#gadgets 2019

[drawfee-quot3s]

[about the emergency fabulous grenade]

it's for when you're the only one serving

and i don't mean the food

- karina

[some-melon]

Some Old Art of Gadget I Found

Going thru some old post and files, when i came across old art i made of gadget LOOL

Found this in my old 3ds files. sadly idk when i made this due to my sd going RAW and when i recovered my files they got redated to when they were recovered, but ik i made this when i was 15, maybe around dec 2019 all the way to april 2020

These two i found on my personal insta- they were posted in march 2020 when i was 15 LOLOL second one he looks so judgmental i wish i could remember the context....

Hope i can find more, i just need to get my old art out of my dads place, i left my boxes of old sketchbooks there bru

gadget brainrot lasts forever

[velvetjune]

how am i supposed to take dr darling’s final videos in control and his ominous demise seriously when the first update we get on him in alan wake 2: the final draft is him holding hands with thomas zane

[milkyberryjsk]

i got back into r6

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The paradox of choice screens

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

It's official: the DOJ has won its case, and Google is a convicted monopolist. Over the next six months, we're gonna move into the "remedy" phase, where we figure out what the court is going to order Google to do to address its illegal monopoly power:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

That's just the beginning, of course. Even if the court orders some big, muscular remedies, we can expect Google to appeal (they've already said they would) and that could drag out the case for years. But that can be a feature, not a bug: a years-long appeal will see Google on its very best behavior, with massive, attendant culture changes inside the company. A Google that's fighting for its life in the appeals court isn't going to be the kind of company that promotes a guy whose strategy for increasing revenue is to make Google Search deliberately worse, so that you will have to do more searches (and see more ads) to get the info you're seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It's hard to overstate how much good stuff can emerge from a company that's mired itself in antitrust hell with extended appeals. In 1982, IBM wriggled off the antitrust hook after a 12-year fight that completely transformed the company's approach to business. After more than a decade of being micromanaged by lawyers who wanted to be sure that the company didn't screw up its appeal and anger antitrust enforcers, IBM's executives were totally transformed. When the company made its first PC, it decided to use commodity components (meaning anyone could build a similar PC by buying the same parts), and to buy its OS from an outside vendor called Micros-Soft (meaning competing PCs could use the same OS), and it turned a blind eye to the company that cloned the PC ROM, enabling companies like Dell, Compaq and Gateway to enter the market with "PC clones" that cost less and did more than the official IBM PC:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

The big question, of course, is whether the court will order Google to break up, say, by selling off Android, its ad-tech stack, and Chrome. That's a question I'll address on another day. For today, I want to think about how to de-monopolize browsers, the key portal to the internet. The world has two extremely dominant browsers, Safari and Chrome, and each of them are owned by an operating system vendor that pre-installs their own browser on their devices and pre-selects them as the default.

Defaults matter. That's a huge part of Judge Mehta's finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google's own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever. This puts a lie to Google's longstanding defense of its monopoly power: "choice is just a click away." Sure, it's just a click away – a click, you're pretty sure no one is ever going to make.

This means that any remedy to Google's browser dominance is going to involve a lot of wrangling about defaults. That's not a new wrangle, either. For many years, regulators and tech companies have tinkered with "choice screens" that were nominally designed to encourage users to try out different browsers and brake the inertia of the big two browsers that came bundled with OSes.

These choice screens have a mixed record. Google's 2019 Android setup choice screen for the European Mobile Application Distribution Agreement somehow managed to result in the vast majority of users sticking with Chrome. Microsoft had a similar experience in 2010 with BrowserChoice.eu, its response to the EU's 2000s-era antitrust action:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Does this mean that choice screens don't work? Maybe. The idea of choice screens comes to us from the "choice architecture" world of "nudging," a technocratic pseudoscience that grew to prominence by offering the promise that regulators could make big changes without having to do any real regulating:

https://verfassungsblog.de/nudging-after-the-replication-crisis/

Nudge research is mired in the "replication crisis" (where foundational research findings turn out to be nonreplicable, due to bad research methodology, sloppy analysis, etc) and nudge researchers keep getting caught committing academic fraud:

https://www.ft.com/content/846cc7a5-12ee-4a44-830e-11ad00f224f9

When the first nudgers were caught committing fraud, more than a decade ago, they were assumed to be outliers in an otherwise honest and exciting field:

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real

Today, it's hard to find much to salvage from the field. To the extent the field is taken seriously today, it's often due to its critics repeating the claims of its boosters, a process Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to actually opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless

By ascribing widespread negative effects to subtle psychological manipulation ("dark patterns") rather than obvious and blatant fraud, we inadvertently elevate "nudging" to a real science, rather than a cult led by scammy fake scientists.

All this raises some empirical questions about choice screens: do they work (in the sense of getting people to break away from defaults), and if so, what's the best way to make them work?

This is an area with a pretty good literature, as it turns out, thanks in part due to some natural experiments, like when Russia forced Google to offer choice screens for Android in 2017, but didn't let Google design that screen. The Russian policy produced a significant switch away from Google's own apps to Russian versions, primarily made by Yandex:

https://cepr.org/publications/dp17779

In 2023, Mozilla Research published a detailed study in which 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland set up simulated mobile and desktop devices with different kinds of choice screens, a project spurred on by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which is going to mandate choice screens starting this year:

https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/choicescreen/

I'm spending this week reviewing choice screen literature, and I've just read the Mozilla paper, which I found very interesting, albeit limited. The biggest limitation is that the researchers are getting users to simulate setting up a new device and then asking them how satisfied they are with the experience. That's certainly a question worth researching, but a far more important question is "How do users feel about the setup choices they made later, after living with them on the devices they use every day?" Unfortunately, that's a much more expensive and difficult question to answer, and beyond the scope of this paper.

With that limitation in mind, I'm going to break down the paper's findings here and draw some conclusions about what we should be looking for in any kind of choice screen remedy that comes out of the DOJ antitrust victory over Google.

The first thing note is that people report liking choice screens. When users get to choose their browsers, they expect to be happy with that choice; by contrast, users are skeptical that they'll like the default browser the vendor chose for them. Users don't consider choice screens to be burdensome, and adding a choice screen doesn't appreciably increase setup time.

There are some nuances to this. Users like choice screens during device setup but they don't like choice screens that pop up the first time they use a browser. That makes total sense: "choosing a browser" is colorably part of the "setting up your gadget" task. By contrast, the first time you open a browser on a new device, it's probably to get something else done (e.g. look up how to install a piece of software you used on your old device) and being interrupted with a choice screen at that moment is an unwelcome interruption. This is the psychology behind those obnoxious cookie-consent pop-ups that website bombard you with when you first visit them: you've clicked to that website because you need something it has, and being stuck with a privacy opt-out screen at that moment is predictably frustrating (which is why companies do it, and also why the DMA is going to punish companies that do).

The researchers experimented with different kinds of choice screens, varying the number of browsers on offer and the amount of information given on each. Again, users report that they prefer more choices and more information, and indeed, more choice and more info is correlated with choosing indie, non-default browsers, but this effect size is small (<10%), and no matter what kind of choice screen users get, most of them come away from the experience without absorbing any knowledge about indie browsers.

The order in which browsers are presented has a much larger effect than how many browsers or how much detail is present. People say they want lots of choices, but they usually choose one of the first four options. That said, users who get choice screens say it changes which browser they'd choose as a default.

Some of these contradictions appear to stem from users' fuzziness on what "default browser" means. For an OS vendor, "default browser" is the browser that pops up when you click a link in an email or social media. For most users, "default browser" means "the browser pinned to my home screen."

Where does all this leave us? I think it cashes out to this: choice screens will probably make a appreciable, but not massive, difference in browser dominance. They're cheap to implement, have no major downsides, and are easy to monitor. Choice screens might be needed to address Chrome's dominance even if the court orders Google to break off Chrome and stand it up as a separate business (we don't want any browser monopolies, even if they're not owned by a search monopolist!). So yeah, we should probably make a lot of noise to the effect that the court should order a choice screen, as part of a remedy.

That choice screen should be presented during device setup, with the choices presented in random order – with this caveat: Chrome should never appear in the top four choices.

All of that would help address the browser duopoly, even if it doesn't solve it. I would love to see more market-share for Firefox, which is the browser I've used every day for more than a decade, on my laptop and my phone. Of course, Mozilla has a role to play here. The company says it's going to refocus on browser quality, at the expense of the various side-hustles it's tried, which have ranged from uninteresting to catastrophically flawed:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again

For example, there was the tool to automatically remove your information from scummy data brokers, that they outsourced to a scummy data-broker:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership

And there's the "Privacy Preserving Attribution" tracking system that helps advertisers target you with surveillance advertising (in a way that's less invasive than existing techniques). Mozilla rolled this into Firefox on an opt out basis, and made opting out absurdly complicated, suggesting that it knew that it was imposing something on its users that they wouldn't freely choose:

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

They've been committing these kinds of unforced errors for more than a decade, seeking some kind of balance between monopolistic web companies and its users' desire to have a browser that protects them from invasive and unfair practices:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow

These compromises represent the fallacy that Mozilla's future depends on keeping bullying entertainment companies and Big Tech happy, so it can go on serving its users. At the same time, these compromises have alienated Mozilla's core users, the technical people who were its fiercest evangelists. Those core users are the authority on technical questions for the normies in their life, and they know exactly how cursed it is for Moz to be making these awful compromises.

Moz has hemorrhaged users over the past decade, meaning they have even less leverage over the corporations demanding that they make more compromises. This sets up a doom loop: make a bad compromise, lose users, become more vulnerable to demands for even worse compromises. "This capitulation puts us in a great position to make a stand in some hypothetical future where we don't instantly capitulate again" is a pretty unconvincing proposition.

After the past decade's heartbreaks, seeing Moz under new leadership makes me cautiously hopeful. Like I say, I am dependent on Firefox and want an independent, principled browser vendor that sees their role as producing a "user agent" that is faithful to its users' interests above all else:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Of course, Moz depends on Google's payment for default search placement for 90% of its revenue. If Google can't pay for this in the future, the org is going to have to find another source of revenue. Perhaps that will be the EU, or foundations, or users. In any of these cases, the org will find it much easier to raise funds if it is standing up for its users – not compromising on their interests.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

Image: ICMA Photos (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/icma/3635981474/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[nixariel]

#my takeaway was that it’s more Carmen telling herself it’s for Zack and Ivy#when Zack makes the botched getaway Carmen doesn’t get mad until they are caught#calls to mind what Maelstrom told Crackle#to fail is forgivable to be caught is not#when shadowsan checks in at a bad time Carmen is snappy with him#and brings up that they’re fine without hq out of nowhere#this episode for Carmen is about wanting to impress Shadowsan with her team#that’s partly why I think she organized player shadowsan bonding time#but Zack and Ivy are less than impressive this episode until the end#she wants so badly to be different from vile#by the end I think she realizes that she is no matter what happens#her team got caught and there was tension but they still stuck with her#they didn’t jump at the first sign of adversity#so she feels safe having a home base because Zack and Ivy proved without realizing it that this isn’t vile#though with how much ivy spends the episode saying Carmen isn’t mad at us#makes me wonder if she gets it#that was my thoughts last night anyway might be way off via rueitae

"Putting down roots for them is the least I can do." - Carmen at the end of season 2 episode 6, The Need for Speed caper.

This is so interesting, actually. We don't really see Zack and Ivy regret their lack of home base. When the subject comes up in The Fashionista caper, they talk happily about "Carmen's Sandiego never ending tour". Don't get me wrong, they definitely are enthusiastic about the Carmen Brand Outerwear building, but they leave it without a look back at the end of The Boston tea party caper.

Shadowsan is the one actively pushing for an HQ, with Player suggesting the idea of the warehouse at the end of The Fashionista caper.

Was buying the building just a way for Carmen to indulge Ivy and Zack with something they liked, or did I miss something bigger?

[fangedxnight1836]

Character of the day:

Virginia Hex aka Jinny Hex

Some information about her:

Jinny Hex is the great-great granddaughter of Jonah Hex.

Joined the Young Justice in the recent comic series (2019).

A former mechanic.

She gained access to the gods eye which used to belong to Jonah Hex, and was what her biological father wanted.

She is a century baby, meaning that she is immortal, and has energy negation.

Is implied to be queer.

Owns a lot of her grandfathers left over weapons and gadgets at the back of her car.

Some HC’s:

Her favourite hero is superman.

She plays resident evil.

She loves her truck. She drove it when she as( 12.)

She hates when people call her apple jack.

She lives off junk food.

She can defo rap.

She KNOWS EVERYONE.

One time she made everyone clean their shoes after a battle before they got in the truck.

[doraemon-facts]

Doraemon keeps many hammers in his pocket.

Source: ジークフリート, 1977 (manga)

Source: モアよドードーよ、永遠に, 1978 (manga)

Source: 出てくる出てくるお年玉, 1979 (manga)

He uses them to destroy unwanted gadgets.

Source: 人間製造機, 1974 (manga)

Source: かがみでコマーシャル, 1977 (manga)

Source: なぜか劇がメチャクチャに, 1981 (manga)

When overcome by guilt or embarrassment, he sometimes tries to use them to destroy himself.

Source: 好きでたまらニャい, 1971 (manga)

Source: Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil, 1983 (manga, Doraemon Long Stories)

Source: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend, 2008

Source: Nobita's Chronicle of the Moon Exploration, 2019

Doraemon keeps a lot of other mundane items in his pocket too.

[beardedmrbean]

California became just the third state in the nation to pass a "right to repair" consumer protection law on Tuesday, following Minnesota and New York, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 244. The California Right to Repair bill had originally been introduced in 2019. It passed, nearly unanimously, through the state legislature in September.

“This is a victory for consumers and the planet, and it just makes sense,” Jenn Engstrom, state director of CALPIRG, told iFixit(which was also one of SB244's co-sponsors). “Right now, we mine the planet’s precious minerals, use them to make amazing phones and other electronics, ship these products across the world, and then toss them away after just a few years’ use ... We should make stuff that lasts and be able to fix our stuff when it breaks, and now thanks to years of advocacy, Californians will finally be able to, with the Right to Repair.”

Turns out Google isn't offering seven years of replacement parts and software updates to the Pixel 8 out of the goodness of its un-beating corporate heart. The new law directly stipulates that all electronics and appliances costing $50 or more, and sold within the state after July 1, 2021 (yup, two years ago), will be covered under the legislation once it goes into effect next year, on July 1, 2024. For gear and gadgets that cost between $50 and $99, device makers will have to stock replacement parts and tools, and maintain documentation for three years. Anything over $100 in value gets covered for the full seven-year term. Companies that fail to do so will be fined $1,000 per day on the first violation, $2,000 a day for the second and $5,000 per day per violation thereafter.

There are, of course, carve outs and exceptions to the rules. No, your PS5 is not covered. Not even that new skinny one. None of the game consoles are, neither are alarm systems or heavy industrial equipment that "vitally affects the general economy of the state, the public interest, and the public welfare."

“I’m thrilled that the Governor has signed the Right to Repair Act into law," State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said. "As I’ve said all along, I’m so grateful to the advocates fueling this movement with us for the past six years, and the manufacturers that have come along to support Californians’ Right to Repair. This is a common sense bill that will help small repair shops, give choice to consumers, and protect the environment.”

The bill even received support from Apple, of all companies. The tech giant famous for its "walled garden" product ecosystem had railed against the idea when it was previously proposed in Nebraska, claiming the state would become "a mecca for hackers." However, the company changed its tune when SB 244 was being debated, writing a letter of support reportedly stating, "We support 'SB 244' because it includes requirements that protect individual users' safety and security as well as product manufacturers' intellectual property."

[dontforgetukraine]

US-Ukraine startup Esper Bionics makes robotic prostheses that are currently being used by over 30 Ukrainian soldiers serving in Russia's war and 80 veterans in Ukraine.

While the bionic arms and hands are not for military use and are not durable enough for combat, the wartime setting has yielded live feedback for the company from soldiers and veterans. One such example of Esper Bionics striving to meet the needs of their clients was making the fingers in the hand out of metal so that it could withstand more stress.

The company never planned to provide bionic prosthetic hands that would help soldiers return to combat back in 2019 when it was founded, but Russia's full scale invasion changed the startup's course. Now, research and development, assembly, and production all take place in Ukraine.

Through its donor-funded program Esper for Ukraine, the company is able to donate all the hands it produces to Ukrainians in need of prostheses.

In an example of artificial intelligence being used for good, Esper Bionics wants to incorporate AI into their bionic hands so the prostheses are more "context-aware" and "better able to predict its user's movements" and what the user wants to do in any particular situation.

The idea behind Esper Bionics' AI-powered future hand will be to create “an entire ecosystem” that can pass information from a series of sensors attached to its user to cloud-based software that constantly analyzes data to learn its users' habits.

The robotic look isn't just for functionality either, but a company goal to avoid the "uncanny valley" look. With attractive branding and designs, Chief of Marketing Dmytro Ganush says Esper Bionics seeks to promote the idea that people with limb differences don’t have a medical issue but “a really interesting lifestyle” or, if anything, “a gadget just like any other."

---

Ukraine is highly likely to become the country with the most prostheses used among its population. The effort to normalize and de-stigmatize disability must start now, and I'm glad Esper Bionics seems to have this in mind with their designs. The enthusiasm users have in the design of the bionic hands is promising, and I hope everyone involved has a bright future.

Source: Ukrainian startup Esper Bionics makes cyborgs a reality

[tinydeskwriter]

Buzzfeed:The 10 Times Harry Styles and Y/n Y/l/n Made Us Believe in Love

A/n: I have been working in this for some time, I was pretty much inspired by my Jack Harlow piece, someone send a ask about doing one for Harry, and it’s just fluff💗 all the pictures are just illustrative, there is no face-claim, nothing, it’s just o ‘illustrate’ the article (?)

The 10 Times Harry Styles and Y/n Y/l/n Made Us Believe in Love

10. They Have Known Each Other for Years Before They (Finally) Started to Date

When it comes to famous couple we hardly ever know how they met, but not with this hot couple. It was Stevie Nicks who first spilled the beans:superstar Harry Styles and nepotism babe Y/n Y/l/n met back in May 2015 at the backstage of a Fleetwood Mac concert in London, while attending with mutual friends and Mr.Styles took her out for a bite afterwards. According to rumours Styles and Miss Y/n were seen out and about around London during the month of May and she was photographed in a One Direct concert in Wales, and then Harry reportedly dated a string of Victoria Secret models and Camilla Rowe… 

Asked about it in a interview with Vanity Fair, Y/l/n said:”I was very young back then, just seventeen, still a little green and naive in this whole ‘love game’, we liked each other very much, but at that time we would have just… crashed and burned. Feelings were hurt, but it’s safe to say we’ve kept special places for each other in our hearts, and when we met again at Shangri-La we just fitted together…” 

A Bonus: While promoting her new movie with Julia Roberts, Y/n Y/l/n was asked by James Corden about the rumor that her famous mom ‘just loves to public  embarrasses her’, to which Y/n gave us a funny story: ‘So, as a teen I just loved Harry Styles, you know: the hair, the eyes, the dimples… I was like: we are soulmates, we are destined for each other. I had a framed poster of him in my bedroom. So… we are traveling from London to LA, my mom had just finished a movie, we are at the airport, and a few foot away, handsome as ever is Harry Styles, and his whole boyband… my mom recognized him from my posters and basically all my gadgets background, and she goes: excuse me… hi, Harry, my name is Y/m/n Y/l/n, my daughter just loves you… and she wouldn’t stop… let’s just say I spent a long time hiding in the ladies restroom’ Y/l/n added: ‘Harry actually finds the story funny and always tells all of our friends’.

There it goes: Y/n Y/l/n is jus like every other teenage with a Harry Styles crush.

9. They Rekindled Their Romance at the 2019 Met Gala

Harry co-chaired the event. Y/n made her solo debut—this is her third year attending the gala, but the first time without either her famous parents—, she attended as a guest of Gucci, dressed in a green-glittered-feathered gown custom designed for her by Alessandro Michele. The twenty four years old singer and the twenty years old actress were pictured in he pink carpet and, I mean, just the way they looked at each other screams volumes. 

We may not know what happened inside the gala, but we can have a idea by the after party picture, and let’s just say:you can manage to see a photo of either of them where the other isn’t by their side or the background.

Dating rumors started after pictures were published of Harry and Y/n leaving the after-after party in the same car with Styles gentlemanly carrying Y/l/n red gown’s train. 

The same month ‘sources close to the couple’ reported that Harry and Y/n actually met months in advance to the gala ‘Y/n was working with Mark Ronson at Shangri-La in Malibu, her and H stared as friends, just going out and spending time together, things changed in Italy in early 2019 when they decided to go together for fittings with Alessandro’.

When questioned about the young couple went with the standard: We’re just friends.

8. Their Romance is Packed With PDA

Though they keep their ‘Just Friends’ answers, the couple haven’t shied away from some good old Public Displays of Affection. And this says something when we’re talking about Harry Styles.

And they’re cutie. 

7. We Got a Glimpse of Their Romance in August 2019 When Photos of Y/n Got Shared in The Internet

O-kay, it’s totally not okay for someone close to you—someone you clearly trust— to leak private pictures of your private instagram to the world. Y/n private IG account went from 167 followers o 165 after pictures the actress posted on her profile were printed and leaked.

That being said… We can’t deny Y/n and Harry are a cute and romantic couple:

I mean: she even uses his picture as a book-marker, this is pure fluff

6. Fans Noted This Little Detail in Paps Photos 

The couple has a matching tattoo, and we’re dying. Nothing screams ‘Love’ like a matching tattoo.

5. That Lego Bouquet

Y/n was there for her man during SNL, as Harry was both host and musical guest. And she got him a bouquet… of Legos. 

Sources said ‘Y/n has been here with Styles all week, Harry, surprisingly is a very shy guy, so she was  always keeping him calm and relaxed, helping him with his anxiety, and just being a helping hand, they keep  in their own bubble but are very approachable’.

4. December Was a Emotional Month For Harry and Y/n ‘s Fans

Little Women was released and our girl slayed as Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation. During promotion Y/l/n was paired with Pugh and Chalamet, and those tree were the trio of BFF’s we needed. Y/l/n and Chalamet chemistry—this is their second movie together— generated a few rumors of troubles in paradise.

But it was all just rumors, as Y/n was photographed at Styles one-night-only show at The Forum in Los Angeles, 

She was once again by his side in London. 

The bomb that broke millions of hearts came in 28 December.

In a joined statement was released by Styles and Y/l/n teams… After Academy Award winner filmmaker and producer, Y/f/n Y/l/n, communicated to the world in his official website that his wife and him ‘are happy to announce the marriage of their youngest daughter to Mr. Harry E. Styles’ all very formal like Y/f/n usually is.

The couple got married in 18 December at Hampstead Town Hall in London, both their families were in attendance. The couple asked for respect of their privacy, and announced that they would continue to live bi-continental.

3. Harry Styles Music Videos and… Surprises.

We hoped, but we weren’t sure, that we would see Y/n in Styles Music Videos, I mean, isn’t a rule somewhere that if you got a gorgeous, Academy nominated actress for a WIFE, you must put her in your MV’s? No?

Harry didn’t disappoint us. The singer and his wife frolicking by the beach, feeding each other fruits is a state of mind.

It also marks the debut of Y/n in Styles public feed.

Styles was praised by models in his video for asking for consent to touch them while filming, it was also said that the couple is very much in love and still in their honeymoon phase, just enjoying being together with one saying ‘when they looked at each other, you sometimes felt like you’re invading a private moment, Harry wouldn’t stop gushing over Y/n and how she inspired his more soft romanic songs’ and ‘they are just so nice to everyone’.

The surprise came months later during the release of ‘Golden’. The song is said to be about Y/l/n, with fans nothing that the actress and our favorite nepo babe has ‘you’re so golden’ tattooed in her ribs since 2017. 

The video was filmed in the Amalfi Coast, with Styles running and driving around, Y/l/n doesn’t show up until the end, looking very gorgeous in white… and sporting a small baby bump. Yep, the couple probably had the best pregnancy announcement of 2020.

2. Harry Styles Being a Supportive Husband

2021 was a great year for Y/n Y/l/n, and no one can deny. 

The actress  welcomed her first child in early February. She went on to own a Golden Globe and a Emmy for her Netflix Miniseries. 

The couple had their red carpet debut while attending the Grammys, with Styles proudly showing off his wife, the actress got candid while admitting that it was her first time going out without the baby, and though the child was with ‘grannie Anne’ the new mom still felt anxious.

In a interview with Kelly Clarkson while talking about parenthood Y/n said ‘It’s a crazy rollercoaster, they grow so fast! We decided, for now, not to have a nanny,  we just want to enjoy all those little moments that we can, so it is being kinda of nuts, but we have a great team and a very supportive family. Harry is great, he aced the nappy game and night feeding, he’s a amazing daddy, we often joked that H had amazing fun uncle potential, but he’s positively surprising us all, he just goes beyond, the  best parenthood partner a girl could ask for.  Definitely  my favorite dilf.’

1.Harry’s House.

Months before the ‘Adore You’ crooner announced his new album, Styles shared a candid picture of himself, his wife Y/n and their babygirl Delilah, with the caption: Home. 

In early  April the lyrics of ‘As It Was’ confounded fans a little, until four months later the couple announced the birth of their second daughter, Talulah, and their relocation to England in a more permanent scale. The couple not only has been living in London since mid 2021, they also acquired two homes in Styles motherland. Styles in a interview with Apple Music, said about his move: ‘A lot has change in my life the last few years, my home are now three amazing girls, my gorgeous wife and our two baby-daughters, but England is my comfortable place, initially we moved because I was going to film a movie, Y/l was still pregnant with Talulah, one night I come home after shooting and my wife goes: what do you think about moving here for real? And she goes on: I just spent an afternoon at a public park with Lilah without men with cameras following us around. It was a no brainer decision, we’re very happy, Lulah was born in London, my mum and sister are always around, I’ve never been happier’. 

[drawfee-quot3s]

[disbelievingly]

dondarf snowbonk??

- julia

[some-melon]

holy fuck who allowed this

i need gadget moots NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWWWWW

funfactoid i got fixated on gadget when i was around 15 in late 2019-early 2020 then kinda dropped it out of embarrassment BUT NOW IM BACK BABEEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(i still love the prince of egypt i promise)

[antagonistchan]

in early 2019, there was a trend going around about making Favorite Character Bingo cards. i participated, and recently stumbled upon mine again. i shared it with some friends, and they felt inspired to do their own. in turn, i felt inspired to update mine- for one, it was almost six years out of date, but also i was never that confident in the accuracy of it even back then. i am MUCH more confident in this 2024 update.

Julian Bashir (Star Trek) | Reisen Udongein Inaba (Touhou) | Legion (Mass Effect) | Luna Platz (Mega Man) | Inspector Gadget (specifically the one from the 1999 Matthew Broderick movie)

Keima Katsuragi (The World God Only Knows) | Epsilon (Red Vs Blue) | Road Rage (Transformers) | KITT (Knight Rider) | Kaoru Seta (Bandori)

Madoka Kaname (Puella Magi Madoka Magica) | Rin Hoshizora (Love Live) | FREE SPACE | Hayate Yagami (Lyrical Nanoha) | Marta Cabrera (Knives Out)

Optimus Prime (Transformers) | IA (Vocaloid) | The Doctor (Doctor Who) | Noire (Hyperdimension Neptunia) | Miku Kohinata (Symphogear)

Sofia de Sainte-Coquille (Rune Factory) | Tsugumi Hazawa (Bandori) | Robo-Ky (Guilty Gear) | Hazumu Osaragi (Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl) | Sideways (Transformers)

[hottakehoulihan]

Hench

by Natalie Zina Walschots

(tl;dr: It's capepunk. There's a sorta-Accord-like character? The book uses some JKR words. : ( ...but it's a book with some good ideas. Like measuring cape-hero damage in 'lifeyears' and opposing it therefor and arguably for ACAB reasons.)

There is no ethical employment under capitalism, but people still gotta eat.

So if you can't make a living wage slinging fries or answering phones, you try dipping your toes into henching for B-lister criminals.

Like Uber and Leet. Or, in Walschots universe, Electric Eel, a villain who seems like he likes incense and peace signs when he's not throwing victims into a pit that's full of ethically-sourced sharks?

The book was readable and I thought it had a lot of promise.

The author is mostly new but clearly into the subject (her other book is apparently erotic love poems to supervillains) and seems like she'd be fun to hang around. The book is pretty good. 3.5 to 4 stars out of 5. It has some new ideas I greatly enjoy. My normal instinct would be to puff the book up to and beyond its deserts, because I parasocial easily and also I want to get new authors a leg up and especially if they show promise to grow into something I'll like even more.

Which is to say that although it doesn't deserve fulsome praise, it deserves praise and I would ordinarily overdo it because--as G. K. Chesterton did NOT say but maybe Oscar Wilde would have (and as HotTakeHoulihan ABSOLUTELY says), "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth overdoing."

But first, before I get into the plot, why am I restrained?

Our protagonist ("Anna", when she's not working) is a woman in her...early 20s? And once, back when signing up at a temp agency, went by the Harry Potter surname "Tromeldov" and regrets it. ..but this is the best name we have for her (the other alternative is her never-used work-name "Palindrome"?) As far as we know, she's "Anna Tromeldov" on her birth certificate or...something?

The author published this book in 2021.

In book publishing years, the timeline between 2019 (when JKR went fully mask off) and 2021 might be longer than it seems.

And maybe the author didn't know because she doesn't pay attention to these things. Plausible deniability exists, and sometimes it's because it's the honest truth.

But it's as if the main character had a crush on a character who happened to be named Hank Atlas Rearden or Eva Dolph Brawn. It's distracting and hinky, but could be not-a-dogwhistle at all. Here's hoping I'm not helping platform a hate-group person. : /

Also, spoilers:

Protag gal signed on for a short gig just standing around with other bodyguards/henchmen at an event for her C-list supervillain boss. She's not strong or powered (maybe in a subsequent book--the sequel comes out in March) but he wanted some women in with all his muscle (which are common enough they're referred to as "meat", in-universe.)

Alas, this wasn't the minor stand-there-and-look-like-a-scary-fireplug job it was set up to be. Electric Eel is a villainous tinker and while his gadgets are usually about as reliable as the X-ray specs from an old magazine catalog (I have never held one of those but I've seen simulations on YouTube), he's got an enslavement ray going and he's kidnapped the mayor's kid.

Protag is unhappy, because she got handed the slave-ray just after the boss told the kid to cut off part of a finger (to demonstrate the ray) and the kid was gearing up to do his best and was clearly going to be allowed to.

It's not at all clear if protag was going to stay obedient much longer, but she seemed pretty frozen by indecision.

Fortunately, a flying brick burst in and knocked her out of the way, destroyed the dingus, beat up all the 'meat', and chased the villain (who was hoo-hoo-ha-ha-ing his retreat and spraying murder-clouds everywhere, killing some people our protag knew.)

And then our protag realizes she can't stand. Later, in the hospital and having to undergo multiple surgeries to partly-reconstruct her leg (Supes hits hard) she learns she's fired for being no-longer-useful as a physical hench, that she's not going to walk for at least six months and will be using a cane after that, and the cops and superheroes have decided the official report is that she was hurt by the villain because superheroes do no wrong.

Shortly after she's evicted, but her best friend takes her in, and during this time?

This is the interesting part

She starts internetting and studying natural disasters and hits on the concept of the "Life Year", which is measuring the impact of things (like COVID) based not merely on how many deaths they caused or on merely how many dollars of damage or lost income they caused, but also things like impaired ability to live life--such as she's enduring--at that time.

And she's meticulous about documentation, and conservative about how she notates her assertions, so when her blog is discovered by pro-cape media they mock and deride it with the spin they can muster, but she starts acquiring her own community of contributors and corroborators.

Bluntly speaking, hero activity isn't just more trouble and damage than its worth, but this is true on an immense scale. Unless you're a mayor's son, I guess.

Soon after, protag acquires a new A-list supervillain employer, who is meticulous and precise and also a powerful combatant with mechanized mail and claws and mask. He'd like her to both continue her research and also--now that it's clear that she's on the same page as he is--help him come up with ways to utterly destroy (what we might call "cancel") or at least nullify the cape threat.

And she does. She becomes pretty cool, and her fellow henches end up with a cute office culture and get. shit. done.

Another review I read (after I finished the book) says she goes full-on-evil. Maybe they're more right than I am, and of course few IRL villains would admit they're being and doing evil to themselves...but she's doing the wrong things, for the wrong reason, but to accomplish the right ends. ...and she'd freely admit this even while twirling the modified cane her employer gave her.

Alas for her, she's made the more amoral facets of the superhero community Very Angry. And so for the final third of the book? She's gonna have to deal with the upcoming climax.

(Also, she's got a crush on her new boss. ...and her best friend--who doesn't mind henching or supervillains at all--is freaked out by her prominence and her importance and...and it sucks to have your BFF cut comms. I expect this'll pay off in a subsequent book, with BFF either becoming a hostage, an adversary, or a secret third thing.)

(Author is demonstrably pro-woman (Yay!) and LGB friendly (Yay! 3/5!) , which are things I'm a fan of, and there are some same-sex couples in the peripheries of the book, but protag seems pretty into only dudes, so I don't really think her profound attachment to her BFF is latently romantic or sexual.)

I can tell you how it works out, and there are some fun bits of media manipulation, office snark, and combat shenanigans. ...and if you ask in the comments I'll answer.

But that's the book. I'm kind of--guardedly--a fan of the protag (and the author), and am sorta cheering as these well-meaning heroic doofuses are retiring or 'being retired' as a result of the protag's efforts. ...because they ARE well meaning. ..and they're killing the mosquitos on the playground with industrial quantities of DDT.

The sequel, "Villain", comes out in March. I'll probably wait until I can get it used, but will want to read it just to see where the story goes.

3.5 stars out of 5, and the protag is more morally gray than Taytay. I love the ideas and approach. At no point in the first third of the book did I successfully guess what direction the story was going (I legit thought maybe she'd end up being courted by the contrite-and-trying-to-do-better flying brick hero, for a time. Also, I did not expect her to get knocked out of the henching junior leagues so decisively or early.)

Maybe I'll check out one of the fanfics (there are at least two) on AO3.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Subprime gadgets

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.

That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.

Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):

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

But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:

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

Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.

Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.

Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.

What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.

Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.

With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.

Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.

Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/

For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.

So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.

This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.

There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.

Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.

But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.

This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.

Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.

One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.

Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.

This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.

Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":

https://lemmy.world/post/13359866

Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.

There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.

This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/