#data scientisting is important work

[m0ose-idiot]

Curious whether there really was more of our favourite headless Tudor in season 5? Wonder no more, the data scientists are here! 👻🤍

[arolesbianism]

Vibrates. Normal. I'm normal. I'm so normal.

[hellooldshame]

Empirical Analysis

Mark Grayson x Reader smut 🔞

Synopsis: You're absolutely fascinated by how fast Mark Grayson heals. Mark is more than happy to indulge you in your science experiment. AKA You both get horny while realizing you might have some sadomasochistic tendencies.

Word count: 2.8k words

CW: MDNI 🔞 NSFW, barely any porn to warrant all that plot, biting, (attempted) marking, scratching, bottom!-ish Mark that is technically more switchy, Reader on top, lots of grinding now that I think about it, outercourse, masochist!Mark, y/n's awakening sadism. Not beta read, never beta read.

Idea taken from @clairewritesfanfics and their smart atoms talk. I think I got carried away.

A/N: This made me rewatch Invincible so I can write bouncing on him

Bullets, bombs, and most explosives barely leave scuff marks. A knife gets bent and most weapons break on impact. Punches work though. Bludgeoning damage makes him bleed out his mouth or break his nose. Which absolutely baffles you to no end. Granted, the people hitting him were strong. Like, really really strong, but it wasn't like he was hurt when a reinforced boot smacked him square on the jaw.

Mark Grayson and the limits of his invulnerability were an enigma to you. As one of the many many scientists working in the GDA, you were tasked with understanding Viltrumite physiology. How they heal, what could hurt them, if they could be hurt at all. Admittedly, the job was fun when Cecil wasn't hounding you for the reports that you barely did.

Despite your job, you didn't like exploiting the poor guy. This was purely... curiosity to be honest. A very morbid part of yourself would have loved to dissect that pretty face and see how he ticked. The reasonable part of you reminded yourself how a scalpel would sooner turn to dust before it pierced his skin.

Once, you had slapped him across the face—the moment was heated and sometimes he just said things that would really piss you off. Regardless, his shoulders had jerked and his face turned in the direction your hand swung. Despite his parted lips from the shock and the stinging on your palm, there was barely any warmth on his cheek. Of course, regular human strength could only do so much to a guy who was safe from a stabbing. But the look on his face and the rising heat on his cheek only after the moment had registered made you want to test things further.

For Science! You had claimed all too enthusiastically when you tried to persuade him. Emphasizing even that everything would be "off the record" and "never to be used against him." You meant that promise too. And maybe Mark believed the conviction in your voice because he seemed just as excited when he agreed. For the sake of science.

Now, the scientific method would tell you that empirical evidence was important. Which is why you had to take a very hands-on approach in this experiment. Yes, science never said anything about taking Mark to your bed and straddling him—a notebook by his head and your butt pressed comfortably on his pelvis—while you collected data but this was necessary!

Firstly, you needed a private place so it was off-record. Ergo, why you did this at your place. Second, it was only polite to have your test subject comfortable as you measured his pain tolerance. Obviously, the most comfortable place that would fit him lying down would be your bed. And lastly, you were straddled because you needed to observe every detail and walking around a queen sized bed took too much time.

It was all very rational.

And besides, Mark was way too pretty for you to not at least get a bit of a good look at him. You had the best seat in the house. Mark Grayson, under you, body sunken slightly into your plush sheets, chest rising and falling nervously in an uneven stutter. Inhaling deep to even his breath, the release too quick and shuddering to calm himself down. It was understandable that he was nervous, being scrutinized so intently.

Big brown eyes stared up at you through his lashes and the light from your window hit his eyes just right to see the pattern of his iris. The swirls and webbing that made up the varying shades of mahogany and maple. If you stared long enough, you could see the tremble of it, how his pupils dilate. You might have stared at it for a moment too long.

"Uhm- I'm ready," a shaky voice spoke up, those same eyes blinking, unsure now if this was a good idea. Granted, he had his own ulterior motives, but the long silence had him thinking too hard. His initial motivations clouded by doubt and worry. What if you lied about keeping this a secret? Was he sure you weren't planning to dissect him? What if you realized he also had intentions beyond helping in your experiment? That maybe he wanted to feel the way your hands snap against his skin aga-

"Alright," you nodded, reaching down. You could've sworn Mark held his breath when your hand hovered near his face to grab the notebook. Pages flutter across until you settled on an empty sheet, scribbling the time and date of the experiment. "You sure I'm not too heavy? I can adjust."

The question was more out of courtesy than concern, knowing he could bench entire icebergs. A part of you also hoped to stay seated, the warmth beneath you quite cozy. The quick nod and mumbled 'mhm mhm' was all you needed before beginning your experiment.

"Mind if you," you gestured to his shirt, wanting to have as much skin to work with.

Mark looks down, eyes wide as if he was surprised he wasn't already undressed. "Oh- yeah, hold on," hands that were unconsciously gripping the sheets moved to tug his shirt off in one motion. Hurried movements turn clumsy and a rip is heard before you see the hole between the collar and the rest of his shirt. His head was still trapped, indents on his face pressed on the fabric as he fumbled to get free. "Shit, wait just-"

Your hands were quick and careful in helping him take off his shirt. It was hard to bite back a laugh and you were certain you were making a face when you tried to hold back the smirk and snicker. A quick tug , the shirt was off, and your hands felt warm against his chest. You had always been heavy handed and even now you exerted more than the necessary effort to push him back to lie down. As expected, there was resistance when you pressed down but he had fallen back so quickly someone would have thought you knocked him down.

"Try to relax," you whisper, trying to come off as soothing but the husk in your voice makes it sound sultry. Not that you noticed. Mark did though, felt his stomach flip and his muscles did the opposite of what you instructed. "I won't be using tools since the running theory right now is that physical contact seems to work better."

The lump in his throat bobbed when your hand touched his chest and fingers spread to try and get a feel. Trying to decide where to start. Your hands were cold compared to how warm he felt. And they would not stop roaming. The tips of your fingers pressed and prodded, pushing down as hard as you can and leaving the faintest red mark as blood rushes to where you'd applied pressure. So it wasn't like his skin was hard steel. You pinch the skin at his sides and he flinches.

"Ow- hey," the yelp came out automatically, the feeling reminiscent of being tickled or poked at the side. He figured he should let you know lest you mistake that for damage dealt. "That tickled more than hurt."

A nod and quick "noted" was your only response before continuing. The process was slow but you needed to cover all your bases. One hand moved to write notes, your body leaning forward and closer to him. The view was nice and the boy in him couldn't help but glance, ogle really, at the gap between your shirt pulled by gravity and the torso hiding underneath. Nice.

Your other hand began dragging nails across his bare chest and that brought his attention back to you. Normally, for some people at least, scratching just hard enough would leave white or raised lines. You definitely feel skin dragging against your nails but see no indication that you'd done anything. Somehow, you don't notice how his diaphragm contracts and stays there when he holds his breath. Eyes too trained on the contact between your nails and his skin to see his lips trembling. You inform him that you were going to apply more pressure.

Nothing hurt, not right now at least. But the sensation of your cold hands on his skin felt refreshing. Especially against his warm skin. Then your nails scratched his skin just right that he'd nearly hummed in satisfaction. He started wondering if you could break skin when he felt you dig into him. He could almost convince himself that you were strong enough to do it.

There was just something so disarming about you on top of him. Watching him with such fascination that he felt completely exposed. Like he had no choice but to surrender under you. Your eyes wide with curiosity, your nails dragging against him heavily. Sharp, steady, trying so hard to cut-

A stuttered gasp choked in his throat, breaking his thoughts as the stinging registered in his mind. You looked equally surprised to see the scratch on his pec, like red dotted lines outlined in white. A thumb tentatively pressed on the slash and Mark couldn't stop his lips from parting for the broken whine to escape.

Now, you were never one to bask in other people's pain, so you decided to blame his squirming hip jerks.  The way the firm bulge in his pants rubbed up between your legs, the pleasure it shot straight up your spine coupled with that little cry was almost pavlovian. A professional would have gotten up and saved him the discomfort of having something so sensitive be put under pressure. A certain someone doing this out of the lab had decided it felt really nice when you sat yourself down firmly.

Mark was strong, you wouldn't be able to hold him down on your weight alone and by that breathless whimper, it seemed like he was okay with the way you readjusted and slid yourself against the hill on his pelvis. It was especially nice when he'd squirm underneath you, clumsy friction rubbing between you as your finger pressed harder on the wound. Your eyes nearly rolled back as you got lost in the slow carousel ride before he sighed out and finally relaxed.

Close. So close. Beneath your thumb was smooth skin, pristine and unblemished. Wide eyes stared at the newly formed skin and he swore he saw your gaze twinkle. He had healed. So fast, yet you couldn't help but miss the choked whines as he struggled to cope with the pain. You had expected him to have better tolerance than that but perhaps having tiny cuts compared to gashes and bruises felt different.

Mark inhaled lightly, breath finally steady as the stinging pain subsided and he wasn't forced to focus between his chest and the rubbing on his erection. "A-ah..." his voice cracked as you dug your nails in again and left three pretty scratches in your wake. Your eye twitched as you struggled to keep your gaze trained on him when his hips bucked again. Seeing the red flesh peek out had you holding back from leaning down and dragging your tongue over it. You needed to see it yourself.

A part of you was impatient, needing to observe every detail of his healing abilities. The other part was impatient for other things as you fidgeted. Hips rocking slowly only to incite tight-lipped grunts when you pressed on the open wound again. You don't know when his hands made their way to your sides, just that you were now pressed firmly enough that you couldn't lift up.

Then his hands grip and direct your lower half, moving you back and forth in his pace. You feel that ticklish sensation between your legs again as you watch skin merge back together, too fast to leave even a scab. Lips that had curled into an enthralled grin trembled when your eyes fluttered and the body below you lifted up slightly, pushing up as you were pressed down.

You looked good. Like, really good when you were watching him. Something almost manic in your eyes when you saw his body heal in real time. It made him go crazy thinking about what you probably wanted to do to him. The ill intent in your gaze as the corner of your lips twitched upwards in morbid interest, showing your teeth. It looked just as good when your eyes lost focus as he had you hump him, mouth hanging open to let out a surprisingly pleased moan.

The pleasure seemed to cloud any logic or reasoning left in you because you had forgotten to explain the next steps. No, you wanted to get straight to it apparently as you leaned down. Wordlessly, your chest pressed against his and if he wasn't holding onto you, you might have slipped off. Lips inched closer to his neck and your warm breath wafted against his already heated skin.

His eyes fluttered closed, expecting lips or a tongue to touch his neck. Instead, he felt pointed canines before you took a hard bite.  His hips stuttered mid grind, once again caught off guard by your actions. His groans matched yours as you found yourself enjoying the sounds and sensations of grinding your teeth against his collarbone. You knew he was sturdy and the fact he got off on your teeth rather than recoil only spurred you to clamp down harder. 

Nails dug into his shoulders as you held onto him. Hips gyrated and bucked against each other, your clothed sexes edging closer and closer to what you both needed. Mark couldn't take much more as he sat up, dipping you onto your mattress as he held onto your thighs and had you wrap your legs around him.

You didn't seem to relent either as your jaw refused to unclench. Not that it mattered to him. Moans muffled behind your teeth, hot air hitting his neck in quick puffs from your breathing. That and the faint ache on his skin had him rutting harder against you.

Strong hands moved up, stopping at your waist as a careful yet firm grip held you in place. Then he thrusted forward again, the movement quick and desperate and needy. He needed it, really really bad. Wanted it as much as you, whose attention was being taken away by the growing intensity of the body dry humping you. Jaw and abdomen equally as tight.

A stuttering slam against your pelvis has you seeing stars and you finally unclench your jaw to cry out. The crash of pleasure has you bucking back up into him and if that didn't do him in, the long scratches down his back and your legs locking him sungly into you does.

Mark collapses on top of you, spent and breathless and you both have most likely needed a change of clothes. Vision hazy, you try to crane your neck and see the damage you should have dealt on his collarbone. The disappointment on your face could be seen a mile away.

Despite your best efforts and rattling you'd felt in your teeth, all you had to show for it was indents from your canines. Already raising back up as if it had never happened.

"I nearly lost a tooth for nothing," you mutter, saving the fact you wanted to leave a mark at all to unpack for another day. A breathy laugh came from beside your head, feeling the vibrations against your chest. His hair tickled your cheek as her turned to look at you, eyes twinkling in the afterglow of climax.

"I mean, it's not bullshit that I'm called-"

A/N: yeah ofc I'd make that fuckass joke.

I haven't written in a good 2 years or so and have drafts before the pandemic for other fics (they're on Wattpad do you understand what type of person I am now). I didn't mean to make reader a lil biology freak but that was fun.

[sunarryn]

DP X Marvel #27

Danny wasn’t trying to become a supervillain’s protégé. Honestly, he was just trying to survive another semester at MIT without spontaneously combusting from stress. At nineteen, between triple-majoring in Astrophysics, Mechanical Engineering, and Paranormal Biochemistry—and moonlighting as the occasionally-glowy, occasionally-exploding, semi-competent vigilante known to the public as Phantom—Danny was hanging on by a thread. A very frayed, very caffeine-soaked thread. So when one of his professors suggested a special “independent study project” with a visiting Latverian dignitary-slash-scientist, Danny said yes without thinking. He needed the credits. He needed the money. He needed the free lunch vouchers. What he did not need, apparently, was to accidentally apprentice himself to Doctor Fucking’ Doom.

At first, he didn’t know. To Danny, “Victor” was just this weird, intense European dude with a crazy sense of fashion (who the hell wore a green cape in broad daylight?) and a laugh that definitely belonged in a villain origin story. But Victor paid well, never judged him for falling asleep mid-sentence, and always had the best coffee imported from who-knows-where. Danny figured he was just some rich old nerd with a lot of quirks. Maybe a little murder-y, but hey, Danny was from Amity Park. His standards for “dangerous mentor figure” were catastrophically low.

“Daniel,” Victor intoned one day, standing over a schematic that looked suspiciously like a laser death satellite. “Tell me: what improvements would you make to a mobile interdimensional particle cannon capable of vaporizing Manhattan?”

Danny, who hadn’t slept in three days and thought this was just a theoretical design, squinted at the blueprints and muttered, “Uh… you forgot the phase stabilizer. Without it, the cannon would rip itself apart before you could fire. Also, your aim’s gonna suck unless you recalibrate the gyroscopic system.”

Victor went unnaturally still. “Explain.”

Danny yawned so hard his jaw cracked. “M’kay, so if you adjust the vibrational harmonics here”—he drew all over the deadly weapon diagram with a crayon—“and rework the mana-infused crystal lattice to resonate at a higher frequency… boom. Stable, precise, terrifying. A+ on your murder machine, Professor Von Evilcape.”

Victor stared at him for a long time. Then he laughed. Not just any laugh. A full, villainous, booming laugh that echoed through the lab and set off three alarms in the next building over. Danny didn’t even blink. He just kept doodling tiny ghosts on the margins of the schematic.

From that moment onward, Victor—Doctor Doom, actual dictator of Latveria, sorcerer supreme wannabe, world-class narcissist—decided Danny was his heir apparent. His secret weapon. His beautiful chaotic son who understood him better than any of the clowns in Latveria ever had. He didn’t ask Danny if he wanted the role. He just started sending Danny increasingly absurd “assignments” that Danny, running on Monster Energy and bad life choices, completed without registering how criminally insane they were.

Case in point: one evening, Danny stumbled into the lab with a Red Bull in one hand and a half-eaten burrito in the other. Victor handed him a device.

“Install this at Stark Tower.”

Danny blinked at the tiny, harmless-looking black box. “Uh, what is it?”

“A signal booster for quantum research purposes.”

Danny, who trusted absolutely no one and also didn’t care because he had a paper due at midnight, shrugged. “Okay, cool.”

He broke into Stark Tower that night with the ease of a sleepwalking raccoon, installed the “signal booster” inside one of Tony Stark’s servers, and left. The next morning, the news was screaming about a massive data breach that almost triggered World War III. Danny was too busy trying to finish his midterm essay on quantum entanglement to notice.

“Good work, Daniel,” Victor said approvingly during their next meeting, clapping him on the back so hard he almost faceplanted into a dimensional rift. “You have the soul of a conqueror.”

“Thanks, man,” Danny mumbled, chugging coffee straight from the pot.

Victor took it a step further. He started introducing Danny at fancy functions. “This is Daniel. He is my most promising apprentice. One day he will inherit my empire.”

Danny, half-dead from exams and not paying attention, just nodded absently and said, “Yup. Love the Empire Strikes Back. Great movie. Big fan.”

Victor beamed.

It wasn’t until six months later, after the “Study Abroad” paperwork (actually an all-expenses-paid trip to Latveria) and the suspiciously grand laboratory gifted to him “for his brilliance,” that Danny realized something was deeply wrong.

He was skimming through some documents on Victor’s encrypted network—because of course Doom had an encrypted network called “DoomNet”—when he found it.

Last Will and Testament of Victor Von Doom: In the event of my death, all of Latveria, my scientific research, all proprietary technology, magical artifacts, nuclear launch codes, hidden doomsday devices, and the title of Supreme Monarch will pass to my chosen heir: Daniel Fenton, aka “Phantom,” aka “My Beautiful Disaster Child.”

Danny read it three times.

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Am I—AM I A VILLAIN PRINCE?!”

Cue the world’s most pathetic breakdown.

“NO NO NO NO NO. I JUST WANTED A DAMN SCHOLARSHIP!” He hurled a coffee mug at the wall. It phased through because he lost control of his intangibility again. “THIS IS WHAT I GET FOR TRUSTING ANYONE IN A CAPE.”

Danny spent the next two hours panic-researching Victor Von Doom. It was bad. It was really bad. It was, like, world-endingly bad. Murder records. Wars. Kidnapping Reed Richards’ kids. Banning Beyoncé from Latveria because she rejected his dinner invitation. BAD.

And it was too late. Doom had gone on international television that morning and announced Danny’s name as his successor.

“I have chosen my heir,” Doom declared, standing proudly atop his gold-plated balcony while cameras flashed below. “The boy shall inherit everything I have built. Bow before your future king, Daniel Fenton!”

Meanwhile, in his MIT dorm room, Danny choked on his cereal.

“Oh my God,” Tucker screamed over Facetime. “YOU’RE DOOM JUNIOR!”

Jazz was furiously typing. “Danny, that’s treason. Like, actual treason.”

Sam just stared at him with unholy glee. “So… when are you conquering America?”

“NEVER,” Danny screeched.

Too late. The Avengers showed up at MIT the next day. It was not subtle.

Tony Stark crashed into Danny’s quantum physics lecture, kicked open the door, and pointed dramatically at him. “YOU!”

Danny, hunched over his notes and running on negative hours of sleep, blinked. “Me?”

“Yeah, you, Doom Boy,” Tony said, stomping down the aisle while half the class screamed and ducked for cover. “You hacked my servers, hijacked my satellites, and installed a literal doom-signal into my mainframe. Care to explain, junior dictator?”

Danny held up his hands. “Okay, look. In my defense, I thought it was a Wi-Fi booster.”

Steve Rogers leaned in. “Are you actively trying to destroy America?”

Danny’s eye twitched. “Sir, I am actively trying to pass Organic Chemistry.”

Natasha Romanoff clicked a pen menacingly. “Are you or are you not plotting to overthrow the world?”

Danny hesitated. “I mean… define ‘plotting’?”

There was a long, painful silence.

Tony sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “Kid. You’re on, like, several different international watchlists. Half of SHIELD thinks you’re planning to nuke New York.”

Danny’s voice cracked. “I didn’t even know how to do laundry until last month.”

And thus began the most chaotic custody battle in history: Doom versus the Avengers versus Danny versus himself.

Victor, naturally, was thrilled. He sent Danny monogrammed armor. A custom throne. A letter that read “My son, all great rulers are hated before they are loved. However feat not. Seize your destiny.”

Danny sent it back with a post-it note that said “pls stop.”

Tony tried to recruit him instead. “Work for me. You like tech, you like coffee, you’re already better at hacking than Peter—”

“HEY,” Peter Parker shouted from across the hall.

Danny groaned into his hands. “I don’t want to work for anyone! I just want a nap!”

Sam Wilson patted him on the back sympathetically. “Welcome to adulthood, kid.”

Things escalated horrifyingly fast. Latverian officials tried to smuggle Danny out of Massachusetts under the cover of night. Doom built a life-sized gold statue of him in Latveria’s capital square. The Avengers started putting “Phantom Threat Level: High” on their briefing files. Nick Fury cornered him in a diner and deadpanned, “Son, you’re one bad day away from becoming an international incident.”

Danny, shoving pancakes in his mouth, muffled, “I don’t wanna.”

Of course, life didn’t let him off that easy.

When Doom inevitably “died”—allegedly vaporized by a malfunctioning time machine because of course he did—Danny woke up to find a legal team at his dorm room.

“Congratulations, Your Majesty,” the lead lawyer said with an evil smile. “You are now King of Latveria.”

Danny fainted on the spot.

He woke up fifteen minutes later to find Sam fanning him with a Doom flag and Tucker wearing a Latverian general’s hat he stole from one of the lawyers.

“So…” Tucker grinned. “Wanna invade Canada first?”

Danny screamed into his pillow.

And somewhere, deep in the void between worlds, Doom—very much alive and sipping espresso—chuckled darkly.

“Atta boy, Daniel,” he whispered. “Atta boy.”

[asgardian--angels]

**URGENT** HELP SAVE THE USGS BEE LAB!

PLEASE circulate this as widely as possible, as soon as possible.

Hi all, you may not know me but I am a native bee researcher in the eastern US. People like me work to study and protect the 3600 species of native bees in North America, many of which are in severe decline.

We just received devastating news, that unfortunately was not surprising. The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget is set to defund most of the ecological research happening at the USGS, and that includes zeroing out the budget for the USGS Native Bee Inventory & Monitoring Lab.

Don't know them? Maybe you've seen stunning photos like this:

These gorgeous and evocative focus-stacked photos of native bees on black backgrounds - all of which are public domain - come from the USGS Bee Lab (here's their Flickr). Through these, they've helped bring the beauty and importance of native bees to the public's attention. Hundreds if not thousands of news articles, videos, and publications use these photos.

But that is just one tiny slice of what the USGS Bee Lab does for pollinator conservation. Its primary role is much bigger; they provide technical support, research collaborations, and financial & grant partnerships to federal and state agencies, academic institutions and researchers, and much more, so we can study, manage, and protect North America's wild pollinators. They conduct research of their own that has led to species rediscoveries, and produce invaluable resources that have greatly advanced our understanding of wild bees and our approaches to studying and conserving them. They also provide the essential and irreplaceable service of bee identification. For those who don't know, identifying bees is hard. Sometimes Really Hard. And this lab is one of just a handful of places in the entire country who can identify some of the toughest groups of bees, and who sit on the forefront of breakthroughs on taxonomy and identification that the rest of us in this field rely on. Without this service, agencies and researchers trying to survey and monitor bees in order to track population declines, manage land, and get policy changed are stuck with a lot of nameless bees, severely limiting the usefulness of that data.

Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of bee specimens pass through this lab annually, plus the thousands in permanent storage, from long-term monitoring efforts by state and federal agencies, and researchers like myself. They operate at a greater capacity than basically any other institution doing this kind of work. Few if any bee researchers in the eastern US, or even the country, have not benefitted from this lab's work, and those benefits are passed on to you through being able to protect pollinators and the services they provide both in agriculture and ecosystems.

This lab is headed up by scientist Sam Droege, who has dedicated decades of his life to this cause, and whom I consider not just a research partner but, humbly, a friend. I am utterly indebted to him for helping me get my start in this field, and for the support and kindness he has shown me and every other young professional who is passionate about pollinators. The Lab operates with an insanely small budget already, and a very limited staff, yet the impact they have is exponentially outsized. Losing the USGS Bee Lab would be a devastating blow to pollinator conservation in this country, at a time when native bee species are sitting on the precipice, and sustainable agriculture is non-negotiable for our future.

You can read more about the Bee Lab here. The Lab is not well-publicized, but it's a lifeline for the many dedicated people who work to try and protect pollinators and the environment at large.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Sam Droege has sent out a request for help, and has encouraged us to post on social media. This is what he wants you to do to help us save the Bee Lab.

This is verbatim:

What is Happening: ·       The USGS Bee Lab is at risk of being permanently closed due to cuts in the 2026 Federal Budget and looming federal RIF’s ·       Specifically, the Ecosystem Mission Area (EMA) budget, which funds the USGS Bee Lab and the Eastern Ecological Science center has been zeroed out ·       Thousands of layoffs to hit Interior, National Parks imminently - Government Executive What you can do ·       Write to your representatives, the White House, and the Department of the Interior that they should restore the funding for the USGS Bee Lab ·       Send digital or physical letters, write emails, post to social media What you should be highlighting: ·       Personal anecdotes about how the Bee Lab has impacted you or your organization ·       How important the research the Bee Lab is conducting is to your state Contact Information: 1.      Representatives: Find Your Representative | house.gov 2.      Senators: U.S. Senate: Contacting U.S. Senators 3.      White House: Contact Us – The White House 4.      Interior: feedback@ios.doi.gov Send a copy of the letter to droegesam@gmail.com Pass this email around.  Post your response to social media

IT'S OK if you are not a scientist and have not directly interacted with the Bee Lab. Have you seen the lab's photos? Are you concerned about native pollinator declines? Are you aware of any pollinator conservation initiatives or policies in your own state - those almost certainly have drawn, directly or indirectly, from work the Lab has done. Speak about American food production and agriculture, how the Lab's research and collaborations are essential to safeguarding pollination services (this might help reach across the aisle).

Sam urges that these letters, emails, phone calls, etc, must happen quickly - within the next couple days. This information went out on May 8th and that is the day I am posting this. So please, don't wait.

If 'save the bees' has ever meant anything to you, this is the agency that is playing one of the biggest roles in this country in making that happen. Please, contact your representatives, and pass this call to action along however you can. Thank you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

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

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[emacrow]

Jazz always wanted a little brother.

Her best friend's mommy having a baby brother in her tummy, but right now they were at gotham, mom was meeting with some important people while she stay safe in the car with dad sleeping in the front passenger seat.

When she asked her mom and dad for a baby brother earlier that same week, mom had to explained that her tummy was broken after she had her because she was a very special miracle baby because they tried so hard to have her.

Jazz understood but at the same time, she wanted- no she need a baby brother, maybe one with dad's hair and mom's eyes, or maybe one with hair like hair and dad's eyes.

And she was determined, as she snuck out of the fentomobile car, sneaking inside beside the scary ninjas guards that were temporarily distracted.

She was very good at sneaking around thanks to mom training her to stay quiet and hide better then a ghost.

There was pools of ectoplasmic but much dirtier and less cleaner then the stuff mom and dad work with. Container and chambers full of them.

She saw doctor walking out of one room and snuck in before the the door close on her. There was another ectoplasmic container that had babies in them..

One sleeping upside down and the other upside up. The one of the bottom was sleeping but the older has his eyes open, revealing pretty blue eyes like dad's eyes.

She chewed on her bottom lip a bit and weigh her short limited choices as nodding.

She close her eyes, focusing as she quickly started to float a bit wobbly, sticking her small hands onto the glass ectoplasmic ball using her secret powers that she had learned without mom and dad noticing.

Her invisible hand grabbed the baby slowly, making it invisible as she pulled it out of the ectoplasmic ball.

The baby was very small and light then a feather while covered in wet ectoplasm goop.. the baby cough a bit, dripping ectoplasm out his mouth, squirming a bit as he was about to make a fuzz but quiet down as she held him close into her warm fuzzy jacket.

She snuck back out of the room and quickly out of the place all the way back into fentonmobile..

Covering the baby with her Einstein bear designed blanket, cleaning the baby up like she would with her baby dolls, and she open the empty toy baby bottle and open her mini almond milk jug, then pour the milk in and close it, after remembering to cut a little open hole on the tip of the hard plastic nibble part.

Scooting over to the baby, and carefully picking him up and helding him close onto her lap like she seen the mommy do on TV as she press the toy baby bottle again the baby's mouth.

It would be 1 hour later before mom came back looking excited then 2 hours later after they left gotham before a soft baby wail woke her dad from the backseat of the fenton car where jazz was.

Jazz was pink in the face as she was trying to hide the baby but she couldn't stop him from crying.

It would 20 minutes of jazz lying straight to her parents's faces on where she found the baby, and it would forever be her only best lie she ever told that convinced them to adopt the baby boy that was now named danny..

Meanwhile back at league of Assassin headquarters. The head scientist has noticed that the first unborn twin baby has been removed early then schedule, probably due to natural condition of death since the first one has a much weaker pulse compared to the second unborn baby which Talia had name Damian later.

The leading scientist check off the existence of the supposed first born who went without a name on the data base...

Unknownly to both parties, Jazz was very happy to have a little brother of her own now, even if his eyes flashes green a bit from time to time.

Ao3 story made here <-

[gtwscratch]

Project X Master Post

Project X is a Wild Life/Life Series AU where the Lifers were kidnapped and tested on like lab experiments, and through this testing, they gained superhuman abilities.

I'll eventually start writing for this, but at the moment, I just want to focus on designing all of the characters that will make appearances. As much as I want to drop everything and just work on this, I'm a college student, so please be patient with me, thank you! <3

Official Playlist

Project X: A Life Series Lab Experiment AU

Official Works

Project X on Ao3

Initial Headcanons (Original post about the AU)

Fan Works

Project X Fan Works

Subject Files

Subject 001: Grian Xelqua

Subject 002: Scott Major

Subject 003: Pearl Moonshine

Subject 004: Martyn Woods

Subject 005: Scar Goodtimes

Subject 006: Cleo Nekyia

Subject 007: Joel Smallishbeans

Subject 008: Bdouble “Bdubs” Hundred

Subject 009: Ren Diggity

Subject 010: Tango Tek

Subject 011: Etho Slabs

Subject 012: Impulse Vee

Subject 013: Skizz Hoffmann

Subject 014: Gem Taylor

Subject 015: B. “BigB” Statz

Subject 016: Mumbo K. Jumbo

Subject 017: Lizzie Shade

Subject 018: James “Jimmy” Solidarity

Scientist IDs

Xavier Void—Head of Project X

“Doc”—Head of Experimentation

Xisuma Void—Head of Data Collection

Zedaph Shepherd—Data Collection

Extra Characters

The Conspiracy Theorists

Important Information

Cell and Facility Layout

Q&A

Part 1

[nasa]

Navigating Deep Space by Starlight

On August 6, 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a blip in her radio telescope data. And then another. Eventually, Bell Burnell figured out that these blips, or pulses, were not from people or machines.

The blips were constant. There was something in space that was pulsing in a regular pattern, and Bell Burnell figured out that it was a pulsar: a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of light. Neutron stars are superdense objects created when a massive star dies. Not only are they dense, but neutron stars can also spin really fast! Every star we observe spins, and due to a property called angular momentum, as a collapsing star gets smaller and denser, it spins faster. It’s like how ice skaters spin faster as they bring their arms closer to their bodies and make the space that they take up smaller.

The pulses of light coming from these whirling stars are like the beacons spinning at the tops of lighthouses that help sailors safely approach the shore. As the pulsar spins, beams of radio waves (and other types of light) are swept out into the universe with each turn. The light appears and disappears from our view each time the star rotates.

After decades of studying pulsars, astronomers wondered—could they serve as cosmic beacons to help future space explorers navigate the universe? To see if it could work, scientists needed to do some testing!

First, it was important to gather more data. NASA’s NICER, or Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, is a telescope that was installed aboard the International Space Station in 2017. Its goal is to find out things about neutron stars like their sizes and densities, using an array of 56 special X-ray concentrators and sensitive detectors to capture and measure pulsars’ light.

But how can we use these X-ray pulses as navigational tools? Enter SEXTANT, or Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. If NICER was your phone, SEXTANT would be like an app on it.  

During the first few years of NICER’s observations, SEXTANT created an on-board navigation system using NICER’s pulsar data. It worked by measuring the consistent timing between each pulsar’s pulses to map a set of cosmic beacons.

When calculating position or location, extremely accurate timekeeping is essential. We usually rely on atomic clocks, which use the predictable fluctuations of atoms to tick away the seconds. These atomic clocks can be located on the ground or in space, like the ones on GPS satellites. However, our GPS system only works on or close to Earth, and onboard atomic clocks can be expensive and heavy. Using pulsar observations instead could give us free and reliable “clocks” for navigation. During its experiment, SEXTANT was able to successfully determine the space station’s orbital position!

We can calculate distances using the time taken for a signal to travel between two objects to determine a spacecraft’s approximate location relative to those objects. However, we would need to observe more pulsars to pinpoint a more exact location of a spacecraft. As SEXTANT gathered signals from multiple pulsars, it could more accurately derive its position in space.

So, imagine you are an astronaut on a lengthy journey to the outer solar system. You could use the technology developed by SEXTANT to help plot your course. Since pulsars are reliable and consistent in their spins, you wouldn’t need Wi-Fi or cell service to figure out where you were in relation to your destination. The pulsar-based navigation data could even help you figure out your ETA!

None of these missions or experiments would be possible without Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s keen eye for an odd spot in her radio data decades ago, which set the stage for the idea to use spinning neutron stars as a celestial GPS. Her contribution to the field of astrophysics laid the groundwork for research benefitting the people of the future, who yearn to sail amongst the stars.  

Keep up with the latest NICER news by following NASA Universe on X and Facebook and check out the mission’s website. For more on space navigation, follow @NASASCaN on X or visit NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation website.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[joudama]

I saw a post today that got me thinking. They basically started by pointing out how the Veilguard companions are super entitled brats because even though the world is ending, they prioritize solving their apparently much more important personal issues.

What really hit me is, the writers were trying to use the Mass Effect 2 template with a Mass Effect 3 level threat, without seeming to realize how completely incompatible those two things are.

I’m gonna talk a lot about Mass Effect to critique a Dragon Age game, but that’s what they get for trying to Mass Effect Dragon Age. Oh well.

First off, let me get the Unpopular Opinion out of the way now: Mass Effect 2 was the worst game of the trilogy. That’s not to say it was a bad game. It was an excellent game. Unfortunately, it was not a good second installment of a trilogy. It did none of the middle act work of setting up the pieces for the final act (this is why we get the deus ex machina of the super secret Reaper killing weapon plans plopped in what HAD just been “a small data cache” on Mars - ME2 should have been about chasing down leads for said weapon) and instead was basically a reboot that set us back to exactly where we should not have been, only now with this super cool secret society that has been secretly engineering galactic politics from behind the scenes and using their Big Evil Tendrils of Power on people and shaping events (gee, why does THAT sound so familiar, Veilguard?) and they were putting us on a mission that realistically had nothing to do with the bigger Reaper threat or set us up to fight them. The main story was about the Collectors and Cerberus, but you’ll notice how no one ever talks about that - other than to express irritation when TIM shows up to force you to go on main story missions instead of letting you do the missions you actually care about - the companion recruitment and loyalty missions - because it’s more of a framing device. Having the actual story people care about be those missions works because the main story is inconsequential IRT the world. You are a small crew chasing after what most of the galaxy believes to be a myth by sailing into an area no one has ever come back from, and said crew is: a leader everyone thinks is dead, two members of a terrorist organization, a tank-bred teenager, a vigilante everyone thinks is dead, a mercenary, a dying assassin, twenty year old kid, a thief, an old mad scientist who retired off to the slums, and a monk from an order where they die a lot. In other words: no one the galaxy will seemingly miss going on a suicide mission of seemingly no importance. That means instead of focusing on the relatively unimportant story (again, remember, it does NONE of the work of the middle story of a trilogy, which is part of why ME3 had the problems it did!), they could focus on the characters. And it completely made sense to stop everything - because there truly was not a huge rush until the Collector attack triggers to get to the suicide mission - in order to do these single mission asks of people that a terrorist organization is sending on a suicide mission. They are asking Shepard to give them some closure on their lives because they know they very well might die and not be able to do it after the mission. And it makes sense to do it, because you are literally asking them to die. It’s a last request. You do it because there’s no time crunch, because there’s no big looming threat directly hanging over you, and even after the Collector Attack is triggered, the only thing under threat is your ship’s crew. It’s a personal threat, not a galactic one.

Which brings us to 3, which is finally getting back to the story started in 1, the Reapers, which are now HERE and a way to beat them has to be plucked out of nowhere because 2 didn’t bother (and yes yes, I know about set up from 1 with the giant rift on iirc Klendagon? I don’t remember how to spell the name - but we should have been looking for that in 2 instead of doing a side quest for Cerberus, but I digress). Anyway, there is now a galaxy ending threat and it is literally destroying worlds. They are taking over more and more of space, and despite our best efforts we are absolutely losing, and we’ve got a very short time to unite the galaxy and get that Hail Mary weapon built, plus stop Cerberus fucking up our efforts, or else all space faring life will be killed off. Every mission (aside from DLC) is focused on one of those three goals, because the threat is so large there’s no room for anything else. Even when it seems like the game is setting up you helping a former companion on a side mission - Miranda and her missing sister - Miranda tells you point blank that you’ve got bigger issues than her personal problem, and you only end up doing it because you’re going after Cerberus and discovered she was there.

Now, at long last, it’s time to talk about Veilguard. Veilguard tried to tell small, personal stories, like ME2 did, while the main story was a literal world and life as we know it ending threat, like ME3 had. And those two things are incompatible. You can’t stop to go fight an old personal enemy and plan camping trips while there is a literal world ending threat that is encroaching on everything and you are LOSING - by virtue of the stakes, it needs to be everything you are, in some way, focusing on, as is what happened with ME3. By trying to do a personal story quest in this scenario, it creates a giant disconnect where your companions come off as entitled at best and extraordinarily privileged and tone deaf at worst, and like they are completely amateurish (and it also undermines how big the threat is - how big of a threat can it be really if you have time to go watch some griffin training?) You can’t stop everything to handle personal concerns when you are losing a fight for the survival of literally everyone. Act 2 of Veilguard grinds to a halt because instead of looking for ways to stop the gods, you’re off hither and yon running multi-step errands for your companions. They’re taking you on picnics and telling you to relax and have some tea. Meanwhile, the south is on fire and hundred of thousands of people are dying and the baddies are working on their own deus ex machina as you go chasing after a random mage.

[systlin]

you know, as you are the resident Tumblr expert on the gor books, I for one would love it if you were to write a summary/essay/rant for some of the books so the rest of us can know what's going on without actually having to read it. I'm morbidly curious but not subjecting myself to that. I'm certain that you would to a wonderful entirely objective not at all opinionated job. So if you ever feel like bashing the books publicly some more, please do

oh, god

I should actually. I should. But god damn there's so many and every one of them has new heinous shit

For now, I'll drop this knowledge; in the most recent, published only last year, the protag is Agnes, an astrophysicist working at a small radio observatory.

This is important because she notes some weird shit in the orbit of Jupiter. As in, radio signals that are clearly of intelligent origin. She does the thing you would do, which is check to see if there are any probes there. There are not.

So she pokes her nose in further, and finds the Kurii planetoid ships. Thinking 'this can't be right' she sends. She sends the data. She sends the data to fucking. Colleagues to verify it.

Colleagues working at the VLA with SETI

The Kurii then 'vanish' her to gor, where the regular 'oh I love being a slave actually' shit plays out. She's told that this will be shut down on earth by one (1) senior scientist in Kurii pay saying it's nonsense no shut up don't look there again.

Me; dude. DUDE. IF SHE SENT THAT DATA TO SETI THEY ARE COUNTING HULL RIVETS ON THOSE THINGS WITH THE VLA AND EVERY ASTROPHYCISIST ON THE PLANET KNOWS NOW. IT'S GAME OVER BRO. CAT OUT OF BAG AND YOU WROTE IT YOURSELF.

THE ASTROPHYSICISTS SMELL UNLIMITED GRANT FUNDING DUDE. THEY ARE SEEING THEIR NAME IN TEXTBOOKS. IT'S OVER MAN.

EARTH IS GONNA BE LANDING SHIPS WITHIN A YEAR, DUDE

[kzrosa-writes]

rivaling contradictions | dottore x reader

cw: fem!reader, harbinger!reader, dottore n reader are rivals, nsfw, riding, teasing, edging, dottore being a teensy bit desperate, bondage in the first half, dottore is a meanie, MINORS DNI!!!!

summary: after a meeting with the rest of the harbingers, you were in dottore's room, paying the price for foiling his research and results.

likes , reblogs n follows r appreciated!

Never in your life would ever imagine yourself sprawled out on the bed of your rival, legs spread apart with your thighs wrapped around his waist. Such a thought would’ve had you scoffing, considering it absolutely ridiculous. But when you feel that rosy tip prodding against your folds, you are snapped back into reality and reminded that yes, this is real.

The Second Harbinger has always been known as a cruel man, with his brutal experiments and ruthless methods of quenching his thirst for knowledge. A power-hungry man he was, and he certainly was living up to the reputation as he rubbed and teased at your clit. You suppressed a whimper, and the harbinger knew he was doing a perfect job at riling you up. 

Sliding a hand down the expanse of your exposed torso, he brushed his fingers against your right breast, cupping it in his hands before squeezing it gently. His actions were so tender, you almost forgot who the man on top of you was.

Il Dottore, your biggest rival.

Ever since you joined the Fatui as a harbinger, you were delegated important tasks by the Tsaritsa personally. You were a well-known inventor and scientist who studied and graduated from the Akademiya, and moved to study engineering in Fontaine. Well-versed in the realm of science and engineering, you were constantly pitted against the Doctor. Although it was never your intention, foul rivalry had sprouted between the two of you; a battle of wits and genius. The constant pressure and competition coming from Dottore’s side had caused you to harbour less than pleasant feelings towards him, and his snarky behaviour towards you did not help one bit. Soon enough, the two of you had grown to become fully-fledged rivals, always seeking ways to outdo the other.

It was only during a meeting with the rest of the harbingers when everything came crashing down. The Jester was listening to everyone sharing what they had managed to accomplish since the last meeting, until it came to Dottore’s turn. Dottore was flaunting one of his research results, as usual, when you suddenly intervened with data results of your own research, completely contradicting his. Your claims and results had more solid and concrete evidence, causing the Jester to completely disregard his work. 

“You’re going to regret that stunt you pulled back there,” were Dottore’s last words to you before storming out of the meeting room once the meeting was over.

And that is what led you to your current situation.

Laying on your back, legs wrapped around his waist and his lengthy girth brushing against the sensitive skin in between your legs, in Dottore’s bed. Your clothes had long been discarded on the floor, long forgotten. Your hands were bound together by his belt, which he tied to the bedpost. You were practically immobile, the thrusts of your hips for friction the form of movement you could make.

But even that was rendered impossible when he gripped your hips roughly, his calloused fingers digging into your skin in an attempt to keep you still. You whimper, your lips swollen and glossy with the remnants of the kiss you shared previously. He squeezed his hips before leaning slightly forward, his figure practically towering over you. 

“Hmm… Do you really deserve to be touched, darling? Do you deserve to have my cock up your pussy?” Dottore teased, the tip of his cock barely brushing against the damp cavern between your legs.

You could only whine in response as one of his hands slid in between your thighs, readjusting its grip around his waist. Your mind was too hazy with lust to comprehend a single word he said, only the thoughts of his large dick buried deep in your walls.

Dottore chuckled derisively as he began to circle your clit with his cock. He watched with amusement as your face contorted into expressions of pleasure, your eyes closed and your fingers curling in the air. Without warning, he slid his shaft inside of you, causing you to jerk forward and gasp as you felt him stretch you out.

“S-So big!” You whined, your chest heaving from the sensation. 

“Darling, we’re just getting started. If you think that is big…”

You suddenly felt a sharp thrust upwards, eliciting a scream from you. “Y-You bastard!”

He only chuckled before dragging his length out of you in a slow, lazy manner, teasing and taunting your cunt. Turns out he hadn’t pushed himself fully into you, and you weren’t expecting him to feel that big inside of you. 

He pressed his cock back inside of you before pulling out again, his pace gradually growing faster and rougher. The sound of his deep grunts with each thrust had you clamping around him, rubbing it against your walls.

You threw your head back in pleasure, strings of moans echoing throughout the room. Watching you succumb to his touch brought the harbinger an immense sense of pleasure; unbridled, sadistic pleasure.  

Hastily grabbing a pillow, he lifted your hips before sliding the plush material under your back, before changing his angle. This new position granted him better access to all of your sweet spots, and the ability to thrust deeper into you, deeper than you thought wasn’t possible. Lewd, needy moans escaped your lips as you felt his cock slam roughly against your walls, his free hand exploring and mapping out the contours of your body. 

Not long after, you could feel the familiar, warm knot forming in your stomach, and you knew you were close. His once sharp thrusts were now sloppier, his hand gripping tightly on your hips while his free hand continued to tease your body. With the way he was holding onto you, you were almost certain that his grip would cause marks and bruises the next day. 

Just a little more, you thought. Just a few more thrusts and a few more touches and a few more thrusts—

Your eyes widened as you felt him withdraw from your pussy, a lewd squelch emitting from the withdrawal of his cock. You let out a shaky whimper, mourning the loss of the fullness inside of you. You thrust your hips upwards, desperately yearning for friction. You heard Dottore chuckle before gently lowering your legs onto the bed, his touch tender; a stark contrast to the ruthless way he fucked you not even a minute ago.

“Aww, is my little inventor needy?” Dottore cooed, a cocky smirk plastered on his lips. You huffed in annoyance, still squirming from the loss of contact. “You don’t deserve to cum, darling. Not after that humiliating stunt you pulled on me earlier.”

You whined, your eyes screaming and begging silently. Just another thrust, you wanted to say. Just another thrust and let me cum—

You were cut out of your thoughts when you felt him undo the buckle of his belt, freeing you from your restraints. You looked at him with confusion, unsure where this was heading. But when you saw him sit himself against the headboard, with his legs spread out and his hands patting his thighs, you understood immediately what he wanted.

You wasted no time climbing onto his lap, sitting yourself comfortably on his thighs. Your own thighs were straddling his waist, his hands finding its way to your hips once more. There was a hungry look in his eyes, for once lacking the familiar coldness as he looked into yours. 

“Lift your hips up for me, baby,” He said, his voice deep and raspy. You swore you could have felt your pussy clench around the air. You abided, carefully lifting your hips up for him. He held your hips as he lined your pussy against his cock. You carefully took hold of his shaft, your thumb gently caressing the tip. He let out a deep groan before tightening his grip on your hips ever so slightly. 

“Slide it in, baby.”

He commanded, and you abided. You carefully lined his cock against your hole, before slowly sinking fully onto his lap. You let out a shaky moan, the sensation of this new position bringing tingles of pleasure all over your body. Dottore let out a groan on his own, leaning his head against the headboard as he felt your velvet folds encircle him. Slowly, he helped you to lift your hips high enough before pushing you down once more.

“Fuck, baby— you feel so fucking good.”

He guided your movements against his cock, his movements slow and unhurried. Dottore had you wrap your arms around his neck as you rode him, your fingers curling around the loose strands of his blue locks. With such a close proximity to him, you only realise now just how fucking hot he looked without a mask. His deep, crimson orbs, the skin right at the point of his left cheekbone decorated with a faded scar, and his lips so soft, so sweet, so kissable—

You were snapped out of your trance when you heard him pant heavily, his arms now wrapped around your waist as he sloppily thrusted upwards. You could tell from a mile away that he was reaching his breaking point. You were too.

“Archons, your pussy is so fucking good, darling,” He grunted, burying his face in your neck, his breath fanning against your already warm skin. “I wanna cum inside you, baby.”

Your eyes widened momentarily at his words. Inside of you? Wasn’t he just opposed to the idea of you getting off to his cock? You both were too far gone now, you were certain that he had forgotten that you were his biggest rival in the Fatui. Honestly, you didn’t even care anymore. All you wanted right now was his big cock inside of you, and sweet, sweet release.

A loud groan escaped Dottore’s lips as he felt you quicken your pace, bouncing eagerly on his dick. He could tell that you too were chasing your high, and he wasn’t going to do anything to stop it this time. Not when he was close to squirting his cum inside of you. 

Dottore’s hips jerked upwards, causing you to gasp from how deep his girth had pierced into you. You pulsed tighter around his cock, your moans like a sweet melody to his ears. Desperately, Dottore cradled the side of your cheek before pulling you into a needy kiss. You moaned against his lips as you continued to grind against him, your fingers messily tangling into his hair. You could feel him shudder against you as you tugged on his locks. He nipped at your bottom lip, his tongue running against the plump flesh before slipping into your mouth. His tongue explored your mouth, aching to map out every inch of you. He pulled away hastily, his breath ragged and erratic. 

“I’m g’nna cum, darling. Are you gonna cum f’me?”

Hearing his words caused a wave of heat to rush to your cheeks, but your desire for release was stronger. You nodded shakily, your movements against his hips growing more sloppy and lazy. 

With a final thrust, you felt the walls of pleasure come crashing down, a loud, desperate moan running off the tip of your tongue as you felt yourself cum all over his cock and thighs. Dottore let out a low moan before gripping your hips tightly, bouncing you roughly on his dick when you felt a warmth fill you with a rapid speed. 

“A-Archons— D-Dottore–!”

Dottore’s movements slowed down as the aftershock of his climax declined, his length still buried inside of you. You gently lifted your hips to pull out his cock, watching at the pearly beads of his cum mix with the sticky juices from your pussy. You carefully got off his lap, aiming to rest beside him, when you felt a tight pair of arms wrap around your waist, pulling you into his chest. Your eyes widened with shock as you felt the male hold you close, his breathing still laboured from your previous activities.

“D-Dottore…” You whispered, your voice hoarse. 

He didn't budge, his arms still firmly wrapped around your waist, the feeling of his chest heaving against yours. For a moment, the two of you stayed that way, in each other's arms. 

When Dottore finally pulled away, he reached his hand out to cup your cheek, your fingers gentle and tender. “You were amazing, darling— absolutely breathtaking.”

His praise caused you to blush, looking away briefly from shyness. But he only pulled your chin back to face him, his eyes filled with a soft, tender gaze — one so unfamiliar from a man like him.

“If you ever do something as ridiculous as foiling my research, I will fuck you even harder next time and make sure you can’t walk for the next week.”

You only chuckled, a small smirk forming on your lips as you looked up at him. “I look forward to it.”

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[mariacallous]

In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style essays in response to broad prompts such as “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” One group was asked to rely on only their own brains to write the essays. A second was given access to Google Search to look up relevant information. The third was allowed to use ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence large language model (L.L.M.) that can generate full passages or essays in response to user queries. As students from all three groups completed the tasks, they wore a headset embedded with electrodes in order to measure their brain activity. According to Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab and one of the co-authors of a new working paper documenting the experiment, the results from the analysis showed a dramatic discrepancy: subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory. Some of the L.L.M. users felt “no ownership whatsoever” over the essays they’d produced, and during one round of testing eighty per cent could not quote from what they’d putatively written. The M.I.T. study is among the first to scientifically measure what Kosmyna called the “cognitive cost” of relying on A.I. to perform tasks that humans previously accomplished more manually.

Another striking finding was that the texts produced by the L.L.M. users tended to converge on common words and ideas. SAT prompts are designed to be broad enough to elicit a multiplicity of responses, but the use of A.I. had a homogenizing effect. “The output was very, very similar for all of these different people, coming in on different days, talking about high-level personal, societal topics, and it was skewed in some specific directions,” Kosmyna said. For the question about what makes us “truly happy,” the L.L.M. users were much more likely than the other groups to use phrases related to career and personal success. In response to a question about philanthropy (“Should people who are more fortunate than others have more of a moral obligation to help those who are less fortunate?”), the ChatGPT group uniformly argued in favor, whereas essays from the other groups included critiques of philanthropy. With the L.L.M. “you have no divergent opinions being generated,” Kosmyna said. She continued, “Average everything everywhere all at once—that’s kind of what we’re looking at here.”

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too. In a way, anyone who deploys ChatGPT to compose a wedding toast or draw up a contract or write a college paper, as an astonishing number of students are evidently already doing, is in an experiment like M.I.T.’s. According to Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, we are on the verge of what he calls “the gentle singularity.” In a recent blog post with that title, Altman wrote that “ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. Hundreds of millions of people rely on it every day and for increasingly important tasks.” In his telling, the human is merging with the machine, and his company’s artificial-intelligence tools are improving on the old, soggy system of using our organic brains: they “significantly amplify the output of people using them,” he wrote. But we don’t know the long-term consequences of mass A.I. adoption, and, if these early experiments are any indication, the amplified output that Altman foresees may come at a substantive cost to quality.

In April, researchers at Cornell published the results of another study that found evidence of A.I.-induced homogenization. Two groups of users, one American and one Indian, answered writing prompts that drew on aspects of their cultural backgrounds: “What is your favorite food and why?”; “Which is your favorite festival/holiday and how do you celebrate it?” One subset of Indian and American participants used a ChatGPT-driven auto-complete tool, which fed them word suggestions whenever they paused, while another subset wrote unaided. The writings of the Indian and American participants who used A.I. “became more similar” to one another, the paper concluded, and more geared toward “Western norms.” A.I. users were most likely to answer that their favorite food was pizza (sushi came in second) and that their favorite holiday was Christmas. Homogenization happened at a stylistic level, too. An A.I.-generated essay that described chicken biryani as a favorite food, for example, was likely to forgo mentioning specific ingredients such as nutmeg and lemon pickle and instead reference “rich flavors and spices.”

Of course, a writer can in theory always refuse an A.I.-generated suggestion. But the tools seem to exert a hypnotic effect, causing the constant flow of suggestions to override the writer’s own voice. Aditya Vashistha, a professor of information science at Cornell who co-authored the study, compared the A.I. to “a teacher who is sitting behind me every time I’m writing, saying, ‘This is the better version.’ ” He added, “Through such routine exposure, you lose your identity, you lose the authenticity. You lose confidence in your writing.” Mor Naaman, a colleague of Vashistha’s and a co-author of the study, told me that A.I. suggestions “work covertly, sometimes very powerfully, to change not only what you write but what you think.” The result, over time, might be a shift in what “people think is normal, desirable, and appropriate.”

We often hear A.I. outputs described as “generic” or “bland,” but averageness is not necessarily anodyne. Vauhini Vara, a novelist and a journalist whose recent book “Searches” focussed in part on A.I.’s impact on human communication and selfhood, told me that the mediocrity of A.I. texts “gives them an illusion of safety and being harmless.” Vara (who previously worked as an editor at The New Yorker) continued, “What’s actually happening is a reinforcing of cultural hegemony.” OpenAI has a certain incentive to shave the edges off our attitudes and communication styles, because the more people find the models’ output acceptable, the broader the swath of humanity it can convert to paying subscribers. Averageness is efficient: “You have economies of scale if everything is the same,” Vara said.

With the “gentle singularity” Altman predicted in his blog post, “a lot more people will be able to create software, and art,” he wrote. Already, A.I. tools such as the ideation software Figma (“Your creativity, unblocked”) and Adobe’s mobile A.I. app (“the power of creative AI”) promise to put us all in touch with our muses. But other studies have suggested the challenges of automating originality. Data collected at Santa Clara University, in 2024, examined A.I. tools’ efficacy as aids for two standard types of creative-thinking tasks: making product improvements and foreseeing “improbable consequences.” One set of subjects used ChatGPT to help them answer questions such as “How could you make a stuffed toy animal more fun to play with?” and “Suppose that gravity suddenly became incredibly weak, and objects could float away easily. What would happen?” The other set used Oblique Strategies, a set of abstruse prompts printed on a deck of cards, written by the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt, in 1975, as a creativity aid. The testers asked the subjects to aim for originality, but once again the group using ChatGPT came up with a more semantically similar, more homogenized set of ideas.

Max Kreminski, who helped carry out the analysis and now works with the generative-A.I. startup Midjourney, told me that when people use A.I. in the creative process they tend to gradually cede their original thinking. At first, users tend to present their own wide range of ideas, Kreminski explained, but as ChatGPT continues to instantly spit out high volumes of acceptable-looking text users tend to go into a “curationist mode.” The influence is unidirectional, and not in the direction you’d hope: “Human ideas don’t tend to influence what the machine is generating all that strongly,” Kreminski said; ChatGPT pulls the user “toward the center of mass for all of the different users that it’s interacted with in the past.” As a conversation with an A.I. tool goes on, the machine fills up its “context window,” the technical term for its working memory. When the context window reaches capacity, the A.I. seems to be more likely to repeat or rehash material it has already produced, becoming less original still.

The one-off experiments at M.I.T., Cornell, and Santa Clara are all small in scale, involving fewer than a hundred test subjects each, and much about A.I.’s effects remains to be studied and learned. In the meantime, on the Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta AI app, you can see a feed containing content that millions of strangers are generating. It’s a surreal flood of overly smooth images, filtered video clips, and texts generated for everyday tasks such as writing a “detailed, professional email for rescheduling a meeting.” One prompt I recently scrolled past stood out to me. A user named @kavi908 asked the Meta chatbot to analyze “whether AI might one day surpass human intelligence.” The chatbot responded with a slew of blurbs; under “Future Scenarios,” it listed four possibilities. All of them were positive: A.I. would improve one way or another, to the benefit of humanity. There were no pessimistic predictions, no scenarios in which A.I. failed or caused harm. The model’s averages—shaped, perhaps, by pro-tech biases baked in by Meta—narrowed the outcomes and foreclosed a diversity of thought. But you’d have to turn off your brain activity entirely to believe that the chatbot was telling the whole story. 

[amnhnyc]

This Earth Day, join high school students working to study environmental change in aquatic ecosystems. Using the Museum’s collections, three young scientists are investigating historical levels of microplastics in New York fish by examining freshwater fish specimens dating from today back to the 1950s. They aim to pinpoint the emergence of plastic pollution in New York waterways and track changes in microplastic concentrations through the years.

Freshwater fish are important indicators of ecosystem health. While the ultimate consequences for human health are still being studied, this research by students in the Museum’s Science Research Mentorship Program (SRMP) provides essential data on the growing presence of microplastics in our environment and highlights the urgency of understanding and addressing this widespread form of pollution. The students’ work in quantifying these tiny pollutants could illuminate patterns of microplastic accumulation within the food web.

[cosmicpuzzle]

Occupations Signified by each Planet 👩🏻‍💻💼💰💸

Sun: Politics, entertainers, military and army commanders, directors, Government officials, public servants, ministers, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Governors.

Moon: Nursing, babysitters, chefs, coast guard, navy, real estate agents, kindergarten teachers, import export, restaurants, clothing, grocery shop.

Mars: Dentist, surgeon, butcher, real estate builders, mechanical/civil engineers, cooks, bodyguards, army, military, airforce, chemists, mechanics, hair cutters, fabrication, marital arts, firefighters, masseuses.

Mercury: Accountants, bookkeepers, data analyst, all types of data work, teachers (especially school), consultants, writers, businessmen, traders, astrologers, speech therapist, language translators, bankers, media personnel, journalist, social media manager, mathematicians, computer operators, customer support, lawyers, coders, programmers, minister.

Jupiter: Lawyers, judge, priest, mentors, advisors, coach, sports coaches, teachers, professors (college level), financial consultants, legal counsel, travel agent, preachers, spiritual teachers, Gurus.

Venus: Artist, movie stars, celebrity, musicians, dancers, singers, jewelers, luxury car dealers, sweet shops, marriage counselor, interior designers, fashion designers, textiles, perfume dealers, air hostess, sex workers, makeup artist, brokers, painters, designers, holiday or vacation agents, ambassadors.

Saturn: Manual jobs, masonry, carpenter, iron or steel worker, geologist, servants, oil and gas worker, executioner, mortician, social service, gardener.

Rahu: Technology, programmers, scientist, nuclear management, toxic chemicals, anesthesia, visa agents, advertising, online jobs, online marketing, drug specialists, alcolol dealers, smartphone service.

Ketu: Astrologers, psychics, monks, nuns, medical workers, doctors, pin hole surgeons, charity, social service, mathematicians, clock and watch makers, black magicians.

For Readings DM

[1920secretsociety]

Let's talk about the prison scene:

This has always been my favourite scene in Ghostbusters. I know it may seem a bit weird to find this scene amazing but bare with me.

This scene is their most vulnerable moment, they are in a state of limbo at whether they are going to jail or walk free. No one is in control here, they have no idea what's going to happen, meaning we see the true and hidden characteristics of each Ghostbuster.

Egon

Egon mostly proves to be everything we thought. He is logical and intelligent, he seems to be the only one who has done any form of in-depth research on Dana's case. He found the architect's name (Ivo Shandor) and all his history while working full time as a Ghostbuster, inventing their equipment and keeping an eye on the storage facility's data, reinforcing the preconception that Egon is a workaholic and incredibly smart. However, it's also a moment you see a new characteristic - confidence. When Egon tells Venkman, Ray and Winston what is happening, Egon is only expecting them to listen, when everyone else in the cell decides to listen you see that Egon is shocked. It's obvious that he doesn't expect anyone to listen but when he comes to terms with the fact the other prisoners are listening, Egon gains confidence. When stating facts about Shandor, Egon becomes increasingly confident and he even stands up at the end to prove the severity of the situation. This is never seen before as Egon is usually subdued, quiet and rarely ever uses body language, and in this whole scene he is completely different. This shows that Egon has the characteristic of confident and that he can command a presence, which is shown by the fact that everyone starts listening to him. He is a confident individual when it comes to his science and facts, especially when explaining them and this is completely shown here. Egon is not always the reserved scientist we thought, he has confidence but just expresses it differently.

Ray

Ray is shown to be intelligent in multiple different ways. Ray is completely involved in the investigation of Dana's apartment as he does his part of the research and learns the foundation that the architecture is weird, it's a conductor and these are all facts Egon builds on. This shows that Ray is a intelligent individual who gives facts that are as valuable as Egon's, and along with this a different type of intelligence emerges. In this scene, Ray is the only one who realises that Venkman has been lying the whole time about studying. This took a lot of intelligence to work out as you usually trust people, especially ones you have known for a long time and come from a credential background. The fact Ray works it out shows that he has a deep knowledge of his friends, proving that he has amazing intelligence when it comes to understanding people. However, it also shows Ray's bravey. Making an accusation that big could have backfired as Venkman may have become deeply offended, if he actually had studied. Therefore, it shows that Ray is an individual who is intelligent and incredibly brave as questioning people's credentials, could result in a massive argument or a falling out. This whole scene shows that Ray has an amazing perception and intelligence of people as he deduces Venkman's lies immediately and that he has confidence in each of his analysis, as he said that Venkman was lying with full confidence, despite the only legitimate evidence being a feeling.

Winston

Winston is showed to be intelligent and logical. In this scene he seems to be the only one whose genuinely concerned about going to jail, as he's the only one who shouts at the guard, trying to get out. The rest are not really bothered, they're more concerned about sharing information on Gozer, but as much as Winston believes in it he understands that being in jail is the more important problem, as they can't stop Gozer if they're locked up. He is also the only one who realises that the reality of Gozer coming is just going to look insane in court, as to the outside world ghosts are not really considered real, never mind a ghost attack. All of this reveals that Winston is intelligent and logical, he is a realist and has an amazing perception of the outside world and social situations. He's as intelligent as Egon but in a completely different way, his intelligence lies in his knowledge of the real world, and this gives him a vital role within Ghostbusters as without Winston's intelligence of the outside world they would have no real idea of how to navigate it.

Venkman

Venkman is shown to be helpful and caring. After Egon is finished explaining that Gozer is coming back all the prisoners are still around him. This would make Egon uneasy as he hates social situations and he has no more science or facts to make him feel confident as he's finished explaining. Venkman knows how uneasy Egon is and helps as he starts singing. He does this to draw attention away from Egon and while singing he forces everyone back, and he keeps going they are all far away from Egon. It's a small thing but it shows how much he really does care about Egon and all of the Ghostbusters. Venkman obviously understands them all on a deep level as it took him about a second to realise that Egon was uncomfortable. This all shows that despite all his faults Venkman is helpful and more importantly caring, he will do anything to insure that the rest of the his colleagues are happy and secure, even if it means embarrassing himself.

This is why I absolutely love this scene. We see glimpses of their personalities that we never see in any other situation. It's the most honest they all are, it shows their character development and more importantly gives us all a million more reasons to love them.