#connor is very sad

[gunstellations]

confessions

[k0libra]

I went to my first ever pride event today… feeling very emotional, because I find it so hard to believe that now I live in a place, where you can just be! Live and love whoever you want. I’m just so happy….

Have these fine gentlemen, I wish them a very good pride month. And everyone, happy pride, too!

Under the cut you can find a version without the magazine layout + a link to an artwork that inspired this piece (I go absolutely insane for their work)

*looks at the artwork by Saya*

*starts to cry*

[lionofstone]

my spotify wrapped this year is both funny & sad to me bc usually my wrapped is Overtaken by the playlist for whatever project i’m writing that year, but this year i wasn’t working on anything new :0!! bodyshare came out obviously but the writing part had already been done so i wasn’t listening to playlist as much & i didn’t start writing anything new until literally like three days ago lmao. so this year instead of it being a nice little record of what i’d been writing it’s like “remember. You Are A Pop Music Fan. also have like seven frank turner songs and some mcr.”

[crow-talks-hockey]

good morning beloveds. i spent most the time before i opened my eyes internally wrestling with myself and trying to comprehend that last night did in fact happen and i am still miserable. in my mind i'm sending all of you the lb and all the oilers hugs. we shouldn't have had to go through that fr 😕❤️

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[itsalwaysdark]

sry for posting so much im like introspective or something

[tricoufamily]

judith has always had such an awful, fraught relationship with connor and jeremiah is her golden child, yet jeremiah has been a man to her since he was like fifteen where connor will always be a boy. they should all go to therapy probably

[themyscirah]

This may be a comic fan red flag to some but I have to say I genuinely do love Chuck Dixon's Ollie. Like yeah whenever I start thinking about it too hard I get pissed off about it and the way it goes against previous characterizations and important character beats presented in the same book etc etc but like by god is it funny. Like I'm sorry Ollie diehards I love him too but him calling Connor a bastard is probably a top 10 moment for me personally. I really do love it sm. Absolutely amazing, no notes, hypocrisy at its finest. V much like gee I wonder Ollie. Who's fault could that possibly be.

[thefabelmans2022]

i have two connor roy playlists, one is called "connor roy playlist" the other is called "connor roy playlist but sad".

[suddenrundown]

me reading one salt sea: oh my god connor go away

connor: *fucking dies*

me: oh no im--that’s not what i meant

[theonewhosnameshantbesaid]

its a sad reality :'(

Always the writer, never the reader.

[saggytitty464]

My dad hasn’t called me in almost 2 months…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Premature Internet Activists

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TOMORROW (Feb 14) in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and SATURDAY (Feb 15) for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

"Premature antifacist" was a sarcastic term used by leftists caught up in the Red Scare to describe themselves, as they came under ideological suspicion for having traveled to Spain to fight against Franco's fascists before the US entered WWII and declared war against the business-friendly, anticommunist fascist Axis powers of Italy, Spain, and, of course, Germany:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Denial/fBSbKS1FlegC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22premature+anti-fascist%22&pg=PA277&printsec=frontcover

The joke was that opposing fascism made you an enemy of America – unless you did so after the rest of America had woken up to the existential threat of a global fascist takeover. What's more, if you were a "premature antifascist," you got no credit for fighting fascism early on. Quite the contrary: fighting fascism before the rest of the US caught up with you didn't make you prescient – it made you a pariah.

I've been thinking a lot about premature antifascism these days, as literal fascists use the internet to coordinate a global authoritarian takeover that represents an existential threat to a habitable planet and human thriving. In light of that, it's hard to argue that the internet is politically irrelevant, and that fights over the regulation, governance, and structure of the internet are somehow unserious.

And yet, it wasn't very long ago that tech policy was widely derided as a frivolous pursuit, and that tech organizing was dismissed as "slacktivism":

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

Elevating concerns about the internet's destiny to the level of human rights struggle was delusional, a glorified argument about the rules for forums where sad nerds argued about Star Trek. If you worried that Napster-era copyright battles would make it easy to remove online content by claiming that it infringed copyright, you were just carrying water for music pirates. If you thought that legalizing and universalizing encryption technology would safeguard human rights, you were a fool who had no idea that real human rights battles involved confronting Bull Connor in the streets, not suing the NSA in a federal courtroom.

And now here we are. Congress has failed to update consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they banned video store clerks from blabbing about your VHS rentals). Mass surveillance enables everything from ransomware, pig butchering and identity theft to state surveillance of "domestic enemies," from trans people to immigrants. What's more, the commercial and state surveillance apparatus are, in fact, as single institution: states protect corporations from privacy law so that corporations can create and maintain population-scale nonconsensual dossiers on all the intimate facts of our lives, which governments raid at will, treating them as an off-the-books surveillance dragnet:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Our speech forums have been captured by billionaires who censor anti-oligarchic political speech, and who spy on dissident users in order to aid in political repression. Bogus copyright claims are used to remove or suppress disfavorable news reports of elite rapists, thieves, war criminals and murderers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd describe the fights over tech governance in 2025 as frivolous or disconnected from "real politics"

This is where the premature antifascist stuff comes in. An emerging revisionist history of internet activism would have you believe that the first generation of tech liberation activists weren't fighting for a free, open internet – we were just shilling for tech companies. The P2P wars weren't about speech, privacy and decentralization – they were just a way to help the tech sector fight the entertainment industry. DRM fights weren't about preserving your right to repair, to privacy, and to accessibility – they were just about making it easy to upload movies to Kazaa. Fighting for universal access to encryption wasn't about defending everyday people from corporate and state surveillance – it was just a way to help terrorists and child abusers stay out of sight of cops.

Of course, now these fights are all about real things. Now we need to worry about centralization, interoperability, lock-in, surveillance, speech, and repair. But the people – like me – who've been fighting over this stuff for a quarter-century? We've gone from "unserious fools who mistook tech battles for human rights fights" to "useful idiots for tech companies" in an eyeblink.

"Premature Internet Activists," in other words.

This isn't merely ironic or frustrating – it's dangerous. Approaching tech activism without a historical foundation can lead people badly astray. For example, many modern tech critics think that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes internet users liable for illegal speech acts, while immunizing entities that host that speech) is a "giveaway to Big Tech" and want to see it abolished.

Boy is this dangerous. CDA 230 is necessary for anyone who wants to offer a place for people to meet and discuss anything. Without CDA 230, no one could safely host a Mastodon server, or set up the long-elusive federated Bluesky servers. Hell, you couldn't even host a group-chat or message board:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Getting rid of CDA 230 won't get rid of Facebook or make it clean up its act. It will just make it impossible for anyone to offer an alternative to Facebook, permanently enshrining Zuck's dominance over our digital future. That's why Mark Zuckerberg wants to kill Section 230:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/zuckerberg-calls-changes-techs-section-230-protections-rcna486

Defending policies that make it easier to host speech isn't the same thing as defending tech companies' profits, though these do sometimes overlap. When tech platforms have their users' back – even for self-serving reasons – they create legal precedents and strong norms that protect everyone. Like when Apple stood up to the FBI on refusing to break its encryption:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_dispute

If Apple had caved on that one, it would be far harder for, say, Signal to stand up to demands that it weaken its privacy guarantees. I'm no fan of Apple, and I would never mistake Tim Cook – who owes his CEOhood to his role in moving Apple production to Chinese sweatshops that are so brutal they had to install suicide nets – for a human rights defender. But I cheered on Apple in its fight against the FBI, and I will cheer them again, if they stand up to the UK government's demand to break their encryption:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g288yldko

This doesn't make me a shill for Apple. I don't care if Apple makes or loses another dime. I care about Apple's users and their privacy. That's why I criticize Apple when they compromise their users' privacy for profit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

The same goes for fights over scraping. I hate AI companies as much as anyone, but boy is it a mistake to support calls to ban scraping in the name of fighting AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's scraping that lets us track paid political disinformation on Facebook (Facebook isn't going to tell us about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

And it's scraping that let us rescue all the CDC and NIH data that Musk's broccoli-hair brownshirts deleted on behalf of DOGE:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-access-important-health-info-thats-been-scrubbed-from-the-cdc-site/

It's such a huge mistake to assume that anything corporations want is bad for the internet. There are many times when commercial interests dovetail with online human rights. That's not a defense of capitalism, it's a critique of capitalism that acknowledges that profits do sometimes coincide with the public interest, an argument that Marx and Engels devote Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto to:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

In the early 1990s, Al Gore led the "National Information Infrastructure" hearings, better known as the "Information Superhighway" hearings. Gore's objective was to transfer control over the internet from the military to civilian institutions. It's true that these institutions were largely (but not exclusively) commercial entities seeking to make a buck on the internet. It's also true that much of that transfer could have been to public institutions rather than private hands.

But I've lately – and repeatedly – heard this moment described (by my fellow leftists) as the "privatization" of the internet. This is strictly true, but it's even more true to say that it was the demilitarization of the internet. In other words, corporations didn't take over functions performed by, say, the FCC – they took over from the Pentagon. Leftists have no business pining for the days when the internet was controlled by the Department of Defense.

Caring about the technological dimension of human rights 30 years ago – or hell, 40 years ago – doesn't make you a corporate stooge who wanted to launch a thousand investment bubbles. It makes you someone who understood, from the start, that digital rights are human rights, that cyberspace would inevitably evert into meatspace, and that the rules, norms and infrastructure we built for the net would someday be as consequential as any other political decision.

I'm proud to be a Premature Internet Activist. I just celebrated my 23rd year with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and yesterday, we sued Elon Musk and DOGE:

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-musk-endangering-privacy-millions

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/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

Image: Felix Winkelnkemper (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acoustic_Coupler.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[snekdood]

lmao???

this quiz sorts through characters from like dozens of fandoms and finds the one you’re most like. I’m not even a little bit surprised by my result

[leclercari]

connor having ptsd over his wedding cake. connor finding out dead last that his father died, while they are literally at his wedding. connor’s very first instinct reaction being ‘he never even liked me’. connor knowing he has to be sad but also knowing his father gave him nothing. he has nothing to grieve. he’s empty. none of them even considered asking him to come say goodbye. he’s irrelevant. they are at his wedding. connor comforting his sister. connor not getting to be the supportive big brother. or the first son. he never was. connor asking the one person who actually has the power to hurt him by leaving if she’s only around for the money. she is honest with him. someone is finally honest with him. he marries her in front of no one. it’s not for show. it’s not for his father. it’s for connor and connor alone.

[androidetwink]

From my point of view, the game leaves many clues that Connor is a deviant. In the scene where he is with Hank in the park, when he gets out of the car and walks towards the lieutenant, even though he can't feel the cold, what is the need for him to curl up in on himself for protection? from the cold and snow? It is a scene that can go unnoticed, but I feel that it is very symbolic.

The same thing happens in the scene where Hank asks him if he's afraid of death. If you choose the option where he is honest and admits his fear of deactivation, you will be able to see the traces of vulnerability in his features, as well as how he moves his eyes nervously and draws his eyebrows together.

The look he gives Hank leaves a lot to say; a vulnerable and sad trait. While it clearly hasn't gone missing yet, there are plenty of details in the game that give a clue.

There are also deleted scenes where they show it more clearly. It's a shame the creator removed it from the final game. Connor's characterization is impressive, and yet I was left wanting to see more of him.