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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

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

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

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

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

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

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

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

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

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

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

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

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

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

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

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punkpandapatrixk · 9 months ago

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❤️‍🩹I Just Want to be Loved ♦︎ Timeless Pick A Card

We attract terrible loves for various reasons; so many lessons; but now sorrow has got to lessen. Let’s reveal patterns by exhuming roots. We’ve got to stop this cycle of disappointments. Done being made to feel as if we’re hard to love.

We’re not hard to love. Many of us were simply denied love, warmth and affection as we were growing up… Don’t know how to love self; don’t know how to love others; basically don’t know how to even receive Love… Who’s to blame now?

Why the hell were so many children denied love, warmth, affection…?

What are you going to do with yourself when you were denied love, warmth and affection as you were growing up?

☆♪°・.

‘The child who isn’t embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.’ – an African proverb

People denied warmth and affection tend to fall into a desperate loop of fishing for attention as a result of love-deficiency, right? Some learn to lick love off a knife; some pursue success (whatever that means) all too frantically; some…shoot complete strangers in broad daylight; and some who ain’t got the guts to murder complete strangers in public places go instead for antagonising strangers on social media… Gosh, that is desperate.

But you know what, not all hope is lost because there’s still plenty of us who are blessed with this incredibly RARE thing called self-awareness. There are plenty of us who will take our traumas to the graveyard than pass them down the next generations.

You, don’t deserve to have your sanity and your Life ruined by some psychos who didn’t know how to love you. Reclaim lost pieces of yourself by understanding THREE Houses in your natal chart, babe:

4th House: your roots; tells you what was lacking in your home; explains your erratic 10th House ambitions

8th House: your marriage or your desire for a bond like it; this the House where trauma manifests itself in full spectrum

11th House: your wish fulfilment; where you connect with people who support your visions; breeds a healthy sense of connection, even community

SONG: Emptiness by BoA

MOVIE: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

[PAC Masterlist] [Part 2] [Part 3]

[Patreon] [Paid Readings]

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – Because I Can’t Even Trust Myself

VIBE: Trust by Hamasaki Ayumi

lost pieces (pertaining to 4th House) – Ace of Pentacles Rx

It’s clear your childhood didn’t offer a sense of stability or security—the physical kind that children usually need. It could be that a grownup left early or it could be that you moved around a lot, so you easily lost contact with new friends you’d just made. In essence, it feels like you grew up feeling ‘everything disappears eventually; everyone leaves eventually’.

Some of you might’ve grown up not having a lot of material resources, but for the majority of you tuning into this Pile, it was more a feeling of a lack of warmth. For children, the pain of neglect and a lack of emotional connection do really affect our physical health more severely. You might’ve grown up poor and sickly due to all the grownups around you being inattentive, unaffectionate, and just…unreliable at best.

Because of this awareness, from a young age you realised you would have to do everything yourself. You wanted to grow up quickly and do your own things your own ways. It’s not like you had to grow up fast, you wanted to grow up fast to have your freedom and power! It was…hard to trust adults. It was hard to trust the world at large.

growing pains (pertaining to 8th House) – 8 of Pentacles

On the path of growing up, I think you became a hard worker of sort? This is very nuanced though—there are layers to your developing yourself to become a hardworking person. In many ways, you grew up responsible because you didn’t want to become like the adults who had disappointed you. But since this sense of ‘responsibility’ is a product of neglect and trauma…this is coming off as your feeling responsible for everything. Everything!

Some of you could’ve been too hard on yourself, expecting way too much for your age. You’ve felt like you’re always the one with everything to prove. It’s hard living like that. It feels like you’ve put so much effort into keeping everything together, and yet, nobody sees how much you care. Nobody truly understands the fear in your mind and pain you carry in your heart.

In matters of relationship, you cling extra hard to friends or lovers, too; because deep down you’re afraid of losing things and people, again and again. This unhealthy attachment—and to some extent, controlling behaviour—is truly your wounded inner child attempting frantically to keep your Reality from falling apart…

reclamation (pertaining to 11th House) – 4 of Cups

I’m very sure that at some point in Life, your Higher Self and team of Spirit Guides are going to kick in and meddle with your Earthly business. For some people, it’s possible you could lose contact with everybody you’ve ever known in Life and go into a hermit mode to find yourself again. For some, it could be that your whole Life is simply flipped, without necessarily losing key people in your Life, for you to look at Life and human connections from a very different point of view.

It’s going to be hard, of course. Emotionally, it could be devastating. Themes of abandonment and betrayal are big in your incarnation. But you know, ultimately, all of these challenges serve to remind you that the Cup of Love and Affection you’ve been looking for has always been right inside of you. You’ve had a bitter time with a lot of people because deep down you couldn’t trust them. You couldn’t trust other people’s loyalty because you didn’t even believe that you’re worthy of that Love and Loyalty you yearn for.

Your Spirit Guides are saying, that although at some point in Life things are going to get really tough, know that when you’ve graduated those lessons, you’re going to be rewarded with the most beautiful Soulmate-shit friendships, familyship and relationship. Truth be told, part of your Soul’s scenario in this incarnation is to find your Soul Tribe; and find your Tribe you shall~

A L O N E🔻💗

ALL of you – Red Alchemist (John Dee)

becoming ONE and whole – Priestess of Healing

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – Misled by My Own Compassion

VIBE: Cry Me A River by Julie London

lost pieces (pertaining to 4th House) – Knight of Cups

It’s very likely your 4th House is in a Water sign, but if not, you’re still very much a Water-y person; perhaps your Ascendant or Moon is in a Water sign, or that you have Neptune/Moon near/in your 4th, 7th or 11th House. All of this generally makes you a deeply compassionate person. No matter what outer appearances give, you strive to look deeper into a person’s Soul. You have so much empathy and you want to believe in the good of people.

Alas! This rotten world doesn’t make it too easy. This world is not a world where kindness and compassion are truly rewarded, if we don’t learn to be a tad cruel ourselves. You’re not in the wrong for being so genuinely good and compassionate; it’s this world that’s the wrong world. You know that? Therefore, it is paramount you learn to be a bitchilante! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In spite of this PAC’s intro, I sense the majority of you tuning into this Pile actually grew up quite well. Many of you actually grew up in loving homes and that’s why it’s been quite challenging for you to grapple with the realness of the ugliness of the world outside of your loving home. Really…people in the real world…are monsters! And you were taken aback!

But some of you instead most likely grew up in chaotic, battlefield-esque homes and that’s why you’ve striven to be so good to a point of detriment.

growing pains (pertaining to 8th House) – 0 The Fool Rx

Be that as it may, you being you… Well, you do put in the effort to try and understand what makes monsters the way that they are, right? It’s all good and wonderful, until you get yourself in deep trouble where nobody can save you but your own monstrosity. Depending on your age when reading this, this could be something that’s happened in the past or will happen; where you will be forced to grow up in the sense of seeing the world as it is and get firm with assholes!

Dr Jordan Peterson has this gold shit to summarise this spiritual lesson you will be taking at some point in Life: ‘You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn to control it.’ Well, that’s male speech. In female speech, we just say: ‘you gotta grow up and be a bitchilante!’

Be a bitch only to those who deserve it. How would you protect yourself from monsters if you don’t have the strength to fight them at their own game, darling? If you’re harmless, weak as a fawn, if anything, the real monsters in the world are going to toy with your sanity: ‘I saw my “crazy” side once and decided I wouldn’t be involved with anyone that would take me out of my peace like that ever again.’

Be a bitchilante. That whole concept of ‘good, harmless, love and light, positivity-only’ bullshit was put out there not to really make you good but to weaken you against the truly monstrous ones. WAKE UP, BITCH!

reclamation (pertaining to 11th House) – 4 of Pentacles

So? So what if you’re selective with your affection? Not everybody deserves your compassion. That’s for sure. There are many people in the world and you can’t be nice to all of them. One at point or another, you’re gonna be a villain in someone’s story—so what? Everybody else is the main character of their own Stories; that, you can’t control.

Be careful that you’re not falling victim to your own narcissism in wanting to be praised in everybody’s Story, yeah? So then, pertaining to your 11th House, weirdly enough, your wish fulfilment is in the form of a psychological liberation from your own idea of yourself in the minds of others. I sense that if you’re East Asian this is gonna resonate much harder and louder LOL

Anyway, I want to assure you that once you’ve graduated from your spiritual lessons, you will be met with unique, courageous, rebellious weirdos who will be just as clear as you are about what it truly means to be a good person in a world that’s often very bad. How good should a person be to truly be considered a good person?

‘If I offended you, cry me a river. I’ll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears eating chips and working on my tan.’ – Fuckology

A L O N E🔻💚

ALL of you – Green Geographer (Gerardus Mercator)

becoming ONE and whole – Priestess of Success

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☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – Lights Out; I’m Out to Find Myself

VIBE: To. X by Taeyeon

lost pieces (pertaining to 4th House) – Ace of Cups Rx

I’ve to preface this Pile by saying this the pile that gets a little violent…

You were originally such a positive, happy-go-lucky kid, but quite early on, this world gave you so much darkness. So many reasons to be sad. It’s not been a very kind life, to be honest. Defo many of you have tragical placements here—your 4th or 5th House could start or end in Scorpio; have Lilith/Pluto/Chiron/Saturn there or in the sign of Cancer/Pisces; or it could be that your Venus/Moon is imprisoned in the 8th or 12th House and harshly aspected, too...

If your childhood has been violent or mightily confusing, it’s a group thing, OK? You can think like that. It’s not your fault. Know that practically everybody who has these harsh placements has gone through very similar things as you. So you’re really not the only one who’s failing—whatever that means. You’ve been gaslit a lot into believing there’s something wrong with you, but it was your environment that was just filled with totally terrible Human beings. That much I’d like to assure you.

It wasn’t natural how you were abused psychologically and emotionally. The people around you drew a parallel to Cinderella’s stepsisters in the Disney classic. It’s ridiculous like that. I think you grew up terribly lonely and created comfort characters in your head to console your sorrows? It’s very likely that your comfort characters were in actuality a mirror fragment of your Soul Family’s existence locked in your memory bank.

growing pains (pertaining to 8th House) – XIV Temperance Rx

Life, unfortunately, isn’t a Disney movie. As a result of the psychological and emotional abuse you’ve endured in childhood, your friendships and relationships might’ve been quite turbulent, at times even violent. Juuust a small number of you could’ve dealt with being called a violent kid, or you could’ve struggled with anger management and have terrible tantrums. All of these have made human connections quite difficult to navigate.

It’s not like you want to be a nasty person, right? Many times, you couldn’t help the way you react/respond to what’s being said and unsaid because, somehow, there are many things that people do and say that trigger a trauma response in you. There’s a very difficult Mars thingy going on here. I think many of you resonating with this Pile have some difficult Mars (ruler of Scorpio) placements/aspects that affect the way you manifest human connections in your Life.

Speaking in terms of synastry, it could be that you’ve attracted a great deal of people whose Mars aspected badly in your natal chart—consequently triggering bad traumas and manifesting violent outbursts in your connections. Ultimately though, these negative experiences with other people could’ve enforced your belief about how unlovable you are, which, really, is a false belief…

reclamation (pertaining to 11th House) – 5 of Wands

It is a false Reality that you’re unlovable or unworthy of a healthy relationship. That bullshit was implanted in you through the creation of a harsh environment that caused you a great deal of rage. Of course, you’re accountable for how you behave towards other people, but your foundation was never quite healthy or peaceful or harmonious, so… How about we put it all behind us and focus on healing? After all, it’s not like the people you’ve had a beef with were completely innocent? XP

It's kinda selfish to think like that, but you can depend on your own discernment to distinguish who amongst the people you’ve hurt or had a beef with to apologise to. Remember: sometimes apologies only make you weaker and looking at the unique bullshit astrological placements you were born with… apologising to the wrong fucker would only get you gaslit even more! So, don’t. Don’t apologise for the distress you experienced under other people’s lack of support.

Burn that bridge and detach yourself from that old stinking world. With your sheer willpower, you have it in you to rebuild your own little world of love and peace. After all, those harsh placements you were born with, are you aware of just how much power they bestow you? These placements come with a lot of turbulences but once you graduate your first Saturn Return, they also give you a burst of power unlike any other!

Lights out. Not entertaining aenergies that seek to nip your power at the bud anymore. Burn, baby, burn strong! Burn the whole Tower and find yourself on new lands~!

A L O N E🔻💜

ALL of you – Gold Alchemist (Roger Bacon)

becoming ONE and whole – Priestess of Solitude

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

[PAC Masterlist] [Part 2] [Part 3]

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