates are reached (a project that would at this point span a century) or, a much simpler correction should be applied.

If the law says it can't be made available for profit, it becomes public domain.

You write off your movie as a tax break? Fine, that movie is available for anyone to enjoy, remix or alter for free.

You can't work out a deal between the film company and the game company to keep the classic video game available? You're both willing to chop the baby in half rather than let the other one have it? King Solomon says the baby belongs to everyone.

And to close the loophole for companies employing more than X number of people, if you can't buy it, or stream it, then you can't enforce copyright on it. There's no excuse for any major media company not to have its entire catalog available to the public at least as a burned-DVD-on-request system.

These companies want to sit on piles of culture like dragons and reap the rewards. In the case of the oldest and largest, in many cases they claim ownership over what can only be called our modern folklore. The idea that a company can own Batman should be as insane as the idea of a company owning Hercules, Paul Bunyan or the Archangel Michael.

But if that isn't going to be insane, if we're going to give that kind of power to corporations, that power should come with responsibilities.

[kwyw]

Hey “Karlie Kloss is married” Anon:

You are aware that in 2023, the LGBTQIA community is still fighting for basic human rights, no?

You are aware that in 2023, people are banning FICTIONAL books because of the mere mention of LGBTQIA characters, right? What about the banning of drag shows? “Don’t Say Gay” in Florida?

Read the room, a book or maybe watch/read the news. The LGBTQIA community exists and will continue to exist regardless of the treatment they receive from those who claim to “not judge people for who they love because love is love” when it’s convenient for them and who misquote & misinterpret Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on the one day out of the year they try to show they don’t discriminate against people in any way, shape or form.

However, it’s people with mindsets like yours who will always force the LGBTQIA+ community to continue the fight for equality, even in 2023!

Lavender marriages exist. People aren’t making this up or pulling it from the depths of their asses. If it were so easy to “just come out”, people would more frequently because that would mean people truly don’t care.

People lose jobs for being gay. They’re turned away from restaurants. Refused wedding cakes. Overlooked for promotions when they’re more than qualified or deserving. Denied the opportunity to buy a house or adopt a child. Called mentally ill or pedophiles. Physically attacked. Harassed. Murdered. All because of who they lay beside at night.

Just because Taylor is a billionaire doesn’t mean people wouldn’t treat her differently if she ever (allegedly) came out and the same for Karlie (allegedly). She would lose fans. Her albums may not sell as much. Venues may not want her to perform there to avoid protesters. People may stop buying a company’s products if she endorses them. Look at Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney.

Because for some reason, some people in society think money loses it’s value if someone’s sexual orientation isn’t the same as theirs, but guess what:

Money is still green and it’s still paper, whether it comes from a gay person hands or not. That same green paper is what people want others to spend to support *them* and *their* business. You want it as a reward for your hard work at your job. You accept it as a gift. If you found $50 outside of a gay bar, you’re gonna pick it up because it’s $50 on the ground, right?

People will accept cash, card, credit, Apple Pay, etc., but won’t accept other people based on their race, sexuality, etc.

Crazy world we live in.

It’s not even easy for people to become billionaires, much less come out of the closet because in either scenario, they could lose everything.

Why do you think Scott Swift and that other guy were so against her speaking about politics? Ask yourself why you’re so triggered at the possibility that Taylor and Karlie could be or are (allegedly) gay?

Why do you think Josh (allegedly) takes Karlie on the majority of his business trips? His own family refused to acknowledge her for years. Josh himself referred to his friend Mikey (also married with two kids) as their roommate. Have you seen his past birthday tributes to Mikey compared to Karlie’s?

At the end of the day, people in some industries have to present themselves a certain way to be successful. It’s like code switching. You have to change or suppress things about yourself to appease other people.

Also, Karlie *has* actively dropped Easter eggs (hello, cardigan/folklore!). You probably just don’t like the messenger. For example:

Her using Labyrinth’s music in her IG stories just for Labyrinth to be a song on midnights?

Her own sister, Kimby, saying “la la la la” on twitter, just for Karlie to pop up at the LA show.

Taylor said in MA that she and her partner decided together they wanted their relationship to be private.

Wouldn’t you say that fits Taylor/Karlie? Because when you don’t see two people associating as much publicly as they used to, you automatically assume something happened or that they aren’t friends…right? Because that’s what everyone assumed until Karlie showed up at the rep tour and the eras tour.

[https-witch]

Thoughts on the green practice

💭To me, being a practitioner is about developing a balanced relationship with the Universe & its components. I do not separate my home habits from my craft & beliefs.

As a child I would hang out in the forest a lot & talk to the trees. Maybe I spent so much time with them because I don't see much difference between us anymore. What's best for me is best for them & vice versa. We both need the Sun & the rain. The cycle of the days, the presence of the moon. Good health to survive the season's change & clean, safe grounds to establish roots in. We are stronger than our environment while also being part of it.

This relationship helped me become more mindful of my place in this world. On top of this, travelling a bit & becoming a vegetarian sensitized me to the pride of having a supporting community & the importance of investing in sustainable, local options while shopping for any kind of goods. It is a conscious, constant effort, but it is very rewarding. Here are a few things I do:

👕My clothes are thrifted or gifted. When I don't wear something, I either cut it up to use the fabric on something else, or I give it away. I never throw away clothes.

🫐I try to buy local products in the grocery store. I don't eat meat or products derived from meat.

🫙I thrifted a lot of furniture, tools & decoration. I try to reuse broken materials as well.

🗑️I recycle & compost. Those are free services offered by my city.

🫧I buy very little single-use anything. I don't use ziplock bags or paper towels.

💶I try to be mindful of the companies I invest in.

It's not much, but it's still good. I'm confident my efforts are enough to send good vibes in the Universe.

Just a thought 💭

Tip me

[ca-suffit]

Rolin Jones saying he made the show for neilcfreak doesn't absolve her of her racism and general unpleasantness. It proves two things. That Rolin doesn't know anything about fandom and if he does doesn't care. And two that even the most wretched white people get good things. They get to slip into spaces they shouldn't even after being terrible while Black people who are more deserving don't.

Also let's not kid ourselves. Rolin makes this show for Lestat and the huge boner he has for Lestat. When he found out AMC had bought the books he begged to be put on the project and had his own production company come up with a brief to present to AMC.

He's said repeatedly that he can't wait to do the Lestat season and that he enjoys writing Lestat. By the way I have no problem with him loving Lestat because that hasn't stood in the way of Season 1 being as good as it is.

I'm just saying he didn't know Gorrei before he spent money to pitch the show. So let's take that with a grain of salt.

I'm p sure Rolin says a lot that he doesn't read stuff online. he's also a white guy in his 50s with a long history of working in television. it's ttly different worlds. I don't expect him to know shit lol.

but ya that's the point ppl don't want u to focus on. ppl want u to think if I was nicer then we'd all sit down and solve racism in an hour and I could stop being so "jealous" and "have fun" too. lol but that's not real. all of this happening isn't v surprising because this is already what's been happening and will continue to happen. the white fandom ppl the show seeks out or who buy access to these spaces aren't more deserving or smarter (def not that lol) they're just white. anne rice was also just white. if she'd been anything else she'd have lost her job instantly for opening her mouth the way she did.

this is why white ppl need to be the ones saying things more because a lot of white fandom bs relies on white ignorance and appealing to white emotions. rn white fandom here isn't even mostly white ppl anymore and that's made it worse tbh. cuz they rely on usually showmey0urfangs or maybe keybearer to shout down at ppl how they're black and won't be spoken over.....while literally they have no community with the black fandom here anymore at all lol. neither one of them is american either btw. there's not a single well known black american fan here despite that being the main character of the show rn and plenty of fans fitting that description. if neilcfreak wanted to scream so loudly about "I'm (white) jewish so understand the struggle" when talking about racism then where tf is her solidarity for speaking on racist shit lol. couldn't possibly be that was only a way for her to avoid apologizing for saying racist shit? never....

white fandom only cares about protecting its own and having a specific identity only when it can be weaponized to avoid accountability. that's all anne rice did too. arguing with ppl and being a constant victim is a basic manipulation technique meant to exhaust the other side and "win" without needing to provide any real argument. these ppl can't talk about the themes of anything with any depth so u'll notice even when talking about the books, it's always broad mentions of "dark themes" without discussing them ever. they're only smart to themselves and that's why they're in my asks screaming I'm jealous of them. u can see how maven and them talk how superior they feel for this despite the majority of the fandom knowing they're stupid. ur just white, that's the end of it. u have never proven ur deserving of anything and I already know that's how the world works so lol. scream it at me as much as u want but it doesn't make it more true. ur just white and whiteness gets rewarded when u also promote white fandom shit. this group works together to promote each other for this reason but it's still usually only the white ppl getting the full benefits. ur bland af catering to the widest appeal possible. ur challenging nothing but needing to get in my asks to show off about it because ur so angry I'm not kissing ur asses lol. the lestat parallels never end I stg.

the one thing I think white fandom isn't prepared for tho is that maybe the Rolin's lestat won't be the version they expect him to be either lol. if ur familiar with stuff Rolin does I don't think he's gonna be what they want and that's gonna be so funny.

[hasankcskin]

 — it seems that [ hasan keskin ] has entered the scene ! he looks exactly like [ can yaman ]. this [ 35-year-old ] is the [ major shareholder ] of [ app-h inc. ]. it’s a small wonder since he is known for being [ ambitious & confident ] and [ arrogant & greedy ]. he has been involved with the company for [ 6 ] years. 

𝙗𝙖𝙨𝙞𝙘𝙨

name : hasan keskin age : thirty-five years old height : 188 cm / 6'2" gender : cis man, he/him sexual orientation : straight status : single children : two — 10 years old — 3 years old

𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙚

schooling: massachusetts institute of technology

born and raised in istanbul. older brother to feyza and their two younger siblings. during his childhood and teen years, his life revolved around football. his dream just like every young boy his age was to be a football player until one christmas he was gifted a psp. he became obsessed with video games and no longer as infatuated with football.

later his interest grew to fascination. how were these games created? what goes into making a gaming console? how long does it take to create something like this?

once finding out what it required to become a game developer, he started taking school more seriously. it was a great surprise to his parents to find him excelling in his studies even though it was due to his obsession with video games. they couldn't tell him to reduce his playing time solely due to the fact he was getting amazing grades.

after university, his career was flourishing, working under companies like ubisoft, and EA who have all created his favourite games. — but just as thing were getting good, in 2014 he gets his situationship pregnant and he had just blown most of his money on contributing to the ethereum crowdfund and bitcoin, which had horrible returns for the rest of the year. he kept his situation hidden from his family. they didn't need to know.

two years later when feyza had approached him to invest into app-h inc., he was reluctant. now that he's responsible for a child, he's convinced he needed to take less risks. it wasn't responsible living a lifestyle of big rewards or big losses. although photograpp-h is doing amazing, it didn't guarantee app-h inc., would do well.

he came clean about the child and how he would have immediately agreed if it wasn't for the child. he didn't express his other concerns since it didn't seem relevant and he didn't want to pessimistic considering he wasn't in the position to lecture or give advice to his sister who was doing better than him.

with bitcoin crashing even more significantly in 2018, he was desperate for fast cash. he was doing well for himself, but not enough to maintain the lifestyle he created for himself and the lifestyle he's grown accustomed to. he reached out to his sister and asked if the offer was still on the table. feyza suggested he buy shares now that they were more established and she would trust him in that position rather than some fancy investor in a suffocating suit.

without much of a thought, he agreed. if this went to shit, he would put everything into a high interest savings account and never invest anything until he earned the amount he desires.

in the next two years everything moved so fast. app-h inc., was turning over a high profit, catching up to comoedia and the bulletin — and bitcoin reached an all time high ending the year at around 20k per bitcoin. with the amount of money he had, he didn't need to work anymore.

he left america and moved to london to be closer with his siblings. his involvement with app-h inc. increased. his position is merely an advisory role and helps with day to day production while coming and going as he pleases.

[ausetkmt]

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

From the author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a “gripping” (The Wall Street Journal) exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health.

“The processed food industry has managed to avoid being lumped in with Big Tobacco - which is why Michael Moss’s new book is so important.” (Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit)

I came to the question of food and addiction inadvertently with the 2013 publication of my book Salt Sugar Fat. In it, I argued that grocery manufacturers were competing with fast-food chains in a race to the bottom that rewarded profits over health.

Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry.

Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note. Knowing all that the companies did to prop up their unwholesome products, I argued, was oddly empowering. We could use that insight to make better choices because, ultimately, we were the ones deciding what to buy and how much to eat.

Thus, the initial imperative for this book: to sort out and size up the true peril in food. To see if addiction is the best way to think about our trouble with food and eating, given what we’ve learned from other substances and habits. And to peer inside the processed food industry to see how it is dealing with what, in its view, would be a monumental threat to the power it holds over us.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions - and to find the true peril in our food.

Moss uses the latest research on addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities - as well as food manufacturers - already know: that food, in some cases, is even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.

Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry - including major companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg’s - has tried not only to evade this troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually exploit it.

For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.

A gripping account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns, and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public health crisis, Hooked lays out all that the food industry is doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us why what we eat has never mattered more.

[petalsmooth]

If Hollywood doesn't have the money to meet the demands of the writer's and the actors, why are the CEO's still pulling down record salaries?

Seems to me either they are lying to these groups, or they are lying to their investors.

Presumably the people who have owned and invested in these companies are receiving truthful reports of the company's solvency or believe they are, or why else would they authorize these men to make hundreds of millions of dollars? If the companies are truly losing billions of dollars, shouldn't fiscal responsibility start at the top? And by that I don't mean simply making billions less than you made 3 year's ago, but actually in the red. Where a company loses more than it takes in.

And certainly it's not inconceivable some sort of fraud could be occurring at the top, but if so shouldn't that be exposed? Open up your books if that the case. The public would be on your side if actually were true....people aren't completely unreasonable. If you have unscrupulous execs pocketing an obscene amount of money from a very limited pot then people should know that too. If I were an investor I'd certainly wonder. Sure, they might think these guys are looking out for their interests AND GRASPING EVERY extra penny they can from the people on the bottom but...they could also by lying to you as well. I'd probably want more transparency myself to be certain with independent auditing.

And, If you are bleeding, why are you constantly consolidating more companies under your umbrella (Disney) rather than trying to shore up your base company first? Why do you keep authorizing new headquarters to be built while firing long term employees (ESPN/Disney)? Where is all this money coming from to keep putting out projects that loses hundreds of millions at the box office? Where is the fiscal responsibility on the production side?

These people are acting like they are not experiencing any financial difficulty because none of the hardship is being passed on to them. SO why would the actors/writers believe them? All they see are 7000 people fired while you give your CEO's raises. That doesn't necessarily mean your company is in difficulty. Could just be CEO's investors are greedy. Buying new yachts or meeting at exclusive resorts does not carry the narrative your business is in trouble.

And maybe you are. Maybe you are like the Featherington's running up bills all over town, hawking silverware and emptying own chamber pots to give illusion not in financial straights. But if you are? You should be exposed and fired. NOT REWARDED WITH NEW MULTIMILLION DOLLAR CONTRACTS while other people lose their jobs so you can keep up the pretense rather than living on a budget.

[ragayazhini]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI’s productivity theater

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!

Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons:

1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and

2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents).

There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job.

Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would love to fire you and replace you with a chatbot. Chatbots don't unionize, they don't backtalk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshittify the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages.

That makes your boss such an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI might represent a bet the usefulness of AI – but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job.

But bosses' resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss's path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

The headline findings tell the whole story:

96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;

85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;

49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;

77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.

Working at an AI-equipped workplaces is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book, and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine shrimp he ordered from a notorious Holocaust denier to wear little crowns like they do in the ad:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/hitler-and-sea-monkeys

Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The "productivity paradox" shows a rapid, persistent decline in American worker productivity, starting in the 1970s and continuing to this day:

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

The "paradox" refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing miracle. There are many theories to explain this paradox. One especially good theory came from the late David Graeber (rest in power), in his 2012 essay, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit":

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches. Research was once dominated by weirdos (e.g. Jack Parsons, Oppenheimer, etc) who operated with relatively little red tape. The rise of IT coincides with the rise of "managerialism," the McKinseyoid drive to monitor, quantify and – above all – discipline the workforce. IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records.

Before long, every employee – including the "creatives" whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century until the 70s – was spending a huge amount of time (sometimes the majority of their working days) filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work. All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers, who colonized every kind of institution – not just corporations, but also universities and government agencies, which were structured to resemble corporations (down to referring to voters or students as "customers").

Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful, there's no denying that the more time you spend documenting your work, the less time you have to do your work. The solution to this was inevitably more IT, sold as a way to make the record-keeping easier. But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway: the easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping will be demanded of you.

But that's not all that IT did for the workplace. There are a couple areas in which IT absolutely increased the profitability of the companies that invested in it.

First, IT allowed corporations to outsource production to low-waged countries in the global south, usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators. It's really hard to produce things in factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country. But IT makes it possible to annihilate distance, time zone gaps, and language barriers. Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands thrived. Executives who oversaw these projects rose through the ranks. For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China.

https://archive.is/M17qq

Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity…for a while. But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized, and companies needed a new source of cheap gains. That's where "bossware" came in: the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline. Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest-grained levels, measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements.

What's more, the declining power of the American worker – a nice bonus of the project to fire huge numbers of workers and ship their jobs overseas, which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds – meant that bossware could be used to tie wages to metrics. It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent five star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked – it's also creative workers whose Youtube and Tiktok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Bossware dominates workplaces from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers, and extends to your home and car, if you're working from home (AKA "living at work") or driving for Uber or Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces productivity:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

One way to think about how this works is through the automation-theory metaphor of a "centaur" and a "reverse centaur." In automation circles, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by an automation tool – for example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur, a human head atop a machine body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity.

A "reverse centaur" is a worker who acts as an assistant to an automation system. The worker who is ridden by an AI that monitors their eyeballs, bathroom breaks, and keystrokes is a reverse centaur, being used (and eventually, used up) by a machine to perform the tasks that the machine can't perform unassisted:

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

But there's only so much work you can squeeze out of a human in this fashion before they are ruined for the job. Amazon's internal research reveals that the company has calculated that it ruins workers so quickly that it is in danger of using up every able-bodied worker in America:

https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage

Which explains the other major findings from the Upwork study:

81% of bosses have increased the demands they make on their workers over the past year; and

71% of workers are "burned out."

Bosses' answer to "AI making workers feel burned out" is the same as "IT-driven form-filling makes workers unproductive" – do more of the same, but go harder. Cisco has a new product that tries to detect when workers are about to snap after absorbing abuse from furious customers and then gives them a "Zen" moment in which they are showed a "soothing" photo of their family:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-bringing-zen-first-horizons-192010166.html

This is just the latest in a series of increasingly sweaty and cruel "workplace wellness" technologies that spy on workers and try to help them "manage their stress," all of which have the (totally predictable) effect of increasing workplace stress:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The only person who wouldn't predict that being closely monitored by an AI that snitches on you to your boss would increase your stress levels is your boss. Unfortunately for you, AI pitchmen know this, too, and they're more than happy to sell your boss the reverse-centaur automation tool that makes you want to die, and then sell your boss another automation tool that is supposed to restore your will to live.

The "productivity paradox" is being resolved before our eyes. American per-worker productivity fell because it was more profitable to ship American jobs to regulatory free-fire zones and exploit the resulting precarity to abuse the workers left onshore. Workers who resented this arrangement were condemned for having a shitty "work ethic" – even as the number of hours worked by the average US worker rose by 13% between 1976 and 2016:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI is just a successor gimmick at the terminal end of 40 years of increasing profits by taking them out of workers' hides rather than improving efficiency. That arrangement didn't come out of nowhere: it was a direct result of a Reagan-era theory of corporate power called "consumer welfare." Under the "consumer welfare" approach to antitrust, monopolies were encouraged, provided that they used their market power to lower wages and screw suppliers, while lowering costs to consumers.

"Consumer welfare" supposed that we could somehow separate our identities as "workers" from our identities as "shoppers" – that our stagnating wages and worsening conditions ceased mattering to us when we clocked out at 5PM (or, you know, 9PM) and bought a $0.99 Meal Deal at McDonald's whose low, low price was only possible because it was cooked by someone sleeping in their car and collecting food-stamps.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/disneyland-workers-anaheim-california-authorize-strike

But we're reaching the end of the road for consumer welfare. Sure, your toddler-boss can be tricked into buying AI and firing half of your co-workers and demanding that the remainder use AI to do their jobs. But if AI can't do their jobs (it can't), no amount of demanding that you figure out how to make the Sea Monkeys act like they did in the comic-book ad is doing to make that work.

As screwing workers and suppliers produces fewer and fewer gains, companies are increasingly turning on their customers. It's not just that you're getting worse service from chatbots or the humans who are reverse-centaured into their workflow. You're also paying more for that, as algorithmic surveillance pricing uses automation to gouge you on prices in realtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

This is – in the memorable phrase of David Dayen and Lindsay Owens, the "age of recoupment," in which companies end their practice of splitting the gains from suppressing labor with their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

It's a bet that the tolerance for monopolies made these companies too big to fail, and that means they're too big to jail, so they can cheat their customers as well as their workers.

AI may be a bet that your boss can be suckered into buying a chatbot that can't do your job, but investors are souring on that bet. Goldman Sachs, who once trumpeted AI as a multi-trillion dollar sector with unlimited growth, is now publishing reports describing how companies who buy AI can't figure out what to do with it:

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

Fine, investment banks are supposed to be a little conservative. But VCs? They're the ones with all the appetite for risk, right? Well, maybe so, but Sequoia Capital, a top-tier Silicon Valley VC, is also publicly questioning whether anyone will make AI investments pay off:

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/

I can't tell you how great it was to take my kid down a grocery checkout aisle from which all the eye-level candy had been removed. Alas, I can't figure out how we keep the nation's executive toddlers from being dazzled by shiny AI pitches that leave us stuck with the consequences of their impulse purchases.

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/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

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

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

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How Much Does It Cost to Develop an eCommerce Mobile App

By 2027, the total annual revenue of the eCommerce industry will reach a staggering USD 5.56 trillion. To put that into perspective, it is more than the GDP of the UK. And that will grow as more people prefer to buy products and services online.

This has encouraged small and large businesses to actively participate in doing more commerce business. We know this because we have worked on many eCommerce app development projects. One of the most common questions is about the eCommerce mobile app development cost.

‘How much is it to develop an eCommerce mobile app?’

We will answer it in this post and a few essential factors you need to know about before hiring eCommerce app developers.

Factors That Influence eCommerce App Costs

Let’s look at the factors that decide the cost of eCommerce app development in 2023.

How complex the app is

Developing an eCommerce app like Amazon or Flipkart is a massive task as it involves extensive work and development. And the app is highly complex due to a variety of features.

A few of the elements that make the app complex are:

User account creation.

Payment gateways.

Product catalogues.

The check-out process.

Rewards systems.

EMI payment options.

The more complex the app is, the more expensive the development process is. If you are a small business looking to sell your products, that will cost you less. 

Platforms the app is being developed for 

If you want to develop the app natively for iOS and Android, that will cost you a lot. It will take a lot of time, and you also need to hire different production teams to work on different app iterations.

This is also going to cost you more money.

The best way to avoid such issues is to do the required market research and create an app that caters to your target audience.

Using a cross-platform app development approach is also highly recommended.

Integration and use of third-party APIs 

Creating features natively for your app can increase the overall cost of development, as a developer needs to spend time on it. And that will take more time and money out of your pocket.

Instead, you can integrate third-party APIs to bring all the capabilities and functionalities to your site.

Since they already have working features, you don’t need to worry about their performance.

Whether you want maintenance 

Other factors to consider when building an eCommerce app are regular updates and maintenance. You can enter an AMC contract with the eCommerce development company you are working with if needed.

That’s going to cost you extra. However, you can also do that if you want to have an AMC outside of the existing contract.

Either way, maintenance is a crucial element of any app. And the more complex the app is, the more it will cost you. 

Customization and design requirements 

Suppose you want a highly customized eCommerce mobile app with an impeccably unique design that will take time and cost you more. Developing customized apps right from the ground up is a time-intensive process.

Opting for that will save the time needed to complete the project, which naturally makes the app cost more.

The same thing happens with the design, too. You may use templates or themes available with a few edits. And that brings the cost down.

Where your development partner is located 

If you hire eCommerce app developers in the US or the UK, that’s going to cost a lot of money because they charge higher. On the other hand, choosing a partner from India or the Philippines can cost you a lot less money.

There are several reasons for this, and the biggest reason is that labour in India and the Philippines is more affordable.

Hence, you get impressive value for every dollar you invest in the project. And you can get all these without compromising on the quality.

The app development process 

Yes, that’s right. Depending on the development process, the cost can vary.

Let’s say you are developing a new eCommerce app right from scratch. It takes time to be ideated, planned, and executed meticulously.

This takes a lot of time. 

Instead of that, you can build a clone of an existing app.

And that will cost a lot less as the idea is already there. You must clone the app to fit your products and brand preferences.

Payment gateways 

Payment gateways are essential for accepting online payments. But they will cost a lot as integrating them takes time and effort.

Depending on your business, these options change, such as:

Hosting payment gateway as needed into the app.

Integrating the API.

Setting up alternative payments.

Effectively embed the payment gateways into the app.

Integrating mobile wallets as per your needs.

The Cost of Developing eCommerce Apps

We hope you understand the factors affecting the cost of developing an eCommerce app. This is how we explain the cost to our clients. We educate our clients when they want to know about the project's cost.

Here is a table with the approximate amount for developing an eCommerce app. 

Benefits of Having an eCommerce App for Your Business

While developing an eCommerce app is a considerable investment, it has the potential to take your business to the next level.

Here are a few advantages of using ecommerce apps.

Ease of use 

It enables your users to buy products and services more conveniently. They can buy your products anywhere—while travelling, from their office, or at home.

And that can make your business more user-friendly, improving your sales.

Customer experience 

Having an ecommerce app improves the overall customer experience. The convenience they can enjoy is unparalleled. And this will positively influence your business. 

Brand awareness 

People will use it more when your business has an excellent eCommerce app. And they will talk about it in their community, friend circles, etc. This is great for your business as it can expand your brand awareness.

A competitive edge 

You can trump your competition with a high-performing and intuitive mobile app to sell your products. As you offer a more convenient way, you can also attract users from your competition

Improved sales 

Selling products and services at the store and from your eCommerce app leads to more sales. And you can also reach more people than you could not previously.

How to Develop an eCommerce App on a Budget?

An intelligent approach and expert eCommerce app development company like AddWeb Solution can help you build an eCommerce app on a budget.

Here is what you can do.

Step 1 

Don’t release the app with all the features at first. Develop only the most important factors first and add more features later if your users need them.

Step 2 

Shopify, WooCommerce, etc., offer many pre-built eCommerce platforms. Use this to save time and money.

Step 3 

You must work with an agency that can offer you affordable services. AddWeb Solution in India is an excellent option to do that.

Step 4 

Instead of using proprietary software programs, develop the app using open-source platforms and technologies. Some of the open-source technologies are even better than their paid counterparts.

Step 5 

You can also reuse the code from your previous app. If you can use some parts of the code, it would reduce the overall development cost for sure.

Step 6 

Many eCommerce app development companies offer multiple engagement options. Opt for a fixed-price agreement option, which ensures more value for your project and reduces costs.

Related Article: VueStorefront Headless Commerce A Modern Solution for eCommerce Challenges

Why Choose Us for eCommerce App Development?

When hiring eCommerce app developers, you must hire a reliable eCommerce mobile app design and development company like us.

And if you are wondering why AddWeb Solution is unique, here are a few reasons.

Our expertise in the industry 

AddWeb Solution is among the most respected agencies offering eCommerce app development services. We have earned that image by working on diverse projects from large and small businesses during the last decade.

This expertise enables us to work on diverse eCommerce app projects innovatively and deliver the best service at all times.

Trained and skilled developers 

You can hire eCommerce app developers confidently from AddWeb Solution. They have the experience and qualifications to do what they are doing. Our practice is to train each of our developers in the latest technologies and frameworks as they are released.

So, you never have to worry about the talent working on your project when you choose AddWeb Solution's eCommerce app development services.

Streamlined development process 

Imagine if you have not planned your app development. The result is a waste of resources in terms of money, time, talent, etc. But that does not happen at AddWeb Solution.

We plan every single project we undertake, eCommerce app development or not.

This helps us deliver the project on time, ensure value to the client's investment, and make it easier for them to quickly take their product to the market.

Advanced eCommerce apps

We believe in creating apps that help your business grow. And technology plays a massive role in that. Having realized this, our team of expert eCommerce app developers always leverage the latest technologies to make your app.

This empowers your app with all the features and advanced functionalities you need to impress your existing and prospective customers.

Multiple QA processes 

Quality means the world to us as an eCommerce development company in India. We have multiple quality assessment processes and tests to keep the apps we develop at the highest echelon of quality.

Regardless of your industry, your app will always comply with industry standards and often exceed the benchmarks of global quality expectations. Son, you don't need to worry about the quality of our apps.

Conclusion

eCommerce apps help sell your products and services and reach more users easily. Most people worldwide use a smartphone, so you can make your app available to them to encourage them to buy from you. This is a marketing strategy that many businesses have used and has proven highly effective. However, when developing an eCommerce mobile app for your business, you must hire eCommerce app developers who can deliver value and quality. And that’s something we can offer you aplenty.

We have served numerous businesses looking to expand their reach and sales through dedicated eCommerce mobile apps. We have always served tailored eCommerce development services that exceeded their expectations.

Source: How Much Does It Cost to Develop an eCommerce Mobile App